Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes

by David Horowitz

  * * *

  *This account of the case of Geronimo Pratt was written in 1997. Two years later, another appeal for a new trial, this time by prosecutors, was rejected by the court. Geronimo Pratt was set free.

  IV

  PROGRESSIVE EDUCATION

  11

  Academic Politics

  GRADUATION CEREMONIES on America's college campuses have become occasions to reflect on the near total domination of the left over the institutions of higher learning, a politicization of academic life unprecedented in the history of our democracy. Typical of one recent graduation cycle was the ceremony at the University of Michigan, whose invited speaker was racial extremist Mamphela Ramphele, a leader of South Africa's far left "black consciousness" movement. The four previous graduations at Michigan featured First Lady Hillary Clinton, political ally and friend of Mrs. Clinton, Marian Wright Edelman, liberal cartoonist Cathy Guisewite, and former Spelman College president and veteran of the communist left Johnetta Cole. By contrast, notable conservatives like former Education Secretary William Bennett, Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman, authors Tom Clancy and William F. Buckley, and Supreme Court Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas were passed over as potential orators not only by Michigan but by all three thousand-plus colleges and universities across the land.

  Any political bias revealed in the selection of commencement speakers is overshadowed, however, by the political bias evident in university hiring practices during the school year itself. A Wall Street Journal article by Vincent Carroll recently described the situation at the University of Colorado, where the number of registered Democrats on the faculty exceeded the registered Republicans by thirty-one to one. There was not a single Republican or conservative in the English, psychology, journalism, philosophy, women's studies, ethnic studies, and lesbian and gay studies departments.

  This is in a state where registered Republicans outnumber Democrats by more than one hundred thousand and have elected six of eight members of the Colorado congressional delegation.

  On the basis of personal experience I can attest that this situation is fairly typical of colleges across the United States. In the last few years, I have spoken on over one hundred college campuses in every corner of the country — north, south, east, and west. I have spoken before audiences at state schools and private schools, religious schools and state institutions, technical schools and liberal arts colleges-rural and urban, small and large. At every single one of them, without exception, I have found that professors who are conservative in their outlook constitute a mere handful on any given liberal arts campus. They are more isolated, more politically excluded, more intimidated, and more restricted in their opportunities for scholarly advancement and political expression than communist and pro-Soviet professors were in the McCarthy period, during the height of the Cold War.

  Of the colleges where I have appeared, only four invited me officially. By contrast, communists like Angela Davis, and racial extremists like Khalid Muhammad and Kwame Ture, are regularly asked to speak by university administrators and student governments — and paid handsome sums to do so. In 1998, Ms. Davis, whose speaking fee is twenty thousand dollars, was the featured official speaker at the University of Chicago's Martin Luther King Day commemorations. Davis is fawned on by administrators and faculty alike at her appearances, which are more like regal visits. In 1998, she was also a featured speaker at Brandeis, a campus to which the conservative former United Nations Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick had been officially invited but then dis-invited after leftists protested her scheduled appearance. Conservative figures like myself, by contrast, have to rely on small conservative student groups for invitations and off-campus conservative organizations for expenses. Wherever I go, I make it a point to ask the students who invite me how many conservative professors are available to be their official campus advisors and sponsors. The answer invariably is: two or three. That is, two or three out of the entire faculty who are willing to identify themselves openly as conservatives.

  This deplorable situation did not happen by accident. It is the result of a McCarthyism operating inside these academic institutions, fueled by the atmosphere of "political correctness" that has enveloped the academy since the ascension of the tenured left. The hegemony of this left has resulted in politicized hiring practices, systematic exclusion of dissenting voices, and an atmosphere of political intimidation to a degree seen only in countries ruled by communist or fascist or theocratic dictatorships. In America, however, the state is not the enforcer of political orthodoxy. It is leftist faculty members and pliant administrators who are responsible for this state of affairs.

  Because intellectual censorship is exercised at the faculty level, it is carried out with an efficiency that an outsider like Senator McCarthy could never have achieved. The prevailing intellectual environment on American campuses resulting frorn this situation has been chillingly described by the literary critic Harold Bloom. In an interview recorded by Mark Edmundson in Trotsky Without Orchids, Bloom described faculty politics as "Stalinism without Stalin. . . . All of the traits of the Stalinists in the 1930s and 19408 are being repeated . . . in the universities in the 1990s."

  Letters responding to the Wall Street Journal article on the situation at the University of Colorado put flesh on Bloom's observations. One letter writer was a professor who also served as a faculty advisor to College Republicans at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo. "Republican faculty members operate on a 'don't ask, don't tell' basis to the best of our ability," she wrote. "At official faculty meetings, Democratic fund-raising requests, political buttons, bumper stickers and petitions are very publicly circulated, putting non-tenured faculty in a very difficult position." After this professor was "outed," a department colleague told her "we would never have hired you if we'd known you were a Republican."

  This unconscionable situation has been challenged in a legal case against the University of California School of Journalism at Berkeley. The plaintiff in the case is Michael Savage, a political conservative who is also the premier radio talk show host in the San Francisco Bay Area. Savage is a former academic with a doctorate, two masters and eighteen published works to his credit. In 1997, the journalism school began a search for a new dean and printed an advertisement in the New York Times soliciting applications for the position. The school emphasized that it was interested in radio and television journalists particularly. Savage applied. Despite his impressive qualifications, however, he was swiftly informed by the chairman of the search committee, Professor Troy Duster, that he would not even be interviewed for the job. Troy Duster is an old acquaintance of mine, a Berkeley leftist who has not had significant second thoughts about his radical views.

  The applicant who was eventually selected for the new deanship was Orville Schell, another Berkeley radical, who would have known Duster and the other leftists on the search committee for thirty years. Schell has no doctorate, and although he has written several books on China and authored some op-ed pieces, is not a working journalist. His main occupation is a pig farm he owns in Bolinas, an upscale community just north of San Francisco. Orville's real credential for the Berkeley deanship was that he had the same radical politics as Troy Duster and the faculty powers who control the journalism school.

  Michael Savage was made aware of these connections when he was informed how Schell was chosen. The retiring dean of the school had called Schell, who was a friend, to ask his advice as to whom they might pick to be the new dean. Schell volunteered himself. In short, the placement of the New York Times ad was little more than a pro forma exercise to justify the decision — already made — to hire a political comrade for the position.

  This is not a small matter. According to a recent poll conducted by the Freedom Forum, a liberal foundation in Tennessee, 89 percent of American political journalists covering Washington politics voted for Bill Clinton, and only 7 percent identified themselves as conservatives. The journalism profession in America has undergone a sea change in re
cent years. Previously, beat reporters were just that, reporters. They often did not have undergraduate college degrees, not to mention degrees from journalism schools. But now they do, and notoriously they write editorial content into their reporting. There is a direct connection between the leftist control of journalism schools like Berkeley and the leftward bias in the national media.

  Michael Savage decided to fight the political octopus he encountered at Berkeley rather than meekly yield to its superior power.

  He turned to the Individual Rights Foundation (IRF), a public interest law group I created, for help. The legal director of the IRF, Patrick Manshardt, has filed suit against the Regents of the University of California and also against Professor Troy Duster, both as an individual and in his capacity as chairman of the search committee. In other words, the IRF intends to hold the radicals directly accountable for their assault on the very soul of the American university and the integrity of the Fourth Estate.

  The IRF case is based on two contentions. The first is that this political selection of a University of California dean constitutes political patronage, which is illegal under the labor laws of the state of California. The second is that requiring a political litmus test for applicants for a deanship is a violation of Michael Savage's First Amendment rights, which hold that one may not be excluded from public employment based on political affiliation.

  The Michael Savage case illuminates the ongoing political subversion of the institutions of higher learning in America. In today's poisoned academic atmosphere, Afrocentric racists can expound theories of blood destiny, queer theorists can promote the "revolutionary" idea of pursuing promiscuous sex in public places while an epidemic rages, and both can do so with the resources, imprimatur, and encouragement of the university itself. Intellectual charlatans and political extremists can control entire departments and liberal arts faculties. But conservative scholars are treated as intellectual pariahs and forced to seek refuge in "think tanks" outside the university, and generally are denied access to any but conservative audiences.

  The politicization of the university and the debasement of scholarship are a national tragedy of incalculable dimensions. If the situation is to be remedied, it can only be by a restoration of the integrity of these institutions parallel in magnitude and scope.

  12

  Postmodern Professors

  WHEN THE IMPEACHMENT OF BILL CLINTON ran out of gas, there was consolation in the fact that for the nation much of the damage was reparable and many of the scars would be readily healed. As a new election cycle rolled into view, Bill Clinton, along with his seductions and prevarications, would in due course be gone. As the impeachment ended, fresh faces became the focus of public attention. There was renewed respect for the privacy rights of public figures, and new skepticism about the Special Prosecutor Law that liberals contrived as a weapon against conservatives and conservatives turned into a weapon against liberals, and then against themselves.

  But one institution, whose corruptions thrust it to the fore in the presidential crisis, would not be so easy to mend. This was the American university, which in the midst of the presidential battle volunteered a contingent of scholars to serve a partisan cause. As the House Judiciary Committee was gearing up for its impeachment inquiry in October 1998, a full-page political ad appeared in the New York Times, entitled "Historians In Defense of the Constitution." The historians declared that in their professional judgment there was no constitutional basis for impeaching the president, and to do so would undermine the constitutional order. The historians' statement was eagerly seized on by the president's congressional defenders and deployed as a weapon against his congressional accusers. In the none-too-meticulous hands of these political pols, the signers became four hundred "constitutional experts" who had weighed in with an authoritative constitutional judgment that exposed the Republicans' attempt at a "coup d'etat." One of the three organizers of the statement, Professor Sean Wilentz, even appeared before the House Judiciary Committee to warn the impeachers that "history will hunt you down" for betraying the nation. On the day his Senate trial began, the president himself referred reporters to the battalion of "constitutional experts" who had gone on record to assert that under the law of the land he should not have been impeached.

  Those who signed the statement, however, are not constitutional experts at all. One of them, Julian Bond, is not even a historian, though two universities — Maryland and Virginia — have appointed him a "professor of history." Currently head of the NAACP, Bond is a veteran politician with a failed career whose university posts can only be understood as political appointments for past service.

  Another signer, Henry Louis Gates, is not a historian, but a talented essayist and professor of literature. A third, Orlando Patterson, is a first-rate sociologist, but not a historian. Perhaps the three constitute an affirmative-action cohort to increase the African-American presence and reassure everyone that the signers were suitably diverse. All three, of course, are men of the left.

  Sean Wilentz is himself a Dissent socialist, whose expertise is social, not political, history, though his scholarship does cover the period of the American founding. A second organizer, C. Vann Woodward, is a distinguished historian of nineteenth- and twentieth-century America, but also not specifically a historian of the Constitution. The third, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., is a partisan Democrat who has written adoring books on Andrew Jackson, Franklin Roosevelt, and the Kennedy brothers, as well as a book on the presidency.

  These three were, if anything, more qualified than almost all the other "historians in defense of the constitution." With a handful of exceptions like Pauline Maier, who had indeed studied and written about the American founding, and Clinton partisan Garry Wins, the others on the list had even fewer credentials than the organizers to pronounce on these matters. Todd Gitlin, for example, is a professor of sociology and cultural studies, whose only contribution to historical knowledge is a tendentious book justifying the 1960s from the perspective of a former president of Students for a Democratic Society. Jon Weiner is a writer for the Nation whose major publication is a book on John Lennon's FBI file. Michael Kazin is another Nation leftist whose work as a historian is on American populism. John Judis is a New Republic editor and man of the left who wrote a biography of William Buckley and a book on twentieth-century conservatives. Jeffrey Herf's expertise is modern German history; Robert Dallek and Bruce Kuklick are twentieth century diplomatic historians, who have also written books on Lyndon Johnson and the occupation of Germany. Maurice Isserman is also a Nation regular and a historian of the twentieth-century American left.

  Another signer, Ellen Du Bois, can be taken as typical of a large cohort of what have become the thoroughly politicized humanities. She is a professor of women's history at UCLA and a militant feminist. She is joined as a signer by other zealots whose academic work has been the elaboration of feminist themes. These include Gerda Lerner, Linda Gordon, Ruth Rosen, Sara Evans, Christine Stansell (Wilentz's wife), and Alice Kessler-Harris. Two months after the Times ad appeared, while the House of Representatives was pursuing its impeachment vote, a notice was posted on the Internet announcing that Du Bois would be a speaker (along with two other well-known leftists) at a "Reed College Symposium on the Joy of Struggle." The symposium was a presentation of the Reed College Multiculturalism Center and was co-sponsored by the Feminist Union, the Queer Alliance, Earth First, Amnesty at Reed, the Latino/a Student Association, and the Reed student activities office.

  To be sure, not all the signers were ideologues, but the statement they signed reflects the long-standing political corruption of the American academy, and was itself a political deception. By massing four hundred historians "in defense of the Constitution," the organizers implied that these well-known liberal and left-wing academics were scholarly experts defending the document's original intent. Since when, however, had liberals and leftists become defenders of the doctrine of original intent? Were any of the signers on record as o
pposing the loose constructionism of the Warren Court? Were any of the scholars exercised when the Brennan majority inserted a nonexistent "right of privacy" into the Constitution to justify its decision in Roe v. Wade? Were any of them outspoken defenders of Judge Robert Bork — the leading theorist of "original intent" — when a coalition of political vigilantes set out to destroy his nomination to the Supreme Court, even soliciting his video store purchases to see if he had rented x-rated films? Not only was the answer to all these questions negative, but dozens of the same historians, including organizers Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Sean Wilentz, were "veterans of the politicized misuse of history" (as Ramesh Ponnuru put it in a Nationl Review article on the episode), having previously signed a tendentious "historians brief" to the Supreme Court supporting abortion.

  Concern for the original intent of the Constitution apparently enters these academic hearts only when it can be deployed against Republicans and conservatives. This probably explained why the office address listed at the bottom of the historians' statement was the Washington address of People for the American Way, a national lobby for the political left.

  Partisan political pronouncements by groups invoking the authority of a profession are treacherous exercises. They misrepresent what scholarship can do, such as deciding questions that are inherently controversial. More importantly, they cast a chill on academic discourse by suggesting there is a party line for the historical profession. When Jesse Lemisch, a notable left-wing historian, tried to organize a counter-statement favoring impeachment (over Clinton's wag-the-dog policy in the Gulf), he received vicious e-mails from his colleagues.