_______________ FIGHT THE POWER BY DAVID HOROWITZ (06/15/98)

David Horowitz's polemic about the leftist tendencies of America's university faculty is wide off the mark -- and I speak as a registered Republican and a conservative. While it is undoubtedly true that there are universities where the faculty is overwhelmingly liberal, I suspect there are as many in which the faculty is balanced, and at least a handful at which the dominant philosophy is conservative. Horowitz cites the University of Chicago's invitation to Angela Davis as an example of that institution's leftist bias. As an alumnus -- I got my master's there -- I can assure Horowitz that the institution strikes me instead as a perfect example of a place that provokes lively debate through a diversity of perspectives. Indeed, the Chicago School of Economics is largely responsible for the resurrection of conservative economic thought in the United States and elsewhere in the world. On the social and cultural fronts, the Committee on Social Thought, once led by the late Allan Bloom, has attracted some of the most prominent conservative thinkers in philosophy, literary criticism and a host of related disciplines. While other departments are indeed redoubts of radical liberalism, the diversity of opinion strengthens the university rather than weakening it. This letter is certainly not intended as a selling pitch for Chicago. Rather, I've found that Chicago is the norm. The lively debate between left and right that I witnessed there was equally present at my undergraduate institution, Harvard. Even though Harvard is frequently maligned as the home of countless limousine liberals, I'd point out to Horowitz that it is also the home of scholars such as Richard Pipes -- who still insists on calling Communists "Bolsheviks." Horowitz says he's spoken at 75 universities in the past few years. If he's found an audience at that many places, surely they're not all brainwashing their constituents into knee-jerk liberalism. -- Ravi Desai It seems that conspiracy is where you find it. Is academia full of cronyism, petty politics and shoddy scholarship? Yup. Does this amount to a liberal takeover of academia as a whole? Well, nope, unless you pick and choose your examples to make the case. If I were as willing to put polemics above facts as David Horowitz is, I could easily make the opposite case. Leftists have taken over the classroom? At the Ivy League school that I graduated from a few years back, there were quite a few young liberal professors -- none got tenure. Meanwhile, the school gave tenure to a paid spin doctor for the Turkish government's genocide-denial program (who had minimal academic credentials) in exchange for Turkey's sponsorship of the chair. The politics department, in particular, was so conservative that civil rights was taught by a professor who argued that no such thing existed. I had a Russian studies professor who became livid when I compared the Soviet annexation of Estonia to the U.S. annexation of Hawaii. A close friend, currently attending another Ivy League school, has dropped her plans to major in politics because the politics department there is so stridently conservative that there is simply no room for a student with liberal views. No conservative speakers? The year I graduated, George Bush received an honorary degree, and Norman Schwarzkopf gave the address. Liberals taking over? The vice president of the university went to all lengths to undermine the school's written nondiscrimination policy and allow the CIA to recruit on campus. The same administration secretly sacked the head of the sexual assault counseling center because her work with survivors of assault was leading to too much bad publicity. Horowitz thinks conservatives lack a voice? The conservative students had at their disposal not one but two right-wing student publications, generously funded by a network of conservative organizations, while the sole left-wing publication subsisted on very meager university funding that barely covered printing costs. In academia, in government, in many spheres there is a battle of ideologies. When my side wins, it's the inevitable victory of reason; when your side wins, it's a great conspiracy. Personally, I expect more from Salon. A frank and honest criticism of the petty politics, insularity and cronyism of academia would have been interesting. Yet another barbarians at the gate, the queers and blacks and feminists are taking over, fall of Western civilization rant is just a waste of everyone's time. -- Oleg Urminsky As a Ph.D. sociology student, I have firsthand experience with the academic climate on our universities. I am also a moderate liberal in an academic profession that is mostly radical leftists and Marxists. It is undeniable that there is a cloud of intellectual censorship that pervades the ivory towers of our universities. If you take a position that goes against the PC mindspeak, you are called a fascist corporate apologist who is not a "real" sociologist. I take the position that we have gone too far to the left in our ultimate victimhood society. Everyone is the victim of either a bad home environment, racism, corporations or that ubiquitous specter of "patriarchy." There seems to be a belief that all human problems are the result of something that someone else is responsible for. Even the "mentally ill" are victims of their own bad biology. There seems to be a political culture of conflict in all things. Pragmatic solutions lose out to mind-numbing rhetoric. When you violate the conflict ideology at the heart of academia, you face the unfortunate prospect of a very lonely existence. -- Matt Hoover Methinks Horowitz is just bilious from his ingestion of sour grapes. Liberals in academia? I think we need someone with ol' Dave's penetrating insight to tell us why bankers, soldiers and cops tend to be so overwhelmingly Republican. Discrimination in hiring? Perhaps in part. I have found, however, that occupation often reflects worldview. University-level teaching requires a broad mind and a willingness to accept opposing views -- something Michael Savage has shown precious little of in his radio fulminations, as I have heard them. -- Michael Treece San Francisco David Horowitz is correct on noting the pervasiveness of liberal elitism within academia. While I am repulsed by the academic dysphoric relationship to reality and all us "peasants" (very much like the elitist attitudes of Hollywood), I also believe that in order to be conservative you must be either thick as a brick or rely on those who are this thick in order to receive validation of inner hatred of humanity. Yes, the left is full of disconnected, passionless effete snots, the right is rife with dolts and hate mongers. No wonder the body politic is so convoluted. -- Greg Daries Does David Horowitz think that a poll of the party affiliations of stockbrokers or bankers would turn up very many registered Democrats? Our politics are a part of who we are, not simply a suit of clothes we wear. The same aspects of our personality that cause us to choose to be a member of one party or another probably also cause us to choose certain careers. I used to teach at Ball State University in Indiana during the Reagan years. Some of my brightest, most intellectually curious, most ambitious students were very conservative. Inspired by their president, they planned careers in politics, law and business. They were economics majors, prelaw and premed. Not one that I know of even considered going on to teach. And I don't recall that the mood of the times was one of economic self-sacrifice. Republicans like money. They think that it is good to have it and they like careers that promise to pay them lots of it. Teaching, even at the best colleges, does not pay like Wall Street does. It is too bad that there aren't more conservative voices in academia. It's too bad that there aren't more moderates there. If Horowitz wants more conservatives in the professoriate, he'd do better to teach young conservatives that money isn't everything. Or convince colleges to quadruple the starting salaries for new professors. -- David Reilly Syracuse, N.Y. I was an academic for some 24 years. What I found at my university was that in certain areas of specialization, liberals far outnumbered conservatives. However, in other areas, such as business, engineering, political science, conservatives far outnumbered so-called liberals. Thus any consideration of the "quotas" of liberals and conservatives should consider the various disciplines at a given school. Similarly, there is a distinction to be made between reporters (usually liberal) and editorial writers and publishers of newspapers, who nearly always are conservative (especially in small towns). Who runs the universities today? Administrators. And they are conservative. College teachers are make-believe liberals, touting perhaps a Marxist line but secure in tenured slots. Mr. Horowitz ought to know that the tenure system came about because of bias against communists and left-wing thinkers. It is now the tenure system that protects those poor minority conservatives who run and teach in schools of business and engineering and in most of the sciences. -- Fred Lapides, Ph.D. SALON | June 18, 1998

R E C E N T L Y+| THE BOY IN THE CELLULOID BUBBLE BY CHARLES TAYLOR

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