Diggins’ observation provides the template for what has happened to American universities in the last 30 years. The liberal academy of the 1950s and 1960s, whose ideals were shaped by Charles Eliot and Matthew Arnold and whose mission was “the disinterested pursuit of knowledge,” is no more. Leftists tenured after the 1960s first transformed these institutions into political battlegrounds and then redefined them as “agencies of social change.” In the process, they first defeated and then excluded peers whom they perceived as obstacles to their politicized academic agendas.

Some years ago a distinguished member of this radical generation, Richard Rorty, summarized its achievement in the following words: “The power base of the left in America is now in the universities, since the trade unions have largely been killed off. The universities have done a lot of good work by setting up, for example, African-American studies programs, women’s studies programs, gay and lesbian studies programs. They have created power bases for these movements.” Rorty is a professor of philosophy at the University of Virginia and one of the nation’s most honored intellectual figures. He is also an editor of the democratic socialist magazine Dissent and a moderate in the ranks of the left. That such an intellectual should celebrate the conversion of academic institutions into political “power bases” speaks volumes about the tragedy that has befallen the university.

On the occasions of my campus visits, I am always curious to discover the local circumstances that conspire to create a situation so otherwise inexplicable in an open society. How, in particular, does an institution that publicly promotes itself as “liberal” and “inclusive,” as dedicated to “diversity” and the “free exchange of ideas,” devolve into such a dim political monolith? The conservative history professor who had come to dinner was obviously a senior member of his academic department. Of course, he could not have been a junior member, since the hiring doors had been closed nearly a quarter of a century earlier. So I asked how conservatives were treated by faculty colleagues.

“Well, they haven’t allowed me to sit on a search committee since 1985,” he replied. He was referring to the committees that interview prospective candidates to fill faculty openings. “In 1985,” he continued, “I was the chair of the search committee and of course we hired a Marxist.” He said “of course,” because for conservatives, diversity of viewpoints makes perfect sense.

The professor went on: “This year we had an opening for a scholar of Asian history. We had several candidates but obviously the most qualified one was from Stanford. Yet he didn’t get the job. So I went to the chair of the search committee and asked him what had happened. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘you’re absolutely right. He was far and away the most qualified candidate and we had a terrific interview. But then we went to lunch, and he let out that he was for school vouchers.’”

In other words, if one has a politically incorrect view on K-12 school vouchers, one must be politically incorrect on the Ming dynasty too. This is almost a dictionary description of the totalitarian mentality. But there is more than dogmatism at work in the calculation. The attitude also reflects the priorities of an entrenched oligarchy, which fears to include those it cannot count on to maintain its control.

A focus on control is normal for bureaucrats in any institution. But in an institution like the university, whose very structures are elitist, there are few natural limits to such political agendas. Outside the hard sciences and the practical professions, what is the penalty for bad ideas? There is none. Once a discredited dogma like Marxism is legitimated through the hiring process, there is no institutional obstacle to its expansion and entrenchment as a “scholarly” discipline. And when academics are imbued with a sense of social mission that requires ideological cohesion, the result is an intellectual monolith. How monolithic?

Last spring I organized college students to investigate the voter-registration records of university professors at more than a dozen institutions of higher learning. I had them target the social sciences. The students used primary registration to determine party affiliation, although admittedly, it’s not always an exact match (someone may switch party registration to vote in a particularly heated primary, for example). Here is a representative sample:

At the University of Colorado at Boulder, 192 professors were surveyed. They were drawn from the English, history, political science, journalism, African studies, women’s studies, and sociology departments. On the primary rolls were 117 Democrats, five Republicans, three Greens, 20 who were unaffiliated, and 47 who could not be located.

In short, at a public university in a Republican state 94 percent of the liberal arts faculty whose party registrations could be established were Democrats and only 4 percent percent were Republicans. Out of 85 professors of English who registered to vote, none were Republicans. Out of 39 professors of history, one was. Out of 28 political scientists, two were.

These findings confirm an earlier study by Vince Carroll, editor of the Rocky Mountain News, who found that “of the 190 professors affiliated with a political party, 184 were Democrats.” Carroll could not find a single Republican in the English, psychology, journalism or philosophy departments; nor were there any in such enclaves of freedom as women’s studies, ethnic studies, or gay and lesbian studies (cited in the Christian Science Monitor, May 6, 2002).

How Republican is Colorado? Its governor, two senators, and four out of six congressional representatives are Republican. There are 200,000 more registered Republicans in Colorado than there are Democrats. But at the state-funded University of Colorado, Republicans are a fringe group.

At Brown University in Providence, R.I., 94.7 percent of the professors whose political affiliations showed up in primary registrations last year were Democrats; only 5.3 percent were Republicans. Only three Republicans could be found on the Brown liberal arts faculty. Zero in the English department, zero in the history department, zero in the political science department, zero in the Africana studies department, and zero in the sociology department.

At the University of New Mexico, of 158 social science professors surveyed, six were Republicans: two in economics; one each in sociology, English, women’s studies and African-American studies; and zero in political science, history and journalism.

At the University of California at Santa Barbara, 135 professors were surveyed in the departments of African-American studies, English, women’s studies, history, communications, and political science. Of these, 75 were Democrats, one was a Republican, one was Green, and 58 did not vote in the primary. In other words, 97 percent of the professors were Democrats, 1.5 percent were Greens, and 1.5 percent were Republicans. Only one Republican professor could be found in all those departments.

At the University of California at Berkeley, of the 195 professors whose affiliations showed up, 85 percent were Democrats, 8 percent were Republicans, 4 percent were Greens, and 3 percent were American Independent, Peace and Freedom, or Reform party voters. Out of 54 professors in the history department, only one Republican could be found. And there were absolutely no Republicans in the sociology, English, women’s studies, African-American studies or journalism departments.

At the University of California at Los Angeles, of the 157 professors whose political affiliations showed up, 93 percent were Democrats; only 6.5 percent were Republicans.

At the University of North Carolina, the Daily Tar Heel conducted its own survey of eight departments and found that, of the professors registered with a major political party, 91 percent were Democrats while only 9 percent were Republicans.

In an ideological universe in which university administrators claim that “diversity” is their priority, these facts are striking. How can students get a good education if they’re being told only half the story? The answer is, they can’t.

Many contemporary academics see themselves not primarily as educators but as agents of an “adversary culture” at war with the world outside the university. But the university was not created and is not funded to compete with other institutions. It is designed to train citizens, employees and the leaders of those institutions, and to endow them with the appropriate knowledge and skills. Because of its strategic function as an educator of elites, however, the university can be effectively used to subvert other institutions in the way that Antonio Gramsci proposed.

The structural support for ideological conformity is intensified by the introduction of overt political agendas. These agendas were originally imported into the university by radicals acting as the self-conscious disciples of Gramsci, an Italian Marxist. As an innovative Stalinist in the 1930s, Gramsci pondered the historic inability of Communist parties to mobilize workers to seize the means of production and overthrow the capitalist ruling class. Gramsci’s new idea was to focus radicals’ attention on the means of intellectual production as a new lever of social change. He urged radicals to acquire “cultural hegemony,” by which he meant to capture the institutions that produced society’s governing ideas. This would be the key to controlling and transforming the society itself.

To illustrate how ingrained this attitude has become, and how casually it is deployed to justify the suppression of conservative ideas, let me cite an e-mail I received from a professor at Emory University. The professor was responding to an article I had written about the abuse of conservative students by administrators at Vanderbilt University, and the exclusion of conservatives from the Vanderbilt faculty. He was not especially radical, yet he did not have so much as a twinge of conscience at the picture I drew of a faculty cleansed of conservative opinions. “Why do I and other academics have little shame here?” he asked rhetorically, then answered the question: “We are not the only game in the marketplace of ideas. We are competing with journalism, entertainment, churches, political lobbyists, and well-funded conservative think tanks.”

There is an organic connection, for example, between the political bias of the university and the political bias of the press. It was not until journalists became routinely trained in university schools of journalism that the mainstream media began to mirror the perspectives of the adversary culture. Universities have become a power base of the political left, and the Emory professor’s argument only makes sense, really, from the vantage of someone so alienated from his own society as to want to subvert it. His suggestion that universities somehow “balance” the conservative think tanks of the wealthy is patently absurd. “Well-funded” conservative think tanks may stand in intellectual opposition to subversive agendas, but what wealthy think tank can compete with Harvard, its centuries of tradition, its hundreds of faculty members, its government subsidies, and its $18 billion tax-free endowment?

The present academic monolith is an offense to the spirit of free inquiry. The hiring practices that have led to the present situation are discriminatory and illegal. They violate the Constitution, which prevents hiring and firing on the basis of political ideas, and patronage laws that bar state institutions from servicing a particular political party. Yet university administrators have not shown any inclination to address this problem or to reform the practices that perpetuate it. Nor have self-identified “liberal” professors who are themselves the source of the problem. If there is to be reform, it will have to come from other quarters.

The trigger of the debate is the recent decision of the Justice Department to remove restrictions it imposed on itself in 1972 that prevent the agency from spying on organizations that have not yet committed an actual crime. A chorus of so-called civil rights groups has already attacked the decision — which involves no change in the law and no endorsement of illegal behavior — as though it were an attack on the Constitution itself.

The 1972 restrictions were adopted by the FBI in the face of an assault on its practices by the political left. The issue was the FBI’s “COINTELPRO,” an effort to counter massive civil disobedience and the growing threat from quasi-military radical groups who had gone from demonizing America to planting more than 1,000 bombs, committing acts of military sabotage and killing at least one innocent math professor in their campaign against the Vietnam War.

While lighting the fires of war on the homefront as a protest against the war abroad, the political left succeeded in making the FBI the villain. Of all the groups targeted by the FBI’s COINTEL program, the one most often held up as an example of American injustice was the Black Panther party. Plots and alleged acts of political “repression” against the Panthers became the prime justifications for clipping the FBI’s wings.

In fact, the Panthers were a heavily armed group prone to violence against their own members and others. One of their leaders, Elaine Brown, boasted they had more than 1,000 weapons including rocket launchers and machine guns. But since the Panthers were a “political” party, and since a vast fellow-traveling cadre of left-wing lawyers and civil rights groups abetted by a willing press was ready to see them as victims rather than perpetrators, the FBI was effectively neutralized and the Panthers continued on their radical course.

The 1972 restrictions, which barred the FBI from infiltrating the Panthers and acting to prevent violence before it occurred, made the task of controlling them much greater. With the restrictions in place, the Panthers were able to murder more than a dozen people — mostly black — in the 1970s including my friend Betty Van Patter who was bludgeoned to death in 1974. No one was ever prosecuted for these crimes.

In 1969 a group of SDS New Leftists created the Weather Underground, America’s first terrorist cult. The Weathermen made very obvious their anti-American jihad. They issued a declaration of war against “Amerikkka” and began a campaign of violence that included detonating a bomb in the U.S. Capitol building in 1971. In 1970, three of their leaders were blown up while building a nail bomb, which they intended to set off at a dance at Fort Dix, in New Jersey.

The FBI knew the names of every leader of the Weathermen and most of its members. But the FBI — even prior to its self-imposed restrictions — was unable to penetrate the leftist networks that protected and supported the terrorist cadre, and the government was never able to apprehend them. Luckily, the Weathermen did not have Stinger missiles, anthrax caches or suitcase nuclear devices to make their mayhem really impressive. The FBI’s new mission — to stop domestic terrorism before it happens — is difficult enough. We should applaud any bureaucratic effort to make that job easier.

All Americans who care for their own lives or the lives of their families and neighbors, both leftists and conservatives alike, should join in praising John Ashcroft for taking these minimal — but politically difficult — steps to defend their homeland. The FBI could not stop the Weathermen and the Panthers in part because the bureau did not take the threat these groups posed seriously enough. They were also hampered by the charge of “McCarthyism,” the label the left used to tar all government attempts to curtail Communists who were loyal to the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

The government now understands, presumably, the threat that radical Muslim and Arab terrorists present to this country. Giving them the means to control this threat, to infiltrate and surveil groups whose agendas set them at war with the United States, is common sense.

It would have been better if the FBI had announced that it was specifically targeting mosques where radical Islamic doctrines are preached, instead of churches, synagogues and mosques in general. This blanket approach was obviously adopted to make the agency less vulnerable to attacks from the vocal fellow travelers of the civil-rights left.

But the fact remains, according to Steve Emerson’s “American Jihad,” that 80 percent of America’s mosques are funded by the Saudis, who also fund al-Qaida worldwide, along with the suicide bombers in the Middle East. The leader of the first bomb attack on the World Trade Center in 1993, whose aim was to kill 250,000 people, was a blind sheik who operated out of his own mosque. The radical lawyer representing the now imprisoned blind sheik is under indictment by Justice for allegedly helping the prisoner communicate with his terrorist cohorts in the conduct of their violence in the Middle East. The lawyer — Lynne Stewart — is a well-known radical “civil rights lawyer” and former attorney for the Weather Underground terrorists. She is currently also representing three pro-Palestinian teenagers charged with a hate crime for attempting to firebomb an orthodox synagogue in New York as a “protest” against Israel’s attempts to defend itself in the Middle East.

Both Stewart’s attorneys are radical lawyers who have defended terrorist bombers whose targets were Americans. One of them, Susan Tipograph, was the prime suspect in the escape of a Puerto Rican terrorist from an American prison. Stewart’s colleague in defending the teen terrorists, Stanley Cohen, is a lawyer and political advocate for Hamas and a disciple of another Stewart colleague, William Kunstler, whose Center for Constitutional Rights is a front for left-wing extremists intent on carrying on their own war with America. As an editor for the New Left magazine Ramparts, I remember being visited in 1969 by Arthur Kinoy, who with Kunstler was co-founder of the Center for Constitutional Rights. Kinoy was carrying with him a draft manifesto for a new “Communist Party” (those were the words in the document), which he intended to organize with Kunstler. The agendas of the hard left never really change. Support for America’s enemies then; support for America’s terrorist enemies now.

Following the Ashcroft announcement, I was a guest on Sean Hannity’s radio show opposite Francis Boyle, professor of international law at Illinois University and self-proclaimed “civil liberties” activist. Professor Boyle went swiftly on the offensive. The removal by the FBI of its own self-imposed restrictions was an assault, he said, on the First and Fourth Amendments — although no one’s free speech was in danger and no search and seizure was proposed. Boyle was concerned, he said, about the liberties that made America what it was.

Or was he? Francis Boyle is a legal advisor to the terrorist PLO and the terrorist Palestine Authority. His agenda in the Middle East, laid out in the pro-Palestinian Internet magazine Counterpunch, is “dismantling [the] criminal apartheid regime” in Israel! In fact, Boyle is a supporter of the anti-Israel disinvestment movement and compares the liberation struggle against Israel to the liberation struggle against South Africa. The destruction of Israel doesn’t phase Boyle at all. But then Boyle sees the present Republic of South Africa, which has tragically become the rape, murder and AIDS capital of the world, as “a beacon of hope” for mankind.

While many people in the civil rights business are genuine liberals, others are people who sympathize with terrorists like the Panthers and the Weathermen, and now Hamas and al-Qaida. This should be a warning to all Americans who care about their country. It is not only that we have to take the threat to our homeland more seriously. We have to become more sophisticated about the threat we face.

Not every Democrat is as kooky or anti-American as Rep. Cynthia McKinney who sits with her party’s connivance on the House International Relations Committee and spent the week before 9/11 joining hands in South Africa with Iranians and other Islamo-fascists to condemn the United States, then came home to accuse Bush of plotting the September terror attacks so that his friends in the Carlyle Group could make war profits on defense contracts. But more mainstream Democrats — the Leahys and the Boxers and other equally left-wing and determined antagonists of American power — are far more significant players in the debacle of 9/11. And no one is more singularly responsible for America’s vulnerability on that fateful day than the Democratic president, Bill Clinton, and his White House staff.

It was President Clinton who knew of a plot to use airliners as bombs to blow up American buildings — Clinton officials learned of this back in 1995. But they did nothing about it, and they kept this information from the Bush security team.

More on this later, but first the background:

No aspect of the university system exposes this bias so readily as the process by which tribunes of the nation’s culture wars are invited to speak at college forums. Only authorized student groups with faculty sponsors can extend such invitations. Moreover, they must come up with funds to underwrite travel and lodging arrangements, along with an honorarium that can range from $1,000 to $20,000, depending on the speaker’s celebrity. If the speaker is a political activist, these appearances can provide a substantial supplement to personal income and a significant subsidy to the speaker’s political cause.

I spoke at 23 universities this spring, including an appearance at Vanderbilt on April 8. The invitation had come from a conservative student group called Wake Up America, which was formed three years earlier for the purpose of bringing speakers to campus. Despite its dedicated agenda, however, Wake Up America has only managed to put on four events in the three years of its existence. This is not because of a scarcity of conservative speakers ready to speak on college campuses. It is because Vanderbilt refuses to provide funds to Wake Up America to underwrite its aspirations. Vanderbilt’s attitude toward Wake Up America is, in fact, anything but supportive; Vanderbilt officials have treated the group like an alien presence from the moment of its conception.

Thus, when Wake Up America’s founder, Dan Eberhart, approached the assistant vice chancellor and head of student life, Michelle Rosen, to gain approval for his group, she told him, “There is no need for your organization because a student group already exists, namely the Speakers Committee.” This was an Orwellian subterfuge. The assistant vice chancellor knew that the Speakers Committee was a partisan student group dedicated to bringing left-wing speakers to the Vanderbilt campus. James Carville, Ralph Nader, Kweisi Mfume and Gloria Steinem, for example, are recent visitors, courtesy of the Committee. These are pricey celebrities and the Vanderbilt student activities fund has granted the Speakers Committee $50,000 a year in the past to make their wish list real. This year the Student Finance Committee, which administers the fund, has increased the Speakers Committee grant to $63,000. By contrast, in its entire three-year existence Wake Up America has never been granted a single cent to bring conservatives to the Vanderbilt campus.

The Speakers Committee is actually only one of an array of left-wing groups that are the beneficiaries of Vanderbilt funds. In a recent press release announcing the disbursement of $1,143,963 to student groups, the Student Finance Committee defined its purpose in these noble words: “to fund activities that will have broad campus appeal and that will guarantee a diversity of activities within our community.” A glance at the roster of funded groups reveals, however, that this diversity principle does not extend to the realm of ideas.

While Wake Up America receives no funds, the Vanderbilt Feminists receive $10,620; the Vanderbilt Lambda Association (a group of gay leftists) receives $12,000; the (left-wing) Middle Eastern Student Association receives $4,700; the (left-wing) Black Students Alliance receives $12,400; the (left-wing) Organization of Black Graduate & Professional Students receives $13,120; the (left-wing) Vanderbilt African Student Association receives $1,500; the Vanderbilt Association of (left-wing) Hispanic Students receives $14,200; and the (left-wing) Vanderbilt Asian American Student Association gets $15,000.

How do I know that these ostensibly ethnic associations are “left-wing?” I know it as a result of my inquiries at Vanderbilt and by my own broad range of experience with similar groups on campuses across the country. They are not only political and to the left, but they are more often than not at the extreme end of that spectrum as well. For example, when I spoke at Denison College in Ohio a few weeks before Vanderbilt, I had been preceded by Angela Davis, Denison’s official Martin Luther King Day speaker the month before. Davis is a lifelong Communist apparatchik who received a “Lenin Prize” from the East German police state during the Cold War, and remained a party member after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The official Denison Web site, on the other hand, describes her as “known internationally for her ongoing work to combat all forms of oppression in the United States and abroad.” The university closed its offices during her speech so that the entire campus could hear her unreconstructed anti-America, Marxist views.

When I spoke at Michigan State, I had been preceded by columnist Julianne Malveaux, the official Martin Luther King Day speaker there, who received $15,000 from student funds, some of which were supplied by the black student association. As in the case of Davis, Malveaux’s views are antithetical to King’s. She is a crudely racial Marxist who once asserted that there were “200 million white racists in America,” and on another occasion expressed her wish that Clarence Thomas would have a heart attack. Her speech was called “Economic Justice: The Struggle Continues,” and included attacks on Ward Connerly, Laura Bush, the idea of a colorblind society and of King as its prophet.

I had been preceded at Duke by Aaron McGruder, a black cartoonist who had gained fame through his strip “Boondocks” and notoriety for attacking America after the World Trade Center was bombed. McGruder was also the university’s official Martin Luther King Day speaker. In his speech, McGruder noted that 90 percent of the American people supported the war and said, “I would like to believe the 10 percent left over is black.” He then told the students, “your vote means nothing; you can protest if you want, they’ll throw you in jail.” Davis, Malveaux and Magruder reflected the extremist sentiments of the black student groups on campus without whose imprimatur no Martin Luther King Day speaker could be selected.

In the academic world, the situation at Vanderbilt — where $130,000 is provided to left-wing groups, and roughly $0 to conservatives — is completely normal, with the exception of a handful of small conservative and religious schools like Hillsdale and Bob Jones University. At the University of Wisconsin, the Multicultural Students Association attacked the reparations ad I placed in the Badger-Herald last spring by attacking the paper as “a racist propaganda machine” — an absolutely unfounded smear — and attempting to shut the paper down. The MSA was rewarded for its bad behavior the following fall with a grant of $1 million to fund its radical activities. On the same campus, the Students for Objectivism receive a mere $500 in student program funds. At Duke University, in the wake of my reparations ad and the demonstrations that attended it, president Nan Keohane announced a grant of $100,000 in additional funds for student groups. When I spoke at Duke, which was a day after my visit to Vanderbilt, $50,000 of Keohane’s grant had been disbursed — $500 to the Duke Conservative Union and $49,500 to left-wing groups. Because university funds were unavailable, my Wake Up America hosts had to raise the money from outside contributions, not an easy task for students. They managed to secure funding from three individuals and from two conservative organizations — Young America’s Foundation, which underwrites the lion’s share of my tours, and the Leadership Institute. The money they raised allowed them to bring me to campus, house me and provide about one-fifth the honorarium I would have received if I were a left-wing ideologue like Julianne Malveaux. If I were Malveaux, or Cornel West, or Gloria Steinem, in other words, I could have collected more than $200,000 this spring for attacking America and posing as a champion of economic justice to college students. There is probably not a single left-wing activist working the campus circuit who is not making a six-figure income.

A frustrating but typical trait of college conservatives is that they don’t — as a rule — complain about the inequities that are routinely inflicted on them. Because they do not make trouble for abusive and illiberal campus administrators, nothing is done to correct these problems.

Funding inequities are actually only a small part of the injustices that conservative students suffer and that seem like normalcy to them. They also adjust, for example, to the rampant political bias in their expensive curricula, which is the result of a faculty hiring process that bars conservatives and limits the education of all students to a relentlessly one-sided view of the world they live in. Obtaining a faculty sponsor for Wake Up America was thus even more difficult than getting the vice chancellor to approve its formation.

The founder of Wake Up America, Eberhart, scoured the campus for a professor who would sponsor his club. He put letters of request in professors’ mailboxes. He approached them directly. In the end, out of approximately 1,000 faculty members at Vanderbilt, he was able to come up with only one who would sponsor a group whose intention was to bring conservative speakers to a college campus. Vanderbilt is not only an old and traditional institution, but it is hosted by a state with a Republican governor and two Republican senators, and a citizenry whose majority voted Republican in the last presidential election — against a favorite son, Al Gore. The successful purge of conservatives from the faculty of Vanderbilt is thus a sobering commentary on the politically debased condition of the American university, which has fallen victim to an academic McCarthyism more insidious than the academic witch hunts of the past because it is incomparably more effective.

The lone professor willing to sponsor a non-left student group at Vanderbilt was a business school professor from outside the Vanderbilt community. Because his primary occupation is actually business rather than teaching, this professor flies from his home in San Francisco to Nashville twice a week to teach his course. In other words, there are really no conservative professors in residence at Vanderbilt University who are willing to publicly sponsor a group whose purpose is to bring an underrepresented viewpoint to the Vanderbilt community — even though it is a viewpoint shared by a majority of Tennessee voters and half the American public.

My Vanderbilt talk was scheduled for Monday, April 8, and on Jan. 12 Wake Up America had reserved the room where it would be given. But on Thursday, April 4, the Vanderbilt administration informed Eberhart that a professor now needed the room he had reserved for a review class, and that my speech would have to be canceled. Coincidentally, this happened to me on at least three other occasions on this spring tour alone. The University of Oregon canceled my appearance the day I arrived in the state on the grounds that a request for security for the event made two weeks earlier was one day too late, and the room had been given to another event, although my sponsors were not informed until one day before my announced appearance. NYU canceled the room for my talk there the day I arrived in New York, also because of an alleged room-scheduling problem, and James Madison University canceled, as I was about to depart for Florida, for the same reason.

In other circumstances, a young and well-mannered conservative like Eberhart might have capitulated to this petty harassment and terminated the event. Fortunately, he held his ground in this case, strengthened in his resolve perhaps by the fact that my office had been able to arrange a C-Span taping of the event. His resistance bore fruit, and permission was given to proceed, but not until Eberhart agreed to pay “for the wear and tear to the foyer” of the hall where the speech eventually took place. A $100 cleanup fee was also tacked on, even though no food or beverages were served and there was no refuse to clean up.

Despite a downpour, about 250 people showed up for the speech in Wilson Hall and listened civilly while I described “How The Left Undermined America’s Security.” The attendance was even more gratifying than usual because the Vanderbilt Hustler, which was the student paper, did not inform the campus community of the speech (or report on it after I gave it). This was not surprising, since the left-wing editors of the Hustler had refused to run my reparations ad the year before.

Afterward, I signed books and answered questions of those who stayed to ask them. One of my interlocutors was a professor of philosophy who handed me a yellowing copy of my very first book, “Student,” published exactly 40 years earlier. In it, I described the first student demonstrations of the 1960s at Berkeley, where I was pursuing a graduate degree. I didn’t realize at the time that we were going to transform American universities into politicized institutions, where only approved ideas would be welcome. I hope I would have had second thoughts about demonstrating then if I had realized this would be the outcome.

When I asked the professor what kind of philosophy he taught at Vanderbilt, he said with a smirk, “Marxist philosophy,” then asked me to write the following in his book: “To my political enemy from a foaming at the mouth right-wing ideologue.”

Humor seems not to be a radical asset. I signed the book, but with a different inscription (perhaps “second thoughts are best”), and he left. I was then approached by a group of undergraduates who by their appearance and questions were not politically conservative. A young woman with a diffident demeanor asked, in an earnest tone, what I thought of racial profiling.

Her question was inspired by a portion of my talk that addressed the problem of airport security. I had pointed out that nine of the World Trade Center terrorists were actually stopped by airport security on 9/11 because they had faulty IDs, but they had been allowed to board the planes anyway. I said that the Clinton administration’s failure to institute adequate security measures prior to the attack was due in part to an ideological aversion to profiling Muslim terrorists.

I tried to explain to the student the difference between factoring race into a profile and using race as the profile itself. I referred her to Heather MacDonald’s article in the conservative magazine City Journal, “The Myth of Racial Profiling,” fully realizing as I did so that this undergraduate would never have heard of Heather MacDonald or the City Journal. Nor would she be familiar with the writings of virtually any living conservative writer including myself. I gave her the name of the Web site where MacDonald’s article was posted and could be located. But I did so with a heavy heart, because I knew that the student had many questions, not one; that her parents were paying $30,000 a year to give her a good education, but that at Vanderbilt she would only be getting one side of the story and only one perspective on the ideological conflicts that would affect her life.

I had met students like this throughout my campus sojourns. The encounters were the saddest memories I took away with me. Millions like this young woman would pass through universities like Vanderbilt, which would routinely betray their trust. They would be given decks that were stacked, instruction that was partisan and partial, and there was nothing I or a small contingent of conservatives could do in one hour or during one event to alter these facts.

The job of identifying this piece of Brockian hypocrisy fell to critic Bruce Bawer, who performed the task in a devastating review that appeared in the Washington Post. This was a bad break for Brock, because Bawer is also a formerly conservative gay man who, like Brock, worked for the American Spectator. Thus his credibility on Brock’s subjects is quite high. Brock responded with an angry squeal to the Post’s editors, claiming that Bawer had not disclosed that he was mentioned in the book. The Post editors apologized to Brock, drawing some of the sting from Bawer’s verdict.

The second Big Lie of “Blinded by the Right ” is that Brock’s decision to reform was triggered by a realization that the conservatives who had supported and defended him (and helped to make him rich) were closet homophobes. The reason they had to be closet homophobes is that they not only had sponsored Brock’s media rise, but had continued to support him when the political left outed him as a homosexual. Enter me. Although I barely knew Brock, he cast me as the poster boy for the closet syndrome, reserving the punch line of his pivotal conversion chapter for an incident that allegedly exposed my anti-gay prejudice. According to Brock, I had uttered an unspecified “anti-gay slur” to a nameless editor who I didn’t realize at the time was gay.

I responded to Brock’s attack in an article for Salon. I pointed out that I had a very public career of defending gays and that in typical fashion Brock had printed damaging gossip without checking with the source to see if the inferrences he had drawn — that I was homophobic — were correct. I identified the editor that Brock had referred to as Chad Conway and pointed out that when I called Chad to do the checking myself he had no idea Brock had used the anecdote. Moreover, he told me he was appalled by the use Brock had made of it. I read Chad the passage and asked him to give me a statement I could use in an article I told him I was writing for Salon. Chad dictated the following sentences to me: “You have never made an anti-gay slur to me or about David Brock or anyone else. You have never said anything hurtful to me — not about gays or anything else.”

In response to this article Chad appears to have written a confused e-mail letter to a friend — which quickly surfaced on the Internet, and which he has also sent to Salon. According to the e-mail, Chad now says the remark I made was indeed a slur. On the other hand, despite the fact that his own previous statement to me refuted that claim, he doesn’t bother to retract the statement in this letter. More significantly, Chad’s letter confirms what is the only important fact in this dispute (and in evaluating Brock’s credibility), namely, that I am not anti-gay, covertly or overtly: “Horowitz was always very good about the gay issue with me, and personally I don’t think that he is a homophobe,” he writes in the e-mail. Whatever else one may conclude from this dispute, this particular statement by Chad Conway confirms Brock’s irresponsibility in using the anecdote and establishes the calculating mendacity at the core of his book.

In his letter, Chad — who never called me to discuss the matter — complains that my Salon article failed to describe the actual conversation in which the alleged slur occurred. It seems to be this omission more than anything else that provoked his ungenerous note. “Here is the piece [Horowitz] left off: I told David Brock on the telephone the amusing story of how I came out to David Horowitz.” Note the formulations: an “amusing story” about “how I came out to David Horowitz” — not, for example, about “how I discovered that David Horowitz was anti-gay.” This alone — although Chad himself seems to have missed this — refutes Brock’s use of the anecdote and shows how malicious it was.

Because the injustice of this would be obvious to any fair-minded third party, I would have been inclined to let this matter go. But some sewers of the Internet like Mediawhoresonline have attempted to turn it into an occasion to celebrate Brock’s smear, and to spread it. (“MWO World Exclusive. Capital City Rocked by Horowitz Revelations. Horowitz-Gate: ‘The Problem With the Gays Is That They Are Hysterical.’ Wingers Exposed as Liars, Frauds, and Homophobes!”) So here goes.

I did neglect to describe the details of the original conversation with Chad in my Salon article, and for a good reason. When I called Chad to talk about it before writing my Salon piece, neither of us could remember the specific issue that had provoked the comment and had led to Chad’s “coming out.” This is not surprising since the conversation took place three or four years ago. It is crucial, however, because context determines the meaning of such remarks — just as the fact that I am a conservative defender of gays should indicate (whatever the particular incident was) that Brock blew it wildly out of proportion and utterly distorted it.

Chad now says my remark was made in the context of an article I wrote. Any such article probably would have been about the AIDS epidemic, a subject I have addressed several times for Salon. In dealing with AIDS, I have described the irrational and destructive way in which the gay left has responded to the AIDS crisis. This reaction began with an attack by ACT-UP activists on Ronald Reagan, whom they accused of causing the epidemic (because he did not fund AIDS research at a level satisfactory to them). ACT-UP demonstrators in Washington dressed themselves in black and dragged coffins in front of the federal health building, condemning Reagan as a murderer.

Blaming Ronald Reagan for AIDS is a hysterical reaction. In this context — or a context like it — I made a statement that Chad now remembers as this: “The problem with gays is that they are hysterical.” I do not remember making this statement, a generalization about all gays. We were talking about gay radicals, and a specific reaction by gay radicals, which I may have written about. I remember saying something like, “Well, that’s their problem, that they’re hysterical.”

Such a statement could carry the implication that this kind of emotionalism is a trait evident not just in gay radicals but in broader sections of the gay community, and it could also be misinterpreted by someone unfamiliar with the range of gay personalities to include all gays. In any case, Chad responded to the remark (according to his own account) by saying, “You don’t think I’m hysterical, do you?” and I replied, “Are you gay, Chad?” or, “You’re not gay, Chad, are you?” I certainly didn’t preface this with the exclamation “Jesus!” as Chad indicates in his letter. (I just don’t happen to use “Jesus” in that way.) Unfortunately, I am unable to convey my inflection in a print medium, but it was totally friendly. It was a funny moment, which Brock converted into a nasty, hateful moment.

I do not think what I said in the context constituted an anti-gay slur. I don’t think Chad does either, despite what he now says. And I am sick and tired of this “gotcha” tactic among the politically oh-so-correct. In Chad’s letter he does not recall having any reaction at the time we had the conversation that would indicate he took it as a serious slur. He did not say, for example, as one might expect had he felt that way, “Yes, David, I am gay, and you shouldn’t have said that.” He didn’t react that way, because it wasn’t an anti-gay slur and both of us knew it wasn’t. Nor was it said in any way that could be taken as hostile or denigrating toward gays. Let me put it another way: Are Jews pushy? Yes. Are all Jews pushy? No. Is someone who says, “The problem with Jews is that they’re pushy” guilty of an anti-Semitic slur? The answer is that it depends on the context, the emotional tone with which the statement was made, and the tenor and quality of the speakers’ relationships to actual Jews. Nothing Chad has said in his letter or to me alters the fact that whatever I said, it was not an attack on gays.

Why has Chad written this letter? Perhaps Chad wants to stay friends with David Brock. Perhaps Chad’s liberal politics make him want to defend Brock’s book, which he apparently thinks the world of now that he’s read it. It doesn’t really matter. His letter just adds his testimony to the fact that I am not anti-gay or “homophobic,” that I am in fact supportive of gays — and that David Brock is a liar.