The War on Professors

You can take our lives, but you can't take our academic freedom.

by David Faris

Pennsylvania students and professors busy with last semester's end may not have noticed the end of this state's academic-freedom dustup. But in late November, the Republican-controlled Pennsylvania House handed an epic defeat to right-wing forces who want to strip professors of their academic freedom and dignity under the guise of student "rights." Now, we can all return to work without the thought police's sword of Damocles hanging over our Marxist-Leninist heads.

The movement, spearheaded by '60s leftist-turned-wingnut-gadfly David Horowitz, has as its very raison d'etre the censorship of professors critical of U.S. and Israeli foreign policy. Academic freedomistas like to dress their pathetic little faction up with claims that they care about all disciplines and want to get politics out of the classroom, but what they really want is left-wing politics out of social-science classrooms.

Horowitz is the brains behind Students For Academic Freedom, a group that exists largely to get young Republicans to complain about their grades and harass their left-wing professors in and out of class. His locally based counterpart is Daniel Pipes, founder of Campus Watch, whose mission is to smear and intimidate professors who dare question the party line on Israel and the Middle East in general.

At Penn, one of my semesters as a teaching assistant was deeply marred by an undergraduate Campus Watch spy who admitted on Day One that he was there only to monitor the professor. Not only did this monomaniacal and possibly disturbed student routinely and viciously interrupt lectures, but he made one of my discussion sections a living hell for the other students with his pedantic objections to every single piece of material that didn't portray Israeli history as all puppy dogs, rainbows and hugs. My evaluations were full of things like, "I would have really enjoyed this class if it wasn't for that one unbearable jerk. You know the one."

During the past few years, Horowitz and his group have been instrumental in bringing "academic bills of rights" before a number of state legislatures. The whole movement is based on a few, mostly apocryphal, scare stories about poor, benighted conservative students being embarrassed in class by lefty professors, or graded down on exams for sticking up for the Dear Leader in the White House. Upon further examination, most of these claims turn out to be the gigantic piles of dung that they smell like from afar.

Pennsylvania taxpayers were victimized by this ridiculous hoax during the past year, as Horowitz and his minions convinced the brain-dead and since-ousted Republicans to hold hearings on academic freedom, even though there isn't, and never was, any evidence that students were being oppressed by their professors. Thousands of dollars were wasted and, in the end, even GOP sycophants concluded there was no fire and that the smoke was coming directly from Horowitz's rear end.

The truth is that people like Horowitz don't care about students' rights at all. If they did, they wouldn't be using impressionable 18-year-old kids as the vehicles for their own demented visions of institutional control. What most of these kids need to learn is how to write and think critically, and not to conceive of every classroom encounter as an opportunity to attack the leftist boogeyman. The reality is that most liberal professors and TAs bend over backwards to avoid offending their conservative students.

While the academy certainly has its fair share of obnoxious left-wing professors, Horowitz's solution to this minor problem is to strip professors of their freedom to design courses and grade exams on their merits.

Well, for once, the good guys seem to have won. Pennsylvania legislators were smart enough to see the ruse. Professors here can get back to their classrooms without worrying about getting fired for criticizing the Bush administration.

And David Horowitz can get back to manufacturing stupid controversies. Just don't send him my name — I don't have tenure.

David Faris is a frequent Slant contributor.