David Horowitz Should Really Stop Pulling His Punches

Look, I know my middle-of-the-road foreign policy posts have sometimes had readers wondering about my left-wing credentials. But let me point out David Horowitz has no doubt exactly where I sit politically. In fact, according to him, simply teaching in the University of Massachusetts-Amherst Department of Political Science is enough to prove anyone is a big fat foaming-at-the-mouth American-hating radical bent on propagandizing unsuspecting students:

The University of Massachussetts is…a depressingly radical school where the indoctrination of students in leftwing ideologies is routine.

To end the tyranny of the progressive academy at UMass and nation-wide, Horowitz is promoting an idea, inspired by his visit to my very campus, that is sure to enhance deliberative democracy in college and beyond: the “Adopt a Dissenting Book” campaign. To wit, he is mobilizing students to request a “dissenting” book in every class:

In a democracy there cannot be orthodoxy on matters of opinion. Students must have the right to hear more than one side of controversial issues. And that is why the “Adopt a Dissenting Book” campaign is so important. At the end of the month, the students I met in Massachusetts will begin asking their professor to assign an additional text in his class, one that is written by a conservative and is critical of the liberal majority… If the professor rejects the idea of books with differing views, we will take the request to the chairman of the department. If his answer is negative we will take it to the dean of the college, and then to the chancellor and then to the president and the board of trustees. And we will take it to the press and the public. We will hold “Adopt A Dissenting Book Days” and “Awareness Weeks” especially when parents are visiting a school to look it over as prospective consumers. We will do everything in our power to embarrass university officials by exposing their hypocrisy on this issue so fundamental to our democracy. Universities should not be claiming to educate students when in fact they are indoctrinating them; or claim to be defenders of academic freedom when in fact they are suppressing ideas with which they disagree.

Now at the risk of refuting Horowitz’ claim that we liberal UMass profs are all commie propagandists (and further stoking suspicions that I am in fact a conservative in disguise), I would like to signal my support for this worthy effort. Students do learn better by seeing many sides of an issue, and it’s clear from Horowitz’s one-N study of political science classrooms that as a UMass professor I am failing mine miserably.

For example, although I assign an unhealthy dose of Ruth Wedgwood along with Kenneth Roth in my Rules of War class, it’s true that none of the actual books I assign take positions either for or against the rules of war – they mostly just describe them empirically. I should probably have included a book that denies the Geneva Conventions even exist. While I’m not sure who has written such a book, I am hoping my students will be able to suggest one.*

But despite my general enthusiasm for Horowitz’ efforts, as a scholar of advocacy campaigns I can see three minor shortfalls with his endeavor, based on my understanding of his interests and goals. So I have a few modest suggestions for his free-thinking minions as they press their claims against the tyrants of academe:

1) Adopting Books is So Yesterday. Although his idea is sound, Horowitz’ proposed solution is way too limited. As Nicholas Carr as argued, for this generation of students it’s all about digital media sources, not books. So there’s no reason why professors shouldn’t be permitted – no, make that required – to fulfill the “dissent” “conservative reading” requirement by also assigning a proper proportion of right-wing journal articles, blog posts and web content. (For example, in my World Politics class when we talk about the War on Terror, I realize I’ve been remiss in not assigning sufficient Islamo-fascist content to counter-balance one-sided US foreign policy pieces on counter-terror strategy. And many of the best English-language sources on the extremist right-wing Islamic agenda are frankly websites.)

2) “Dissent” Cuts Both Ways. As everyone knows, it’s important for any new social movement to get its frame right. One of the things I (as a raving liberal) like best about Horowitz’ idea is that it would encourage liberal students to insist their conservative professors also assign dissenting texts. Of course, this only goes to show that Horowitz’ idea risks co-optation by liberal indoctrinators like myself. To avoid this risk of blow-back against conservative academics, who we all know would never propagandize their students, Horowitz might do better to rebrand his movement the “Adopt a Conservative Book/Article/Digital Artifact” campaign. This way there will be no misunderstanding his goals. No self-respecting conservative movement can afford to risk co-optation by anti-American leftists.

3) Don’t Forget The Importance of Enforcement and Oversight.I must say, I think it’s a little irresponsible for Horowitz to stop at mere campus campaigning on such an important issue. Even if a strong informal norm emerges on campuses nationwide to adopt “dissenting” books, there is still much room for interpretation about what counts as dissenting, and professors would still retain a frightening amount of power to set the agenda in their classes without stringent oversight mechanisms.

(Consider a human-security-minded prof like me teaching a class on Genocide Studies. Such a professor might assume as a baseline that the class can agree genocide is wrong, and Horowitz’ scheme would allow him/her to get away with this merely by assigning, for example, a book promoting humanitarian intervention in places like Rwanda and Darfur, and then a dissenting book arguing against intervention. However the real crime would be in not assigning texts that refute the main purpose of the class: true compliance with Horowitz’ rules would necessitate at least one Holocaust-denying text or tome of pro-genocide propaganda. Surely students have a right to be permitted to consider the option that in some cases, genocide might just be the proper course of action. How dare any professor assume they all believe otherwise and stifle their freedom to think differently?) Merely adopting “dissenting” books won’t solve this problem since it would still be up to professors to decide what position should be dissented from.

Therefore, Horowitz should strongly consider the establishment at a minimum of on-campus Academic Virtue Police squads – committees of students and administrators whose job it would be to vet each professor’s syllabus and ensure that the specific books adopted meet the highest standards of “objectivity” – and stone or flog offending professors who flout such standards of conduct. But even these minimal, ad-hoc approaches would be vulnerable to the political proclivities of specific campuses. A centralized oversight mechanism would be far superior: possibly a new government bureaucracy within the US Department of Education designed to ensure proper syllabus construction – and appropriate penalties for dissentersviolators. We may even require a Constitutional amendment to ensure that the federal government steps up to bat to protect our young people’s right to learn.

Academic freedom requires nothing less.

*While I’m still constructing my new “Human Security” syllabus, I would also welcome ideas for books “dissenting” from the controversial notion that humans should be secure.