Unsettling Truth

David Horowitz’s Academic Bill of Rights, Founding Document of Neocon Utopia

Andrew Garib, Turn Left | Link | There was one scandal involving the recent Student Assembly elections that very few seemed to notice. The SixPAC, a small coalition of candidates, included among other inane and ultimately fruitless promises a pledge to ‘establish a Students’ Bill of Academic Rights’. It turns out that this campaign promise is only slightly more ridiculous than other candidates’ desire to ‘increase Greek autonomy’ (whatever that means), but few students may realize how insidious this Bill and the so-called Academic Freedom movement may be.

There are actually two forms of this Bill, the original Academic Bill of Rights and its inspired offspring the Students Bill of Rights, both drawn up by Vietnam War protester – turned neoconservative activist David Horowitz and his Students For Academic Freedom. The Bills both sound great at first hearing: Horowitz wishes to ‘[protect] the intellectual independence of professors, researchers and students in the pursuit of knowledge and the expression of ideas from interference by legislators or authorities within the institution itself.’ But upon a closer reading, these carefully concocted documents show their true colors.

The Academic and Students’ Bills of Rights represent a complete misunderstanding of the nature of academia, and a threat to true academic freedom and progress. They create a false universe where truth is relative, the only world in which Horowitz’s particularly warped brand of conservatism can survive. It puts the power of academic oversight into administrative hands and even possibly the courts – and not under the responsibility of the intellectual communities where true academic authority does and should rest. And, it could potentially create a world where America’s intelligencia cannot fulfil its role as this nation’s conscience due to fear of being branded as a brainwashing liberal.

Horowitz is certainly an independent conservative mind, but if he gets his way in passing versions of his work in legislatures across America, these Bills of Rights would create an America where the word ‘freedom’ carries no meaning.

An Affirmative Action and An Ironic Twist

Part of the psychology of Horowitz’s conservatism is his liberal doublethink – his keen ability to turn traditionally liberal issues into conservative ones. According to his bio on his own FrontPage Magazine website, Horowitz is a ‘lifelong civil rights advocate’ – yet he played a part in ending an Affirmative Action policy in California colleges and universities in 1996. He is a self-styled ‘defender of the rights of minorities and other groups under attack – including the rights of blacks, gays, women, Jews, Muslims, Christians’ and of course ‘white males.’

One of the hijacked liberal ideas Horowitz is fighting for is diversity, but in this case it’s so-called ‘political diversity’ he supports, in a policy that is essentially Affirmative Action in the hiring of conservative professors. The Academic Bill of Rights states: ‘All faculty shall be hired, fired, promoted and granted tenure on the basis of their competence and appropriate knowledge in the field of their expertise and, in the humanities, the social sciences, and the arts, with a view toward fostering a plurality of methodologies and perspectives.’

This is hardly our usual conception of Affirmative Action. At schools like Cornell, admissions officials may choose one candidate student over another of equal academic strength in the interests of diversity – in particular, racial diversity. But David Horowitz would have universities actively recruit professors whose contribution to the diversity of the school would have no positive effect. It wouldn’t just mean more conservative professors in the government department. Affirmative Action for ‘intellectual diversity’ would bring Marxist professors to our economics departments, Freudians to the English department, or even monarchists teaching US history – the equivalent of Aristotelians lecturing Mechanics I to freshman physics students.

The irony of Horowitz’s rabid opposition to real Affirmative Action aside, the Academic Bill of Rights is an interesting case study in the notion of diversity. The 1978 Bakke decision, the case that resulted in today’s conception of Affirmative Action in college and university admissions, described ‘the goal of achieving a diverse student body [as] sufficiently compelling to justify consideration of race in admissions decisions under some circumstances’ with specific reference to ‘racial and ethnic classifications’. But it’s pretty clear that Horowitz’s notion of intellectual or political diversity doesn’t quite gel with ethnic diversity.

Affirmative Action is designed to both confront institutional racism in hiring practices in governments and companies and in the admissions policies of colleges and universities, and to encourage ethnic and racial diversity within academic institutions. Affirmative Action means more qualified students at universities like Cornell who are of different backgrounds than the average Cornellian. It certainly does not mean the lowering of standards at academic institutions or the establishment of quotas.

Ironically, the attacks conservatives routinely launch against Affirmative Action can be justly levelled at Horowitz’s wish of universities ‘fostering a plurality of methodologies and perspectives’. Affirmative Action for conservative professors means that academic departments, the fundamental arbiters of value in academic work, would no longer hire, fire, promote and give tenure based upon the quality of the academic, but on his or her political beliefs. There’s no connection between a candidate student’s quality and her race, but there certainly can be a strong connection between an academic’s scholarly work and his politics. A historian who denies the holocaust, an economist who teaches labor-value theory, and a sociologist who ties intelligence with ethnic background are academically backwards – and their political positions show it.

Horowitz’s crusade against liberal bias in academia obscures its ostensible intention. If there really is an unfair attitude against conservative ideals and professors in the academy, the Academic and Students Bills of Rights are hardly the way to address it. It’s not Affirmative Action Horowitz wants. It’s Affirmative Distraction. Horowitz is a smart man – and like his Bills of Rights, his intentions should certainly be scrutinized more closely.

Freedom for Whom?

There is no essential notion of progress in race, but the academy strives towards an ideal of truth, and with that, a sense of progress towards a better understanding of the world around us. That’s why Affirmative Action policies in America’s colleges and universities are justified, and why the active recruitment for a diversity of political ideologies is tantamount to the destruction of American academia as we know it.

The Academic Bill of Freedom claims that ‘curricula and reading lists in the humanities and social sciences should reflect the uncertainty and unsettled character of all human knowledge in [the social sciences and humanities] by providing students with dissenting sources and viewpoints where appropriate.’ But is the knowledge produced from the study of history, economics, political science and other areas of particular political salience really that dubious? It certainly is when one’s own opinions are in the tiny academic and ethical minority.

Horowitz’s horrendous idea is inherently anti-progressive. It affirms that we could never really know if Nazism was a bad thing, or if Stalinism was a failure, or if the American Civil War was about slavery. By questioning the nature of truth itself, Horowitz wishes to create a safer place for his false and deceptive ideologies, ironically shielding the over-intellectualized underpinnings of his gross conservative position from the great marketplace of ideas.

While the spirit of Horowitz’s words certainly ring true (orthodoxy and dogmatism are most fundamentally anti-academic; a college professor would certainly be negligent if she did not present and critically analyze various viewpoints on any given issue) these convoluted Bills of Rights represent a denial of the fact that some liberal ideas and policies are a product of solid academic work, and that truth may in fact be on the politically progressive side for a large variety of issues.

The Bills of Rights certainly do stand on the side of a freedom: the freedom to spout unfounded reactionary rhetoric into the minds of American under the guise of rigorous academic discourse.

In asserting the supposed right to teach Rightist rhetoric alongside rigorous scholarly work, Horowitz wishes to in fact suppress academic freedom. The Bill maintains that ‘academic institutions and professional societies should maintain a posture of organizational neutrality with respect to the substantive disagreements that divide researchers on questions within, or outside, their fields of inquiry.’ But the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) disagrees, asserting the need for academic departments to make evaluative judgements on scholarly work with reference to the standards of the academic field in question. In the AAUP’s 2003 statement regarding the Academic Bill of Rights states that ‘only by making such judgments of quality can academic institutions separate serious work from mere opinion, responsible scholarship from mere polemic.’ Of course, that’s exactly the distinction Horowitz doesn’t want us to make.

The question really comes down to who is in charge of academic standards; if not scholarly experts in representative fields, then who? The AAUP charges that the Academic Bill of Rights would erode the sovereignty of the academy, leaving university curricula more, not less, susceptible to political influence and the whims of ‘activist’ judges. Horowitz’s Bills of Rights set out to destroy academic freedom and progress, and to give credibility to political ideas and ideologies where it is not warranted. Like Ron Suskind’s critical rendering of the ‘faith-based community’ surrounding George W. Bush, Horowitz would have an America questioning truth itself to make room for his frightening version of reality. The Academic and Students’ Bills of Rights are two steps closer to the neocons’ Orwellian paradise.

Already David Horowitz has succeeded in passing (albeit watered-down) versions of his Academic Bill of Rights in the State of California, and is pushing to have similar bills passed in Colorado, Ohio, Georgia and in the federal House of Representatives. And right here at Cornell, the SixPAC coalition, along with campus conservatives and their selfstyled ‘individualist’ subset wish to impose an image of academic freedom upon this campus that ignores the nature of the academy and obscures the very notion of freedom.

It’s up to us to realize that ‘establishing a student’s bill of academic freedom’ is not like other innocuous campaign promises from SA candidates. It may represent the next great battle between those who wish to truly understand the world around us and expose truth, and those whose personal mantra is ‘ignorance is bliss.’

Sources:
http://studentsforacademicfreedom.org/
http://www.frontpagemag.com/AboutHorowitz/index.asp
http://supct.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/historics/USSC_CR_0438_0265_ZS.html
http://www.aaup.org/statements/SpchState/Statements/billofrights.htm End.