Author: David Limbaugh
Publication: Townhall.com
Date: September 22, 2003
Conservative scholar-warrior David
Horowitz has the left in apoplexy over his ingenious proposal for
an Academic Bill of Rights that would forbid university faculty from
hiring, firing, and granting or denying promotion or tenure on the
basis of political beliefs.
Hysterical liberals are screaming
"quota" and "McCarthyism," neither of which has any basis in rationality.
Horowitz's plan would eliminate quotas, not impose them, requiring
universities to judge professors on their merits, not their ideology.
Horowitz is not demanding that the
percentage of faculty conservatives correspond with the percentage
of conservatives in the general population. But he doubtlessly believes
that if universities were prohibited from discriminating against
conservative professors, their percentages on college campuses would
increase.
Can somebody explain how Horowitz's
plan remotely smacks of McCarthyism? Isn't McCarthyism the groundless
smearing of political opponents by accusing them of being Communists
or the like? If so, then how much more so are liberals guilty of
McCarthyism when they demand actual quotas in university admissions
and other areas of society? This is all ridiculous.
Liberals have gotten to the point
that they throw out the term "McCarthyism" practically every time
they get caught in the act. Their name-calling is designed to divert
our attention from the merits of the Horowitz proposal. How dare
anyone challenge their title deed to their indoctrination factories?
Yale University Professor Bruce
Shapiro - a card-carrying far-left liberal by his own proud admission
- pooh-poohed Horowitz on "Hannity and Colmes," arguing that a professor's
ideology has no bearing on most courses.
Shapiro pressed, "When you say 10-to-1
liberal, are we talking math professors? Is there a liberal way to
teach math? Are we talking about Aristotle versus Plato, or Bush
versus Gore? Are we talking about, perhaps, biology professors? What
is the relevance of how professors or anybody else votes?"
Horowitz shot back, "This is completely
ridiculous. Here we have liberals who want diversity of skin color
because they claim that that means diversity of viewpoint. That's
what the Supreme Court has declared. And yet when I'm showing you
that 90 percent of professors come from one political persuasion,
you suddenly object. You can't get a good education if they're only
telling you half the story."
Horowitz is precisely correct, but
time didn't permit a more thorough response to Shapiro's specious
charge that a professor's politics don't matter in most subjects.
Anyone who has attended college in the last 30 years knows better.
Perhaps if Horowitz had had more
time, he could have directed Shapiro's attention to a few examples,
which I cite, among many others, in my new book, "Persecution: How
Liberals Are Waging War Against Christianity":
Professor Michael Dini at Texas
Tech refused to write medical school letters of recommendation for
students who wouldn't declare their acceptance of the theory of evolution.
San Francisco State University decided
that Professor Dean Kenyon, a leading national authority in chemical
evolutionary theory, was no longer suited to teach introductory biology.
Why? Allegedly because he exposed students to points of dispute among
scientists on macro- evolutionary theory and to the fact that a number
of biologists admit to the existence of evidence for intelligent
design in the universe.
Mississippi University for Women
asked Professor Nancy Bryson to resign as head of the Division of
Science and Mathematics because she taught students the scientific
flaws in Darwinian thought.
Classroom discussion guidelines
for the course "Women's Studies 797: Seminar in Women's Studies"
at the University of South Carolina required students, as a condition
of participating, to "acknowledge that racism, classism, sexism,
heterosexism, and other institutionalized forms of oppression exist."
In the class "Sex and Death" at
Carnegie Mellon University, students examine "whether we need to
liberate death now that (maybe) we have figured sex out."
The University of Virginia offers
a course in Marxism, which posits that the work of the godfather
of Communism is the "standard against which all subsequent social
thought must be judged. . It's worth devoting an entire semester
to it."
Draconian speech codes exist on
many college campuses, censoring politically incorrect (conservative)
speech. University administrations overwhelmingly invite liberal
speakers to deliver commencement addresses. When conservatives are
invited to speak, they are often subjected to ridicule and contempt.
There is more, so much more, but
this is the bottom line: Horowitz is dead on, and his opponents are
either in denial or being disingenuous. The liberal monopoly on college
campuses exists - shamefully so. It's relevant, and it matters.
Bravo to David Horowitz for fighting
back.
