Reconforming Our Universities

   Is There a Crisis in Education Today? David Horowitz is a well-known activist and champion of academic freedom on college campuses. He is the author of the Academic Bill of Rights and a founder of Students for Academic Freedom. He maintains that the environment at liberal arts colleges and universities today is overwhelmingly liberal. Liberal administrators recruit liberal faculty who “indoctrinate” the students by presenting liberal political views as facts rather than opinions. Some encourage students to become activists for liberal issues. Horowitz lectures extensively on this subject, and his lectures are often met with demonstrations requiring campus police for protection. 

   Horowitz outlines the problem as he sees it in a recent book entitled “Reconforming our Universities. The Campaign for an Academic Bill of Rights” (Washington, D.C., Regency Publishing, Inc. 2010). He defines the problem and traces his attempt to formulate an Academic Bill of Rights for students. He aims to have this established in the mission and rules of the colleges and universities across the country. It is of note that in the 1960s Horowitz was a famous leftist radical, Marxist, and editor of “Ramparts” magazine of the New Left. In the 1970s he changed his political views and is now an ardent activist for conservative causes, particularly those related to higher education. 

   Horowitz begins his narrative by defining the problem. In the early days of the country, universities were communities of scholars well versed in Greek and Latin who taught the classics, literature and religion to students from the upper classes that were expected to become the future leaders. In the late 1800s the Industrial Revolution made it necessary to include science and engineering in curricula and to recruit faculty with expertise in these areas. Schools also broadened access to education to those who would be working in such fields, and campus life became diverse. With the Civil Rights and Equal Rights movements in the 1970s, colleges combined courses from different departments to create new fields of study such as “Women’s Studies’ and “American Studies”. These departments were to foster pluralism of ideas, but in fact many simply became centers for political activism. Then they became openly hostile to conservative ideas, regarding conservatives as reactionary, “religious”, “sexist”, and “racist”.

    Horowitz became concerned about the leftist migration of campus thought during speaking engagements in the 1980s and 90s. He found that campus politics of both students and professors was overwhelmingly liberal. He estimates that nationwide about 10% of university professors regard themselves as political activists rather than scholars. In 2003 he and his team documented political party registration of faculty members and administrators at 32 colleges who voted in primary elections. The overall ratio of Democrats to Republicans was >10/1. In many campuses conservative students felt unrepresented and marginalized. Course content was liberal to the point of indoctrination in liberal politics, in Horowitz’s view. For example, at the University of California at Santa Cruz, he found a course on how to organize a revolution. He describes a course at the University of Arizona in which students were given credit for participating in political activity. The instructor provided a list of left-wing organizations for the students to join. Horowitz recounts another incident at the University of Colorado involving a student who was a veteran. The student was offended by an exam question ”Explain why George Bush is a war criminal”. The student answered instead why Saddam Hussein was a war criminal and received an F. This story traveled through the local media and details became murky, but Horowitz gives the story some credibility by the context in which it occurred. Some students described outright hostility from professors. An example is the Malhotra case at Georgia Tech University, which achieved notoriety in the media at the time. An honors student, Ruth Malhotra, was to attend a conservative conference in Washington D.C. She would miss one class and asked the professor what she should do to keep up with the lecture. The professor said that if she went to the conference she would fail the course. The incident went to the administration, which backed the professor. The student dropped the course.

    In 2003 Horowitz decided to take action against this unbalanced situation on the college campuses. He gathered a team of supporters, and they devised a strategy to make changes and bring back political balance on the campuses. They formulated an Academic Bill of Rights for students:
   1. Provide students with materials reflecting both sides of controversial issues.
   2. Do not present opinions as facts.
   3. Allow students to think for themselves.

   Horowitz devoted the next years to getting the Bill accepted by universities. He encountered resistance from both liberals and conservatives in the universities. At one of his invited talks at the University of Missouri in 2003 a professor offered students extra course credit if they protested against his talk. Speaking engagements to promote the Bill often provoked demonstrations. He approached state legislatures, but encountered hostility there also, particularly regarding SUNY. Questions were raised about whether the Bill implies that students have the right to dispute their grade, dictate course content, blackball faculty research, etc. Nevertheless, Horowitz has achieved successes over the years, notably by legislatures and university administrations in Ohio and Pennsylvania. The issue of academic freedom and balanced discussion and pluralism of ideas on campuses has become nationally publicized and recognized.

    Is this a solution without a problem, as one of Horowitz’s critics said, or is there something going on that requires urgent attention? As retired persons, we had the opportunity to audit courses from 2008-2016 at Bowdoin College, a small, highly respected liberal arts college in Maine. The students at that time were all Democrats. The faculty was scholars, and their political affiliations were not obvious in their courses or their lectures. The students were totally concerned with their courses and sports. Invited lecturers tended to be liberal, but one lecture by a general ended with a loud demonstration by students in support of Palestine, which was not the subject of the lecture. In 2013 the College and its president, Barry Mills, were attacked along with other small liberal arts colleges in a report by the Claremont Institute, a conservative think tank. The report maintained that the administration and faculty at Bowdoin and the others promoted exclusively liberal ideas. The attack was vicious and hard to swallow, but some of their criticisms about the minimal presence of political conservatives in debates and invited lectures were taken seriously.

    Our experience as of 2016 resonates somewhat with what Horowitz describes, but not at all to the degree of severity that he advocates. After all, what is a “liberal arts” college? A liberal arts curriculum imparts a broad spectrum of knowledge and ideas to train students to think and form their own opinions about issues. A conservative curriculum stresses traditional values and cautions about innovation and questioning. Thus one would expect liberal arts colleges to have a progressive atmosphere. A pluralism of ideas should include conservative political views as well as progressive ones. Certainly recent events at some schools including Reed and Evergreen State colleges raise concern. Violent outbursts and personal attacks are unacceptable. But our experience suggests that awareness and understanding, rather than action and radical administrative change is what is needed to provide more balanced liberal/conservative debates on campuses. Where is William F. Buckley now that we need him?

Posted by Barbara Banner