Taken in by the rhetoric

The story surrounding the recent referendum that resulted in the adoption of a "Student Bill of Rights" at Princeton caught my attention because I have been following the latest exploits of David Horowitz as he campaigns to rid higher education of the scourge of political bias in defense of the principles of academic freedom. At least that is his self-justifying public rhetoric. The reality is quite different.

I've known Horowitz since he camped out on the other end of the political spectrum. Back in 1973, when he was working for the radical leftist magazine "Ramparts," Horowitz attacked Princeton University Press and me, as the social science editor, for publishing "The New Left and the Origins of the Cold War" by Penn State history professor Robert Maddox. This widely reviewed book was a withering critique of seven prominent New Left writers including Horowitz — author of "The Free World Colossus: A Critique of American Foreign Policy in the Cold War" — for shoddy scholarship. Unable to defend their scholarship, Horowitz and some of the other six New Left writers instead engaged in an ad hominem counterattack. They alleged establishment figures such as George Kennan and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., were leading a "right-wing conspiracy" behind the publication of the book, presumably to discredit the New Left politically.

Since then, Horowitz has certainly moved a long way ideologically but his methods of operating against his perceived political enemies have not, as his recent popular book, "The Professors," shows. As one of the professors attacked in the book, Penn State English professor Michael Berube pointed out, the entry on him consists of "a bizarre cut-and-paste in which Horowitz takes snippets from my essays and tries to argue that because I call postmodern philosophers 'sane' and 'secular,' I am therefore anti-religious. (That will come as news to my Jesuit teachers!) If Horowitz were a college student and tried to get away with this garbage, he would indeed be flunked — not for his conservatism, but for his mendacity."

Horowitz, who visited Penn State on April 13 on his tour of college campuses to promote his new book, showed himself true to form, engaging in political invective against anyone to the left of him while all the while trumpeting his claim to be merely defending academic freedom. The College Republicans at Penn State, alas, seemed beguiled by his rhetoric and unable to realize that, on his own shallow and flimsy evidence, there is no serious problem here — certainly nothing meriting the time and attention of legislators in Pennsylvania, who have so annoyed voters in the state by raising their own salaries hugely with no public debate that there is now a full-scale voter revolt under way.

Fortunately, it would appear that at Princeton the College Republicans have had the good sense to distance their own campaign from Horowitz, eschewing his "tactics." But I can't help but wonder if they haven't also been taken in by his rhetoric. To the extent that there is real substance to the claim that academic freedom is endangered, it comes from the efforts of those like advocates of intelligent design (ID), who want to foist their "theory" on unsuspecting undergraduates who haven't learned enough about science to see through its pretensions of being real science rather than merely being disguised theology. If some Princeton students believe that it is important to have ID represented in the classroom to achieve "balance," then listen to what the American Association of University Professors has to say about this in a new statement: "Balance refers to the obligation of instructors to convey to students the state of knowledge ... There is no obligation to present ideas about intelligent design in a biology course, for example, because those ideas have no standing in the professional community of biologists."

There is a whiff of this spurious notion of balance in the Princeton "Student Bill of Rights," especially in the references to "the exclusion of other opinions and viewpoints" and "intellectual pluralism" in points two and four. Would Princetonians favor giving equal time to ID proponents and Holocaust-deniers, or perhaps even astrologers, among invited speakers and in the classroom?

If one were to take these principles at face value, then the proper response is the one that Asheesh Siddique '07 made, in threatening to file a complaint with the USG about an introductory economics course that ignores "Marxist economic viewpoints, privileging capitalist ones exclusively." (Not surprisingly, Horowitz likes economics departments best among those in liberal arts, except the one at the University of Massachusetts–Amherst, because it is Marxist.) Once you are on that slippery slope, there is no stopping anyone from arguing that it is important to include the Aristotelian perspective in biology courses, as well as ID! Sanford G. Thatcher '65, GS '67 was a philosophy major and is director of Penn State University Press. He can be reached at sgt3@psu.edu.