Spectrum of ideas has more than left, right

David Horowitz's oped last Thursday argued that "intellectual pluralism" is sorely absent at Princeton and that an appropriate remedy would be the adoption of a "bill of rights" guaranteeing academic freedom to all students and faculty.

I do not doubt that faculty members are sometimes pressured to conform to the preferred orthodoxy of their more senior colleagues. Nor do I doubt that students are sometimes unfairly penalized when they are bold enough to defend theses that their professors reject.

But nobody, as far as I know, proposes that a university should condone or tolerate such blatant disrespect for the learning process.

As I understand him, Horowitz thinks that all academic work should be evaluated strictly on its "scholarly merits;" sound methodology, coherent premises, duly qualified conclusions, etc. I urge him to find a professor or administrator on this campus who disagrees.

Thus, Horowitz opposes himself to a rather feeble straw man. If his point is that professors should refrain from intimidating students, or that they should present counterarguments to their own perspective, or that they shouldn't harp on opinions tangential to their area of expertise, then there's nothing particularly novel or interesting about his bill of rights.

So then what's the fuss? Whom is Horowitz trying to convince?

As Horowitz's website makes clear, the absence of "intellectual pluralism" on college campuses has exactly one manifestation: the underrepresentation of professors who espouse conservative political views. His insistence that students are not being exposed to the full spectrum of scholarly opinion is a polite way of saying that they are only being exposed to the left side of the spectrum. In Horowitz's circle, the putative enemies of academic freedom are leftist partisans who indoctrinate their students by denigrating, trivializing or concealing valid criticisms of liberal ideology.

As for Horowitz, he isn't wrong to observe that the politics of academia are often "one sided." But it is highly misleading to suggest that what we really need is more freedom for "the other side."

Here's the problem: who ever said that there are only two sides?

The banner atop Horowitz's homepage declares: "You can't get a good education if they're only telling you half the story." Half? The assumption that scholars can be aptly described in the clichéd terms of the standard liberal/conservative dichotomy only works if we insist on viewing scholarly output through the lens of the culture wars. I see no reason to superimpose the bipolarity of our party politics on the more highly nuanced disagreements among scholars.

The whole point of scholarly inquiry is to be sensitive to subtle distinctions that may not be well-appreciated in the popular culture. Horowitz, on the other hand, views American college campuses as just another front in the culture wars. Understandably, he insists on a fair hearing of both sides. But we should insist on a far more ambitious goal: careful attention to the third, fourth and fifth sides; in short, a willingness to constantly redraw the battle lines.

Horowitz's campaign for academic freedom sells the real promise of academia short. If he were genuinely committed to an intellectual pluralism that puts a premium on nuanced insight, he would be less intent on making academia fairer to conservatives and more interested in praising the good scholarship that challenges traditional ideological categories.

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Horowitz is trying to do exactly what most conservatives would condemn under any other circumstance: he is trying to cash in on the minority status of his "group." This irony has been pointed out before, but if we stop there, we will miss the larger point. Every notion of diversity reifies some basic idea of which differences matter and deserve respect. Horowitz's idea of diversity as a function of political identification would entrench a conception of "difference" that is neither helpful nor scholarly.

Horowitz has already "won" to the extent that he has induced his critics to adopt his binary model of intellectual disagreement. We shouldn't take the bait.

Precisely because academic freedom is so precious, we must avoid invoking the phrase as a shibboleth to rally our own troops. Jeremy Golubcow-Teglasi is a religion major from Potomac, Md. He can be reached at golubcow@princeton.edu.