Indoctrinating You?
A review of David Horowitz’s latest screed, Indoctrination U.
By Amy Schiller, Brandeis University
Wednesday March 21, 2007
While reading David Horowitz’s latest treatise, Indoctrination U, I consistently had to challenge my own implicit assumptions, previously formed understandings, and initial impressions. Exposure to conservative arguments did in fact force me to rethink my liberal positions. Sadly for Horowitz, even this noble accomplishment on his part only reinforced my prior understanding of him as an opportunistic charlatan who considers himself oppressed, even as he condemns the language of oppression when spoken by those who’ve experienced real disadvantages.
Indoctrination U is essentially a rehash of Horowitz’s career in right wing activism, calling out all the supposedly politically correct zealots who have wronged him since his conversion from radical left to hard right in the 1980s. Horowitz’s ability to co-opt the language of oppression and turn a supposedly theoretical manifesto into his personal soapbox would put even the most emo slam poet on your campus to shame.
Horowitz’s thesis is that universities pollute the minds of innocent young people, indoctrinating them into a leftist mindset. His intention is to impose a code of silence around controversial topics within academic classrooms, and to this end, he has tried various methods of imposing this agenda, most famously by shopping around a disingenuous resolution called the Academic Bill of Rights. The resolution has been introduced in dozens of state legislatures across the country and threatens professors with monetary fines or termination if they advance political arguments in class. Much like, for example, the Clean Skies and Healthy Forests Initiatives, the name of Horowitz’s legislation is completely contrary to its content and real goals: to allow monitoring of syllabi and silencing of academic discourse.
Horowitz has no faith in students to rise to the challenge of independent thought when confronted with unfamiliar ideas on topics relevant to their daily lives. But if that is true, why on Earth are students in college at all? A central purpose of higher education is to expand the critical thinking capacity of young people, to make them nimble, adaptable, and secure in their ability to form arguments and appreciate nuance. Horowitz has no interest in increasing students’ mental capabilities; au contraire, his call to “protect” young people from “indoctrination” at the hands of their “biased” professors is based on the assumption that students are intellectually feeble.
As a man without much faith in students’ ability to debate differing opinions, Horowitz makes an enormous fuss when some students are willing to do so. At Reed College, he found the exception that “proves” his rule: a historically liberal student body who, sadly for all involved, took Horowitz at face value, believing Horowitz would challenge Reed students with conservative rigor in a lecture. The bloom came off the rose, however, once the actual debate regarding academic freedom began, and Dean Peter Steinberger made his remarks. By referencing Horowitz’s earlier publications on political framing, which state the importance of co-opting liberal rhetoric for conservative electoral gains, Steinberger attempted to expose Horowitz as the political ideologue he is. Horowitz spends a chapter whining about how rude and dismissive Steinberger’s remarks were, and highlights the incident as an example of the narrow-mindedness and derision he says he is faced with from academic liberals. He misses no opportunity to mention the fact that for a time, he, Michelle Malkin, and Ann Coulter shared a bodyguard (though the image of the trio crouching together for safety is priceless).
All of this takes place in parallel to Horowitz’s intellectual crusade to rid the academia of the people he considers self-pitying wound-lickers, like African-American studies and gender studies professors. Horowitz considers the academic credentials of such scholars illegitimate, because he claims they merely pontificate on their personal grievances, trying to pass them off as critical thought. But nobody fits that description better than Horowitz himself. Since so many gender studies and ethnic studies departments promote a worldview that questions authority and power structures, the reactionary Horowitz believes they are de facto indoctrination camps. This is where the double-talk gets confusing. Horowitz decries identity politics for relying on tropes of victimization, and then turns around to paint conservative college students as defenseless victims to be pitied.
As for his pathetic defense of his 2006 book The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America, Horowitz falls back on that favored James Frey excuse: My publisher made me do it. In an entire chapter devoted to retroactive ass-covering, Horowitz states, “The subtitle was added by the publisher long after I finished the manuscript. … My intention was not to show extremes, but to reveal a pattern of professional behavior that was widespread.” In other words, he didn’t want to give it a provocative McCarthy-esque title—that just happened to be the most effective marketing strategy, with absolutely no bearing on the content and logic of the book itself
The most repugnant moment is when Horowitz and former Reagan administration Secretary of Education Lamar Alexander commiserate about how hard it is to get paid well in academia. The former secretary of education says, in effect, states cut funding for education (gee, I wonder who those governors could have been), therefore conservative intellectuals can’t get paid. Facing a dearth of standard-bearers on campuses, the only solution the men can agree on is to impose a top-down freeze on political expression for professors, to prevent the spread of liberal orthodoxy without any available counterpoint.
Think about that: The former secretary of education says there’s no payday in teaching and then advocates silencing other academics. Curiously, we later learn from Horowitz that the average salary at the University of Kansas is over $92,000 per year, which Horowitz feels is lavishly wasted on such subversive infidels as the professors of Women’s Studies. So, there’s not enough money for conservatives who want to teach, but the liberal professors who do teach have undeservedly cushy salaries? I’m beginning to think Horowitz intentionally leaves these contradictions in the text to bait his critics so he can bemoan their obsession with details as evidence that people like me have no argument to make against him and have to settle for nit-picking. The truth is that Horowitz’s writing is a self-parody of self-pity, a meta-commentary on opportunism, and a display of shameless hypocrisy.
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Comments
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Thanks for the article…this guy is truly dangerous himself, and Revolution Newspaper just devoted an entire issue to this important issue of attacks on academic freedom on campuses. Check it out!
— shlomo - Mar 23, 11:56 AM - #Forgot the link:
— shlomo - Mar 23, 11:57 AM - #http://www.revcom.us/a/081/nazif-en.html
Horowitz reminds me of some of the converts from one faith denomination to another that I have dealt with.
They can’t accept their new faith without trashing their old faith and attempting to punish adherents of the old faith anyway they can.
Sad.
— hterrya - Mar 23, 03:52 PM - #Amy – Thank you for the review. I perceive conservative students views are a bit more tolerated today by some members of the “intolerant Left”. – Please tell me “mom and dad” are NOT paying for your college.
— mighty aphrodite - Mar 23, 05:06 PM - #Horowitz is an ass.
— frank67 - Mar 23, 08:00 PM - #Horowitz is a god. Anyone that actually tinks conservative views are honestly discussed really nneds to put the bong.
— yolo - Mar 24, 02:31 PM - #What I’m hearing is that neo-cons could make more money working as neo-con propagandists than as professors (easier, too, you don’t need so much education and don’t have to go through any vetting processes. You just say what your bosses want, and you get a big fat paycheck.)
— Hattie - Mar 26, 04:54 PM - #But (uh-oh) this leaves those dang liberals in charge of the classroom! Ooops!
What really scares the neo-cons, and why they are becoming more and more strident, is that pretty soon they will have no audience any more and they will have to work for a living and for the perks the way the rest of us do.
After living a lie all these years, espousing worthless ideas and sentiments! Wasted lives!
George. Any time a conservative talks about the “liberal agenda,” I would like a definition. I would also like to know what the “conservative agenda” is.
And a round of applause for Dr. Steinbrenner and the “liberals” of Reed! I’m so proud I went to grad school there.
oops. Steinberger.
— Hattie - Mar 26, 05:15 PM - #It seems that Horowitz is determined to drag down America’s educational standards to an even lower level than before. I have an American acquaintance who can’t understand an argument which comes from a different theoretical base than his own. He makes quite a bit of money in America, so he automatically assumes that he understands everything. Yet, when he tries to argue, he doesn’t have a disciplined enough mind to try to understand a concept in the way the theorist is using it. Instead, he applies his own “common sensical” definition to the term, and ends up cooking himself a dog’s breakfast. But this guy believes that the Humanities are corrupt!!
— Jennifer Cascadia - Mar 26, 07:33 PM - #One question for all of you: Besides those of you in business school or the sciences, have you ever had a professor on campus express a conservative viewpoint? Leading leftist professors have made the point. Based on me and my friends experience it just doesn’t happen. Professors are there to indoctinate. You try bringing up a conservative viewpoint in any history class and you see what happens.
— mark - Mar 27, 11:29 PM - #Mark, if you try to distort historical facts in a history class, then see what happens. I for one have taken plenty of history classes and none of my professors have minded when students including myself have challenged either the Marxist interpretations being offered (not all history is economic strife, Eric Hobsbawm!) or the prevailing opinion. My early economics professors were about 2/3rds conservative, and they didn’t mind when people challenged their interpretations, provided the challenges were well constructed and supported by the evidence.
I think the problem people like the Horowistas have is that they don’t understand the rules when it comes to academic discourse. NOT all ideas are welcome at the table, because not all ideas are supported by the evidence. If someone wants to argue against evolutionary theory, for example, they need to provide more than a copy of Genesis to back their argument.
Professors aren’t there to indoctrinate, they’re there to teach you how to think like a responsible social/natural scientist.
— JR - Mar 29, 11:43 PM - #I think this debate has been marred by misrepresentation on both sides. I think Horowitz needs to come clean with what he actually wants. At his Conference he played it like he merely wants a way for students who are out-and-out ABUSED by professors to have a way to seek redress. But in his book he rails against “Social Work” as a politicized college major. And, he never fully comes out with whether his Bill of Rights would actively enforce balance as far as reading material for classes (which would be stupid). This allows the left to perpetuate the McCarthy stuff.
I’m left wondering what his Bill of Rights would actually do. How would it be enforced, etc.
— Michael - Apr 5, 03:11 PM - #You fail to refute the main premise of his book, i.e. “universities pollute the minds of innocent young people, indoctrinating them into a leftist mindset.”
Instead, your article reinforces Horiwitz’s point. His argument, in your view, however, treats students as intellectually feeble. So, I guess, professors should be able to proselytize from the podium.
Here’s the bottom line; you can’t have intellectual freedom in college classes if the professors require adherence to their particular point of view and failure to do so results in a poor or failing grade.
That’s his point. Nothing else.
I find it hard to believe that you even read the book.
— Max - Apr 18, 01:22 PM - #David Horowitz is right on. I don’t want my young college aged kids sitting under professors at such an impressionable age listening to them spout non-wisdom outside of their subject area. Are you going to put this on your site or accidentally delete it? Whenever anyone starts attacking character instead of ideas, then you automatically know that they HAVE nothing to attack. Horowtiz’s ideas are correct. The University systems are not enforcing their own rules of conduct in the class. So you go ahead and attck him personally i.e. He can’t convert to a new fatith without dissing his last one, etc. Maybe it is okay with you that your professors use their podium as a liberal pulpit because you are on the left. But if your conservative professor starts supporting the Iraq War or Bush (heaven forbid), what would you do? I say you would complain to the Dean, President, etc. The only reason you don’t want Horowitz’s premises to be acknowledged and enforced is because of the overwhelming numbers of leftist professors who want to (yes, I said it) INDOCTRINATE my child in order to perpetuate left thinking as the true way to think. I am a teacher and I don’t let my students discuss the war in my music class. IF the social studies teacher wants to have a HEALTHY debate in his class, more power to him and good luck. He chould be VERY careful not to try and let the students know which “side” he is on, so they are not intimidated. So you say college-aged kids are not intimidated by professors or shouldn’t be? What planet did you say you live on? Have you taken Human Growth and Development? Perhaps this judgement is outside of your expertise as a book reviewer? Hurrah to the $10 million lost at the U of Colorado when Churchill was an idiot. The way we can speak and vote is with our tuition money and I applaud heartily every single parent and student who chose not to attend there until they straighten out that mess. University systems be warned.
— Donna Huston - Sep 21, 01:32 PM - #what a surprise!schiller is intolerant of horowitz and finds her liberal beliefs reinforced. i would guess the reverse is also true. perhaps some student on some campus somewhere will consider the merits of both points of view. perhaps not.
— mark bramson - Mar 11, 08:08 PM - #