Manufactured Controversy
Who’s behind conservative efforts to limit free exchange of ideas on college campuses- and why their efforts have failed.
By Pedro de la Torre III
June 10, 2009
The challenges facing American higher education in its efforts to educate students, come up with new ideas, answers and solutions are plentiful. The current economic crisis makes having a robust higher education system even more important, but it also puts institutions of higher education in
financial jeopardy.
As a result, not only are institutions far more susceptible to criticism and threat—administrators of course fearing threats to their bottom line—but the faculty who educate, and the students who are attempting to get an education, are put more at risk as well.
The trickling down of these financial difficulties for parents, coupled with the decade-long decline in financial aid, may put the promise of a college education out of reach for all but the most well-off students. Likewise, in short-term efforts to improve the financial position of institutions, increased reliance on part-time or contingent instructors who are paid less than their full-time counterparts is projected to have a far-reaching impact on faculty members and the quality of education. Further, all of this comes at a time when legislators and business leaders are looking more and more to higher education to improve our nation’s economic positioning.
Rather than focusing on these very real threats to higher education, the past seven years have seen legislators, trustees and administrators devote large amounts of time, focus and political capital to defending higher education from a marked increase in ideological attacks. Organizations and individuals from the far right wing—led by David Horowitz, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, and the Alliance Defense Fund—have sponsored legislation in no fewer than 30 states, have attempted to get individual professors fired, have sued numerous institutions and have run a media smear campaign with an eye toward persuading decision-makers to regulate the content of higher education and convincing the public that there is a profound problem of “liberal bias” in higher education.
Certainly, this is not the first time that higher education has endured attacks from one political group or another. No one needs to be reminded of the accusations against faculty and student organizations for being “communists” during the McCarthy era. Likewise, the conservative critique of higher education has been part and parcel of the “culture wars” in the United States for well over two decades. The inspiration for this campaign can be traced back to William F. Buckley’s seminal polemic God and Man at Yale, written in 1951.
A fever pitch of critics against higher education was heard during the late 1960s and 1970s as higher education was radically transformed by massive enrollments and the growing admissions of traditionally underrepresented populations. The movement gained renewed vigor in 1987 with the publication of Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, and attacks on higher education have been a part of political life ever since. The attacks of the last seven years took these critiques as their battle cries but took their goal to a more disturbing place—not just attacking the academy for alleged liberal bias, but seeking government regulation of speech to change the situation.
Fortunately, the recent attacks by Horowitz and his allies largely have been seen as what they are—an attempt to insert an ideological agenda into higher education and to silence the free exchange of ideas. None of the states that saw legislation to regulate the classroom passed it into law, most of the lawsuits were settled or lost and few institutions changed any substantive campus policies.
Although formal changes to policy have been avoided, the attacks on the free exchange of ideas in higher education certainly have had an impact on the climate of campuses—from faculty members who are more reluctant to publish and speak about cutting-edge and controversial findings to administrators who are increasingly worried that allowing faculty and student speech free rein will harm
Even as the threat wanes, it is important to understand that right-wing critics of higher education are opportunistic and that so long as higher education remains the location of independent thought and vigorous debate, it will always be a target. With this in mind, the Free Exchange on Campus coalition has released a retrospective report of the most recent attacks on academic freedom and open intellectual discourse—examining the background and context of the attacks, the tactics, the network of organizations behind the attacks, and the actions that have defeated them—with an eye toward deflecting them when they arise in the future.
Click here to read the full report.
The Free Exchange on Campus Coalition is a joint effort by faculty and student groups (including Campus Progress), as well as organizations that work to protect civil liberties and academic freedom. The Free Exchange on Campus is committed to advocating for the rights of students and faculty to hear and express a full range of ideas unencumbered by political or ideological interference. You can read the latest news or find out more about the coalition at freeexchangeoncampus.org.
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I wish you would stop calling Horowitz ideological and take him so seriously as if he had a messaage to offer. His pendualr career— radical left to radical right— is motivated by three needs:
1) he doesn’t like to work 9 to 5 and take orders.
2) he has developed expensive tastes as he got older
3) he wants to be noticed as he wanted to be when he was with the Left.
Cash cows available to him since 1970s leave him no place else to go but DEFECT from the left to the neocons whose funding base is quite neferious. Much of it is Zionazis— right wing Likudniks— who want the Palestinians erradicated either by moving to Jordan (Jordan refuses to take them) or by extermination with war toys Israel gets abundantly from the USA. All of Horowitz’s babble about Marxism and Leftists ideas imposed in inappropriate classes like Biology, etc, is all to cover what he is really payed for: to be a mouth piece for a couple of very rich American Likudniks and Zionatzi types that consider Israel a nice place to visit but they wouldn’t want to live there because of the taxes. These guys got rich one nickle at a time. They didn’t have time for an education nor for developing socially fascilitating manners. So, in their old age they have two dreams:
1) to feel their mensch-hood by bragging that, using their money, they crushed anti-Zionists;
2) to get even with the educated Jews that are liberal and look down on these old guys with lots of money but little more.
Everything else you see and read is deodorant for a smelly operation. Horowitz should be confronted and intellectually assaulted because, if anything was proven by his incessant drive to be seen, heard and read, it is that he doesn’t know much about what goes on in a college classroom because he hasn’t been an academic.
I would gladly debate him but I think a bunch of college freshmen would do a better job, for they know best what’s going on in their classes. The issue is simple: the campus is an open forum and that includes Palestinians and Muslims, without a forum getting labeled anti-Semite by his minions. In a debate, Horowits can easily be confronted with the crap from his many corners where he sprays to make his presence felt so he can get payed his due. Just read what he writes. But really, there are very many far more important issues for you to deal with, like the fact that higher education is so expensive and gives you little practical that you can use to make you gainfully employed enough so you can pay back your student loans quickly.
If Obama does not force universities and colleges to trim down the fat and high schools to provide you most of the educational “background” stuff you need— rather than pay for it in college at hundreds of dollars per credit— then he is screwing you much worse than is Horowitz. If he really cared, he would look at why you all pay so much for so little and would cut off the academics and high school teachers who can’t teach. But he doesn’t, instead he takes tax money from your parents to pay some of your tuition. That’s not good enough. He must force schools to teach and colleges to teach better and more cheaply, as do community colleges. Horowitz doesn’t get involved in that because all he cares about is whatever will pay his three needs enumerated above. Disregard him and hit at the waste of your lives, your time and money that is inflicted on you by the phony pedagogy provided you from Kindergarten on up. The more busy you are with that, the more Horowitz fades because his benifactors pay for the attention he gets with all sorts of “their” issues instead of your real issues; they certainly don’t pay him because they think him a nice guy because he is not a nice guy and neither are they.
— DE Teodoru - Jun 11, 06:52 PM - #It is a one way street with these right wingers. I have tried to ask Horowitz some questions but not even acknowlegement of a letter or email. But his stuff keeps coming and coming.
— Frank Lornitzo - Jun 17, 01:19 AM - #