Judging from the blogs from last year's Students for Academic Freedom Conference, I wasn't expecting much, meaning many students nor much substance. But this year the organizers were smart--the opening reception was not only very shrewdly held at the end of CPAC (the Conservative Political Action Conference, also live blogged for Campus Progress), but featured that hunky piece of man Rick Santorum, as well as free food and FREE ALCOHOL. That's right, free alcohol at an event about an issue that centers on college kids. If you're a poor young Republican lamenting the end of CPAC and wondering where to pre-game for your evening at these Adam's Morgan bars you keep hearing about, do you have any other option?? Sure there were hardly any name tags for pre-registered participants, but I'll be damned if the line for on-site registration wasn't wrapped around the hallway, with most getting a good look at the cheese, crackers, chicken, pasta, Budweiser, and Santorum awaiting them.
 
For those of you who aren't familiar with David Horowitz and the Students for Academic Freedom, it is a movement to temper the perceived leftist professors' monopoly on the academy by introducing an Academic Bill of Rights that would legally protect a student from being the subject of political abuse by his professor. Teachers naturally oppose it because they don't want to be the subject of political abuse by David Horowitz. But seriously, while Horowitz claims that his is a non-partisan effort merely to protect students against professors acting terribly unprofessionally, the activities of the Students for Academic Freedom certainly seem to serve more as a forum to voice wider complaints about what they see as the leftist or even socialist slant of the actual content of these professors' courses. There is a fear, thereby, that Horowitz's effort could amount to the modern-day McCarthyist witchhunt of leftist teachers. I'm here to tell you guys, you don't have much to worry about. 

What makes it even harder to believe that Horowitz's is a "non-partisan" endeavor is how freely he lumps it together with the rest of his neocon politics. For example, his "Discover the Networks" campaign aims to track the funding for left-wing organizations, which he justifies by claiming that consciously or not, the left is aiding terrorists. Then there's the fact that his reception (at the end of the CONSERVATIVE Political Action Conference) featured absolutely no talk whatsoever of the issues that Students for Academic Freedom concerns itself with. Instead, Horowitz used the captive audience to plug his Terrorism Awareness Project, whose cause du jour is to coordinate multiple screenings of some movie about radical Islam's war with the West on the 4th Anniversary of "the liberation of Baghdad." If that's not a politically loaded term, I don't know what is. Horowitz then treated the audience to a flash video, which I swear is not intentionally a self-parody but highly recommend it for a chuckle...which is what it illicited from some (fellow conservatives!) in the room: Link
 

No, seriously, watch that movie. It's too good to miss.

(Horowitz's cinematic sensibilities seem particularly out of wack, as he recently discounted Best Picture nominees "Letters from Iwo Jima" for "positing moral equivalency" between the Japanese and American war efforts, and "Babel" for depicting Americans travelling overseas as "arrogant, racist, and abusive to foreigners." No way. Not us!)

Anyway, then Rick Santorum got a rock star welcome as he took the podium (it was all I could do not to yell some overzealous gay come-on, like "Santorum I want to have your baby!") and also proceeded to totally ignore the issues of the Students for Academic Freedom in favor of partisan rhetoric. After blaming the media, academia, and Hollywood for his election loss, he told us of his efforts to convince George Bush to start using the word "Islamo-Fascism" instead of "terrorism." "Terror is a tactic, not an enemy," he said. Wait, do I agree with Rick Santorum about something? I found myself asking in panic. Then he schooled us in the differences between Shi'ites and Sunnis (in case you missed class, Sunnis want to rule the world with a global caliphate, while Shi'ites merely want the Apacolypse). Ironically, it is exactly this kind of attention to analysis and relativism in regards to terrorism and the Middle East that could, oh I don't know, get a professor accused of pushing a liberal agenda in the classroom. Not surprising, though; if you take the analysis a step further, understanding that Iraq was a Sunni stronghold that kept Shi'ite Iran in check, it's hard to see us bringing a war there as anything other than the worst thing we could have possibly done. Not twenty minutes after Horowitz had mischaracterized the academic left as believing that jihad is just "spiritual struggle," Santorum spent a half hour lecturing us on the distinct spiritual basises of Sunni and Shi'ite jihadists. Irony, table for 2?

I'd be lying if I said Rick Santorum gave a poor speech, though. He's clearly a skilled public speaker, and he had me when he talked about our intelligence community being in a "woeful" state and how we aren't doing anything to help the dissidents in Iran. But he also formed talking points on the basis of the need to "educate, evangelize, and eradicate," and then forgot to tell us how to evangelize.
  
Maybe he was distracted by the throng of seatless people in the back of the room, who idly chatted as they ate and drank freely. When one of the older people who wasn't there for the food interrupted the former Senator to chastise them, it was clear Horowitz's plan for immortality through free beer had imploded. 

More on Day 2 later.