America's Academic Tragedy

FrontPage Magazine has published the introduction to David Horowitz and Jacob Laksin's new book, One-Party Classroom: How Radical Professors at America's Top Colleges Indoctrinate Students and Undermine Our Democracy.

Horowitz wrote the introduction to the book, and he cites UC Santa Cruz's Community Studies Department as an example of how far literal revolutionary indoctrination has taken over the academy:

The Santa Cruz catalog, for example, describes a seminar offered by its “Community Studies Department” as follows: “The goal of this seminar is to learn how to organize a revolution. We will learn what communities past and present have done and are doing to resist, challenge, and overcome systems of power including (but not limited to) global capitalism, state oppression, and racism.”

This is the outline of a political agenda, not the description of a scholarly inquiry. Moroever, the sectarian character of this course reflects far more than the misguided pedagogy of an aberrant instructor. University faculty are credentialed, hired and promoted by committees composed of faculty peers. To create an academic course requires the approval of the tenured leaders of an academic department who have been hired and then promoted by other senior faculty. To survive and flourish as a department its curriculum must be recognized and approved by professional associations that are national in scope. Consequently, the fact that a course in how to organize a revolution is taught by a tenured professor, that an academic department has signed off on its particulars, and that one of the nation’s distinguished academic institutions is granting degree credits to students who take it, speaks volumes about the contemporary university and what it has come to regard as an appropriate academic course of study.

After some additional discussion of the university's ideological curriculum, Horowitz explains what the book sets out to do:

One-Party Classroom analyzes courses at a dozen major universities whose curricula are designed not to educate students in critical thinking but to instill doctrines that are “politically correct.” This is not a claim that professors are “biased.” Bias is another term for “point of view,” which every professor naturally possesses and has a right to express. For the purposes of this study, professors whose courses follow traditional academic standards do not pose a problem regardless of their individual point of view. What concerns us is whether their courses adhere to the principles of scientific method and observe professional standards.

Thus, One-Party Classroom does not propose to hold professors responsible for their idiosyncratic opinions on controversial matters but focuses instead whether they understand and observe the academic standards of the modern research university and the principles of a professional education. The concern of this study is the growing number of activist instructors who routinely present their students with only one side of controversial issues in an effort to convert them to a sectarian perspective.

I'm looking forward to reading the book, but I'll note, further, that even though many professors may not be "classroom activists," and many may generally adhere to the "academic standards of the modern university" through publication in mainstream journals and engagement in the central literary and social scientific debates, the modern professoriate in its very structure and identity shifts the educational agenda to the far left.

I find it interesting, for example, that Henry Farrell, a political scientist at George Washington University, is a featured contributor to the collectivist blog Firedoglake; and his own group blog, Crooked Timber, advances a far left-wing agenda consistent with the ideological sectarianism Horowitz and Laskin identify in their book. Tellingly, as indicated by linking through from Henry's "Go Galt Go!" Facebook page, Henry's a Facebook friend to Juan Cole, the radical "blame-the-West" historian who was denied tenure at Yale in a rare example of an ideological extremist being even too much for a prestigious academic department (although no doubt the University of Michigan is thrilled to have him, see, "Juan Cole’s Jihad Against Israel").

Robert Farley and David Noon, of Lawyers, Guns and Money, are also interesting examples of the mainstreaming of hardline leftists in the academy. Farley is a professor at the Patterson School of Diplomacy and International Commerce, at the University of Kentucky. I've written about Farley many times. For example, my essay, "The Moral Abomination of Robert Farley," detailed Farley's complete contempt for the standards of academic professionalism, as well as the leftist ideological excrement that drives his disastrous anti-intellectualism. David Noon, who is a professor of history at the University of Alaska Southeast, is just as bad as Farley, an "abominable academic wretch" who routinely spouts "ignorant anti-Americanism" as part of his nihilist repertoire excoriating American society and its traditions.

I could go on with examples just from my blogging, but one final and really depressing example, from my own specialty in international relations theory, is Stephen Walt. I finally read, late last year, Walt and John Mearsheimer's The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy. I found it quite disturbing for the same reasons that many supporters of Israel have outlined. But for this discussion, it's important to understand Walt's standing in the academy. As a professor of international relations, and former dean, at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, Walt is positioned literally at the top of the academic foreign policy community, and his voice is extremely influential among the hardline leftists working for the destruction of the Israeli state.

Walt was recently in the middle of the blogospheric controversy over Charles Freeman's failed appointment as the Obama administration's chair of the National Intelligence Committee. Jonathan Chait has written a number of essays on Walt over the last couple of weeks, for example, "Smear Itself: The Paranoia of Stephen Walt Rears its Ugly Head Once Again."

In one post, Chait described the "realist paradigm," of which Walt is one of the greatest modern proponents, as a "distinct ideological perspective that can be taken to rigid extremes." As such, in my estimation, the ostensibly academic objectivism to which Walt deploys realism ends up basically as a perniciouis yet sophisticated version and the Israel-bashing garbage commonly seen in the writings of Glenn Greenwald and Andrew Sullivan, which is to say Walt's program is really awful, if not outright dangerous.

As Chait explains further, at the post:

The method of Walt's argument is vastly more distrurbing than the substance. Walt is arguing that any Jewish-American who does not roughly share his views on Israel (which, of course, disqualifies the vast majority) is presumptively acting out of dual loyalty, is probably coordinating their actions in secret, and should thus be dismissed out of hand. I think Walt has come to this conclusion on the basis of his foreign policy worldview rather than out of animus against Jewish people. But it's a paranoid analysis whose consequence is to make the debate about Israel much more stupid and mired in attacks on motive.

You can see why Jews who do share Walt's beliefs about Israel policy find his methods useful - it disqualifies a vast swath of their ideological rivals from the conversation, and it elevates their role, as the special minority of good Jews who are able to see past the blinders of their ethnicity. Yet what Walt's promoting is an ugly and deeply illiberal form of discourse. Yes, there are people who shout "anti-Semite" at any criticism of Israel, but this doesn't justify errors of the opposite extreme.

And that "ugly and illiberal discourse," as Horowitz and Laskin uncover in their book, is precisely the same ideological agenda that's being foisted on students by the political radicals in the American academy today.

It's a disaster, but that's pretty much where things stand on the modern American college campus.

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Photo Credit: FrontPage Magazine.

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UPDATE: As a matter of housekeeping on this post, I should note that perhaps Facebook's list of "friends" updates automatically.

I've pointed out previously Henry's "friendship" with Juan Cole, but the anti-Israeli jihadist looks to have rotated off Henry's visible list of "friends" on his Facebook page. We do see, however, Jane Hamsher and Katha Pollitt currently listed as "Henry's friends." But if you check over to Henry's "complete" list of friends, we find Juan Cole's listing once again, as well as an interesting lineup of the players on the collectivist left, including Larissa Alexandrova, Eric Alterman, Lindsay Beyerstein, Duncan Black, Steve Clemons, Ezra Klein, Scott Lemieux, Marc Lynch, Amanda Marcotte, Josh Marshall, Matt Stoller, Jesse Taylor, and Matthew Yglesias.

How's that for a lilttle "socialist social-netorking"!