Return of the Campus Witch Hunts: David Horowitz and the Thought Police

This spring, he is coming out with the next salvo in the war over the academy--a book called Indoctrination U, in which he has taken special aim at University of Texas (UT), where I teach, among others.

On February 17, the Daily Texan student newspaper published his op-ed claiming that there are two Universities of Texas--one a world-class institution, and another where "faculty regard themselves as activists, not scholars, and their curriculum is designed not to teach students how to conduct a disinterested inquiry, but to convert them to a sectarian ideology and recruit them to its causes."

"Students are being given an indoctrination, not an education," he claims--and as examples, he points to the Center for Women's and Gender Studies, the Communication Studies Department, and the Division of Rhetoric and Writing. I am affiliated with all of these programs and a clear target in his "new" book, but the Texan would not print my rebuttal.

Many of my colleagues say that we ought not "take Horowitz's bait." Among scholars and activists, he is regarded as something of a kook and a windbag. The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) has argued the weak line that disciplining faculty for supposed transgressions against academic freedom should be left up to university administrators, not politicians.

Then there are the organizations and professors who have devoted themselves to refuting Horowitz's "facts" about their publications and activism. I believe this also is a wrong approach, because his "facts" about faculty syllabi and political affiliations are not in question. It is urgent that we challenge Horowitz politically.

Horowitz's theatrics and demagoguery mask a very serious agenda: to discredit, harass and censor critical intellectuals and activists on our campuses. He knows that universities have historically been spaces of critical thinking and dissent. Students and professors have been organizing against the war and against the greed and hypocrisy of the right, and he would like nothing more than to hound us from our jobs.

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