Response to David Horowitz

It is difficult to respond to a critique of one's work when it is being used as Exhibit A for the thesis that "academic radicals have lost their minds," as David Horowitz titles his response to my review, published in the November 2007 OAH Newsletter, of his book, The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America. Nevertheless, I will respond to several of Horowitz's charges, and I think that readers will see that I have not misrepresented his book, and that he has not rebutted my criticisms of his book.

Let's start with an astonishing statement that Horowitz makes on an issue that I had not discussed in my review: "I have argued that Women's Studies programs that assume that gender is 'socially constructed' are courses in indoctrination which also violate the fundamental precepts of academic freedom." Is Horowitz really saying that there are no differences between women's roles in ancient Greece, pre-Columbian Iroquois society, 19th century China, and the modern U.S. that can profitably be analyzed by looking at the social context of these societies? Is he really saying that such analysis, which is central to Women's Studies programs, to be sure, is beyond the protection of academic freedom? The mind reels at such a narrowing of the permissible boundaries of scholarly discourse.

With regard to my review, Horowitz writes: "Shaffer repeats dozens of false attacks on me that I have already answered…There are replies to every single specific charge made against the book, including the complaints of Eric Foner, on my website…It is tedious arguing with someone who willfully misunderstands the plain meaning of texts and ignores the discussion which has already taken place and is readily available to anyone interested."

Let's examine a few specific examples, some of which had been widely discussed in other commentary on Horowitz's book, but most of which I had not seen mentioned elsehere. I charged that Horowitz, in ignoring the readily available evidence that Eric Foner at a 2003 antiwar teach-in had criticized a speaker who called for the deaths of U.S. troops, had engaged in an "irresponsible" attack on Foner, and that this attack demonstrated the flawed methodology of the book, including "guilt by association, poor research, and selective quotation."

So what does Horowitz's website say about this incident? Horowitz -- or, more precisely, his research assistant, Jacob Laksin, who appears to have written most of the replies on the website to criticisms of The Professors -- acknowledges that the criticisms of Horowitz for neglecting to mention Foner's actual comments on this point at the teach-in are "fair," thus admitting that the attack was not "false." In other words, Horowitz/Laksin admit on his own website that in this case there has been poor research and selective quotation. But then Horowitz/Laksin go on to state on the website that "The Professors neither claims nor implies that Professor Foner endorsed the content of DeGenova's remarks." However, the only possible interpretation of Horowitz's discussion, on p. 178 of his book, linking Foner with DeGenova at that teach-in – the "plain meaning of texts," if you will – is to imply that Foner either endorsed or failed to criticize DeGenova's remarks. Most fair-minded readers will agree that Horowitz's account here is a textbook case of "guilt by association." (Horowitz's book made the same connection between Todd Gitlin and DeGenova regarding that teach-in, and Horowitz's website has the same unconvincing evasive remark that he had not meant to imply that Gitlin had endorsed DeGenova's remarks.)

Horowitz's website includes other rejoinders to Gitlin's criticisms of The Professors. However, I did not locate on the website discussion of the passages I mentioned in my review from Gitlin's The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage, in which Gitlin, contrary to Horowitz's assertions in his book, had indeed criticized both the Black Panthers and the Weather Underground. Moreover, I did not see in any of the website's headings, or in the titles of any of Horowitz's numerous articles linked to it, any mention of issues involving the substance of my criticisms of Horowitz's distortions of the work and ideas of many professors on his list of 101, including Caroline Higgins, Miriam Cooke, Suzanne Toten, Laurie Brand, and Frederick Jameson, among others. So much for having posted on the website "replies to every single specific charge made against the book." Horowitz attempts on his website to reply to many charges, but he had not posted, at least as of today (11/26/07), responses to many of the charges that I make in the OAH Newsletter review.

I noted in my review that Horowitz criticized Middle East historian Joel Beinin, of Stanford, "in part for insisting that the U.S. went to war in Iraq 'to make and unmake regimes and guarantee access to oil.'" Horowitz responds on this point: "In fact, my text is entirely descriptive and makes no such judgments." Again, let's go back to the "plain meaning of texts." Horowitz's three-page profile of Beinin has ten paragraphs. Eight of these "describe" Beinin's ideas about the Middle East in ways that can only be characterized as judgmental, as the text argues throughout with Beinin's interpretation of U.S. policy in the region, the nature of Israel, the purposes of the first Gulf War and the present war in Iraq, etc. In the context of a book whose goal is to identify "the 101 most dangerous academics in America," such discussions cannot merely be seen as "descriptions." One paragraph of Horowitz's entry on Beinin gives two examples of Beinin's alleged misuse of class time for political purposes. One paragraph, which indicates the depth of Horowitz's misunderstanding of the entire academic enterprise – willful misunderstanding, one really has no choice but to add – criticizes Beinin for including, as recommended reading on his syllabus for an on-line course, a state-run Egyptian newspaper that is anti-Semitic and praises suicide bombings. Any course on Middle Eastern history – really, any course in history – would have to include the reading of abhorrent views; placement of any particular primary source on a syllabus indicates nothing at all about the ideological tendencies of the professor. Will I be criticized because the students in my "U.S. Immigration and Ethnicity" course must read Madison Grant's racist depictions of eastern European immigrants, or Know-Nothing attacks on Catholics? Horowitz's arguments here do, indeed, strike at the heart of academic freedom and the very nature of education.

Horowitz claims that the Pennsylvania legislative hearings on academic freedom were much more benign than my characterization made them out to be, and he quotes the chair of the legislative committee to that effect. Indeed, even the Republican majority in the state assembly (at that time) moved to constrain Gib Armstrong, the main advocate of these hearings, from his extremist agenda, and the comments by the chair (that was Rep. Tom Stevenson, a moderate Republican) reflected this effort. But Armstrong himself did, indeed, seek at each of the hearings to find examples of left-wing professors abusing their students. Armstrong's mindset can be seen in the following examples, which I viewed on a videotape of assembly debate (not the hearings themselves). Armstrong had claimed, to show the need for such hearings, that a biology professor at Penn State University had shown Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 911" to his class right before the 2004 election, in an alleged attempt to influence his students for partisan political purposes. An internal investigation at Penn State failed to reveal the errant professor, however, Finally, Democratic legislators Dan Surra and Lawrence Curry found the real culprit: a sociology professor who had shown Moore's "Bowling for Columbine," for a class session on violence in the U.S., which I think most of us can agree is a legitimate use of class time. Moreover, in the initial legislative debate on the resolution, Armstrong (as Dave Barry would say, I am not making this up) claimed to have a list of dozens of examples of left-wing professors who used their classes to indoctrinate students, but he would not divulge any of their names. As a colleague put it to me, Armstrong acted like a caricature of Senator Joe McCarthy. Despite Armstrong's now-acknowledged serious misstatement of the facts (the list never did materialize), Horowitz and his publishers were evidently proud to place his endorsement on the book jacket. (Horowitz claims that Democrats on the legislative committee "subverted" its worthy aims, but the minority Democrats on a majority-Republican committee could only do so because Armstrong's case was an embarrassment even to his fellow Republicans.)

I referred favorably in my review to a recent AAUP report on academic freedom. Horowitz calls this report "a disgrace," although his one-sentence paraphrase of the report seems to me to be a distortion of the report's content. In any case, readers can compare the two versions for themselves, and see which makes more sense. I have to note, however, that Horowitz, through his syntax, appears to criticize me for not having read his critique of the AAUP report before I published my review. His brief critique was published in the Chronicle of Higher Education on October 12 -- a longer critique appeared on his website November 16 -- while I submitted my review to the OAH Newsletter on October 1. And what is one to make of Horowitz's wording immediately after this criticism of me and of the AAUP report: "On the other hand, it is not surprising that -- as his footnotes show -- he [Shaffer] is familiar with an impressive range of books I wrote as a leftist." Since when is being familiar with the previous books an author wrote problematic for a review? Is the implication here that Horowitz's erstwhile career as a leftist is out of bounds for a review of his present work, or that knowledge of such works is suspect? Horowitz surely knows that his work is of interest in part because of his former views and activities.

There are two larger issues in Horowitz's response to my article that need to be addressed.

First, he says that, despite my claim that he had provided "no basis whatsoever" for the figure he had given that 10% of Harvard faculty were radicals, that figure comes from the number of Harvard professors who voted to censure Lawrence Summers for "politically incorrect" comments. I think readers will agree that my confusion on this point comes not from my cursory reading of Horowitz's book, but from his slapdash writing. Horowitz writes on p. xlv of his long introduction: "If we were to take the Harvard case reviewed at the end of this volume as a yardstick, and assume [his word] a figure of 10 percent per university faculty, and then cut that figure in half to control for the possibility that Harvard may be a relatively radical institution, the total number of such professors at American universities with views similar to the spectrum represented in this volume would still be in the neighborhood of 25,000-30,000." A footnote in the middle of this convoluted sentence says simply, "See page 369." One searches in vain on p. 369 for any discussion of numbers or percentages of Harvard faculty radicals. It turns out that on p. 372 – not 369 – there are two sentences that one can now see are relevant to Horowitz's claim, that 218 faculty members, out of 2100 or so on the Harvard faculty overall, voted to censure Summers. So Horowitz is doing two things here. He provides an incorrect reference to his own book, and then blames a reviewer for not tracking down the error and rectifying the problems in Horowitz's confused writing. Second, he assumes, with no discussion or evidence, that all of the Harvard faculty members who voted to censure Summers are political radicals of the sort represented in his book, and he ignores completely the varied reasons for opposition to Summers by Harvard faculty. (Horowitz did not even make an effort to show that Harvard biologist Nancy Hopkins, who initiated the criticism of Summers's comments on women and science, was a political radical of any sort; he simply equated criticism of Summers with political radicalism.)

Finally, Horowitz accuses me, as he has accused other critical reviewers, of not having read his entire book (all I can say is that I did, indeed, read it from cover to cover), and of misrepresenting his central argument. He claims that he does not "attack professors for specific arguments" – but he does so repeatedly. He claims that he does not oppose left-wing ideas in general, and that he would be as critical of conservative academics who abuse their positions as the professors profiled here allegedly do, but he only singles out left-wing professors here (with the possible exception of biologist Paul Ehrlich, whose ideas are difficult to categorize) and those with alleged ties to radical Islamic causes. (I saw no comments on conservatives who mixed scholarship with academics, such as, say, Condoleeza Rice or Fouad Ajami, who bear some responsibility for the current American mess in Iraq.) I stand by my characterization of his central thesis, which he quotes in his response: "Aside from attacking professors for specific arguments in their research, public statements, and, in some cases, their classes, Horowitz asserts that left-wing professors have taken over the universities and use their positions to indoctrinate students and to prevent moderate or conservative scholars from being hired. Horowitz further argues that these leftwing ideas are not based on legitimate scholarly research, so such professors do not deserve 'academic freedom.' " Horowitz contends that his central point is to unmask activists parading as scholars, which I do not think is very different from my characterization of his thesis. Regardless of the wording, it is clear that Horowitz has a frankly ideological agenda with his assaults on leftwing professors.

I will not stoop to Horowitz's level and say that his response shows that conservatives cannot carry on a debate based on the available evidence, but I will say that his response makes me even more convinced than I was before that Horowitz's attacks are based on sloppy work and a seemingly willful disregard for the use of scholarly standards of evidence. Indeed, I am tempted to say that his sloppy work -- in his book and now in his critique of my review of that book -- stem from his single-minded pursuit of his ideological agenda.