Wilentz and ABOR
The errors of fact in Horowitz's book undermine its credibility, but it's worth remembering that many of Horowitz's critics don't exactly have clean hands on the issue of academic freedom. As Mark Bauerlein observed today, the single-minded opposition of groups like AAUP, AAC&U, AHA, and others to ABOR"begs the question of the choice of targets. Across the country we have speech codes written into campus by-laws, ideological advocacy groups passing themselves off as academic centers and departments, and university administrators who need regular lessons in the First Amendment . . . And yet, what gets these groups exercised is one aging man in Los Angeles whose books and web site have rightly tapped into public dissatisfaction with the state of higher education." Horowitz is also correct, it seems to me, in noting that it reflects poorly on the principle of academic self-governance when someone like Ward Churchill (before the controversy) was regularly honored and solicited as a campus speaker; or when an academic department elects as its chair someone who wrote that all religious people are"moral retards."
The Horowitz thesis falls apart, however, when conservatives criticize academic recognition for esteemed scholars who have taken liberal or leftist public stances. I've been deeply troubled by the conservative condemnation, noted by Hiram Hover today, of Sean Wilentz receiving the Bancroft Prize. Wilentz clearly has taken some very strong liberal stances in public. But, at the same time, the book itself is an eloquent reminder of the need for more pedagogical diversity in the study of history, and its prologue is a sharp critique of the narrowing of the academy's approach to American history in recent years. One would think that conservatives (and, indeed, liberals, Democrats, and anyone else who believes it's important that a history education should include study of government institutions and politics) should celebrate this message.
The Wilentz prize and reaction to it illustrates one key shortcoming of ABOR. (The other, it seems to me, is the likelihood that any legislative-sponsored ABOR in our current political climate will be used by anti-evolution forces.) ABOR assumes that the academy's central problem is its political and ideological imbalance; I would argue that this imbalance is a symptom of the real problem: the trend toward narrowing the focus of most fields in the humanities and social sciences. Under ABOR's conception of the problem, someone like Wilentz is a negative. But would students, or the academy, be better served if, say, UCLA was somehow able to find a GOP-registered women's historian to add to its pedagogically imbalanced Americanist contingent?