Charles Durning Carroll

Idea Review

David Horowitz and The Academic Bill of Rights

David Horowitz, who’s become infamous in academic circles for his so-called “Academic Bill of Rights” repeats more nonsense in a recent piece in The LA Times. I have several responses to “Ideologues at the Lectern.” The first part of my response, as I’ve stated before, is to wonder whether Horowitz’s Academic Bill of Rights applies to specifically religious instituions like Wheaton College that claim Christianity as incontrovertible truth. (And incidentally make faculty members to take a pledge that they agree with such a view.) Of course Wheaton and these other institutions are private, and one could argue that the fact that students pay tuition exempts them from Horowitz’s ideological diversity requirements. But in fact, as many students attending private colleges recieve some form of governmental aid, even if only in the form of a subsidized loan, the distinction between private and public institutions is rendered somewhat moot. Yet Horowitz’s failure to cite examples of bias at obviously right-wing institutions makes him look like a hypocrite.

Secondly, Horowitz’s article, and indeed the whole thrust of his argument, is predicated on the idea of some sort of liberal conspiracy in academia that operates to keep conservatives out. While it can’t be denied that liberals populate academia in considerable numbers, Horowitz doesn’t convincingly show that this is anything but the result of faculties trying to hire the best person for the job. Either academia is a free market and the result obtained (many liberals) is the correct result of this market’s invisible hand, or it isn’t a free market, and then institutions like tenure, teacher’s unions, and other conservative bêtes-noirs, aren’t really a problem. However you look at it, the intervention of the Academic Bill of Rights is unjustified. Horowitz wants to have it both ways–because academia delivers a result he finds displeasing he uses the rhetorical red-herring of free markets to engage in a very non free market intervention.

Third, one could argue that the situation of being a liberal in the United States today is analogous to being a conservative student at a liberal university. The unfortunate student who has to listen to anti-Bush professors is not very different from the liberal who has to listen to (and live under laws made by) conservatives. Now that all three branches of government are clearly in conservative hands do we need a Citizen’s Bill of Rights that mandates a certain number of liberals to offset this conservative juggernaut? Of course not. Horowitz could trot out the old saw of students paying for their education and therefore having rights to have their views represented, but I pay taxes too.