Bill Berkowitz
January 14, 2006

Foaming campus cleanser sputters at Temple

David Horowitz attacks liberal academics with so-called Academic Bill of Rights; also looking to rid college campuses of what he calls the anti-war academics who "hate America"

"My wife an I attended the Chanukah (Hanukkah) Party at the White House last night. Bush is the first president in American history to hold Chanukah parties along with the traditional White House Christmas parties.

"The White House is magical during the Holiday Season and there were many old friends in attendance. It had a special importance to me now that we have become in effect two political countries -- one supporting a war for freedom in the Middle East and one at war against us (and yes I realize there are a lot of good people in the middle who don't have a stomach for this war but don't want us to lose it either).

"I was of course thinking. of the wretched lies of Kerry and Dean from the day before.I hadn't been at an event with the President (who is looking slim and trim) in four years and didn't know if he would recognize me. But the minute he saw me in the line he called out 'Horowitz' with a big smile on his face, then embraced me in a bear hug. In the moment I had his ear I said, 'Thank you for taking all those arrows for the rest of us.' Graciously, he said 'You take more than I do,' which I don't and said so. Then as I was walking away he called out, 'Don't let them get to you.' I called back, 'Don't you either,' and he replied in a strong voice. 'I won't.' It was a one day cross-country trip for me and my wife to attend this event but those few seconds made it worth it. I left energized for this battle which is so crucial to the future of our country and the freedom of others." -- David Horowitz's account of attending the White House Chanukah Party.

In early December, aiming to start out 2006 with a bang, David Horowitz's Center for the Study of Popular Culture (CSPC - grants, profile) sent out a fundraising appeal asking for contributions to enable it to place full-page advertisements in campus newspapers across the country warning students that they are surrounded by anti-American leftist academics who hate America.

A month later, at a hearing on academic freedom at Temple University sponsored by the state legislature of Pennsylvania, Horowitz could only find one student willing to testify and even then, the testimony was anecdotal, as he had not filed an official grievance with the proper university authorities.

At a previous hearing, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education, "Rep. Dan B. Frankel, a Democrat who is a member of the Board of Trustees of the University of Pittsburgh, [pointed out] that [since] the issue of potential political discrimination at state universities had received a considerable amount of publicity since the committee's previous hearing three months ago...he might have expected students to come forward with complaints, but none have done so. 'It seems to me we may be overblowing this problem,' he said. 'I don't have streams of people coming to me.'"

In his fundraising December note, Horowitz said that these academics are "not anti-war ...They just hate America. And they're camped out in our classrooms spewing their hatred to our young, future leaders."

At the same time, Horowitz's Students for Academic Freedom is pushing state legislatures to pass a rather benign-sounding Academic Bill of Rights; legislation he claims is aimed at leveling the playing field and opening up America's public universities to more diverse voices.

Horowitz, the President and founder of the Los Angeles-based CSPC, is the former sixties radical who became a Reagan Republican during the 1980s and an influential conservative political strategist over the past decade. His recent fundraising solicitation was headlined "Help Me Expose Intellectually Corrupt Universities." Dated December 1, Horowitz was asking for $131,250, a sum that would allow him to run full-page newspaper advertisements in college newspapers across the country that would "expose the Ward Churchills of America." (Churchill is the tenured University of Colorado professor who came under fire for controversial -- some say insensitive -- comments he made in the aftermath of 9/11.) While Churchill has received concentrated attention from Horowitz's FrontPage magazine website, Horowitz wants potential donors to know that "there are many, many more where he [Churchill] came from."

Horowitz's campaigns are multi-faceted and made up of pre-emptive strikes against his perceived enemies, unremitting accusations that they are anti-American, and a permanent fundraising drive to fill his organization's coffers.

Touting the "tremendous strides" his organizations made against the left on campuses in 2005, Horowitz wants to "get students, professors, and administrators' attention: [and let them know that] we're watching radicals on campuses and we're going to expose them to the public! We know from experience that running ads in 250 student newspapers that nearly 500,000 people will see this ad and be exposed to our Discoverthenetworks.org" -- a CSPC-sponsored website that "casts a bright light on the radical left and shows, in detail, the connections between hundreds of radical organizations ... [including] the financial support these groups receive from left-wing foundations, like Ford, MacArthur and Pew, and self-serving billionaires like George Soros and Peter Lewis."

The "first" targets on Horowitz's list are Cal-Berkeley, Harvard, Yale, and Columbia, universities that he claims are "the hotbed schools for anti-Americanism."

The "radical left" has an "anti-American agenda," Horowitz wrote. "They're not anti-war. They just hate America. And they're camped out in our classrooms spewing their hatred to our young, future leaders."

Horowitz's Academic Bill of Rights

The other prong in his attack on liberal academics takes a generally -- but not always -- "kinder gentler" approach and is being carried out by Students for Academic Freedom (SAF - website), a Horowitz-sponsored operation. The group's website provides students from colleges and universities across the country with a platform to testify as to how they been embarrassed, harassed, criticized, been the victims of vicious indoctrination campaigns and otherwise treated unfairly by a liberal instructor on their campus. Whether these complaints have any basis to them does not seem to concern SAF staffers. The grievances provide the anecdotal bedrock for Horowitz's nationwide campaign to get some form of Academic Bill of Rights (ABOR) legislation passed in individual states, as well as in Congress.

According to PR Watch's Molly Riordan, "A casual reading of ABOR might appear to support his [Horowitz's] claim that it is a 'non-partisan' bill. It requires that hiring, firing and faculty tenure decisions be made regardless of political beliefs; that professors present their students with a 'broad range of serious scholarly opinion' without ignoring those they oppose; and that grievance procedures be established to manage reports of student abuse."

Leaders of Students for Academic Freedom -- which was founded by Horowitz in 2002 and now has some 150 campus chapters -- claim that its Academic Bill of Rights campaign is designed to open up the nation's college campuses to more diverse voices. In an interview with PR Watch's Riordan, SAF's national campus director Bradley Shipp told her that he "encourage[s] [students] to use the language that the left has deployed so effectively in behalf of its own agendas. Radical professors have created a 'hostile learning environment' for conservative students. There is a lack of 'intellectual diversity' on college faculties and in academic classrooms. The conservative viewpoint is 'under-represented' in the curriculum and on its reading lists. The university should be an 'inclusive' and intellectually 'diverse' community."

In a recent New York Times article titled "Professors' Politics Draw Lawmakers Into the Fray" (December 25, 2005), Michael Janofsky reported on a complaint leveled against a physics professor at the York campus of Pennsylvania State University that caused the state legislature to get involved. According to Janofsky, Jennie Mae Brown claimed that the professor "routinely used class time to belittle President Bush and the war in Iraq," Brown, a veteran of the Air Force "said she felt the teacher's comments were inappropriate in the classroom."

Brown's complaint, Janofsky reported, "has blossomed into an official legislative inquiry, putting Pennsylvania in the middle of a national debate spurred by conservatives over whether public universities are promoting largely liberal positions and discriminating against students who disagree with them."

Within the past few years, Horowitz's campaign "has produced more debate than action," Janofsky wrote: "Colorado and Ohio agreed to suspend legislative efforts to impose an academic bill of rights in favor of pledges by their state schools to uphold standards in place. Georgia passed a resolution discouraging 'political or ideological indoctrination' by teachers, encouraging then to create 'an environment conducive to the civil exchange of ideas.'"

The $10,000 challenge

During a recent business meeting of the American Historical Association, the organization passed a resolution opposing Horowitz's Academic Bill of Rights:

Resolution Opposing Academic and Student Bills of Rights and Similar Regulations of the Academic Community

Whereas, So-called Academic and Student Bills of Rights legislation, investigations, and similar measures will give power over such matters as curriculum, course content, and faculty personnel decisions to governmental authorities and other agencies outside the faculty and administrations of institutions of higher learning; and

Whereas, Such measures would violate academic freedom and undermine professional standards by imposing political criteria in areas of educational policy that faculty members normally and rightly control; therefore, be itResolved, That the American Historical Association opposes the passage of Academic and Student Bills of Rights and all similar attempts to regulate the academic community.

FrontPage magazine's Ben Johnson reported that Horowitz immediately responded by "offering $10,000 to any member of the AHA who can 'point out a sentence in this [ABOR's] document' that would have the Orwellian impact their resolution pretends it would."

The American Council of Trustees and Alumni and the American Legislative Exchange Council board the train

There are a number of other conservative organizations battling for "diversity" on America's college campuses. In a recent op-ed piece in the San Francisco Chronicle, David Davenport, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, a conservative think tank, pointed out that the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) -- an organization founded in 1995 as the National Alumni Forum by Lynne Cheney, Colorado's former Democratic Governor, Richard D. Lamm, and Democratic Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut -- recently issued a report entitled "Intellectual Diversity: Time for Action," which found that "the most serious challenge for higher education today is the lack of intellectual diversity." (Horowitz's FrontPage magazine ran ACTA's press release on December 14, 2005.)

Molly Riordan's excellent PR Watch piece also looked at the role that the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC - grants) -- a powerful, yet relatively unknown group which provides state legislatures with sample legislation on a broad array of conservative issues -- may be playing in publicizing Horowitz's Academic Bill of Rights:

On April 30, 2004, ALEC's Education Task Force met in Austin, Texas, to draft a model bill and resolution regarding ABOR. Almost without exception, their language was taken verbatim from Horowitz's original document.

[SAF's Bradley] Shipp claims he did not know how SAF was involved in the ALEC drafting. 'I'm almost positive that we sent them copies of our bill,' he said, but was unsure who was consulted in the drafting. He indicated that Horowitz had spoken at ALEC conferences on several occasions. 'There were Congressmen who were independently concerned with issues of academic freedom, asked for the education lobbyists' input. They came up with language that everyone agreed upon.' Shipp insists that ALEC's involvement is not indicative of a conservative agenda behind the 'academic freedom' campaign.

According to Riordan, ALEC's Education Task Force director Lori Drummer did not respond to her "request for an interview, and "no information is available on how many state legislatures have considered ALEC's model legislation."

Nevertheless, depending on who is doing the counting, Academic Bill of Rights legislation is pending in from 11 to 19 other states. The New York Times' Janofsky pointed out that in 2005, House and Senate committees "passed a general resolution ... encouraging American colleges to promote 'a free and open exchange of ideas 'in their classrooms and to treat students 'equally and fairly.'" Further Congressional action is expected this year.

Meanwhile, back in Pennsylvania, where Horowitz's gang had hoped that a two-day legislative hearing on academic freedom held in Philadelphia in the early part of January would sizzle, fizzled instead.

According to Philadelphia Inquirer staff reporter Patrick Kerkstra, "The sole student to appear before the legislative committee acknowledged he had never filed a formal grievance."

"We have reviewed our records and we do not find any instances in which students have complained about inappropriate intrusion of political advocacy by teachers in their courses," Temple University President David Adamany told legislators and a crowd of about 50 people who attended the public hearings, held in a second floor Student Center conference room, The Temple News, an independent student newspaper, reported. "Nor have we found instances of complaints by students that they were improperly graded because of the views they set forth in their courses."

Pennsylvania is the only state to have held academic freedom hearings; the Temple University inquiry was the second of four scheduled by the state's House Select Committee on Academic Freedom in Higher Education.

At the end of day one, Rep. Gib Armstrong (R. - Lancaster), the conservative lawmaker largely responsible for getting the hearings approved by the Pennsylvania House, appeared frustrated that no students had filed official grievances against Temple academics. "If there are students out there who feel their rights are being abridged, they need to speak up," Armstrong said.

There is no denying that the fact that ABOR and/or ABOR-type initiatives are being considered in a number of states is due to the relentless efforts of Horowitz and his Students for Academic Freedom.

According to The Temple News, on the second and final day of the hearings, Horowitz -- who closed out the proceedings -- introduced himself to the 12-member panel with four words: "I'm the scary guy."

According to Inside Higher Education, after the hearings at Temple, which "critics of the Academic Bill of Rights were saying that they had scored key points ... Horowitz ... admitted that he had no evidence to back up two of the stories he has told multiple times to back up his charges that political bias is rampant in higher education."

In a post-hearing interview "Horowitz said that his acknowledgements were inconsequential, and he complained about 'nit picking' by his critics. But while Horowitz was declaring the hearings 'a great victory' for his cause, he lost some powerful stories. For example, Horowitz has said several times that a biology professor at Pennsylvania State University used a class session just before the 2004 election to show the Michael Moore documentary Fahrenheit 9/11, but he acknowledged Tuesday that he didn't have any proof that this took place."

Jamie Horwitz, a spokesman for the American Federation of Teachers, pointed out that "So much of what he [Horowitz] has said previously has been exposed to be lies or distortions that it makes any of his examples questionable. It should give this committee and any committee anywhere in the country pause about considering an Academic Bill of Rights. The bottom line is that there's not a lot of there there."