David Horowitz, the leftist turned rightist who made a fortune as a best selling biographer of Kennedys and Fords, and who has recently been criticizing left wing radicals in our universities, turned up at a State House of Representatives hearing held at Temple last month. He has been pushing an “academic bill of rights” that would, among other things, prohibit professors from using their classrooms “to advocate for their political and partisan views on controversial matter that are irrelevant to their field of expertise” or “pressure students into adopting their personal opinions;” and that would also prohibit them from “grading students on the basis of their political, social or religious opinions.”
I had thought that Horowitz’s campaign had some merit. I have learned however, that Horowitz is about as interested in fair and balanced teaching as Fox News is interested in fair and balanced reporting.
Protecting the Academic Freedom of Students is a Good Idea
Some of my colleagues at Temple have been outraged by Horowitz’s claim that liberal professors regularly violate these rules and by his attempt to find students who would document these charges by reporting on what occurs in class. Some folks have even called this a new McCarthy campaign against academic freedom. But, for a few reasons, I have not been terribly concerned about this whole issue. First I see no real threat in this academic bill of rights. Horowitz claims that he does not want to fire professors for their political views. Second, I think Horowitz is not entirely wrong. Some faculty members are unfair to their students and sometimes it is because of their political, moral or religious views. have seen one or two cases of this kind in my position as Associate Director of the Intellectual Heritage Program and I have acted to protect students in these cases. And I have heard of other cases where both liberal and conservative faculty members violate their professional responsibility and advocate their political views rather than teaching the subject matter they were hired to teach. And, third, I don’t think that we college professors should be immune from questions or from criticism of what we do in class. Academic freedom requires that we be allowed to pursue our own ideas without fear of losing our position on political grounds. It does not require us to be above any criticism. I don’t see any “chilling effect” on academic freedom because of the Horowitz crusade. And if there is such, it will only because we professors don’t stand up for our own rights.
However, I just now read David Horowitz’ testimony at the Temple hearing. And it turns out that he criticized the program I help administer and my own course materials. The criticisms of our program are truly problematic.
Horowitz’s Real Aim Is To Indoctrinate Students With His Ideas
What those criticism show is that Horowitz’ announced purpose–to encourage discussion and debate from multiple points of view and to protect the academic freedom of students–is not his real pupose at all. Instead, what Horowitz is concerned about is the content of the interpretations of Marx made by faculty members. Horowitz has absolutely no evidence that we require students to accept a certain point of view on Marx in order to get a good grade or that we indoctrinate our students with Marxist ideas.
Instead, he points, first, to discussion questions on our website on Marx that, Horowitz suggests, presuppose that Marx is fundamentally correct. Now the first thing to be said about this claim is that Horowitz is simply making things up. He says that there is discussion question on our website that is leading in that it encourages students to accept Marx’s view uncritically. The question he say is “Marx presents an astute understanding and critique of Capitalism. Is it convincing?” However there is no such question on any of the pages Horowitz points to on our website. Instead, all the questions on our website–questions which I wrote by the way–encourage students to develop their own view about how to interpret Marx and about whether Marx’s view on some matter is correct or incorrect.
Horowitz also points to a web page written by Joseph Schwartz, the chair of the political science department that suggests that the Soviet Union was not a realization of Marx’s own vision of communism. This is clearly a controversial point. Yet is certainly a respectable point of view among academics and there is a page—written by me—that to some extent gives the other side on the issue.
But Horowitz really isn’t interested in dialogue and discussion about Marx. He complains whenever he reads something on our website that might be thought to suggest that Marx could be interpreted to be right about something. To complain about this, however, is to do precisely what Horowitz says he is not doing, that is, to conduct an academic witch hunt based upon the political views of our faculty members.
From time to time, Horowtiz complains that the problem with IH is that it is being taught by people who have no expertise in the subject. Yet the two people whose work he criticizes, Joe Schwartz and me, have Ph.D.’s from Harvard in political philosophy. Again, Horowitz’ real problem with us is not that we force an ideological agenda down the throats of our students but that our interpretations of Marx are not pursuing his own ideological agenda that holds that anything Marx wrote must be mistaken.
The Real Goal of Teaching Great Books
When we teach Marx—or the Bible or John Locke or William Shakespeare—we offer interpretations of texts that make sense of the texts. (And often, we offer more than one interpretation so that our students can see alternative points of view.) If, in doing so, we often try to interpret texts in ways that make them seem reasonable. But that does not mean we are supporting the view expressed in the text. It means we are trying to help our students look at the world from that point of view and see why someone might find it plausible. We do that when teaching Marx just as we do it when we teach Genesis, Exodus, Matthew, Locke’ Second Treatise and many other texts, all of which disagree with one another. We don’t spend a lot of time criticizing Marx directly partly because it is not our job to be engaging in ideological debates and mostly because we read lots of other texts that implicitly or explicitly do it for us. And, if we are any good as teachers, at the end of the semester our students don’t know our own political views. (My students usually don’t have any idea of my political views, unless they read the local papers.)
I’m a Marcist, Not A Marxist
Strangely enough, Horowitz criticizes one of my notes on Marx whose main focus is to show why Marx was so wrong in his prediction that a communist revolution would come about The problem, again, is that I am not sufficiently anti-Marxist for his taste. (Perhaps he is confused by my name. I have never been a Marxist but have, for a very long time, been a Marcist.) Horowitz complains that I show how one can explain the failure of a revolution by, first, looking at what Marx took to be the precondition of revolutions and, then, pointing out that those preconditions never came about. Again my point is not to defend Marx but to help students understand Marx’s argument.
In addition to Horowitz misleading interpretation of my work, he is selective in what he discusses. For example, he never points to a few other pages of mine that do point to some of the difficulties of Marx’s ideas in practice. (They can be found here and here.)
If You Want to Read More
I have written a long response to Horowitz that shows in some detail exactly how he has misinterpreted my teaching materials. I have tried, with no success, to post to his website. So, instead, I am positing it here and, if they ever let me post to his website, will link to it here. It is a long piece and, unless you are interested in the subtleties of both the interpretation of Marx and my pedagogical views, it is probably not worth your time. However, if anyone you know defends Horowitz send them here and let them see how badly and dishonestly he argues for his position.