Academic Freedom Takes a Step to the Right

by Molly Riordan

David Horowitz is battling to save higher education from ideological corruption. Or so he'd have us believe. As a Berkeley student at the start of the 60s, he became a leader of the "New Left" movement, sympathizing with the Black Panthers and speaking out against the Vietnam War. Today, as one of the right's most outspoken neo-conservatives, Horowitz claims to be equally concerned about oppressed voices on college campuses.

To illustrate his point, Horowitz has repeatedly told the story of a student at the University of Northern Colorado who, he says, contacted him after she was forced to "Explain why George Bush is a war criminal" on a criminology exam. The student suspected that her professor punished her with an unfair grade because of her political beliefs. When the student answered the question by writing about how Saddam Hussein was a war criminal, she said she received an "F." This incident, Horowitz claimed, demonstrated the extent of "leftist indoctrination" on campuses and demonstrated why he was campaigning for "academic freedom."

In reality, Horowitz's version of the story is, at best, a manipulative distortion of facts. In March 2005, the liberal watchdog group, Media Matters for America, began raising questions about the story, which by then had been cited in publications ranging from the Christian Science Monitor to the Wall Street Journal. They noted that Horowitz had written an article for his website, FrontPageMagazine.com, in which he claimed that the student's story was discussed during a December 2003 hearing before the Colorado state legislature. Media Matters reviewed the transcript of the hearing and found that there was no mention of any such incident. Subsequent phone calls to various officials at the University of Northern Colorado also turned up no traces of an incident resembling Horowitz's story.

Pressed to substantiate his claims, Horowitz was forced to admit that he had gotten a few details wrong:

• The question on the exam did not ask the student to "explain why Bush is a war criminal." Instead, it asked for a discussion about the disparity between the administration's pre-war claims that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction versus the fact that no such weapons were found to actually exist. In this context, students were asked to explain how the war might be explained in terms of research on "deviance" that had been discussed in course readings. Their answers were to take into account "how the media and various moral entrepreneurs can conspire to create a panic." The question continued, "Where does the social meaning of deviance come from? Argue that the attack on Iraq was deviance based on negotiable statuses. Make the argument that the military action of the U.S. attacking Iraq was criminal."
• The question was one of two essay questions from which the student could choose to answer, so the student was not required to answer it at all.
• The student did not receive a failing grade. Robert Dunkley, the course instructor, told the online magazine InsideHigherEd.com that the student had been penalized for failing to meet the page requirement (she wrote two pages instead of the mandated three). According to Horowitz, the student claims her grade was raised after she went through the university's appeals process. She ended the course with a "B."

Dunkley (a registered Republican) explained to InsideHigherEd.com that his criminology course focused on the relationship between deviance and being classified as a criminal. "We talked in class about how George Washington was considered a war criminal to the British," he said. "We were going into the idea that different people define criminal behavior differently." He would have explained this to Horowitz, he said, if Horowitz had ever bothered to ask. "He's cooked this whole thing up," Dunkley said angrily.

None of these revelations have stopped Horowitz from citing the Colorado case as evidence of "liberal bias" in higher academia. His "correction" for FrontPageMagazine.com carried the headline, "Some of Our Facts Were Wrong; Our Point was Right." It concluded, "While we apologize for not having fully checked and corrected this story, we conclude that our complaint about the exam was justified."

Crafting the Campaign

Horowitz says he began his official campaign for "academic freedom" and "intellectual diversity" after several conservative students approached him with stories of liberal professors attempting to indoctrinate their students, dismissing or publicly humiliating those who disagreed with their "leftist" views. In response to these stories, he authored the "Academic Bill of Rights" (ABOR) more than four years ago. A casual reading of ABOR might appear to support his 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. Horowitz discounts current policies that are already in place for dealing with student complaints, claiming that the existing policies are products of liberally biased institutions.

In 2002, Horowitz founded Students for Academic Freedom (SAF) to manage his academic freedom campaign. SAF is organized as a nonprofit organization with a three-person staff, under the sponsorship of his Center for the Study of Popular Culture. It is responsible for promoting the concept of "intellectual diversity" and Horowitz's Academic Bill of Rights to colleges and state legislatures alike. It collects student accounts of alleged indoctrination and unfair treatment or grading due to the student's political beliefs, and urges students to push the language of ABOR at their schools. Its Washington, D.C., office is also organizing student chapters on campuses across the country, boasting 150 chapters already in place.

Students for Academic Freedom is not alone in its quest. Several other conservative organizations tout "intellectual diversity" and "academic freedom" among their issues, including Young America's Foundation, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, and Lynne Cheney's American Council of Trustees and Alumni. However, SAF is the only organization dedicated solely to the proliferation and publicity of ABOR.

Word Games

SAF's national campus director Bradley Shipp told me he was "shocked" when a Pennsylvania legislator, a Democrat, vocally opposed the academic rights legislation that was passed by her state legislature on July 5. Shipp accused the legislator of "politicizing the issue" by commenting on the already-existing reaches of conservative control and saying that universities should be spared the fate of other social institutions. Shipp responded: "I bet you the KKK said the same thing in the 50s and 60s. 'Can't we have this one town?'" Shipp called the legislator "callous on the issue" and added, "Isn't that what we're trying to stop? Partisan bickering?"

Shipp also expressed surprise that more Democrats aren't supporting "the same type of diversity they've been fighting for." His choice of language is deliberate. Students for Academic Freedom has consciously co-opted liberal catchphrases such as "diversity" to make their version of academic rights more marketable before an academic audience already familiar with these terms as they apply to racial, ethnic and gender diversity. Horowitz admitted this linguistic tactic in his essay, "The Campus Blacklist":

"I encourage [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."

Horowitz's most fundamental linguistic trick in this campaign has been his transformation of the concept of "academic freedom," a phrase that is usually seen as the very opposite of "government control." Horowitz states that "the academic freedom campaign is designed to preserve the intellectual independence of the university." However, he makes it appear as though academic freedom will be achieved by restricting universities' autonomy. If passed by state legislatures, his bill would make it possible for the state to intervene whenever it deemed material presented by a professor was "controversial" or "inappropriate."

Horowitz also adapts conservative rhetoric for his purposes. He wields the term "liberal bias" in describing everything from faculty hiring and tenure trends to required reading lists in individual courses. "Liberal bias," of course, is the hackneyed label that conservatives use to dismiss critiques of their positions.

When I interviewed SAF's national campus director, Sara Dogan, she was careful to insist that SAF does not advocate either "equality" or "balance." These terms would imply that SAF wants to replace liberal faculty with conservatives, which she claims is not one of their goals. Instead she spoke of "fairness" in hiring and promotion and ideological discussion. But "fairness," too, is a term that can have multiple, contradictory meanings (a point that George Lakoff discusses in his 1996 book, Moral Politics).

SAF purports to advocate some form of "equality of opportunity," in which all relevant ideologies would have an equal chance of influencing students. However, their student testimonials often seem to be relying on an expectation of "need-based fairness," which is based on the belief that the more someone needs, the more they should get. They argue that conservatives are "under-represented" and therefore need to have their interests protected on campus.

The notion of need-based fairness, of course, is one of the underpinnings of a number of traditional liberal ideas, such as affirmative action or progressive demands for greater representation of women and minorities in higher academia. It is paradoxical, to say the least, that SAF is demanding need-based special protections for its ideology on campus, while the conservative movement to which it belongs routinely fights against such protections for other, genuinely disadvantaged members of society.

Let's Do a Study

In order to substantiate their claims of faculty bias, SAF began to compile data on the political party affiliations of university professors. The "Chapter Tools" tab on their website for campus chapters included a section on collecting such information using past voting records. It contained explicit directions for obtaining records, as well as a list of university departments to target: economics, English, history, philosophy, political science, sociology and anthropology, with one additional department from the technology or engineering arenas. Its clear focus is on humanities and social science departments, which are perceived as more liberal than the sciences.

When I asked Dogan on July 10 about this portion of the Handbook, she claimed that SAF does not promote such research anymore. "The facts have been well established by now," she said. "There is a bias in hiring and tenure. Liberals vastly outnumber conservatives. [This fact] shows a lack of diversity and discrimination in the hiring process." Three days later, I returned to their website to confirm its language for this article. The section giving instructions on how to research professors' party affiliation research had disappeared from their Chapter Tools, though it can still be found on their site through an Internet search.

The "well-established" facts to which Dogan refers come from several studies published since the organization's establishment. Horowitz's Center for the Study of Popular Culture (CSPC), commissioned Republican pollster Frank Luntz to perform its first study, published in early 2002. The survey asked 151 professors from eight Ivy League universities to answer questions on various political issues. These answers were compared to answers given by a general-public control group. The study seemed to prove that college faculties were disproportionately liberal.

Critics of Luntz's study point out that the questions themselves were not constant: those posed to professors were vague and open to multiple interpretations, while those answered by the control group were more pointedly phrased in order to elicit a desired response. For example, as reported by George Mason University's VitalSTATS website, "Luntz asked the professors if they agreed that, 'The federal government owes American blacks some form of reparations for the harms caused by slavery and discrimination.' He then compared the responses to a Fox News/Opinion Dynamics poll from last spring, which asked, 'Do you think the United States should pay reparations for slavery, that is, pay money to African-Americans who are descendants of slaves?'"

Notice the difference in wording. The professors were only asked if blacks should receive "some form of reparations" - a phrase that could mean virtually anything. The Fox News poll, on the other hand, asked if blacks should be given money.

The VitalSTATS report also noted that "Luntz polled only liberal arts faculties and administrators. And even within the liberal arts, only 12 percent of the respondents were from the more conservative business and economics faculties." Following a strategy similar to SAF's system for surveying professorial bias, Luntz biased his own study by selecting a skewed sample.

The latest "bias on campus" study was published in March of this year. Conducted by professors Stanley Rothman, Neil Nevitte and Robert Lichter, it claims to have found a 5-1 liberal/conservative ratio among the 1643 professors interviewed at 183 universities. However, its own scientific objectivity is still suspect, since the study was funded by the Randolph Foundation, which supports such conservative pillars as the Independent Women's Forum, Americans for Tax Reform and Horowitz's CSPC.

Publicity/Lobbying Tactics

SAF's methods may be suspect, but they have gotten some results. As a result of Horowitz's involvement, ABOR was proposed in the Colorado state legislature. A flurry of media attention framed the handful of professor bias cases presented as a pandemic in the university system. In order to avoid having a measure passed that would increase state control, the University of Colorado system passed its own Memorandum of Understanding on Academic Freedom in March 2004. Horowitz and SAF chalked it up as a victory.

SAF does not depend solely on Horowitz for drumming up publicity and legislature attention. The Student Handbook advises student chapters to contact "non-profit organizations and think-tanks who share your concerns about academia . . . every time a complaint is not quickly resolved." Dogan divulges the reason for this recommendation: "Publicity. Universities won't admit there's a problem until it's all over the airwaves."

The handbook also provides students with guidelines for lobbying state legislators to support ABOR. SAF's tax-exempt 501(c)(3) status prevents the organization from excessive lobbying, but SAF student chapters can still energetically engage in less direct forms of influencing lawmakers, including mobilizing students and generating media coverage.

"Ideally, universities would adopt this language on their own and legislation wouldn't be necessary," said Shipp, indicating that SAF is cautious of using the term "lobby." However, if universities fail to address students' concerns, he said, going to legislatures is the necessary next step.

The Role of ALEC

The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a legislative-focused group composed of state officials and corporate lobbyists, has also been pushing an "academic freedom" agenda based on ABOR. One of ALEC's functions is composing model legislation on the state level that can be introduced by legislators who lack the time to write original proposals themselves. 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.

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.

ALEC's Education Task Force director Lori Drummer did not respond to my request for an interview. No information is available on how many state legislatures have considered ALEC's model legislation, though Dogan reported that some form of an Academic Bill of Rights had been introduced in 16 states.

According to Horowitz, however, "The campaign for an Academic Bill of Rights is not even about legislative measures to address these problems." Even if his legislation never passes, it will have generated publicity for himself and his allegations against academia and will create perceptions of a problem for which SAF provides a ready-made solution. The result thus far has been to put universities and faculty on the defensive, forced to justify their fairness and integrity before a conservative inquisition that is itself anything but fair.

Molly Riordan is a senior at Ithaca College in New York studying media and cultural criticism. She interned with the Center over the summer through an award from the Roy H. Park School of Communications Independent Media Internship program. In addition to writing for PR Watch, she writes for Buzzsaw Haircut, IC's award-winning independent publication.