David Horowitz, the leader of the academic freedom movement and author of the Academic Bill of Rights, questions whether parents really know who is teaching their children. In his new book, The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America, bestselling author Horowitz discusses how today's radical professors are indoctrinating our children with their hate-filled, anti-American agendas.
GIACHINO: My next guest is David Horowitz who joins us to discuss his new book, The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America. Mr. Horowitz's book chronicles some of America's most radical college professors, ranging from the infamous Ward Churchill, who compared 9/11 victims to Nazis, to others who are ex-terrorists, racists, murderers, sexual deviants, anti-Semites and al Qaeda supporters.
David Horowitz is the author of numerous books including an autobiography, Radical Son, which has been described as "the first great autobiography of his generation," and which chronicles his odyssey from radical activism to the current positions he holds. His other books include, The Politics of Bad Faith and The Art of Political War. The Art of Political War was described by White House political strategist Karl Rove as "the perfect guide to winning on the political battlefield." Horowitz's latest book, Uncivil Wars, was published in January of this year, and chronicles his crusade against intolerance and racial McCarthyism on college campuses last spring.
David Horowitz is a nationally known author and lifelong civil rights activist. Since 1988 he has served as president of the Center for the Study of Popular Culture, a vehicle group for his campaigns and his online newsmagazine FrontPageMag.com.
Not only is Mr. Horowitz a respected author, he is also a much-sought-after commentator.
GIACHINO: Your book, The Professors, begins with a discussion of a scandal involving University of Colorado Professor Ward Churchill and Hamilton College. For the benefit of the listeners who are not familiar with what transpired in that situation, can you give them a brief overview?
HOROWITZ: Sure. Hamilton College, which is in upstate New York, invited a convicted terrorist named Susan Rosenberg to be a visiting professor and teach their political faiths. It happens that Susan Rosenberg was sentenced to 58 years in prison but was pardoned by President Clinton along with another terrorist in the same group. She also participated in a bank robbery for the May 19th Communist Organization in New York. Three officers were killed, including the first black police officer on that police force. Her visiting professorship would have gone through without a hitch except that a student at Hamilton lived in the town and that bank robbery - which was a Brinks armored car robbery, was a legend in the town and every day when he went to high school he had to pass the monument for the three slain officers who had left 9 children without fathers. He was so outraged by the fact that Susan Rosenberg would be a visiting professor at his school that he started writing articles and The O'Reilly Factor had him on and it so embarrassed the school and there were actual pickets at a school function by the local police organization.
So they withdrew the invitation to Rosenberg, but they had already invited Ward Churchill to follow in her wake. The reason is that Nancy Rabinowitz, the head of the program, was connected to these radical groups. Ward Churchill had trained these folks in weapons as he is an ex-military person. Well when Churchill's speech was announced, it turns out that another student at Hamilton - Churchill had called the victims of 9/11 and the World Trade Center Nazis, and a student's father had been killed in the World Trade Center. So he and his mother were soon on The O'Reilly Factor and that is how the scandal broke.
The repercussions in Colorado were that the president of Colorado University had to step down. Churchill is still on the faculty there because you cannot fire professors, no matter what they do. It is one of the reasons that the professors in my book, The Professors, are a real novelty in the history of American education. American universities in the past have been home to mediocre people but they have never been a haven for extremists. Now there are thousands of extremists on college faculties as my book shows.
GIACHINO: Following the Churchill debacle, you write that hundreds of professors and thousands of students across the country sprang to Churchill's defense, signing petitions and protesting the "witch-hunt" of academic "liberals."
HOROWITZ: The left does not want to be held accountable for anything. If you try to hold them accountable, then they scream suppression of free speech. I defended Churchill's free speech rights when the governor of Colorado was calling for his firing, but I am not going to defend his incompetence.
GIACHINO: Was the Churchill scandal the final straw giving rise to the need for you to write this book, which examines 101 college professors and reveals the frightening truth about some of the worst academics in the country?
HOROWITZ: What the Churchill scandal did was it created an atmosphere and enough awareness. My book is 112,000 words and it is a very easy read but it is a lot of paper and was expensive to produce, so they had to feel that there was a big enough audience. They did, in part, thanks to Ward Churchill, and it is selling very well.
GIACHINO: In the book you write about how many of these professors get away with their extreme viewpoints because there is not much that administrators can do when one is a full professor, protected by tenure rules and academic freedom considerations. And you eluded to this just a couple of minutes ago in the interview. Are hands really that tied?
HOROWITZ: Well look what happened to Larry Summers at Harvard. He was one of the most powerful university president's in history at a modern research university. Within four years of his appointment, he became the first president of a modern research university ever to be censured and then, since they threatened to censure him again -- and that really crippled him as a leader -- he was forced out. This happened because he challenged the faculty left. It began with his request to Cornell West, a $300,000 a year professor at Harvard who had not published a scholarly piece in 20 years, if he would produce a scholarly piece of work. That was a challenge even on the basis of competence. West left the meeting saying that Larry Summers had a problem with black people.
If it is not McCarthyism then it is racism that you are accused of if you try to call these people into account. He was immediately hired by Princeton and I think that is indicative of how the corruption in the university exists at all levels. It is just a very bad situation - in fact, it is much worse than the Enron scandal.
GIACHINO: So the resignation of Larry Summers from Harvard is not an aberration.
HOROWITZ: No, every university president is watching that and understands that they had better not take on their left-wing faculty. Since 200 professors voted for the censure out of 2000 on the Harvard faculty, I use that as a yard stick and say that on any given faculty - and that's because I am familiar with enough universities to know how similar they are in this respect, 10% of the faculty are radicals and activists and not really scholars in their mentality. So that extrapolates to 60,000 such professors nationwide.
My book is the tip of the iceberg. I explain in the book why this is so. Ward Churchill, for example, somebody who pretended to be an American Indian to get an affirmative action hire, had no Ph.D. Nobody gets to be a professor without a Ph.D. unless maybe you are the president of the United States. He had no Ph.D. and the degree that he had was not in the field. He was a professor of ethnic studies and his M.A. degree was in graphic arts. He had to be hired and then promoted through tenure ranks and to full professor. And each time he had to be voted on by his entire department, which means that the entire department is corrupt. But he also had to have six letters on the last two, for a total of a dozen letters, from experts in the field who are not at the University of Colorado, so that suggests that the corruption extends in the field.
GIACHINO: In the book you identify 101 of the most dangerous academics in America, but you make it very clear that although these 101 are named they are more a representation of the universe of academics who use their positions to promote political agendas.
HOROWITZ: That's right. The 10% of academics.
GIACHINO: Go ahead caller, it's your turn.
CALLER: No, I don't. I think it is history.
HOROWITZ: Well it probably was not a course about the War in Iraq so that is a violation of your son's academic freedom because what the professor is doing is propagandizing in the classroom. It is not his expertise unless he is an expert in the Iraq War - which I doubt since the Iraq War is such a recent war and nobody has written a Ph.D. on the Iraq War and the information is not in and so you cannot really be scholarly about it. The stupidity of the statement itself is a kind of self-conviction on the part of the professor.
CALLER: I actually agreed with the professor.
HOROWITZ: Well, it is not the subject. I'm sorry that I introduced the whole theme because it really is irrelevant to my book. It does not matter if the Iraq War is over oil or not. The professor should not have been saying that.
GIACHINO: On that issue of what teachers are saying, we all know that teacher bias is not just limited to the university setting. What advice do you have for parents who are fed up with teachers, starting at elementary school and going up from there, who go beyond the task of teaching students how to think and enter into the dangerous realm of telling them what to think?
Universities of course affect the K-12 systems because they train the teachers, they affect the courts because they train the lawyers, and they affect the media because they train journalists. So in my view they are a huge problem if they turn themselves into a political party - particularly a political party like the one portrayed in my book because that is a political party of the extreme left. As I say, there are about 60,000 of them already entrenched in universities who hate America and wants the terrorists to win, and say so. They want to eliminate the state of Israel and think and describe white people as evil. I have professors in this book that I written who call for the elimination of the gringo and then say that it means we should kill all white people.
GIACHINO: How do you respond to their charges that your book attacks faculty for their political associations and beliefs, rather than for their political advocacy and indoctrination of students in the classroom?
GIACHINO: In the news media over the last 5-10 years we have seen an extreme growth in talk radio program success and Fox News success because conservatives felt alienated in the mainstream liberal media.
HOROWITZ: At The New York Times you cannot hire conservatives and you can convert your once trusted newspaper - The New York Times at one time met the highest standard of objectivity. Then the young owner came in and made it a left-wing paper and hired only leftists. But there is a market out there for The Washington Times and papers like it and talk-radio and Fox News Channel and talk radio have sprung up. The university is in a monopoly position where the taxpayers pay for the university but the leftists control it.
It is not so easy to create a new university the size of the University of Florida or Florida State and all the other state campuses.
GIACHINO: That was what I was going to ask you - that is whether we might ever see a rise in "conservative" universities?
HOROWITZ: Harvard has a $23 billion endowment and that is a little difficult to compete with. And a 400 year history. You are not going to compete with that too easily.
GIACHINO: There's a sequel for you. Thank you very much for joining us this afternoon. We are all out of time. We have been talking with David Horowitz. Go out and get his book called Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America.