The Political Attack on our Universities
By David Horowitz
FrontPageMagazine.com | March 15, 2006
What follows in these pages is testimony I presented to the Appropriations Committee of the Kansas House on March 15, 2006, concerning the assault on academic freedom by tenured radicals in Kansas’ public university system.
Although the principal examples of political indoctrination and violations of academic freedom cited in this testimony pertain to institutions of higher learning in Kansas, they could easily be replicated in similar institutions in any state in the union.
The intellectual corruption of our universities by political radicals has been proceeding without interruption since the Vietnam War. This political movement in the academic world didn’t get into high gear until the 1980s, when the Sixties generation attained tenure rank and with it institutional power in the universities. But it has now become a pervasive and destructive fact of our national life. Entire academic departments and fields are no longer devoted to scholarly pursuits, but have become ideological training and recruitment centers for radical causes.
Educational institutions are the cornerstones of our democracy. This is particularly so in the present historical juncture when we are engaged in a war with totalitarian enemies that seek to destroy us. Teaching the next generations the principles of our system, and developing in them the ability to reason and think for themselves are agendas crucial to the health and survival of our nation. This knowledge and these abilities are the fundamental prerequisites of a democratic culture. And they are in danger in our country today.
The testimony contained in this pamphlet provides a framework for viewing the problem of our universities within the framework of traditional educational values to which most universities still feel obliged to pay lip service. This framework therefore also provides an agenda for reform – for confronting the intellectual corruption that threatens our institutions of higher learning and for restoring the precepts and standards that created them in the first place and on which the future of our country depends.
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My name is David Horowitz. I am a well-known author and media commentator and am the president of the Center for the Study of Popular Culture, a non-profit public interest organization supported by the contributions of 40,000 individuals. I am also the author of a recent book, The Professors, which profiles more than a hundred academics and reveals several disturbing patterns in university governance, including the use of university classrooms and curricula to promote agendas that are political, not academic.
I am the creator of a national organization called Students for Academic Freedom which has chapters on 150 campuses nationwide and the author of an Academic Bill of Rights, which seeks to restore educational and academic values to university curricula, as well as traditions of academic responsibility that have been lost in recent years. The Academic Bill of Rights has effected changes in the academic policies of public university systems in Colorado and Ohio, and has provided a model for legislation that has been introduced or is in the process of being introduced in more than a dozen states.
In the course of the last twenty years I have visited over 300 campuses, among which was the University of Kansas in Lawrence. In the course of these visits, I have interviewed several thousand students and several hundred professors concerning the academic freedom issues I am here to discuss.
The Academic Bill of Rights I have proposed is an attempt to restore the principles of academic freedom that played a central role in shaping the modern research university in America and making it the envy of the world. My bill is first of all a codification of existing academic freedom policies which university administrations have increasingly failed to enforce in recent years. I have explained why this is so in my book The Professors, but it should be apparent to any observer of recent events at Harvard University, where the most powerful president in the history of the modern research university was forced to resign by a radical faculty which did not approve his expression of politically incorrect ideas. The only real innovation of my Academic Bill of Rights, in terms of existing academic freedom provisions, is that it codifies the existing policies and intentions as a bill of student rights.
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15:24, duminica, 7 iulie 2024
