Students are being robbed of their education if professors have political agendas that deprive them of opportunities in the classroom, David Horowitz, author and founder of Students for Academic Freedom, said Wednesday at a talk at AU.
"You can't get a good education if you're only getting half the story," he said.
Professors are expected to teach their fields of expertise, so a literature professor commenting on the war in Iraq should not make political statements in the classroom because he was schooled in literary interpretation, he said.
"In terms of the war in Iraq, they probably don't know anything more than you do," Horowitz said.
Professors should restrict their speech like others whose jobs require them to do so, such as military personnel and church pastors, Horowitz said.
Horowitz called an AU course titled, "Oliver Stone's America," a form of "historical fraud" after a student told him such a course was taught here. Stone's expertise is filmmaking, and as a filmmaker he does not have to think twice about distorting facts, Horowitz said. Therefore, his films cannot be relied on for teaching historical facts.
Peter Kuznick, professor of history who teaches the class, said the class actually looks critically at Stone's films and compares his interpretations with those of scholars and leading figures of the historical events his films examine.
"I suggest Horowitz try something new-like getting his facts straight before he speaks," Kuznick said in an e-mail. "And Horowitz doesn't really have reason to complain. The history department has also offered courses on some of Horowitz's favorite people, including his personal role model-Joseph
McCarthy."
The political left has transformed whole academic departments at the nation's universities, Horowitz said. Anthropology departments have been "intellectually corrupted," and women's studies courses offer no conservative women analysts.
"You will be trained in radical feminism," he said, which does not meet academic standards.
The humanities provide no bottom line for bad ideas, Horowitz said. It is impossible to have a radical physics department, but subjects such as human geography can be taught, which is "Marxist claptrap," he said.
Horowtz said he visited Poland near the end of its communist regime and stayed with the editor of the largest Catholic weekly in the country. The waiting period for an apartment like the editor's where his and his wife's mattress was in their dining room was 20 years.
"That's socialist economics - that's social justice," Horowitz said stating leftist ideas are the agendas of the majority of American professors.
"They care about advancing their bankrupt, mythical fantasies of a world that is just," Horowitz said.
Social justice is another term for communism, he said.
"If you see an inequality of wealth ... that is an injustice," Horowitz explained.
Horowitz recently wrote, "The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America," which has been criticized for blacklisting liberal professors. Horowitz said the only lists exist on left-wing Web sites, and the 101 professors mentioned in his book are leftists. According to academic studies, the ratio of left-wing professors to right-wing professors is 10 to 1, he said.
Horowitz said he would have written about conservative professors who excessively expounded their political views except that there none.
"In my experience, conservatives are much more principled when it comes to institutional processes," he said.
Horowitz the Academic Bill of Rights. He urged students to form an organization for academic freedom so the Board of Trustees would take their request for an academic bill of rights at AU seriously.
The event was sponsored by the College Republicans, the Graduate Leadership Council and the Kennedy Political Union.
