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The Whole Truth
The following letter responds to "Whose Truth?" by Maurice Isserman, published in the September–October issue.
David Horowitz
To the Editor:
Of the three hundred campus invitations I have received (two at Hamilton) exactly one has come from a professor and never, like that of convicted terrorist Susan Rosenberg, from a faculty committee. Yes, Maurice Isserman invited me but not exactly spontaneously or without prompting. It was I who called him to propose that I come. I observed to him that about six hundred academic courses deal with the 1960s nationally, and that although I am an artifact of that era, and the author of its first manifesto, and the former editor of its largest radical magazine, and its most prominent defector and critic, I have never been invited into one of those classrooms, nor are my books assigned to the students who enroll in them, nor have I been invited to a single one of the hundreds of symposia on a subject that can be said to be my area of expertise. In other words, in our conversation, I set out to see if I could shame Isserman into inviting me, which he did and which I acknowledged in my magazine, Frontpage.
On The O’Reilly Factor, I faced a problem that I concede I solved incorrectly. When I was asked if it wasn’t to Hamilton’s credit to have invited me, I had two seconds to decide whether I wanted to say, “Well, yes, in a sense, but actually I shamed them into it.” Isserman had treated me decently. It seemed unkind to take that away from him. On the other hand, I thought that if I just say, yes, Hamilton should be praised, that would be a really big lie about the reality of my experience at Hamilton and on university campuses. So I said I was invited by conservative students, which was true of my most recent visit to Hamilton, but obviously not the whole truth.
Isserman has now decided to weigh in with an entire article about this trivia in order to discredit the academic freedom movement with which I am associated. This movement is about introducing a little intellectual diversity into the academy. Professors like Maurice Isserman ought to be concerned about the one-party culture they have created in institutions that once honored intellectual pluralism and fairness. Considering this, my only conclusion can be that Isserman must regret bringing David Horowitz to Hamilton. That’s the truth I was driving at.
David Horowitz
Frontpage Magazine
Maurice Isserman Responds:
David Horowitz asserts that I invited him to speak at Hamilton because he “shamed” me into doing so. How he knows this is a mystery. In fact, he does himself a disservice with the claim: I didn’t invite him because he manipulated me into doing so—I invited him because I thought he would be an interesting speaker. But that’s really irrelevant. The point is he was invited to Hamilton by a faculty member and well paid for his appearance. And when asked a simple question by Bill O’Reilly about the circumstances of his visit, he chose without a moment’s hesitation to lie, saying he had come at the invitation of “conservative kids,” and adding, “It’s a little different when you’re invited as a . . . speaker paid by and invited by the faculty. It’s not like the faculty brought me up there.”
This is hardly a trivial lie, given that Horowitz had just finished telling O’Reilly that American campuses are places “run by fear,” where only those who toe the line of “hard-core Marxist radicalism” can get a fair hearing. Horowitz’s actual experience at Hamilton suggests otherwise, as do the experiences of such figures as William F. Buckley, Margaret Thatcher, Phyllis Schlafly, Dinesh D’Souza, and many others of conservative views who have spoken at the college in recent years at the invitation of the administration and the faculty. Horowitz himself complimented the college in 2002, writing that “Hamilton College scores better than your average school in terms of diversity of faculty views.” Now that I’ve dared criticize him for lying about the circumstances surrounding his visit to Hamilton, the college is back to being a “one party” state. Totalitarian regimes thus appear and disappear on a given campus at the whim of David Horowitz.
In an exchange earlier this year, Horowitz claimed that his statement on the O’Reilly show that it was “not like the faculty brought me up there” was “truer” than telling what actually happened. This suggests to me that Horowitz doesn’t have any better grasp of the concept of truth than he does of the concept of academic freedom. I don’t regret bringing Horowitz to Hamilton College. What I do regret is that Horowitz is an unrepentant liar, and this fact is not better understood within the circles in which he still carries some measure of malign influence.
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