Fighting Back: Whose Truth?
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By Maurice Isserman
One way to fight back against contemporary assaults on the values of the American academy is to expose lies when we hear them. In that spirit, I offer the following story, which suggests how little respect conservative activist David Horowitz has for the truth when it proves politically inconvenient.
On Tuesday evening, February 1, 2005, two days before University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill was scheduled to speak at Hamilton College, Horowitz, who campaigns against “leftist bias” on U.S. campuses, appeared as a guest on Fox News Channel’s The O’Reilly Factor. He proceeded to bash U.S. higher education in general and Hamilton College in particular as bastions of left-wing extremism.
Churchill had been invited to Hamilton by the college- affiliated Kirkland Project for the Study of Gender, Society, and Culture. The invitation stirred outraged protests, however, after wider publication of previously obscure and highly offensive remarks he had made several years earlier about those who perished on September 11, 2001, at the World Trade Center. He wrote shortly after the attacks that they were not innocent victims but “little Eichmanns” who deserved their fate. As it turned out, on the day of the O’Reilly broadcast, Churchill’s invitation to speak at Hamilton was withdrawn in the face of death threats against him and others.
Using the Churchill controversy as evidence, Horowitz told O’Reilly’s audience that on contemporary college campuses the prevailing political climate is “the kind of intimidating situation you see in societies run by fear . . . hard-core Marxist radicalism.” The show’s transcript also includes the following exchange about an appearance by Horowitz in 2002 on the Hamilton campus.
O’Reilly: You know—but it is to Hamilton ’s credit that you were invited to speak there, correct?
Horowitz: Yes. Well, I—you know, the conservative kids invited me. It’s a little different when you’re invited as a—you know, a speaker paid by and invited by the faculty. It’s not like the faculty brought me up there.
I’ve been called many things since I joined the history department at Hamilton College, but that was the first time I’ve been called a “conservative kid.” The fact is that it was not conservative kids who first brought Horowitz to our campus: three years ago, I invited him to speak to the students in my seminar on the history of the 1960s and to debate me in a public forum on the legacy of that conflict-ridden decade. In the course of an e-mail exchange on an unrelated matter in summer 2002, Horowitz complained to me that he had never once been officially invited to speak at a college. Because I was teaching a course in the fall where I could slot him in, I spontaneously extended an offer to him to come speak at Hamilton.
But don’t take my word for it—simply go to the archives of Horowitz’s own Web magazine, Frontpage, and look up his blog entry for September 18, 2002: “Today, I am at Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y., to speak on the [s]ixties. It is one of the rare occasions I have been officially invited, in this case by historian Maurice Isserman [who is] . . . that rare specimen, an honest leftist.” After more compliments to his host and to other faculty members he met while on campus, Horowitz concluded, “ Hamilton College scores better than your average school in terms of diversity of faculty views.”
Contrary to the impression he gave on The O’Reilly Factor, Horowitz was, in fact, an official guest of Hamilton College in fall 2002, invited by a faculty member, introduced at his talk by the dean of the faculty, and generously compensated for his time.
Michael Bérubé, a literature professor at Pennsylvania State University and a liberal blogger, whose article also appears in this section of Academe, noticed the discrepancy between the version Horowitz offered on the O’Reilly show and his 2002 comments. Bérubé tweaked him on the conflicting accounts in a February 23, 2005, blog. Horowitz responded on his own Web site:
My appearance on O’Reilly did present me with a problem. I had called Maurice Isserman[,] a leftwing academic I knew at Hamilton [,] and asked him to invite me to speak on campus[,] which he graciously did. O’Reilly was asking me a question [about whether] . . . . I get faculty invitations to speak on campuses. I have spoken on somewhere between 250 and 300 college campuses in the last fifteen years. The invitation from Isserman is the only faculty invitation I have ever received. . . . On O’Reilly I didn’t have time to explain all this and so I glossed over it because it was truer to say that I had to be invited by students (and the second time I went that was exactly the case) than to say the faculty there . . . the Kirkland Project in particular . . . . would invite me.
When push came to shove, and Horowitz had to choose between (a) acknowledging before a national television audience something he had previously stated as fact on his Web site and (b) lying, he chose lying. Telling the truth would have undermined his entire premise (that is, that conservatives are excluded and discriminated against on college campuses as a matter of routine policy). Then later, when called on the lie by Michael Bérubé, he explained that it was “truer” to say what was untrue, that he had been invited there by conservative students, rather than by faculty members.
The simple truth is that Hamilton College has always welcomed speakers from the right and the left: prominent conservatives who have spoken on campus in recent years as official guests include Margaret Thatcher, William F. Buckley, Phyllis Schlafly, Dinesh d’Souza—and David Horowitz. For Horowitz, however, the truer truth is that Hamilton College is just another outpost of the left-wing academic gulag, in which viewpoints like his own are ruthlessly suppressed.
There is nothing original in the subordination of truth to political expediency. It was a commonplace practice among totalitarian movements of the left and the right in the twentieth century. Still, if Horowitz would like to come back to Hamilton to explain to my students why he prefers his “truer truth” to the old-fashioned variety that we like to practice here, he has a standing invitation to do so.
Maurice Isserman is professor of history at Hamilton College. The author of many books, he is currently writing a history of Himalayan mountaineering.
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