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Analysis Demonstrates Flaws in Book
By Gwendolyn Bradley
The recent David Horowitz book The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America is full of errors, according to an analysis conducted by Free Exchange on Campus, a coalition of academic and civil liberties groups that includes the AAUP. Horowitz, the promoter of the so-called Academic Bill of Rights, which champions government regulation of curricula, teaching, and faculty hiring and promotion in both public and private institutions, uses the book to attack a wide range of faculty members whom he accuses of “indoctrinating” their students. However, the book provides little support for this conclusion and contains numerous errors of fact and logic.
For example, despite repeated assertions that his Academic Bill of Rights is needed to prevent faculty members from punishing conservative students with poor grades, the Free Exchange analysis reveals that Horowitz does not cite a single example of this happening. He consistently targets professors not because of their classroom activities or the quality of their scholarship, but simply because he disapproves of their fields—for example, women’s studies. In fact, although Horowitz’s ostensible concern is the student classroom experience, more than 80 percent of the “evidence” he cites concerns nonclassroom activities.
The analysis also reveals that Horowitz frequently takes quotations out of context. In one instance, he quotes Michael Bérubé, an English professor at Pennsylvania State University and a member of the AAUP Council, as saying that the university is “the final resting place of the New Left” and “progressives’ only bulwark against the New Right.” But these quotations are from a book review that lists ways in which various writers have described the university. Also on the list are opposing descriptions of the university, including “the research wing of the corporate economy” and “the conservatives’ strongest bastion of antifeminist education.”
For additional information, see the coalition’s Web site at http://www.freeexchangeoncampus.org
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