Fighting Back: Peace Studies is Not Terrorism
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By George Wolfe
When right-wing activist David Horowitz charged the Peace Studies Program at Ball State with being anti-American and supporting terrorism, faculty and administrators fought back using an effective nonviolent strategy. The resounding triumph for academic freedom at the university is a good lesson not to take such charges lying down.
In September 2004, a student in my peace studies class said I was indoctrinating students and teaching anti-American ideas opposed to the war in Iraq. That student and another student who was not in my class objected to “liberal bias” and went to Horowitz’s organization. Slanderous articles about me were then posted on the Horowitz cybertabloid, Frontpage.com. The students also created a “wanted poster” aimed at a history professor named Abel Alves.
Horowitz, who routinely objects to peace studies programs all over the country, apparently decided that my class in the history and philosophy of nonviolence was anti-American. He claimed that I was teaching my students to sympathize with terrorists. I explained to the reporters who contacted me that there are no nonviolent terrorists and that what I teach in my peace studies class is the antithesis of terrorism. Through local and national newspaper interviews, I discredited Horowitz’s charges, successfully calling attention to his extremist political agenda.
A joint effort involving Ball State administrators and colleagues helped to deflect Horowitz’s attack further. Beverly Pitts, the university’s vice president for academic affairs; JoAnn Gora, its president; Randy Hyman, interim vice president for student affairs and enrollment management; and Joseph Losco, chair of the political science department, all took a public stand against political extremism and publicly refuted the false accusations directed toward peace studies at Ball State.
Pitts wrote a letter to Students for Academic Freedom, the student group affiliated with Horowitz, refuting the accusations against me, and she copied all the legislators in Indiana. Gora followed with a letter published in the Muncie Star Press. Losco spoke for the Ball State chapter of the AAUP. And Randy Hyman supported the peace studies program in an interview with the Ball State campus student paper.
As a result of my counter-arguments and the administration’s efforts in support of the program, two Indiana newspapers, the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette and the Star Press of Muncie, ran editorials criticizing Horowitz’s propaganda campaign. In addition, both encouraged state legislators to ignore requests from Horowitz supporters to enact legislation based on his “Academic Bill of Rights.”
The surge in publicity resulting from Horowitz’s smear campaign resulted, ironically, in renewed interest in the peace studies program at Ball State. The number of students enrolled in the Interdisciplinary Peace Studies minor grew from only six in September 2004 to seventeen by the end of the fall semester. Similarly, enrollment in “Introductory Peace Studies” doubled between spring 2004 and spring 2005. The campus student activist group Peace Workers also grew, and several people in the Muncie community made significant contributions to the Peace Studies Foundation Account. (It is clear that Horowitz knows little about effective activism. He really would benefit from taking my peace studies class.)
The strategy I used against the accusations was threefold. First, I “spoke truth to power,” as they say in peace studies by providing documentation (test questions and handouts of discussion questions I use in my class) to the provost proving that the accusations being made against me were false. Second, two students in my class wrote a letter refuting the accusations made by the complaining student. Third, I allowed Horowitz to get as extreme and hostile as possible with his accusations against me until he provided me with an “uncompromisable injustice”: his accusation that I was supporting terrorism. I could then seize the high moral ground by showing how this accusation was politically motivated and absurd.
The strategy and arguments we used at Ball State University to stand against Horowitz and his McCarthy-style propaganda can be adopted by administrators and faculty at other universities who find themselves bullied by extremist demagogues and self-proclaimed political commentators.
George Wolfe is director of the Peace Studies Program at Ball State University.
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