The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics
in America
by David Horowitz.
(Regnery, $27.95, 448 pages)
Slogging through The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous
Academics in America is a bit like taking in the Interstate
scenery between Abilene and El Paso — a whole lot of the same
thing. Orchestrated by David Horowitz and largely carried out by an
ensemble of assistants, this book consists, in large measure, of a
succession of ideological portraits culled from campuses across the
country. Profiles of anti-American Marxists who employ classrooms
to advance their radical social agenda are interrupted by profiles
of anti-American queer theorists, anti-Semitic Islamists, and
anti-Caucasian racists who all exhibit contempt for ideas other
than their own. Amid the mind-numbing repetitiveness of this serial
critique of academic bigotry and incompetence, a few cases stand
out.
Take, for example, Bernardine Dohrn and her husband Bill Ayers.
Dohrn is a law professor at Northwestern, while Ayers holds the
title “Distinguished Professor” at the University of Illinois,
Chicago. In their youth both joined the Weatherman underground, a
group that “managed to bomb the U.S. Capitol building, New York
City Police Headquarters, the Pentagon, and the National Guard
offices in Washington, D.C.”
Far from being on the periphery of this organization, Dohrn and
Ayers were active members. Indeed, both were pursued by the FBI
throughout the '70s. According to a Horowitz researcher, only a
“technicality” for improper surveillance prevented the pair from
receiving serious jail time for their crimes. Moreover, neither
professor has denounced the activities they supported years
ago.
Of his bomb-detonating days Ayers commented, “I don’t regret
setting bombs. I feel we didn’t do enough.” That comment,
ironically enough, was published by the New York Times in
the edition that was delivered to the Twin Towers on September 11,
2001.
Dohrn, by contrast, now claims to have been “joking” when she
celebrated the brutal Sharon Tate murders that were carried out by
members of Charles Manson’s clan: “Dig it! First they killed those
pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them. They even
shoved a fork into the victim’s stomach! Wild!” This same person
now directs the Children and Family Justice Center at Northwestern
and spends her professional time, along with her husband, working
to prevent the punishment of violent juvenile offenders.
Then there is the inventor of Kwanzaa, Professor Ron Karenga. In
1971, Karenga and two other members of his “United Slaves”
organization were convicted of felonious assault and false
imprisonment. Karenga, who bestowed the title “Maulana” or “Master
Teacher” upon himself, spent four years in prison for these crimes
before being released in 1975. This resume blemish didn’t prevent
Karenga from securing a faculty appointment at San Diego State
shortly thereafter. In 1979 Karenga moved to Cal State Long Beach
where, in 1989, he was named head of the Black Studies Department.
That’s an amazing career track — fourteen years from prison inmate
to department head of a state university!
(Meshing nicely with this case of affirmative action for
criminals, researcher Thomas Ryan notes that Kwanzaa’s seven
principles are the same principles embraced by the Symbionese
Liberation Army — the domestic terrorist group that kidnapped
Patricia Hearst in 1974 and employed a seven-headed snake to
symbolize their collectivist philosophy.)
Of the numerous Communists now teaching on American campuses,
Angela Davis is probably the most famous — having run for
vice-president on the party’s ticket in 1980 and ‘84. But of the
seven “University Professors” in the University of California
system, Davis is surely the only one who gained that title without
having produced a serious scholarly work. Davis does, of course,
possess the distinction of having fled from the FBI and having been
tried for involvement in a 1970 plot to free her imprisoned lover
— a Black Panther awaiting trial for murder. This plot resulted in
the death of four people, including Judge Harold Haley, whose “head
was blown off by a sawed-off shotgun owned by Professor Davis.”
Davis, however, acting as her own lawyer to avoid
cross-examination, was found not guilty of the charges against her
— thus setting the stage for the honors that were lavished upon
her by both the Soviet Union (the International Lenin Peace Prize)
and the University of California system.
Horowitz’s well-written introductory chapter contains the most
egregious example of academic preferences for imprisoned radicals.
That case concerns Susan Rosenberg, who, in the fall of 2004, was
invited to join the faculty of Hamilton College as a “Visiting
Professor.” Twenty years earlier Rosenberg, another member of the
Weatherman underground, had been apprehended and sentenced to 58
years in prison for helping move hundreds of pounds of explosives
into a New Jersey warehouse. A midnight pardon issued by Bill
Clinton, however, made all the difference between doing more time
in a federal prison and teaching a course on “Resistance Memoirs”
to students at Hamilton.
Rosenberg’s invitation to Hamilton was only withdrawn when a
student, Ian Mandel, brought intense public scrutiny to her
background — a history that also included an indictment for the
murder of two Nyack, New Jersey police officers whose memorial
stood a mile from Mandel’s home. As if to indicate their contempt
for public standards of decency, the Hamilton organization
responsible for inviting a convicted terrorist to the faculty
followed that fiasco with a speaking invitation to Ward Churchill
— an offer that was reluctantly rescinded after Churchill’s
“little Eichmanns” comment about the innocent victims of 9/11 was
publicized.
The conclusion one must draw from such examples isn’t that every
institution has its bad apples but rather that, at least in the
liberal arts in America, moral turpitude and political hucksterism
pervades higher education. Radical criminals with questionable
academic credentials flourish in a milieu that bristles with
hostility toward real scholars who don’t toe the party line —
witness the case of former Harvard President Lawrence Summers.
Individuals with prison records or FBI rap sheets don’t get into
major educational institutions because they fudge their resumes.
They get in because they share the political dogmas of those who
hire them — and they flourish for the same reason.
What The Professors ultimately reveals isn’t a list of
instructors that students can avoid, but a corrupt, politicized
system that has contempt for the very idea of liberal
education.
