http://www.frontpagemag.com/articles/readarticle.asp?ID=11509
The following forum was held at the Center for the Study of Popular Culture’s annual Restoration Weekend, Nov. 13-16, 2003.
Lanny Griffith: As I look back at all the years I’ve spent in politics, it goes back for decades, starting in a college campus situation. We’ve sort of seen all these different institution -- we’ve seen such a transformation in this country because starting in the ‘60s, sort of the ‘40s through the ‘60s, every -- so much of our society was dominated by the left in sort of contemporary liberalism, and over the years, we’ve sort of followed -- I’ve spent most of my battles in politics, fighting to push back on that, and of course, we’ve had enormous success in that, and we’ve seen that in all kinds of other institutions in the country. But they’re -- at least in my estimation, there are about three institutions that still are sort of heavily dominated by the left and are arrogantly dominated by the left to the extent that they basically are intolerant of different views, and those institutions probably are mainstream Protestant churches, the media, particularly news media, and then the academic institutions, particularly higher education, where there’s so many of those institutions that are dominated by what I would call not only sort of radical Left views but also an arrogant intolerant left view. And so the people we have here -- as we sort of continue this battle, the people we have here are folks who understand that and are either -- have good insight into why that is, how destructive it is, examples of how extreme that can be, as well as people who are doing some great things in terms of finding solutions to that and sort of battling then at war to open up those academic institutions to give students an opportunity to hear different sides of issues rather than this sort of arrogant leftist views that are just imposed on them when they get into these institutions. So I’m -- well, three years ago, I was able to be on a panel, and since then, David’s insisted that I moderate two panels. I think the reason is because he thinks it’s a way to keep me from talking too much.
So we have a great panel, and I want to introduce them briefly to you. You have their bios, so it doesn’t make any sense for me to read to you, particularly at my advanced age, when reading has become much more difficult, but I want to give you some sense of who it is we have, and we’ll do it -- I’ll do that in the order that we’re going to start with.
Over here, we have Congressman Jack Kingston of Georgia. He has represented the southern part of the state, a large, sprawling, somewhat rural district, although it includes Savannah for 10 years. He is on the House Appropriations Committee and is Vice Chairman of the House Republican Conference, which is a strong indicator of the future leadership. He also introduced the Academic Bill of Rights before Congress, and Ithat’s his focus today.
After Representative Kingston, we will hear from Ron Robinson, the President of Young America’s Foundation, and he’s been doing this for three decades. They have recently saved the Reagan Ranch.
Following Ron is Daniel Pipes, who is the Director of the Middle East Forum, and he’s part of a presidentially appointed board, the U.S. Institute of Peace. He’s been published in just about every magazine you can imagine, and you probably read him in Atlantic Monthly, National Review, Weekly Standard, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post. He also has a website known as “Campus Watch,” which will be his focus.
And last but not least, of course, we have David Horowitz. Now, when Roger Wicker and I were down in Old Miss, we were sort of on opposite sides of David. David was active in California as a communist. We had a liberal or two at Old Miss, but I’m not sure we had any communists, although we were mighty suspicious. There was one point that we did something very radical: the only time we ever did a demonstration is in the Vietnam War when President Nixon mined the harbors of Hai Phong. We got a student rally together to support President Nixon and his mining of the harbor. It was something that wasn’t happening in most college campuses. Meanwhile, our friend David here was actually a major leader in the New Left. His book, if you haven’t read it, Radical Son, describes both the intellectual and philosophical change that he’s gone through since those days. He’s still a radical, and that’s one of the reasons I think we all love him because he now is speaking the truth, and for the Left, there’s nothing more outrageous. He speaks on college campuses probably more than anybody who thinks like we do; he is there probably about 150 times a year. His website, FrontPageMag.com, has two million hits a month. He has recently founded Students for Academic Freedom, which allows young people to fight for their rights on campus.
So that’s our panel. Rep. Jack Kingston will get things started.
Rep. Jack Kingston: When I was first elected to Congress, there was a great Congressman from New York named Jerry Solomon, who’s Chairman of the Rules Committee. When we got into the majority, he was outraged that college campuses would not let ROTC on campus. He introduced legislation that said if the campus did not allow ROTC to drill on site, don’t come asking for Department of Defense grants, because you’re not going to qualify anymore. It took about four or five years, but finally, ROTC is back on college campuses. That was instructive to me that the way to deal with these folks is you have got to attack them head-on.
Now, the legislation which we’ve introduced has 20 co-sponsors, and it actually is the brainchild of David Horowitz and the experiences that he’s had with his reparations, advertisements, and things like that.
Just to give a few other examples, here we are at Duke University, which, by the way, seems to be one of the greatest offenders, but a course called “American Dreams and American Realities,” taught by Professor Gerald Wilson, and then in the words of students, “To my shock and dismay, he began to discuss the three Anglo-Saxon’s myths -- Christianity, capitalism, and democracy. And he had said later that any Republicans should go ahead and drop his class.”
Washington University in St. Louis, the professor spent most of the time denouncing George Bush, the Republican Party, Christianity, and Western culture in general.
Here’s one at Florida International University. Michelle Beer is the professor. It’s called “Philosophy and Feminism,” in which she says that the act of opening doors for women by men is seen as an act of male-dominated oppression. This professor also says the act of sexual intercourse is seen as a service to men. I guess that kind of indicates what kind of love life she’s had over the years.
Here’s at California State University in San Marcos, Maribel Garcia is the professor. “Gender and Race in Contemporary Society,” is the topic, and the professor states that if a straight woman has never had lesbian sex, then she is oppressed by men, and the teacher constantly displays graphic pornography and so forth.
Here’s the University of Massachusetts. An art professor actually got all of her students to write the legislature in Boston for budget cuts, and I don’t know why she wanted them to send it to Boston since that’s not the capital, but that’s the art department.
And then Houston Community College, the society is American Government, and the professor is Rafael Ruiz. He continually talks about the unjust war waged by the unelected president and spent time passing cartoons around to class which mock the president, and then gives an entire lecture on defaming capitalism and praising socialism and communism.
Another one, University of California, Los Angeles one professor calls the Boy Scouts homophobic and paramilitary.
And the examples just go on and on. And these examples have come to us through students.
My dad was a college professor. He went to Buffalo State as an undergrad, then to Cornell for graduate studies. My sister is also a college professor. And at our household, you were expected to participate in the dinner table conversation. You were expected to have opinions, and you were expected to be able to back up your opinion with facts. But the dinner table was neutral. It did not have an opinion. The forum was neutral. And my college professor dad encouraged us to be dissenters. He taught us how to think, and I think that was the classic approach to education. Today, of course, the standard approach is indoctrination.
The Academic Bill of Rights urges colleges to do a self-examination. Are you academically balanced? Do you honor intellectual diversity? It recognizes that the partisanship of professors can abuse a student’s academic rights. It tries to take the politics out of the curriculum. It does not call for any particular politics. It doesn’t call for universities to talk more about being Republican. It just says, “Don’t belittle Republicans.” It makes sure that students who speak up in class aren’t called names. It calls for more balanced graduation speakers and guest speakers.
At the University of Missouri, a science teacher gave her kids extra credit for boycotting and protesting David Horowitz’s speech. And that’s in science. There’s no telling what they would’ve done in government or humanities class.
What we are trying to do is get inclusive myths on college campuses. We’re trying to say that diversity isn’t skin color, and it’s not gender; it’s actually intellectual, and they should be open to these views. Our bill is non-binding. It simply says that you should, on a voluntary basis, have an academic bill of rights for all students, and what could be more pro-intellectual, pro-educational, or pro-American than that?
We have right now 20 co-sponsors. It was introduced October 30. I would love all of you all to go home to your representative and ask him or her to become a co-sponsor. Roger Wicker is here, incidentally, and he’s the second co-sponsor on this bill. So we have a lot of support for it already. We want to get about 100 to 150 co-sponsors so that we can get hearings in the House. The Senate actually has had some hearings, but they weren’t very well publicized, and they don’t have legislation right now. So we need to get more co-sponsors so we can get a little more word out there.
I will say this, that the reaction has been predictable from the academic circles but very encouraging from the students and the middle-class parents who are paying the bill for these tuitions. They’re sick and tired of their kids getting shortchanged on their education. The bill is House Resolution 318. If you want a copy of it, you can get it on our webpage, David can get it for you, or you can contact us, and we’ll be glad to. Thank you very much.
Daniel Pipes: Thank you, Congressman, and good morning, ladies and gentlemen. It’s my pleasure to be here. And, again, I commend
I have a niche topic of the campus problem, which is
Jihad means the extension of Muslim control of territory against non-Muslims. It is not about converting people. It is about extending power. But if you look at what the academics are saying, the people who should know, they deny that that is what it is. They’ll sometimes acknowledge that it’s a defensive war, which it’s not, but most of the time they will say it is moral self-improvement. My favorite definitions are as follows: controlling one’s anger, working on behalf of feminism, and combating apartheid. This is what these specialists are telling us. And this is important because jihad is a significant factor in our foreign policy now.
My focus is really on the college faculty, because my understanding is that the origins of the problem lie with the specialists who are working on the
I see five problems in this field, and I would expect that they apply to other fields, as well:
First, what I mentioned just before, apologetics, an unwillingness to confront the difficult issues. There has never been a full-length study of Osama bin Laden by the academics. They don’t look at the repression on
Mistakes are the second problem. Because the analysis is so lopsided, there’s no debate, and so what one finds as a consensus. The consensus on the Left, as you might expect, is wrong. For instance, the assertion that militant Islam will serve as a democratizing force in the
Then there’s extremism. I hardly need give you the kind of examples of anti-Americanism one finds. It’s ubiquitous.
There’s intolerance of opposing points of view. Again, it’s standard issue. I wouldn’t say that everybody has the same point of view. There are differences, of course, but it’s all on one side of the great debate.
And, finally, the most appropriate to this discussion, there is an abuse of power vis-à-vis students. One finds over and over again that students are not allowed to dissent from their professors’ viewpoints. And I hear about this in an odd kind of way, because I am contacted by students once a month or so, reporting to me that they cited me in a paper, and the professor writes back on the paper that I am not a source that may be cited.
Things have gotten so bad that what one has is a situation largely characterized by sterility, ineffectiveness, and an inability to answer the public need at a moment of national emergency. This is truly a field dominated by arrogance, and it’s a classic example of intellectual hegemony.
By way of solution, I have created something with my colleagues, as you heard before, called “Campus Watch,” which focuses on the
We got started a year ago, September of 2002, with a website, a rather modest website, which merely posted some articles by others that we had noted and found interesting. And what was curious is that the specialists on the
The interesting result of this was to give us a platform. Our little website became a national—indeed, international—topic. Four newspapers in
We’ve even gotten into investigative work. In October of 2003 alone, for example, we did three investigative studies. At the
We have suggested that the
And, finally, we have supported House Resolution 3077, which calls for an advisory board to oversee the spending of
So we’ve got the attention of our colleagues in the universities, and I think it’s a healthy development. They now are aware that students might turn to us with their stories, are aware that we’re watching the student newspapers to see what inanities they might have spoken. We are looking at their research, we are watching, and we might post it, and we might make fun of it, and we might bring into public attention, and we might write about it. We might even go on television about it.
And I think there has been a discernible effect. I flatter myself perhaps in thinking that the rather subdued academic response to the war in
Ron Robinson: Good morning. I appreciated David’s comment last night that he is more a battle tank than a think tank. The truth is, David is both, and without the work he’s done to reach young people on the college campuses, our cause and the idea of freedom on campus would not be advanced as much as it has been. But, also, I think he oftentimes comes up and frames the issues in the best possible way. In talking about academic freedom, sponsoring the academic freedom campaign throughout the country, is a very powerful force for the ideas that we believe in.
I approach the topic a little bit differently from that. Basically, I look at it as how do we bring young people to our ideas, and you have to have academic freedom, I think, ultimately to do that, but there are ways to get young people during a very formative stage of their life with problems still in the academic community. They’re not going to be resolved immediately. It took decades for the Left to accumulate this almost monopolistic power, and it is going to take some time and effort on a number of levels to unravel that.
But what about the young people, the 15 million young people, that are in college every year? That has really been our focus. Michelle and I have three sons; currently two are in college and one is a senior in high school, looking at colleges. This underscores the problems that we have. It also reinforces, by the way, why I say David is both a battle tank and a think tank.
Our youngest son, who was the least interested in these topics at one point, was transformed when David came to our home for dinner. He heard David on radio a couple nights later. He started reading Radical Son, which made me a little bit nervous, but then went on to read the rest of David’s books and probably is today the most politically oriented of our children.
But I look at them as I looked at my own student years as an opportunity to hear and consider ideas. It’s the first time many young men and young women are away from home. It’s a four-year setting. It’s open to new ideas, or it should be. There are college papers, college radio stations, classroom discussions, guest lecturers. There’s many ways to hear and consider new ideas. And if we lose the battle, or worse, if we’re frozen out of those discussions, there’s no way in the rest of life to make it up. You can’t go from the four-year college experience into the workforce and then try to make it up because oftentimes you go directly into the government, or the media, or some other occupation that no longer gives you the freedom to explore these issues as you have on the college campuses. And that’s why this issue, to me, is so important. That’s what we do at Young America’s Foundation.
Now, since we were last here together at Restoration Weekend, one very important Supreme Court decision came down that affects a lot of these issues, and that is the issue that divides students even before they go to college, the issue of what racial classification are they going to be categorized in. Ward Connerly has spoken to this conference before.
But what struck me so much about that Supreme Court case is the colleges and the universities went before the Supreme Court and argued that they needed their so-called affirmative action program because they wanted the strength in the military, that the diversity worked for the military. Therefore, they had to have it at their colleges; it had to be upheld because of what they were doing to protect the military, which struck me as a pretty interesting argument, particularly given what the Congressman said: “For 30 years, we’ve seen colleges and universities resisting students having the right to attend ROTC or even meet with defense and intelligent recruiters on the college campuses.”
One of the first things we can do on the college campuses is to make sure that those colleges and universities that we’re sending our sons and daughters to allow students who want to attend ROTC on their campus to do so. Notwithstanding current legislation, universities such as Harvard and Yale, no longer allow ROTC on their campuses. Their students have to go to MIT or the University of Connecticut. And when we talk about the Academic Bill of Rights, the right of students to attend ROTC should be included in that.
Very briefly, I think there’s a set of issues coming up that freedom on campus and the opportunity to present our point of view is going to be very strong.
The first is political correctness itself. You don’t need mandatory sensitivity training. You don’t need to restrict speakers or shout them down. If you have confidence that the young men and young women in our universities agree with what the Left has to say, you only put those repressive ideas or techniques in place if you don’t have very little confidence or no confidence in your own point of view.
The second, the generation in schools today is the 9/11-generation. They’ve seen America attacked firsthand. They are less susceptible than any generation in my lifetime to the anti-Americanism of their professors, but we have to get our messages out to them. We have to get the speakers, such as the speakers here today, before these student audiences.
The third great opportunity comes next here, and it comes in a more partisan form. And that is when young people do have the opportunity to choose between two points of view, they tend to make the right choice. When President Bush runs against whomever emerges as a Democratic nominee, the young men and young women in our schools are going to have an opportunity to hear those two points of view. Any time students hear two points of view on a particular topic, it is a victory for us. And then I think, also, the communication revolution, in general, the idea that we’re making progress on multiple fronts, the fact that two speakers have already alluded to their websites, the fact that there’s talk radio, Fox News, the publications, there are ways to get our ideas out to young men and young women that we didn’t have in the past, and we ought to continue to emphasize those.
Young America’s Foundation really steps in your shoes, as does what David does day in and day out on the campus, and that is help a young person hear and consider ideas that you would consider to be important. I don’t think there’s probably a single person in this room that wouldn’t advise a grandson or granddaughter, son or daughter, or a young person with a good book, with a speaker that they ought to hear, with the idea of, “Here’s a magazine you ought to read or show you ought to pay attention to,” and that’s what we do institutionally. The speakers that go across the college campuses like David, you do hear the cases where they’re sometimes attacked, sometimes they need security, but I guarantee you that the students attending those events, their lives are changed.
Ronald Reagan knew there was a spark struck at just the right age would light up the rest of a person’s life. David and the other speakers that we’re sending out, some that he would agree with, some that he might not: John Stossel, Ward Connerly, Ann Coulter -- these are people who are changing the lives of many young people in the country. We have a series of conferences. Our National Conservative Student Conference is something that David has been involved with through the years. We have Freedom Fest in May. We have a high school program in June. We have a series of conferences in Santa Barbara. There’s no reason for you just to rely on the universities to educate your children or grandchildren. Use these other institutions as well.
We also have a series of seminars at the Reagan ranch. We’re evolving around the ideas and philosophers that meant so much to Ronald Reagan: Russell Kirk, Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, James Burnham, Henry Hazlitt, Ludwig von Mieses and Frank Meyer are the seven that he particularly cited.
The Reagan Ranch was mentioned. That is an opportunity really to introduce young people to our ideas without having to tell them everything about Young America’s Foundation. ntuitively, they know that a program that is operating in the footsteps of Ronald Reagan is not going to be too far afield from what they might be interested in. We have Michael Reagan involved, but it was exciting for us that for the past two summers we’ve had Ashley Reagan, President Reagan’s granddaughter, with us as well.
Finally, I think there’s a series of general activities that are important in reaching young people that are sort of a mixed bag of activities. We have comedy and tragedy, which studies the most bizarre college courses in the country today, and a number of examples were already cited here. won’t restate those, but what I would point out that we have studied 50,000 courses this year, and we found 10 that had basically conservative writings and conservative themes. That is the ratio that we have found this year, based upon the major colleges and universities. In the top 50 colleges, 50,000 courses, of which 10 represent the ideas that are oftentimes represented by the speakers here today.
We distribute over three million posters. Young people use posters extensively. In the Young Americas Foundation literature, I put our general newsletter and a general brochure on a desk just outside the hall here today. Hopefully, we can probe any of these other areas in the questions and answers.
But let me conclude by lines that President Reagan said very often, probably his most frequently quoted or stated line as president. He said, “Freedom isn’t secured in any one moment of time. We must struggle to preserve it every day, and freedom is never more than one generation from extinction.” Thank you very much.
David Horowitz: Thank you. Universities are not the same institutions that most of the people in this room went to in my generation, over 30 years ago. Our universities have been utterly transformed, and, of course, we’re all speaking here of the humanities and social sciences, the liberal arts divisions. We’re not speaking of engineering and medicine and the things that universities do right.
I’ve been transformed into a political base for the Left and the very hard Left. There are “hate America” airheads who are full professors at Princeton University and others earning $300,000 a year in salary -- I’m talking about the absolute stars of the academic universe -- and making over a million a year in side things, like speaking on college campuses for $15,000 a shot. The universities are the scene of the longest and most successful blacklist in the history of this country. That is the first great change, and that took place probably 20 or 25 years ago. You rarely find a conservative in the humanities on a college campus, and when you do, they have gray in their hair, and that is because the doors were closed so many years ago.
We did a survey -- and, by the way, all of this information is available on our website at studentsforacademicfreedom.org, or you can get it through frontpagemag.com.
We did a survey of college campuses, which showed that the average ratio of registered Democrats to Republicans is 10:1. That’s not counting Greens, Maoists, and al-Qaeda supporters -- and I’m very serious about al-Qaeda supporters. So the ratio is probably 15:1. At Brown, just between Democrats and Republicans, it’s 30:1.
We did a survey of commencement speakers. A graduation is a ceremonial occasion. You know, you put up a role model of somebody who represents the values of the community. We did 32 elite schools, including the entire Ivy League. In 22 of these schools over a 10-year period, not a single Republican or conservative was ever invited to give a commencement address; 169 Democrats and leftists. In the other 10 schools, the ratio was something like 225:15, but the 15 include the President of the United States, who when he went to Yale was boycotted by 187 professors and then half the graduation class turned its back on him; and Yale has a pretty conservative representation on their campus.
But what does it say about a major institution? We’re talking about billions-of-dollars at an institution which, as Harvard, makes ROTC parade on another campus, treats its members like third-class citizens and turns its back on the president of the United States. What this has done by getting in the hard Left -- and believe me, when I edited the largest magazine of the Left, I could reel off all the professors who I wouldn’t let write for Ramparts because they were so kooky and extreme: Stalinists and Maoists.
The leader, for example, of the White Studies movement. You all know, you have black studies, you have Chicano studies, women’s studies, celebrating and adoring these groups so that they do no wrong and they’re just oppressed. Whiteness studies is about evil white people and the leading theoretician of this movement was a Maoist in the ‘60s and he’s a Maoist now except he’s just changed the proletariat or the ruling class for the White ruling race. The last time I looked, he was a lecturer at Harvard with a big celebratory foldout in the Harvard Alumni magazine. But what this has resulted in is a change in the culture of the university.
When I went to school as a Marxist in the McCarthy ‘50s, I never knew the politics of my professors, and I never felt singled out for my anti-American posture. Today, for example, I spoke at Metro State, which is a state college in Colorado, and afterwards got an e-mail from a young man who was in Special Forces. He had served in Panama. He had served in Somalia. He had served in the first Gulf War. He had served in Afghanistan. He had served in Iraq. And he was singled out in his class by his professor as a racist and for violence, told that his uniform was an offense to everybody in the class. He said he had to bite his tongue because he was going back to school having served his country and risked his life to better himself. This is the state of our universities today.
I believe that the biggest battle right now is just to change this culture. My professors were probably all pretty liberal in the ‘50s, but the reality is that they didn’t introduce their politics into the classroom, and that’s what we have to go back to in terms of our educational values.
When Ronald Reagan was shot and they brought him into the hospital and put him on the operating table, right before they put him under, he looked up at the doctors and said, “Are you guys Democrats or Republicans?” And the whole nation laughed and, of course, admired Ronald Reagan in such a situation for having a sense of humor, because we trust our doctors to be nonpartisan. We don’t expect to see cartoons attacking George Bush in the doctor’s office. But we see it in the academy everyday
David Horowitz: Ashley Reagan is a freshman and signed up for an acting class. First day of the class, the professor announces, “I am a liberal Democrat, and I don’t like Republicans, and all Republicans should drop this course.”
Cal Lutheran School, a conservative school run by conservatives -- except that the faculty are a bunch of leftists because of this blacklist. Conservatives don’t even try anymore to go into the profession because they can’t be hired.
If some university president tried to put Daniel Pipes on the faculty, there would be a campus explosion and revolution, and he’d have a revolt by all of the professors, or 95 percent of them, certainly all in Middle Eastern studies. And how did this come about?
It came about because a now-departed PLO, you know, pro-terrorist Marxist anti-American named Edward Said wrote a book called Orientalism 20-some-odd years ago saying that every white person -- I’m making it much cruder than he did; Said was a very sophisticated intellect except for the crudeness of his politics -- every white person of European descent who’s in Middle Eastern studies is a racist and an imperialist. That’s basically what his message was. And so whereas 3 percent of Middle Eastern studies professors in 1979 were not Americans or Europeans, now 50 percent come from Middle Eastern countries, which are all dictatorships, most of whom support terror. So is it any wonder that you have mouthpieces for genocidal Palestinian liberationists getting chairs at Columbia University? It’s no accident whatsoever.
We can do something about this.To show you how bad it is, here’s Jack Kingston, who stood up for the Academic Bill of Rights. It says nobody should be hired or fired on the basis of his politics. Nobody should be promoted or denied promotion on the basis of their politics. Students should be made aware that there is more than one viewpoint. This is very revolutionary. ou know, the books should reflect that. There should be fairness and equity in distribution of student funds, and we can’t even, at this point, can’t even put teeth in -- we don’t even know if it will pass, and we can’t even put teeth into it because the totalitarian Left will denounce this bill as they did in Colorado. I mean there was a firestorm, and it’s still going on in Colorado.
When the left-wing press, the Denver Post, discovered that the governor of the state had met with David Horowitz to discuss this bill, they wrote a lead editorial denouncing the bill as a right-wing plot to put conservatives on the faculty. In fact, point one of the bill says nobody can be hired on the basis of their political views. It says the exact opposite -- it is an anti-quota bill. It’s to try to stop a quota system that’s in place, which excludes conservatives on the basis of their political views. The Denver Post is still writing that story even though there is a conservative editorial -- editorial list maybe.
And at the Rocky Mountain News, a writer exposed that the Post‘s views are complete lies. Republicans are gun-shy. They know they’re going to be attacked. Utah State has now adopted the Bill of Rights -- the students have, but not one faculty anywhere has supported such an idea. The idea is to remind people of what educational values have been in this country.
The whole Academic Bill of Rights is drawn from the academic freedom tradition of the American Association of University Professors. We’re on the side of the angels here, which is why we’re going to win this battle, but the most important thing is to wake up the Republicans and conservatives who fund these universities. The majority of the funders are Republicans. The state of Colorado is a Republican state.
That’s the reality where we’re in in America today, but I know we can win this battle. Sixty percent, as you probably know, of college students support George Bush. And we still live in a democracy, and in the university, when the college students talk, people listen.
I went into the state of Colorado amidst all this news. There were state legislators, a former Democrat lieutenant governor was calling for an investigation of Horowitz’s secret meeting with the governor. My office called his office, asked for an appointment, and I walked in the front door. hat was the secret meeting. It’s a democracy. I’m not the oil and gas lobby. I went to Metro State, which is a state college. There were 800 students inside waiting to hear me speak. Oddly, I was invited by the Student Activities Board. The official thing, paid for by the students, so that means, you know, across-the-board students.
Outside where I was speaking, there’s a demonstration against my speech, (which, by the way, was titled “Academic Freedom”). Demonstrations and protests that I am speaking, led by the head of the faculty senate at Metro State, a trustee of the University of Colorado, who has ambitions to be governor -- hopefully, this will torpedo him -- and the head of the student government, who happened to be black and female. I say that because that gives her license in the university atmosphere, which is so racially constructed these days to do pretty well much what she wants. And she was quoted in the papers as saying, “Why are they letting him on campus to give his views?” And, of course, that became the text of my talk.
How can the trustee of a university or a professor have so misunderstood the educational mission that they think you have to censor somebody before he even speaks, but to censor him at all? This is the opportunity for an exchange of ideas. This is about academic freedom. And what happened after I left, aside from my getting this e-mail from the special forces person, was that the students took up this battle, and they have removed this student body president from her post for doing that. This is anti-educational. We are on the side of educational values, of liberal values, of academic freedom. We are for diversity of viewpoint.
I could go on all day here. I had wanted to give you a pamphlet I’ve done called the “Battle for Academic Freedom” about my visit to Brown University, because that was really interesting. The new president of Brown is a black woman who is the daughter of a sharecropper, the great-great-granddaughter of a slave, who got a Ph.D. in romance languages at Harvard, and was in the foreign services as a translator before she started her academic career. She has publicly endorsed the principal of intellectual diversity. I mean her views are fashionably left-liberal, if you will.
I was banned from Brown for two-and-a-half years. I could not get in. The Republicans were afraid to invite me. That’s how bad the situation is. I mean I had an invitation to speak at Brown, and the head of the College Democrats and a spokesman for the international socialist organization, which are Trotskyites, made a personal embassy to the head of the College Republicans. They told him that when students heard -- this is my favorite line from all my college appearances -- when students heard that David Horowitz was coming to campus, they burst into tears, and -- this is quoted in the Providence Journal -- and also told him that there would be violence if I came. So the College Republicans withdrew my invitation and refused to do it the next year.
But this year I went, and I was introduced by the Dean of Students. That never happens, believe me. I don’t know what Daniel’s experiences are, but that only happens if you’ve been a lifelong communist like Angela Davis and received the Stalin or the Lenin Peace Prize from the police state in East Germany. Then when you go to a college campus, the deans come out for you, but not if you’re Daniel or me.
Anyway, the dean introduced me. The president of the university was in the audience, and the Dean of Institutional Diversity was also there, and she endorsed the idea that intellectual diversity is diversity. This is a battle -- if Republicans will focus on it, we can win. I have told these students, you go right to the president of the university. Actually, this professor that Congressman Kingston mentioned who told Republicans to leave his class at Duke, we publicized this. We have a Students for Academic Freedom Club, and the administration had the professor apologize to the student who did drop the course.
Now, the next battle is to get them to make it a policy that all students regardless of their politics will be respected by professors. That is a victory I want. When you fight a battle, you need victories you can win, and they build on each other if you do that.
I want to just personally thank the people who are up here. Lanny Griffith of the Department of Education, and Jack, as I say, has been a stand-up guy in the Congress. It’s not easy to come by among legislators or people who have to get elected every year.
And Daniel has just done just wonderful work, and you just got started. Daniel, I’d say, he’s a scholar. I mean that’s what he is, and he is never going to get the kind of academic recognition that he deserves, and I think it’s much harder when your work is truly intellectual to be hit by all this name-calling and all the ways in which they try to taint you and stigmatize you so students will not read what you’ve written and not learn from it.
And then Ron Robinson has been in this battle ever since I became a conservative. That’s how I met him. I could never have been on these campuses without him. I do think he probably subsidized my visit to Brown even this year because the Left has the lock on all the funding. It’s just a wonderful work that he’s done that’s made this possible. But we have built this movement now, and now is the time where if we get support from the Republican Party, if we get support from trustees and alumni, we can really take this to a new level and win the first, the most basic victory, which is to stop these professors from using their classrooms as political platforms. It is illegitimate. It is a violation of students’ academic freedom to talk about the war, not only in a biology class but in any class that’s not about the Iraq war. All these protests that take place in classrooms are violations of students’ rights. And as I say, I know we can win this battle if we engage it. Thank you.
Lanny Griffith: Let me just say in closing one of the things I’d think about is I hear all these great folks here is that I was -- as David mentioned, I was in the last Bush administration, and one of the things I had the pleasure of doing was working with Lynne Cheney as she was chairman of the National Endowment of Humanities, and this was all about the time political correctness was taking over the country. And one of the things I remember she would sort of remind us is as you’re fighting this battle, all you have to use against them is to ask them to live up to their own creed. Here we’re asking for intellectual diversity, intellectual tolerance, intellectual honesty, and academic freedom, and so as we close, I’d say let’s go forth and fight that battle. Thank you