They'll Defend Unto Death Your Right To Agree With Them

David Horowitz discusses his campaign to encourage more political diversity on campus:

My opponents have also consistently aimed their intellectual arrows at the wrong targets, allowing me to proceed with my agenda without any substantive opposition. In a September 17 article in The New York Times, for example, Michael Bérubé, a professor of literature at Pennsylvania State University, expressed concern about a legislative committee that I inspired, the Pennsylvania Committee on Academic Freedom, which held hearings in the state. He noted that during the hearings Penn State "revealed that it had received all of 13 student complaints about political 'bias' over the past five yearson a campus with a student population of 40,000."

My response to that point? If there are just 13 abuses per campus at the top 100 universities, that would add up to 1,300 over five years. A study by the historian Lionel Lewis of academic persecutions during the McCarthy era (which, according to Lewis, lasted nine years) found only 126 faculty members involved in academic-freedom cases at 58 institutions nationally. Those cases led to an estimated 69 terminations, of which 31 were resignations at a single institution after it established a loyalty oath. Yet small as that number may appear among the thousands of universities and hundreds of thousands of professors, the author concluded, "It is apparent that their chilling effect on the expression of all ideas by both faculty and students was significant, although in fact there is no way to measure adequately their full impact."

I think most people would concur: The chilling effect is the issue, not the absolute number, although each case is cause for concern. The real question is whether universities are set up to deal with such problems through established and well-publicized procedures.

I think Horowitz's campaign is long overdue. It is easy to find entire political science and sociology departments that have few or no conservatives. My own children have told me about political opinions, mainly Bush-bashing, being injected into classes that have no relationship to politics. Creative writing, Spanish, and geography are hardly topics that require commentary on American politics from either the Right or the Left.