Are Professors Really Too Liberal?
By Colman McCarthy
Which student is it? That boy in the back row taping me? The girl up front taking notes, when no one else is?
As classes begin for the new school year, more than a few professors, myself included, are asking those questions. We wonder if the tapers and note-takers might be spies, rightwing moles eager to catch lefty profs washing the brains of students with the soap of ultra-liberal opinions. Make a crack about George W. Bush, or sprinkle in a Noam Chomsky quote, or refer to God as “she,” or assign an essay from “The Nation” but not “National Review,” and you’ll be outed. Watch out, too, if your university offers degrees in women’s studies, black studies or peace studies, but not capitalism studies.
Earlier this year, the Bruin Alumni Association, a non-profit intent on “exposing UCLA’s most radical professors,” came out with it’s “Dirty Thirty.” It asked students: “Do you have a professor who just can’t stop talking about President Bush, about Howard Dean, about the war in Iraq…or an ideological issues that have nothing to do with the class subject matter?” Get it on tape and you’ll get $100.
The snitch-for-pay deal went nowhere. It even went backwards, when large numbers of the association’s conservative advisory board resigned in disgust.
At the same time this effort retreated to the woodwork, out of it came David Horowitz flailing that the “radical left has colonized a significant part of the university system and transformed it to serve its political ends.” In “The Professors: the 100 Most Dangerous Academics in America,” Horowitz, offered little evidence that he attended the actual classes of the 100 teachers he blasts. He spoke last spring at American University, a talk I would have attended but I was teaching across the quad the same evening—a class on the subversively dangerous thinking of Gandhi and Tolstoy.
The student newspaper reported that Horowitz attacked a university course, “Oliver Stone’s America,” as a form of “historical fraud.” The paper interviewed the course’s professor. After explaining that Stone’s work is examined critically and comparatively, he said: “I suggest Horowitz try something new, like getting his facts straight before he speaks.”
I can understand the right’s being ticked off. It controls or dominates the White House, the Supreme Court, the Senate, the House, the Pentagon, corporate America, the richest think tanks, talk radio. But damnation, not the college classrooms where 17 million students are settling in for another year. In addition to the Dirty Thirty, the 100 Dangerous Ones and uncountable other fellow travelers up at the blackboard, posters are on the walls of the student activity centers recruiting the kids to join the next anti-war protest, the animal rights clubs, the gay and lesbian support groups, living wage campaigns for campus workers. And don’t forget to boycott sweatshop clothes, Coca-Cola and Wal-Mart, sign up for the annual “Take Back the Night” protest and see the drama department’s new production of “The Vagina Monologues.”
Conservatives have a solution: become professors. But how enticing is sweating years for a Ph.D. ,and then getting only a starting salary of only $40,000, when big bucks and easy bucks are all but assured for work in corporate America—plus no papers to grade or deans to obey. Perhaps the professoriate is dominated by liberals because they aren’t money driven.
A second solution exists for those on right: start schools of their own. Except for a few small enrollment campuses--Hillsdale College in Michigan, College of the Ozarks in Missouri, Grove City College in Pennsylvania, Franciscan University in Ohio and a couple more—the right would rather fume against the left than compete with it.
While we await the founding of Horowitz U, a word from Howard Zinn is in order: “In my teaching [at Spelman College and Boston University] I never concealed my political views: my detestation of war and militarism, my anger at racial inequality, my belief in a democratic socialism, in a rational distribution of the world’s wealth….I would always begin a course by making it clear to my students that they would be getting my point of view, but I would try to be fair to other points of view. I encouraged my students to disagree with me.”
When Howard Zinn spoke in one of my classes a few years back, I saw that credo in action--to no one’s harm and everyone’s benefit.
Colman McCarthy, a former columnist for The Washington Post, directs the Center for Teaching Peace, and teaches nonviolence at three high schools and four universities.