Wacko professors are the latest threat to homeland security, discovers John Sutherland
The international departure lounge is one of the few places, nowadays, where customers have time to browse and where books are guaranteed to sell. Not surprisingly, publishers fight hard for places in these prime outlets. Last week, visitors to Borders at Washington's Dulles International Airport were invited to buy David Horowitz's The Professors: the 101 most dangerous academics in America.
Why was Horowitz's book in this privileged spot? Well, for one, it had recently been plugged on Fox News by a ranting Bill O'Reilly (and bookstore managers monitor such things). For another, in late February came the headline-breaking news that Lawrence Summers had, as previously alleged, been ousted from his position as president of Harvard by a rebellious group of arts and humanities professors.
Summers - Bill Clinton's former treasury secretary - had committed, it was argued, two cardinal offences: he had instructed the eminent African-American scholar Cornel West to stop recording rap records and get back to real scholarship; and he had suggested, at a closed meeting of academics, that there might be a biological basis for the absence of women from the top ranks of American science. The man had to go.
The Professors is published by Regnery ("the leading conservative publisher in America") under the shoutline: "Communists, Terrorists and Racists Are Teaching Our Children!" Regnery leads the pack of American imprints specialising in hard-right polemic (it was Regnery that put out the "Swiftvets'" Unfit for Command, which blew John Kerry out of the water in 2004). These rapid-response pamphlets-in-hard-covers are typically timed to coincide with "outrages" being targeted by right-wing commentators such as O'Reilly, Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh. They thrive on the laxness of American libel law. In the UK, a book such as Horowitz's would spend a year being "legalled" into irrelevance.
Horowitz opens his campaign with a profile of Ward Churchill, a professor of ethnic studies at Colorado who declared - on the podium and on his website - that the 3,000 victims of 9/11 were "little Eichmanns" who deserved their fate. Churchill's gloat was picked up by Fox News and O'Reilly (inevitably), and Churchill was promoted to number one on "America's Most Hated". Subsequent investigation raised doubts about his claim to Native American ancestry and there are accusations of plagiarism. But he is protected by "tenure" (something that Margaret Thatcher prudently abolished for dissident dons). He spouts on.
Most of the 101 professors barrel-scraped by Horowitz are virtual nonentities - Greg Thomas, for example, an assistant professor of rhetoric at Syracuse University whose offence, as an African American, is to teach "an accredited course on raunchy hip-hop icon Lil' Kim" (there is a disproportionate number of African Americans on Horowitz's aptly named blacklist). Somewhat desperately, Horowitz points the indignant finger at such ancient warhorses as Victor Navasky ("deep roots in the communist and fellow-travelling left"), Frederic Jameson ("Marxist critic" - big in the 1970s), Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick ("queen of queer theory") and Tom Hayden. An adjunct lecturer in politics at Occidental College, Hayden was a "1960s student radical". Whatever bolts these hoary ideologues once had have long since been shot.
Horowitz's argument depends on a thesis, expressed in Roger Kimball's Tenured Radicals (1990), that having lost the battle in the streets the student radicals of the 1960s went on to capture the classrooms and textbooks and establish themselves as an institutional corrupter of the country's youth. Horowitz argues, unconvincingly, that his 101 professors are representative of the 650,000 higher-education teachers in America. (He could, he says, have profiled 1,001.) They are not. America is no more at risk from its professors than Salem was from witches. But if Cotton Mather were around today, he'd be great for the book trade.
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