p. 356. "Professor Evangelista has predicated an entire course around his idiosyncratic account of the Cold War’s end." Horowitz cites the Cornell website that contains a description of my course. The description makes clear that the course is not based on my views of end of the Cold War, but deals with "the origins, course, and ultimate demise of this conflict that pitted the United States and NATO against the Soviet Union and its allies. It seeks to evaluate the competing explanations that political scientists and historians have put forward to explain the Cold War by drawing on the new evidence that has become available." http://falcon.arts.cornell.edu/Govt/courses/S04/courses.html#383
On p. 359. Horowitz refers to the "overtly one-side character" of my teaching, without presenting any evidence whatsoever. In fact, if anything, my students become rather frustrated with my unwillingness to tell them "the right answer." Instead, my teaching style emphasizes contending explanations for political phenomena and my courses air a wide range of views, including presentations by guest speakers. The last time I taught my course on the Cold War, for example, the class heard presentations from former officials in the US Central Intelligence Agency and Department of State. Several of my students and advisees over the years have been members of Cornell’s ROTC program or serving military officers and none has ever complained about any political bias on my part.
p. 357. "In February 2003, Professor Evangelista played a key role in organizing a series of anti-war events called ‘Week against War.’" I have, in fact, not played an organizing role in any of Cornell’s anti-war events, but I have accepted invitations to speak at them. I do organize weekly seminars for the Peace Studies Program, but these are of an academic rather than activist character, contrary to Horowitz’s insinuations.
pp. 358-359. Here Horowitz draws upon an article describing a talk I gave. He mischaracterizes my meaning by leaving out any qualifiers or even the "if" clauses that suggest a hypothetical statement. Even a cursory comparison of Horowitz’s characterizations with the original source (Franklin Crawford "Panelists speak out against war on Iraq and on civil liberties," Cornell Chronicle, 20 February 2003
p. 399, note 350. Horowitz cites an article I supposedly published in the Cornell Daily Sun, 22 October 2002. There is no such article and I have never published anything in that newspaper. His actual source for my purported remarks is an article from his own FrongPageMagazine.com (24 October 2002), by a regular contributor, Joseph Sabia, a sometime Cornell graduate student. Typical of Sabia’s style is his attribution to me of a view that I have never expressed in language that I would never use, that "the terrorists were avenging the grievances of the oppressed." An article in the Daily Sun of 23 October 2002 (
http://www.cornellsun.com/news/2002/10/23/) more accurately characterized my views in the weeks preceding the US invasion of Iraq: "Evangelista feels that the United States should not abandon the prospect that new weapons inspections would end the impasse over Iraq. ‘The inspections regime in Iraq, for all its flaws, was quite effective,’ he said. ‘They turned up a great deal and destroyed a great deal of weapons,’ more than were destroyed by United States military action during the Gulf War."
Horowitz concludes his discussion by expressing concern that the entire Cornell Department of Government will come to reflect my political views because of the supposedly influential role that I play in hiring and promotion. This contention reflects a naïve and uninformed perspective on how such decisions are made in academic departments. In my case, for example, I am one of several dozen people contributing to the department’s decisions. Even if I judged colleagues or potential colleagues on the basis of their adherence to my own political views – a charge for which Horowitz would be hard pressed to find the slightest evidence – I have only one vote and there are several subsequent evaluations above the level of our department that help assure that such decisions are made according to the faculty members’ teaching and research qualifications, not their political affiliations.