Re: Academic Bill of Rights

To Whom It May Concern:

One of the foundations of my pedagogical approach is to encourage students to see that "things are often not as they seem to be." By contrast, in his profile of my teaching in a recent book, The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America, David Horowitz seems to encourage the very opposite in his urgency to force his own agenda on his readers. He pretends to offer them a complex image of my work. But instead, he transparently resorts to a simplistic caricature of me as leftist professor blindly and boldly infecting "captive" students with anti-American thinking. Maybe Mr. Horowitz has never learned about the vagaries of perception. Or maybe he simply ignored the subtle salience of context and intent when zealously perusing my web site to make me into the "radical leftist icon" that he was seeking. But no matter how it seems to Mr. Horowitz or his readers, my mission as a teacher has always been to introduce students to a panoply of contradictory ideas and then to encourage them to sort out the mess themselves and arrive at their own conclusions. The following quote by Tom Robbins (which is prominently placed on the first page of my electronic syllabus) says it best: "Teachers who offer you the ultimate answers do not possess the ultimate answers, for if they did, they would know that the ultimate answers cannot be given, they can only be received."

As Mr. Horowitz haphazardly pieced together my profile from my web site, I am surprised that he did not pause to seriously examine the 85% of my teaching, research, service and administrative work that is devoted to race relations, other than to make the ludicrous comment that I am not qualified to teach the subject because I did not study race and ethnicity as a graduate student. Moreover, in his chapter, Mr. Horowitz seems to scoff at my reference to the Socratic Method when asked about my pedagogy. However, he apparently has no interest in broadcasting to his readers that I am responsible for bringing together nearly three thousand students every semester to talk to one another—peer-to-peer—about race relations using this very method. And in these Socratic conversations, there is no agenda, no script, no teaching points, and no politics. The student facilitators are trained to ask searching questions that engage their peers in conversation. That’s all.

But just as Mr. Horowitz does not seem to know what I actually do at Penn State, neither does he know how my students perceive my work. During the Fall of 2004, for example, I was a strong advocate for student voting and sponsored a voter registration campaign in my courses. After the election, I took a poll in my classes to ascertain student assumptions about how I voted. The largest group (about 250 students) thought I voted either for Ralph Nader or did not vote at all. The second largest group thought I voted for George Bush. The smallest group thought I voted for John Kerry. It’s difficult to imagine that the caricature (of me) created in the book would lead students to such a conclusion.

This current semester my 850 students responded to a questionnaire about my politics. Only seven percent thought that I was "anti-American." Eighty-four percent thought that my actions in the classroom truly reflected my contention that I do not care what students believe about social and political issues by the end of the semester—that I just want them to think. Needless to say, my students are surprised by the shallow characterization of me that is found in The Professors.

And as for the nearly sixty students who work with me every semester as teaching assistants, none are selected on the basis of a particular ideology. In fact, the application for these positions on my web page clearly states the opposite: "We welcome applications from students of all cultures, faiths, sexual and political orientations, and ability levels. The more diverse we are in ideologies, backgrounds, and experiences, the more we will have to teach one another." [emphasis added] I wonder what kept Mr. Horowitz from reporting that fact. Clearly, he does not know—and might be surprised to learn—that I regularly employ students from a range of groups such as Republicans, Democrats, Greens, the military, Young Americans for Freedom, evangelical Christians, and so on.

I could offer many particular examples, but let me discuss one of my former students. This young man, who was my main teaching assistant for three semesters, is a U.S. Marine who, after seven years of active duty, enrolled in a program for enlisted personnel to complete a B.A. degree at Penn State. He graduated in December of 2004 and is now leading an elite anti-terrorism unit. I have to wonder what story Mr. Horowitz could create to convince his readers of the reasons this young man chose to work with me, the so-called "anti-American Marxist," and then recruit some of his Marine buddies to take my classes.

One notable criticism of my work is that I offer credit to students to attend events that support my "leftist" and "Marxist" bias. He lists a number of films, for example, that students could view for extra credit. What he disingenuously fails to note, however, is that students also receive credit for attending "conservative" events—including a talk by none other than David Horowitz! In fact, when Mr. Horowitz visited Penn State, I strongly encouraged my liberal students to attend. Similarly, the three times that Ward Connerly has visited University Park I found myself implored my students to attend his talks against affirmative action because I knew he would challenge them to think and, for those who supported affirmative action, "defend their views." Did David Horowitz not know this or did he selectively leave this out of his profile of me?

This letter is not meant to "defend" myself from the surreal charges made by a man who is intent on silencing free thought on our campuses. Rather, it is an attempt to give people a sense of just how far Mr. Horowitz has gone by using half-truths and outright lies to distort the public record of academics like myself. Most readers, after all, will have neither the time nor the inclination to search the web sites and publications to discover another side of these stories. Knowing how my work has been so grossly maligned and misrepresented, I am left to wonder if there is any "truth" at all in the other essays.

This is unfortunate, to be sure, because I actually think that this conversation on bias and ideology in higher education is a valuable one to have, and worthwhile for the future of the academy. But with Mr. Horowitz’s shoddy publicity stunt that pretends to be "research," it is almost certain that any useful dialogue and debate will be lost.

Respectfully,