What I'm Reading Now

So what's your impression of the state of "academic freedom" on the typical college campus? Hey, with all the crazy stuff going on at the typical university, people must be free to say pretty much whatever they want, right? And aren't all those lefty professor types super-committed to freedom of speech? Well, no, says Mr. Horowitz.

To understand what this book is about, you have to appeciate the life of David Horowitz, which you can't do unless you read his autobiography, Radical Son. A true "red diaper baby", Horowitz even attended Camp Wo-Chi-Cha as a child in the 1940s. Lest you think that's a cute mid-century tribute to the Iroqois, I need to point out that "Wo-Chi-Cha" was short for "Workers' Childrens Camp". Horowitz progressed to 60s campus radical and leftist revolutionary, but somehow drifted right as he realized that all the talk about freedom, rights, dignity and respect on the far left was just that -- talk. He soon began to attack the left using the left's own methods (which were, until pretty recently, much more advanced and effective than the right's methods) against it.

This book is about Horowitz's campaign over the last decade to restore a conservative voice on the typical US college campus in the name of "academic freedom", a quaint concept from a hundred years ago about how professors shouldn't abuse their power in the classroom by indoctrinating their charges in their own political preferences. If you doubt how out of fashion this idea is, you really need to read this book. The treatment Horowitz has received from the left for pointing out the monolithic nature of the political philosophy promulgated on the typical college campus is appalling. Yet entirely predictable to anyone enrolled as a student in a medium to large US college with decent academic pretensions in the last twenty years.

After you read this, you should read William F. Buckley, Jr.'s God and Man at Yale and George Marsden's The Soul of the American University if you want to know how things got to this sorry state. Then go start a classical school in your spare time.