Wednesday, February 16, 2005

David Horowitz



He is a wingnut who is fighting to fumigate the lefty lairs in academia. The idea is to get rid of all the brainwashing that we progressives/liberals/lefties do to poor wingnut children who attend college. Horowitz is behind the proposed Ohio law that would infringe the academic freedom of professors. Now Atrios is linking to Horowitz's database on the complaints directly. If the connection works (it didn't for me) you can find for yourself all the horrible things that happen to poor baby wingnuts in colleges.

For a sample of the complaints, Thinkprogress gives us these:


"This complaint applies to the discriminating nature of grading of my English teacher…On the last one, I wrote about how family values in the books weve read aren't good. I know the paper was pretty much great because I spell checked it and proofred it twice. I got an D- just because the professor hates families and thinks its okay to be gay." [sic] - Ohio State, English, 2/9/05

"We were then required to watch an immoral Seinfeld episode dealing with masturbation, an exercise with little sociological value. She then gave a lecture on 'moral relativity,' which she defined very closely with 'cultural relativism.'" - St. Louis University, Sociology, 2/13/05

"Talked about flags as symbols of states and argued that new Iraqi flag was not a result of a transparent and fair process…Claimed AS FACT that other Arab societies had red, green and black in their flags…" - St. Michael's College, Human Geography, 4/30/04


Maybe there are many really valid complaints in Horowitz's database. I don't know. But I'm pretty sure that they will not contain the kinds of complaints I could have made as a student. For example, one professor told me to stop studying economics and go home and have babies instead. Another one argued that giving the good jobs to men makes perfect sense in economic theory. A third one suggested a little hanky-panky on his office floor. But then many more than these three said good and encouraging things to me and it never occurred to me to take anything anybody took as a message from the gods. It was all grist for my thinking and good in that sense, though sexual harassment didn't really contribute to anything good.

I have always thought that one of the most valuable things I got from university education was the ability to see, in great detail, how someone else's mind works. Horowitz doesn't like that, it seems. Neither does he like higher education in general, because the whole point of higher education is to stretch the students' thinking, to challenge it and then to change it if it deserves to be changed by facts.