The right v. higher education: change and continuity.

Conservative attacks on higher education in the United States have a long history. To look back only half a century, in 1952 the House Un-American Activities Committee investigated "Communist Methods of Infiltration (Education)" that it claimed were decades old. In the same year, William F. Buckley, Jr. published God and Man at Yale, attacking his alma mater and higher education more generally for straying from principles of Christian morality. Soon, he put some of his own money into the battle for the minds of students, underwriting the initial conference of the Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) at his Sharon, Connecticut home in 1960. Its purpose was to "prepare young people for the struggle ahead with Liberalism, Socialism and Communism." Despite the eclipse of his political style by the rise of the neo-conservative and Christian Right movements, Buckley's influence continues. The National Review, which he founded in 1955, retains its campus appeal as a popular website for news among conservative students.

But these old patterns of red-baiting took a new direction in the 1980s, concurrent with the wave of higher education reforms and the rise of the New Right under Ronald Reagan. For example, in 1985 Reed Irvine, a conservative critic with well-developed connections inside the beltway, founded Accuracy in Academia (AIA) with the goal of exposing leftist teaching in higher education. He patterned this organization after another of his groups, Accuracy in Media, which he had started in 1969 to counter the anti-Vietnam war message creeping into mainstream news reporting. For his new project Irvine solicited unpaid student informants and began publishing Campus Report to target individual teachers and schools and expose what he thought were egregious examples of biased teaching. The first target was Mark Reader, a political scientist and antinuclear activist at Arizona State University, and the first informant was the former editor of its student newspaper, Mark Scully, who described Reader as speaking "for his comrades in the political science department, for the sweeties in the Women's Studies Department--for every puffed up pedagogue on this campus who just wants to do his own thing." (1) Scully went on to become AIA's first national director. This incident set the tone for an abrasive style of attack on progressive and liberal faculty that has been taken up since the 1980s by many groups such as Students for Academic Freedom and the American Council of Trustees and Alumni. By examining some of them, I will consider what they really hope to accomplish, and what possibilities we have to resist and to reclaim lost ground.

The controversy they have stirred up about academic freedom is only the latest in a series of campaigns by conservatives. But the purpose of these attacks is much broader than that of earlier witch hunts. Today, the Right seeks no less than to roll back the progressive gains in higher education of the past forty years. Targets include such curriculum reforms as ethnic, labor, and gender studies. And other features of contemporary university life are also seen as threats: affirmative action and financial aid, for instance. The history of this backlash is one strand in the rise to power of the Right in this country.

It includes the much discussed Culture Wars of the late 80s and 90s, a series of attempts to challenge left, progressive, and liberal thought on campus. A key dement in this conflict has been criticism of a group or institution for its "political correctness." Chip Berlet, Senior Analyst at Political Research Associates, notes that conservatives appropriated the term "politically correct," or "PC," sometime in the 1980s just at the time that critiques of multiculturalism in higher education began to appear. Dinesh D'Souza, conservative author of Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus, and well-traveled campus speaker, called PC the "new orthodoxy," and found in multiculturalism authoritarian underpinnings. The Right criticized not only curricular innovations and affirmative action in college admissions, but also course content that focused on the power inequalities of race and gender. The nearly universal acceptance of "PC" as a term of derision, across the political spectrum, indicates the success of this frame. As often, in the Culture Wars and after, what appeared a challenge to unreflective assertions looks more insidious, on a closer look.

Critics of political correctness on campus, perhaps best represented by lawyer Harvey Silverglate and professor Alan Kors, have diverted attention from the historical reasons for such liberal reforms. Their 1998 book, The Shadow University: the Betrayal of Liberty on America's Campuses, reframed the powerful commitment to student and curricular diversity as a posture of political correctness and a violation of students' rights to free speech. Their legal defense organization, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), has successfully brought suit against colleges based on information gathered by informants. It has sometimes fixed on policies and practices, such as speech codes, that are vulnerable to strict constitutional interpretation. More often, though, it undertakes campaigns of intimidation that merely threaten legal action, as FIRE's own materials state.

   When appropriate, FIRE contacts
   college administrators to remind
   them of their moral and legal obligations
   to uphold the First Amendment
   rights of individuals on campus.
   FIRE may also seek public
   exposure of an individual's plight, a
   process that encourages colleges and
   universities to remember their
   responsibility to respect the individual
   rights of students and faculty. (2)

Another conservative group, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA), has sometimes focused on political stances of individual faculty members. It is especially famous for its post 9/11 compendium of supposedly unpatriotic quotations from academics, Defending Civilization: How Our Universities Are Failing America and What Can Be Done About It. When the broadside received substantial criticism for its ad hominem liberal-bashing, ACTA quickly put out a second version with names of the accused deleted. The group also regularly advocates curriculum reforms that would bring higher education, especially in the humanities and social sciences, back to the traditional Western canon.

The National Association of Scholars (NAS), founded in 1988, is another major player in conservative battles for public opinion. It has advocated such policy changes as colorblind college admissions and the return to a core curriculum emphasizing the contributions of Western civilization and opposing liberal goals for educational programs. For instance, NAS President Stephen Balch, in 25 pages of testimony on behalf of a Pennsylvania Academic Bill of Rights in November 2005, accused the University of Pittsburgh School of Social Work of being unwelcoming to conservatives, because its stated mission included ideas such as, "The school is committed to promoting the principles of social and economic justice." An Academic Bill of Rights, Balch said, would help rid the university of such an intellectual climate, created by leftists and liberals who indoctrinate their students. The bill did not pass, but the controversy generated substantial media attention.

Local activists in the Right's campaign circulate similar charges. In 2000, a first year UCLA student, Ben Shapiro, started writing conservative opinion pieces in the campus paper. In one, about controversial newspaper ads against reparations for slavery, he voiced a standard claim by neoconservative students and their adult counterparts: "The liberals on campus have metaphorically beaten the conservatives into submission, removing them from the faculties and frightening others into silence." (3) In addition to stoking up such controversies at UCLA, he quickly became a spokesperson for the small army of young conservatives who march across American campuses armed with tactics taught them by national groups like the Young America's Foundation, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, and Morton Blackwell's Leadership Institute.

Shapiro, who has been a syndicated columnist since he was 17, wrote Brainwashed: How Universities Indoctrinate America's Youth in 2004 at the age of 20. Armstrong Williams, another nationally syndicated columnist (and nationally embarrassed for willingly accepting federal money to promote the troubled No Child Left Behind Act), touted Brainwashed in this way: "Ben Shapiro rips the liberal university system to shreds. With an arch wit and insider's perspective, Shapiro exposes how liberal group-think has spread bacteria-like through our education system and is threatening to quash genuine debate in our schools." Shapiro's audience is made up of students and recent graduates who are building a young conservative movement. Fellow student Andrew Jones made headlines when, after founding an organization of UCLA alumni in 2005, he solicited from students examples of their professors' "radical" propagandizing, in exchange for cash. Even Harvard professor Stephan Themstrom, an advisory board member for the group who was described as "one of Harvard's most conservative professors" by the Harvard student newspaper, the Crimson, found the action "over the line" and resigned. Widespread outrage halted the payment scheme but not the request for evidence.

Ex-leftist David Horowitz is today the most infamous critic of American universities. The author of the antireparations ads Shapiro had supported, Horowitz launched Students for Academic Freedom (SAF) on the AIA model in 2003, from his Center for the Study of Popular Culture, now called the David Horowitz Freedom Center. SAF organizes student groups campus by campus, claiming nearly 200 chapters as of the fall of 2005. Students seek to uncover what they see as political bias on the part of individual faculty members and report incidents to SAF, which mounts intense media critiques of specific faculty members. Also, this year Horowitz published The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America, a diatribe against named faculty members, reminiscent of ACTA's Defending Civilization.

But his main strategy of late has been to generate media buzz about the possibility of enacting Academic Bill of Rights legislation. The ABOR, he claims, is a nonpartisan effort to ensure open debate and balanced instruction. Some fear, reasonably enough, that it would legislate restrictions on faculty academic freedom. More deeply, though, the campaign aims to move public opinion rightward.

Horowitz is a master at provoking anger, sarcasm, and retaliatory attacks from his targets. He assiduously documents these exchanges at www. frontpagemag.com, but the long term effect of these skirmishes has been more subtle. His skill at generating and maintaining media attention has placed many faculty members on the defensive, in much the same way that Reed Irvine did to Mark Reader 20 years ago. The attacks also contribute to a campus climate in which some students feel their teachers are fair game.

Take, for instance, what happened to John Daly, an adjunct professor at Warren County Community College in New Jersey in November 2005. Politically-active first year student Rebecca Beach announced by email that Scott Ritter, author of Iraq Confidential, would be speaking on campus. The event was cosponsored by her group and the Young America's Foundation, a conservative activist group targeting students. This derivative of the first YAF was sponsoring "Freedom Week," to celebrate the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Among YAF's materials were posters that compared Ronald Reagan, "the Liberator," to Che Guevara, "the Murderer," claiming that Che's ideology had murdered 100,000,000 people (see poster at http://www.club100.yaf. org/freedom_week/FreedomWeek3. pdf). Daly rose to the bait and fired off an angry email reply to Beach who reported it to YAF. YAF energetically waged a media campaign against Daly, reprinting his message, circulating his email address, and whittling away his administrative support. Finally Daly resigned, saying he feared being fired for expressing his opinions. (4) Progressives in higher education are becoming wary.

Oneida Meranto, political science professor at Metropolitan State College in Denver, won a Pyrrhic victory in her encounter with students who claimed she discriminated against their political views. After a year of harassment, formal complaints, a reported death threat, and public criticism in a legislative hearing on the proposed Colorado Academic Bill of Rights, Meranto came before Metro's administrative council. The President of Metro State, Raymond Kieft, issued his decision:

   You are entirely within your legal
   rights to hold and express views contrary
   to your students' on Latin
   American politics, current public
   issues like the 'student bill of rights,'
   and the proper responsibilities of student
   organizations you advise and its
   members.... The College cannot and
   will not presume that your treatment
   of students reflects ideological bias or
   prejudice merely because you express
   your point of view. (5)

Despite this support, Meranto decided to begin taping her lectures. When the anticipated complaint surfaced (a student claimed she had attacked Republicans in class), Meranto produced the tape. It vindicated her, but the price of the victory was high in time and energy spent on a defense necessarily waged in multiple venues: Meranto's classroom, the college's administrative process, the state legislature, and the national media. It is probably small compensation that she gained a place in Horowitz' compendium of "dangerous" professors.

These incidents may be understood as a resurgence in red-baiting, or at least liberal-bashing; and judging from the spate of relevant blogs and chats, they probably do have an effect on the public's perceptions about individual faculty members. But they also signal a broader agenda, the attempt to reclaim higher education from progressive influences dating back to 1960s movements. Horowitz says that he and his organization, Students for Academic Freedom, are only interested in removing indoctrination from the classroom and making it a space for "diversity of thought." This is the essence of academic freedom, they claim, the chance for free and open discussion. Their representation of political debate on campus as weakened by the dominance of liberal thought has been heard from various sources for years. But what makes it new is the shift to the legislative arena, where those not involved in--and with little knowledge of higher education have been encouraged to make laws that codify government oversight of faculty political expression in and outside the classroom. Even if the bills don't pass--and at this writing, none has, in the 24 states that have considered such legislation media coverage can easily reinforce the widely held opinion that universities, especially public ones, eat up far too much of taxpayers' money, and with dubious results.

What is the actual threat to conservatives from the dominance of left and liberal faculty on campus, as documented at least in the social sciences? Faculty members have, and cherish, the right to determine course topics and the content of syllabi. This becomes a problem for those on the Right who fear the influence of current higher education on student political attitudes. There has been a slow increase in the percentage of conservatives among entering students, but attending college has historically had a liberalizing effect on students. Some of that effect comes from socializing with students and faculty from different backgrounds, but students also become more liberal because of what and how they are taught. (6) Threats to women's, ethnic, sexuality; or cultural studies are attempts to diminish the power that comes from studying these topics. Looked at from the Right, it follows that controls on the curriculum would help to ensure not only the development of conservative students but also the maintenance of both a conservative voting base and the Right's national power.

It is tempting to react to these attacks as if they were so silly or so off the mark as to be unimportant. This would be a mistake. The attacks have been skillfully framed in ways barely altered for more than two decades: our colleges are on the decline because of the Left's influence; and protecting higher education is all about freedom. Paralleling the shift throughout the larger culture in the drawing of political lines, the touted danger of communist indoctrination on campus has morphed into a demonization of liberals. Those liberals have stolen the academy from the rest of us, says the Right, and it is time to make adjustments, just to recreate balance. The message sounds innocuous, but the goal is a profound shift in ideology and control.

Another temptation is to believe that right-wing criticism only targets individuals. In fact, leaders of this movement will not be satisfied with damaging individual reputations, but they may well be pleased if the fallout is a wave of subtle self-censorship among academic novices as well as veterans. For example, in this climate, a hiring committee might consider courting new hires who can be seen as "rounding out" the political profile of a department. Again, for Daly and Meranto, what at first looked like a confrontation between individual students and teachers turned out to be incidents in an orchestrated debate whose terms have been set by the Right.

While it is necessary to come to the fierce defense of each teacher attacked in this way, the greater challenge is to remember the larger issues, including those outlined above, as well as who has the power to determine curriculum, and who has access to study it. It may ultimately be more effective to refuse the debate altogether, unless we can articulate, openly defend, and reclaim the fundamental principles on which we base our work.

Understanding where these attacks originate and what their architects hope to accomplish helps to craft effective responses. Each conservative assault feels new to those attacked, but all these destructive efforts share a common cause: to decrease the power of radical, progressive, and even liberal ideas in American culture, by silencing them in higher education. This trend is fundamentally reactionary. It represents a series of backlash efforts, responding to gains made in higher education over the past 50 years. For instance, attacks on affirmative action and financial aid respond to successful efforts to create broader educational opportunities for women, communities of color, and the poor. Attempts to realign the curriculum on male, Eurocentric principles emerged when conservatives recognized the power of new disciplines and pedagogies. And growing, conservative campus activism reacts to the successes of students empowered to challenge the powers that have controlled the quality of their educational experiences.

In short, if we choose to view the latest claims about political indoctrination in the classroom as attacks on free speech or academic freedom, as most responses suggest we should, we may be missing the point. This campaign is not chiefly about rights of free expression; it is a "political war," in Horowitz's own terms. (7) It aims to diminish the status and the influence of progressive intellectuals, and--through self-censorship--their very ability to be heard. Beyond that, attacks on individuals aim to diminish public support for and funding of higher education.

How in fact has the academic community responded to the latest wave of assaults? Take the Academic Bill of Rights as an example. Media coverage about Horowitz's latest campaign has been largely limited to the print Chronicle of Higher Education and the online Inside Higher Ed, two publications read mainly by members of the academic community. That limitation applies to many efforts at fighting back.

In June 2005 the American Council on Education (ACE) coordinated a joint statement of 28 higher education groups, affirming their commitment to academic freedom and intellectual pluralism. The document insists that colleges and universities need independence in order to allow for academic and intellectual excellence, and also challenges external interference in the fundamental work of colleges and universities. This, rather mild, statement has chiefly reached the ACE's own constituency.

Two web-based campaigns have emerged: the student-generated Center for Campus Free Speech (http://www. campusspeech.org) and a coalition of higher education activist organizations, Free Exchange on Campus (http://www. freeexchangeoncampus.org). Such efforts capitalize on the potential of the web for organizing. The Center for Campus Free Speech provides arguments for seeing ABOR as an "Academic Bill of Restrictions." While providing materials in useful formats like "Facts Count: an Analysis of David Horowitz's The Professors," the Center tends to focus on refuting Horowitz's claim that radical political indoctrination is rampant in college classrooms. Free Exchange additionally hosts a blog with links to the greater blogosphere. It appears, however, that members of the audience for these sites may be those already interested in challenges to academic freedom--that is to say, members of the academy.

It may be instructive to learn from Horowitz directly. Gone are the days when he focused on college campuses. It has been five years since he argued against reparations for African-Americans by attempting to buy advertising space in college newspapers and touring campuses to sustain the controversy. Having apparently learned a lesson about the most effective sites for media attention, he has shifted his arena to the public square. The key battles in his campaign for the Academic Bill of Rights take place in state legislatures which support built-in press offices, not on college campuses--which tend to be isolated from one another and from the public's daily view. The level of his argumentation in these venues wins coverage on the nightly news, not in the pages of professional journals.

While it can be infuriating to observe debates about academic life being politicized in this way, we can also take a cue from Horowitz in recognizing that the place to affect the public's views of college teachers is, indeed, in public. In her latest article on the Right's attacks on higher education, Ellen Messer-Davidow reminds us, "No matter how scrupulously researched and rigorously argued, critiques fashioned for communities of scholars will not persuade, or even reach, nonacademic audiences." (8)

What then, should be done? If the mission of conservative attacks is to discredit higher education in the eyes of the public, including the government, then progressive strategists might craft counter-campaigns that address this goal head on. For one thing, we must often refuse to accept the terms of the debate (an example is, "Are leftist teachers engaged in indoctrination?"), and instead frame the counterattack to focus on the Right's ultimate targets (for instance, "Are colleges serving our society well and do they deserve our support?"). For another, we must take on the Right in the public arenas it is now entering, as many faculty and student organizers have done in successfully fighting ABOR legislation.

It is also critical to apply a lesson we have learned from activism in other areas: that effective responses to systemic oppressions like racism, sexism, and homophobia require patient, ongoing organizing. This means imagining a response to right-wing attacks as part of a coherent social justice movement, and carefully nurturing the elements of such movements, like organizational capacity, effective leadership, adequate resources, and clear goals.

When we seek to reclaim lost public relations turf, one place to start might be in work alongside student movements that have been struggling to improve how colleges function. Conservative groups have a history of "mis-empowering" students to be their eyes and ears for campaigns that ultimately are not in students' best interests. The progressive alternative is to work in coalition with progressive student groups toward mutually beneficial goals. Identify and ally with other movements that have been attacked by the Right and that have some connection to potential student populations, such as immigrant or welfare rights activism, or progressive, K-12, public education reform. Remain open to other possible alliances, such as with labor, social welfare, or health care groups, that could join in mutually beneficial support. And continue to engage in and encourage research exposing the strategies and tactics of the Right, as seeking to perpetuate unfair power and privilege. Finally, approach the problem as good radicals should: look to the people. Consider this movement to be a public education campaign with the goal of solidifying broad general support for higher education as we would like to see it.

If history teaches us anything, it is that this backlash campaign will be around for as long as conservatives recognize the value and power of what higher education has become. The challenge is to keep up with the inevitable shifts that result when one tactic seems to lose its usefulness, and is dropped for another. And get ready, because that is already beginning to happen. David Horowitz has chosen his next target: tenure.

NOTES

(1.) Bill Turque, "Conservative Watchdogs Chill Academic Give and Take on Sunny Campus," Louisville Courier Journal, August 8, 1985, 1.

(2.) https://www.thefire.org/index. php/submit November 27, 2005.

(3.) Ben Shapiro, "Diversity of Campus Thought Lost in the Name of Liberalism," UCLA Daily Bruin, May 3, 2001. Quoted in Ben Shapiro, Brainwashed: How Universities Indoctrinate America's Youth, (Nashville, Tenn.: Thomas Nelson/WND Books, 2004), ii.

(4.) http://www.insidehighered. com/news/2005/11/23/adjunct. November 27, 2005.

(5.) Jennifer Jacobson, "A Liberal Professor Fights a Label," The Chronicle of Higher Education, November 26, 2004, 8.

(6.) "The American Freshman, National Norms for Fall 2004," Higher Education Research Institute, http://www.gseis.ucla. edu/heri/PDFs/04_Norms_Flyer. pdf, Alexander Astin, "Diversity and Multiculturalism on the Campus: How are Students Affected?," Change (March/April 1993), Eric L. Dey, "College Impact and Student Liberalism Revisited: The Effect of Student Peers." ASHE 1988 Annual Meeting Paper, Oct 5, 1988, ERIC # (ED303066).

(7.) For an analysis of Horowitz and his tactics, see Aaron Barlow, "The Art of the Slur," The Public Eye, XX.3 (Fall 2006) 14.

(8.) Ellen Messer-Davidow, "Why Democracy Will Be Hard to Do," Social Text 86, 24.1 (Spring 2006) 25.