Defending "The Professors"

Front Page Magazine ^ | March 20, 2006 | David Horowitz

[Lorianne]

[John K. Wilson, who posed these questions, is the editor and publisher of Illinois Academe, the newsletter of the Illinois Association of University Professors. Wilson is the author of The Myth of Political Correctness: The Conservative Attack on Higher Education, 1995]

Wilson: You are “grateful” to your own professors at Columbia University in the 1950s, where even though you were a Marxist, professors “never singled me out for comment” or asked, “why do Communists kill so many people?”(xlvii) I find it strange that someone who now regrets his youthful belief in idiotic ideas would praise his teachers for failing to challenge his beliefs. Is it possible that you might have avoided the left-wing political stands and affiliations you now repudiate if you had been pushed to analyze your politics more in college?

Horowitz: First, thank you for actually reading my text, which is far more than I can say for most of my critics. The answer to your question is simple. First, I was an English major at Columbia and the issues of Communism and Marxism would have been irrelevant to most of the subjects I took. To introduce Marxist themes into literature would have reduced the subject to ideology taught by people ignorant of what they were talking about, which is unfortunately all too often the case in today’s academy. You should read Stanley Fish and Frank Lentricchia, two well-known leftwing academics on this subject. Second, in my Contemporary Civilization course at Columbia we did read both Marx and his critics, in particular Bakunin and Hayek. So I was indeed challenged, but in an appropriately academic fashion. Unfortunately, it took me twenty years to benefit from the lesson.

[RoadTest]

Good defense, Mr. Horowitz. I bought your book and am reading it and weeping.

I appreciate you whistleblowers tremendously. They are the voices of truth that light the dark places.

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

Good defense

And BTTT.