Don’t buy The Professors by David Horowitz

From This Modern World:

Seriously, it’s the same “radical professors” crap that conservatives have been whining about for years. We’ve seen this argument a million times before and it’s still as simple-minded as it was forty years ago. To conservatives like Horowitz, liberalism on college campuses is the result of political bias and intolerance for alternative views. While cherry-picked examples of political correctness run amok can certainly be strung together to support that thesis, there’s a more obvious answer that’s being overlooked by the egomaniacs on the right. When educated people disagree with you, it has nothing to do with political bias. They disagree with you because you’re wrong. If Horowitz and his peers had the slightest bit of humility, they’d take the unpopularity of their views among intellectuals as a sign that they might need to reevaluate their views. But that would require flip-flopping and we all know how wingnuts feel about that.

Click here for the rest (which is essentially a plug for Tom Tomorrow's new collection of This Modern World strips, and worth checking out if only because he's great).

Whether in his 1960s guise as a Stalinist radical or his current one as a paranoid conservative extremist, David Horowitz has always been the same thing, a professional bully. His latest crusade is to root out the "intolerance" of conservative academics by colleges and universities. His central premise is that most professors are liberal, which is probably true if one excludes business schools and economics departments, and that the reason why is that schools systematically discriminate against conservative teachers. A corollary of this premise is that all these liberal professors are brainwashing millions of American students year after year into becoming wild eyed communist America-haters. This proposition is obviously absurd. Never mind the fact that most college educated Americans are not radicals. Most colleges and universities, especially the big state supported ones in "red" states, are run by conservatives who are well connected to business and government interests. There's just no discrimination to speak of.

Tom Tomorrow hits the nail on the head when he says, "When educated people disagree with you, it has nothing to do with political bias. They disagree with you because you’re wrong." Simply put, the reason there are so few conservatives in academia is because their views just don't cut it intellectually--the only place these guys can find employment is with right-wing think tanks or as propagandists for corporations. That is, there's really no such thing as a conservative "intellectual." The people who call themselves that are simply con men.

What Horowitz's crusade amounts to, then, is simply neo-McCarthyism. That is, bullying. And that's what Horowitz does best. I'm glad he's found his niche.

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$