Horowitz makes wild claims in his book. He writes that left-wing radicals among faculty members used to outnumber right-wingers by a 9-1 ratio, but now these campus commies prevail by a 30-1 ratio. Actually, the most comprehensive study of political viewpoints held by scholars, one conducted by UCLA, revealed that professors holding views from mainstream liberalism to socialism outnumber conservatives by only a 3-1 ratio. This trend says nothing about the quality of these scholars or their fairness towards students with whom they disagree.
It remains unclear, beyond giving students the power to silence political opinions they don’t like in the classroom, what solution Horowitz advocates short of some sort of ideological affirmative action. Of course, what Horowitz fails to acknowledge, bias varies by department. Bolsheviks, for instance, don’t tend to dominate business schools, where many faculty members draw handsome endowments from Fortune 500 companies. The same is the case with petroleum engineering departments and in the sciences where many professors’ financial comfort is tied to defense spending or big oil.
Horowitz’s book was sloppy, with the author labeling as “dangerous” professors he disagreed with on the Iraq war, race relations, or affirmative action. To Horowitz, his opponents don’t simply hold bad ideas, they are bad people. One target, Caroline Higgins, made the list for teaching classes on peace and social justice at Earlham College, a Quaker college. Quakers are, by theology, pacifists and teaching a class on peace at such a school is the equivalent of teaching about Jesus at Baylor.
University of Texas at Arlington political science professor Jose Angel Gutierrez got (black)listed because of his student activism in La Raza Unida back in the 1960s and 1970s and a book he wrote as a young man 32 years ago called “A Chicano Manual on How to Handle a Gringo,” a work Horowitz decried as racist.
Far more interesting and revealing than who Horowitz listed as dangerous was who he left out. What Horowitz deliberately ignores is a disturbing trend in academic disciplines such as psychology and sociobiology across the United States and Canada. In these fields, many academics have embraced not merely right-wing politics, but overt racism. A shockingly large number of professors in these disciplines argue that real biological and intellectual differences exist between races and because of these differences, African Americans and Mexican Americans are less intelligent than whites and more prone to crime, welfare and childbirth out of wedlock.
Recent genetic research confirms that race is an illusion. It seems certain that the first human inhabitants of Europe shared dark skin with their African ancestors. Recent DNA mapping demonstrates that all present-day homo sapiens are more than 99.9 percent genetically identical. Yet, upon this infinitesimal degree of genetic difference, some white supremacists within the academy have built claims of immense differences between whites and their black and brown neighbors in terms of intelligence and character.
This belief is not limited to a marginal group of cranks. In one 1980s survey, 50 percent of physical anthropologists and 73 percent of animal behaviorists accepted the notion that biologically distinct races exist within the human species. Meanwhile, “
sychologists tend to base their racial classifications on categories defined socially, rather than by physical or biological anthropology,” author Marek Kohn has noted. “Yet their findings have evidently persuaded many of them that races are both real and intellectually unequal.”
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