David Horowitz, relentless warrior against entrenched tenured radicals, has a new book out today, Indoctrination U: The Left’s War Against Academic Freedom, published by Encounter Books. He recently took questions from National Review Online editor Kathryn Lopez about the book and the battles.

Kathryn Jean Lopez: Isn’t it a little broad-brushed and unfair to cast “the Left” against academic freedom?

David Horowitz: Not when you are the target of thousands of attacks, orchestrated by the professor unions and leftwing websites — and unchallenged by “liberals” — which call you a “witch-hunter” merely for proposing that there should be two sides to controversial questions and that students should be educated rather than indoctrinated in totalitarian agendas. Seriously, of course there are leftists who are for academic freedom. I mention one in my book — Stanley Fish — and discuss his views. I am aware of others and have had private correspondences with several. But none have had the courage to come forward and say what they believe. None have come forward to object to the slanders directed at the Academic Bill of Rights and its author by such powerful left-wing organizations as the American Association of University Professors, the American Federation of Teachers, the American Historical Association and the Modern Languages Association among, and the American Anthropological Association among others.

The reason for the silence of what I believe is actually a “liberal” academic majority should be evident from the fate of Larry Summers at Harvard. Here was the most powerful administrator in the history of the modern research university. Yet he became the first president of a modern research university to be censured and then forced to resign by his own faculty. His crimes? Trying to hold an African-American professor accountable for his failure to produce a single scholarly work in nearly 20 years, and uttering a politically incorrect idea (that women in general had lower aptitudes for mathematics at the high end of the Bell curve than men) which was scientifically correct. In other words, his crime (it is really singular) was crossing the Left.

Alan Dershowitz is one of the very few professors who were not conservative who publicly defended Summers against the anti-intellectual forces at Harvard. The loneliness of Alan Dershowitz is proof that there are indeed leftists who will support academic freedom. But the fact of his loneliness is also proof that the majority of such leftists will not do so because they fear the loss of their progressive credentials more than they fear the loss of academic freedom itself.

Lopez: So Larry Summers was a victim of this “war against academic freedom” you’ve identified?

Horowitz: Precisely. Larry Summers was a victim of the feminist reactionaries who terrorize academic faculties today. These anti-intellectuals were rewarded with a $50 million bribe by Summers himself and then by the Harvard trustees who named one of their number as his successor. Academic feminists are so powerful that they have been able to inflict a religious doctrine on institutions of higher learning, wherever Women’s Studies programs are in vogue. It is ironic that liberals who react phobically to Intelligent Design theory as a form of creationism incompatible with a modern research university are complacent about the presence of women’s studies departments which teach that women are created by a patriarchal ruling caste whose design is to oppress them. The idea that everything we associate with womanhood that is not genitalia-related is “socially constructed” — i.e., a diabolical contrivance of men — is a form of secular creationism that flies in the face of modern neuroscience, evolutionary psychology and biology. Yet women’s studies marches on. Of course women are different from men — for example, they have a lower aptitude for mathematics (and higher verbal skills). But if you say so out loud in an academic environment these days, even if you are the president of Harvard and a former Cabinet secretary, you will be punished; you might even lose your job. This grotesque reality is what my book and the campaign it describes are attempting to challenge.

Lopez: Is there anyone out there on your radar who is teaching students “how to think, not what to think”?

Horowitz: Yes. As I pointed out in my much-maligned book The Professors, most faculty are still scholars, and observe traditional academic standards. All the hard sciences, for example, and most of the professional schools (but not schools of social work or education) are reality- rather than ideology-based. They observe scientific method, as opposed to what Charles Pierce called the “method of authority;” they are appropriately skeptical; and they do not require students to believe in preposterous and unverifiable theories like the social construction of gender and race. It is only a minority who are political activists and ideologues first and foremost. This, however, is not a small number. As I point out in my book The Professors it may amount to 50,000 professors, and probably more.

Lopez: What is a “democratic education” and where do you go to get one?

Horowitz: Well, this question can easily be misunderstood. Education is based on a hierarchy of knowledge; it is by nature not democratic. Professors and students, for example, are not equals, which is why it is so important for professors to observe a professional discipline in the classroom and not to abuse their authority by attempting to indoctrinate students in their inexpert prejudices and opinions. What we mean by a democratic education is an education that prepares students to participate as citizens in a democracy. Therefore it strives to teach students how to think for themselves. Unfortunately, a large and vital part of our educational system has been suborned by political activists who want to tell students what to think, so they can “change the world.”

Lopez: Is there anything inherently wrong with “women’s studies” – which you mentioned earlier — or, say, “peace studies”?

Horowitz: Both these programs generally are not academic courses of study but in effect the platforms of political parties in the academy, which seek to instill their radical worldviews and agendas and recruit students to radical causes. Literally. Often students are required to work for radical organizations in order to receive class credit. I have posted analyses of the curricula of more than a dozen universities at www.discoverthenetworks.org (click on “Academia” and then click on “Indoctrination Studies”) which show beyond the shadow of a doubt that these programs exist and how they operate.

Lopez: What ever happened to Ward Churchill?

Horowitz: The University of Colorado convened a panel of professors to review Churchill’s academic work. They found him to be a plagiarist, to have falsified evidence, to have invented historical events, to have written putatively academic studies on subjects in which he has no academic background and to lack the basic outlook of a scholar. (Churchill actually told them that he starts his research with an ideological conclusion and then looks to find the evidence to confirm it.) Finally, they recommended that he be fired. Yet, he is still on the faculty of the University of Colorado. It is that hard to fire an academic incompetent and fraud. By the way, there never would have been an academic inquiry into Churchill’s work in the first place if he had not been turned into a national embarrassment by Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity. So imagine how many Ward Churchills are out there, holding forth in academic classrooms. I’ll give you a hint — the number of actual extremists (in the Churchillian mode) teaching in university classrooms today probably numbers in the thousands.

Lopez: How worried should parents be about what is being taught in grades K-12?

Horowitz: Very worried. The “Social Justice” movement in the ed schools which train K-12 teachers is nearly 30 years old and has become a powerful force in K-12 education. The goal of this movement is the indoctrination of K-12 students in radical agendas and their recruitment to radical causes. The illiterate rant of the high-school geography teacher in Colorado which was taped by one of his students and became a cause celebre awhile back is but the tip of a growing iceberg. For example, Columbia Teachers College — the foremost teacher training institution in the country — has published a series of “Teaching Social Justice” manuals for K-12 teachers. One text is called “Teaching Social Justice for Mathematics.” Have a numbers problem? Use Iraq body counts in your example. Want to teach percentages? Use the “fact” that two percent of the population owns 90 percent of the wealth. Any radical agenda to which you can attach a number becomes an excuse to recruit junior-high-school kids to radical causes. The editor of the Columbia Teachers College series is Bill Ayers, formerly the head of the terrorist Weather Underground, now a Distinguished Professor of Early Childhood Education at the University of Illinois. You couldn’t make this stuff up.

Lopez: What is the goal of your Academic Bill of Rights?

Horowitz: To take politics out of the classroom and restore professional academic standards. My goal is to empower students to protest the indoctrination they are receiving and demand an education instead. The only way to accomplish this is to give them a bill of academic rights and provide them with a grievance machinery that will protect them from faculty retribution if they have the temerity to complain.

Lopez: How would you describe its success?

Horowitz: Well, in three years we have put the issues of intellectual diversity and academic professionalism on the national radar screen. There is not a university administrator in the country who is unfamiliar with the Academic Bill of Rights and the challenge it presents. So in getting to step one we have been successful beyond expectation. And this year we even went beyond step one. In the state of Pennsylvania we were able to get two major universities — Penn State and Temple — to adopt student-specific bills of rights. This is unprecedented in the history of higher education in Pennsylvania and, I believe, in the history of higher education period. Finally, in response to our campaign for intellectual diversity, the Penn State administration green-lighted a proposal for a new department called “The Center for the Study of Free Institutions and Civic Education,” headed by Professor David Saxe. If successful this will be a step beyond the Madison Center Program that Robert George has pioneered at Princeton because it will have its own curriculum and degree program and will control its own professor lines and hiring.

Lopez: Is there anything about your (“McCarthyite”!) book The Professors that you regret?

Horowitz: Not really. Should I? As I pointed out, at the time, I did regret the sensationalist subtitle my publisher gave to the book — “The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America” — mainly because it was no part of its conception and gave the left an easy way to distort its contents and dismiss its findings. But I think the book still stands as the clearest analysis of what is wrong with our universities and the most comprehensive view of what many departments in our liberal arts colleges have become. As for “McCarthyite” — if you are a conservative and leftists have not tried to smear you as a McCarthyite, racist, sexist, or homophobe, it simply means that, in their estimation, you are not very effective.

Lopez: You mention in the book that at Duke you find “that students are generally civil and faculty generally hostile” How frequently do you find that?

Horowitz: It is what I experience at every university I visit without exception.

Lopez: Why don’t you just open your own school?

Horowitz: That’s a very conservative idea. Take home your marbles and start your own game. Very individualistic. Very entrepreneurial. But also, in circumstances were there has been a theft of a university system that is hundreds of years old and represents trillions in assets, very impotent, very self-defeating. I’m still a radical I guess. I don’t believe we should surrender our universities to crypto-Communists who hate the institutions that provide us all with our liberties — specifically private property and the political instruments created by the Founders. Yet this is exactly what is taking place in our institutions of higher learning on campuses across the country. As a radical I was brought up to seek to change social institutions that were corrupt, destructive and unjust, and that’s what I aim to do. I am doing it, however, in a conservative way: by attempting to revive the traditional standards and values that are still part of university templates, but unfortunately un-enforced.

Lopez: Do you ever get tired of caring so much about tenured radicals?

Horowitz: Actually I don’t care at all about tenured radicals. They can go to hell as far as I’m concerned. What I care about are the millions of students who are being robbed of an education they have paid for, and who are being bullied in the classroom by ideological dolts seeking to alienate them from a country that has given them such great blessings — and not only them but the spoiled ingrates themselves.