Barbara McKenna, an editor at the American Federation of Teachers, calls it “a bit of playful irony” to have associated my and David Horowitz’s efforts to gain a hearing for alternative viewpoints in the academy with the hideous despotism of Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

This absurd and venomous attempt to establish guilt by association bespeaks not humor and cleverness, Ms. McKenna, but party-line propaganda, ill will, and mean-spiritedness. It is one more sad, small sign of the enfeeblement of discourse and decorum in the public square. Yet in one sense perhaps not so small, as the AFT speaks in the name of legions of teachers and professors.