Michael Berube on David Horowitz

"Between a provocateur and a buffoon." That's how Berube describes Horowitz in this interview with Marc Bousquet. Berube explains what happens when Pennsylvania experimented with Horowitz's "academic bill of rights"

Category:

People & Blogs

Tags:

• Colleges
• universities
• professors
• students
• adjuncts
• faculty
• David Horowitz
• Berube
• Bousquet
• academic bill of rights

[geezer2]

Great interview. I worked for Horowitz on Ramparts back in the seventies. He shared the editorial board with Sheila Daar and Peter Collier. Horowitz was a complete buffoon even then, though on the left. Once, Horowitz wrote an editorial calling for the "overthrow of the American government, by any means possible." He and Collier then made a lot of dough writing a book on the Rockefellers (whose young family members subsidized Ramparts).They both went over to Reagan in the 80's.

[gulshabbo]

@geezer2 My old professor said that Horowitz has attacked academics out of pure jealousy. Do you agree?

[TheLiberty53]

It is obscene to paint conservatives with such nonsense. Conservatives believe in democracy. A democracy is about freedom and equality. Communism, socialism and Marxism are not about freedom and equality. Their ideology is about controlling every little thing in society because they know best how to run things. Starting with failed Marxist economies, totalitarian ideology, mass murder of citizens, forced indoctrination to Marxist ideology where would anyone find anything good in this rubbish?

[TheLiberty53]

@geezer2 - In the 1970's Horowitz as much a leftist idiot as you are. Fortunately for David he woke up and smelled the reality of what the left really sells. Not one Marxist-Socialist state has a good record. In fact the ones in the west are dangerous to our way of life. It seems that all you leftists know how to sell is division and diversion along with your ideas of totalitarian ideology. You don't give a damn about minorities or poor, you use them for your Marxist personal political agenda.

[MultiSmartass1]

@pyroseed13 Conservatives-if they can be called that-dont want diversity but orthodoxy. They want freedom of ideas so long as it is freedom of their ideas. Right wingers really dont believe in freedom because they rail against anything that smacks of free speech, expression and life style.

Thus right wingers are against people of color, gays, women rights are other such things because they promote freedom and more importantly free will.

This is no different in colleges-the right seeks control.

[pyroseed13]

@MultiSmartass1 I disagree. The crime is not "having a point view," but imposing that view on others. We can dispute Horowitz's true intentions, but I don't see how you can argue against objectivity in the classroom when the purpose of a higher education is to encourage student's to assess different viewpoints and form their own conclusions.

[DaHonestAbe]

To call Horowitz a buffoon is an insult.......to buffoons.

[MultiSmartass1]

The point of being a Professor at a University or College-especially in arts and humanities is that Professors have a point of view. History is not merely an objective subject without a point of view, for example, Historians have a point of view. What this movement is is a bunch of aggrieved right-wingers who want a conservative orthodoxy to reign intellectually and structurally on campuses.

If they can't have the cake, they will smash it.

[OneCarefulListener]

M. Berube should be heard out; after all, the American Association of University Professors defended David Horowitz's right to speak after his speaking engagement was canceled at St. Louis U. (Cary Nelson, AAUP, 2009). Here, Berube says that Horowitz wants his Academic Bill of Rights to be a "legislative initiative," however, "government interference" in a professor's work is "inappropriate for a free society." And, it's fine that professors often develop opinions on work outside their field.

[321lawc]

Yes, play the role of the poor and oppressed innocent. It's too easy to see through the left's bullshit.