plasti-some DD for you-In short, scholars who loathe Discover the Network for its vulgarity, viciousness, and utterly cretinizing effect are welcome to help him publicize it. “And yet you persist in portraying me as a Stalinist,” Horowitz wrote me. “What’s wrong with this picture?” Horowitz also pointed out that he “offered a $10k reward to any member of the American Historical Association who can back up the false claims about my Academic Bill of Rights made in their resolution denouncing it.”
Unfortunately it is difficult to honor the democratic bona fides of what sound like just so many rather cynical publicity stunts. Last month’s vote by the AHA Council condemning the so-called “Academic Bill of Rights” was unanimous. It was an expression of serious concern by a scholarly organization whose members are capable of grasping the concept of academic freedom.
That nobody has taken Horowitz up on the offer to exchange their dignity for the chance to win valuable cash prizes is not, perhaps, a particularly telling indictment of the academy.
You judge a political figure by his actions as well as his words. In the case of David Horowitz, we have someone who has smeared not simply one professor or another, but the entire academy. He has made inaccurate statements, admitted it, then denounced those who expect public debate to follow some rules of logic and evidence. And he runs a Web site that permits readers to post calls for terror against “dangerous professors.”
And no, I am not saying that without evidence. Consider the case of James Holstun, a professor of English at the State University of New York, Buffalo. The entry on him in The Professors appears to be a revision of Karen Welsh’s article “Buffalo’s Bullying Professor,” which ran last summer at FrontPage. The day that it appeared, someone writing in the comments section of the site advocated a violent assault on Holstun. Eight months later, that call is still up.
After I pointed that link out to David Horowitz, he wrote back to say: “I absolutely never go into the GoPostal section of the site and never saw this before. We have no screener because we can’t afford one and I have been advised by our lawyer that if we edit/censor one letter we have to screen them all or we open ourselves to the risk of a libel suit. If you’re asking whether I approve of this I don’t. If you’re asking whether there are rightwingers who express views that I find repellent I do, and this is one of them.”
Appropriate sentiments, certainly — but again, the lack of accountability is remarkable.
Once, the strongest claim to moral authority that the conservative movement in the United States could make was that it, at least, nourished the idea of responsibility. That carried with it an understanding that some things were honorable, while others were uncivilized.
A question to decent conservatives, then, about the public role of David Horowitz: Why do you put up with it?
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