Steve Brodner

It was a spectacle--some self-generated, some audience-generated--when David Horowitz, a New Left agitator in the 1960s turned conservative social activist in more recent decades, visited Duke last spring. "I have in my hand here a book," he told a Page Auditorium crowd, making a wry reference to the famous line spoken by Senator Joseph McCarthy: "I have here in my hand a list of fifty-seven people that were known...as being members of the Communist Party." The book's title, Horowitz went on, is The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics, a roster that includes two from Duke.

All of those professors, according to Horowitz, who wrote the book, contribute to "the intellectual corruption of the American university." He pronounced himself "amazed at the number of courses and events on this campus whose sole purpose is to persuade, if you like--indoctrinate, as I prefer--Duke's students to believe that America is a racist, sexist, oppressive, imperialist empire that deserves to be attacked."

Encouraged by a cultural-anthropology professor, a small contingent of students sat in the front of the auditorium wearing black T-shirts reading, "Why didn't I make the list?" on the front and, on the back, "Intimidation, Blacklisting, Litmus Testing, Narcing on Professors=Academic Freedom?" At several points, the group heckled Horowitz with a display of loud, concerted giggling.

Though he may be today's most vocal critic of higher education, Horowitz comes from a tradition that stretches back to the 1988 publishing phenomenon, The Closing of the American Mind, by University of Chicago professor Allan Bloom. The theme was picked up with Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Higher Education, by Roger Kimball, managing editor of New Criterion, in 1990. Those books, and now Horowitz, argue that college and university faculties, certainly in the humanities and social sciences, are predominantly left-leaning. Many who are familiar with the higher-education landscape wouldn't disagree with that assessment. But they would contest the assumption that learning has become corrupted and politicized, or that individual professors are downright dangerous propagandists.

Fair and balanced?: Students for Academic Freedom president Miller decries lack of conservative voices in the classroom

Anthony Cross/The Chronicle

Horowitz is on the speaking circuit promoting an "Academic Bill of Rights." Among other things, it would require that colleges and universities appoint faculty members "with a view toward fostering a plurality of methodologies and perspectives." It also would enforce the principle that "faculty members will not use their courses or their position for the purpose of political, ideological, religious, or antireligious indoctrination." Horowitz's campaign has caught the attention of Republicans in several state legislatures. Shortly before his visit to Duke, the South Dakota House of Representatives voted to require that the state's public colleges report annually on steps they have taken to ensure "intellectual diversity" and "the free exchange of ideas." In Pennsylvania, legislators formed an investigative panel, triggered by a resolution that protested the liberal "imposition of ideological orthodoxy" on college campuses.

Academic organizations, including the American Association of University Professors, are critical of the campaign. The AAUP argues that the Horowitz-inspired "bill" would "invite diversity to be measured by political standards that diverge from the academic criteria of the scholarly profession." In the end, as the AAUP sees it, scholarly judgments, including evaluations of students, would be left in the hands of administrators or judges--a dramatic departure from the traditional prerogatives of professors.

For some conservatives, the academy is a tempting target, says John Harwood '78, who has covered politics for The Wall Street Journal and, more recently, for CNBC as chief Washington correspondent. "Look what happened to [Harvard president] Larry Summers with what he said about women's achievement in high-end math and science. The reaction that provoked became sort of Exhibit A for the idea that campuses are politically correct in a way that is extreme. And I'd say that critique became very widely accepted in the mainstream press, not just by conservatives."

Harwood questions at least one tenet of the conservative charge against campuses: the idea that the influence of the classroom can overwhelm the influence of family, friends, and society. Many progressive causes have been popularly ingrained, he says. "I think twenty years from now, nobody's going to bat an eye about gay marriage, for example."

It may be "self-evidently true" that the academy is biased, but "the consequences are a little harder to spell out," says Dean McGrath '75. A partner with the law firm Manatt, Phelps & Phillips in Washington, he teaches a "Conservatism in Law in America" seminar at Georgetown University. He was formerly deputy chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney; he also served in the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. "You can assume that a very high percentage [of the faculty] is liberal. But it's not true that the student bodies that graduate reflect those same percentages." So whatever biases are being brought into higher education by professors "don't seem to be affecting the views of the students who are coming out." He says he's often joked that the academy is filled either with professors who aren't good at indoctrination or students who are immune to it.

McGrath adds that it may be disingenuous for conservatives--valuing as they do free markets--to beat up on higher education. Higher education "is the one part of our education system that is definitely not broken," he says. "I mean, the world walks to American colleges and universities for their education. We let students freely pick; they go anywhere they want. And to a great extent we don't tell them what to take once they're there. I would not be in favor of trying to tell colleges and universities how to do things. How would an Academic Bill of Rights be enforceable? In the courts? Just what we need: more lawsuits."

Even as conservatives decry liberal bias in the academy, some observers detect a timeworn theme in such complaints. That's the view of John Chandler B.D. '52, Ph.D. '54, who arrived at Williams College as a young faculty member shortly after earning his doctorate at Duke. (He later became president of the college and of the Association of American Universities.) "President [James Phinney] Baxter, the president of Williams at the time, was having to defend the faculty, several of whom were being hauled up before the various congressional committees and accused of being Communists and so forth," he recalls. "I remember that President Baxter was always trotting out the geology department as an example of the diversity of the Williams faculty. And he would say, 'The geology department is made up almost entirely of rock-ribbed Republicans.'

"And, of course, back in the 1960s and '70s, it was the same kind of thing. There was a big push among some conservatives to get economics departments to teach more about free-market capitalism back when departments were bringing in Marxists. I do think some changes in faculty attitudes took place in the 1960s; advocacy in the classroom, perhaps, became more pronounced after that. But I don't see a great deal that's really new."

If there is something new, Chandler says, it's that students tend to push back more than they once might have. A couple of years ago, he assigned columns by The New York Times' Paul Krugman. "One student came after me after I had handed out the syllabus and said, 'What in the world are you assigning Krugman for? He's just a propagandist; he's not objective.' And I was a little startled because I had never before been challenged on the grounds of the appropriateness of an assignment."

There's nothing startling about the academy's ideological leanings, according to New York Times columnist David Brooks, who is far removed from his colleague Krugman on the political spectrum. But he says campuses suffused with liberal thinking aren't good for the academy, or the culture. Brooks, who calls himself "sort of a John McCain/Rudy Giuliani conservative," is teaching this fall in Duke's Sanford Institute. (His course is "Policy Wars: Liberalism and Conservatism in America.")

Brooks graduated from the University of Chicago. "Chicago has this conservative reputation, but I didn't know any conservatives while I was there," he says. "I was in the history department, and they were all New Dealers, pretty much." Shortly after graduating, he took a job at The National Review, the conservative magazine founded by William F. Buckley Jr. At one point Brooks ran into one of his former philosophy professors who, he recalls, "told me he had failed as a professor if I was working at National Review." As it happens, he notes, the professor's assignment of Edmund Burke, the eighteenth-century British statesman and political philosopher who was a critic of the French Revolution and a supporter of the American Revolution, started him on his path as a conservative thinker.