A couple of kids at Ball State got arrested when they tried to hit David Horowitz with a pie. The gist of the story I read was that the assault was part the overall protest of students and faculty against Horowitz speaking on campus.
Horowitz is the guy who wrote a book about liberal free speech suppression on college campuses. Ball State is one of the colleges he targeted, because they have had a saxophone teacher named George Wolfe in charge of the University's Peace Studies program. According to Horowitz, Wolfe turned the Peace Studies program into a taxpayer-funded protest movement against the Iraq war.
Besides questioning the qualifications of a saxophone teacher to lead an academic program, whether it be Peace Studies or anything else outside of music, Horowitz has set out to expose Wolfe as a Ward Churchill-style anti-American leftist agitator who uses his position at a State University to advance his personal political agenda.
The pie throwing assault and related protests of students and faculty during Horowitz's recent visit to speak on campus was one of many similar assaults on conservative speakers visiting campuses across the country. The story did not mention Horowitz's actual speaking event, and whether or not his speech was disrupted. There have been speeches by conservative activists in various colleges that have been disrupted and even broken up by faculty and students who resort to shouting the speaker down, rushing the stage, throwing pies, and even using physical assaults.
I haven't read Horowitz's book, but have read up on the guy and his basic message. I come away a bit puzzled, because the loudest proponents of free speech rights are generally liberal. So why is it that the liberal faculty and their student minions are the ones doing everything in their power to silence conservative speakers who arrive on campus?
How often have liberal speakers been assaulted and shouted down by conservative faculty and students when they arrive on college campuses? If it has happened recently, I haven't heard about it. If prominent left-wingers like Michael Moore or Noam Chomsky or Cindy Sheehan showed up on campus to speak (and I don't know whether or how often they do), are they attacked by the Young Republicans?
As to Horowitz's message, he states that university faculty are monolithically liberal. Conservatives need not apply when it comes to university professor positions, at least outside of the practical engineering, math and science departments. He says that conservative thought is not only unwelcome on campus, it is actively suppressed. He says the Ball State president, Joann Gora, did not support his speaking engagement. I'm not sure what that means, given that he apparently did arrive in Muncie to speak.
What's the objection to Horowitz, anyway? Do those who hate the man disagree with his thesis? Is he lying about the political philosophies that dominate Ball State's faculty? Is he lying when he says that professors teaching classes in subjects that have nothing to do with politics, like English for example, spend hours of valuable classroom time ranting against George Bush and the military and the war in Iraq? Is there no truth to his assertion that taxpayer funds are paying salaries for unqualified saxophone teachers to transport students in the Peace Studies program to war protest marches in Washington, DC?
What is wrong with the idea that professors who don't teach political science or sociology shouldn't spend classroom time on political indoctrination, whether it is left-wing, right-wing, or anywhere in between? Why exempt political science and sociology from the discussion anyway? Shouldn't those courses of study be focused on a dispassionate examination of all forms of government and societal norms, open to debate and discussion from all about the relative pros and cons of each?
I'm a Ball State alum, and although I had my fair share of radical leftist professors, I don't recall that any of them ever mistreated anyone for expressing moderate or conservative viewpoints. If you were to ask me to name a professor who had a conservative policital philosophy at Ball State, I could not. There were professors who never expressed any sort of political point of view, but those who did were universally left or far-left. The most frequent comments I used to hear about communism (this was before the fall of the Soviet Union) were that communism was a really good idea that was poorly implemented and sadly corrupt in its Soviet form. But then I toured Russia and Poland and Latvia with the University Singers, and after seeing the reality of oppressive and repressive communism, became convinced that their pro-communist arguments were ridiculous.
The lesbian professor I had for a required sociology class was a living caricature of the liberal feminist. I felt sorry for her, because something horrible must have happened in her childhood to become filled with so much hatred for western civilization in general and white men specifically.
But I did have at least one professor who did a fantastic job of playing devil's advocate in classroom discussions: He would introduce a topic (relevant to the curriculum, by the way), and take a position generally at one extreme or the other. When a spirited classroom discussion came to a close, he would admit that he didn't actually hold that viewpoint, but wanted to use it to encourage thoughtful discussion and argument. Too bad he was the only one using that particular approach.
I wonder if there are still professors who encourage open debate on political and social topics in classes where such topics are consistent with the course being presented? Horowitz says probably not.
In America, if you have a problem with a message, you don't physically attack or shout down the messenger. You counter with your own message.
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