[Editor's note: It’s a modern-day tale of David vs. Goliath. In 2003, David Horowitz launched a reform campaign that made up with an ambitious goal what it lacked in its limited resources: to defend and restore academic standards to liberal arts programs in America’s universities and to challenge a corrupt and politicized academic culture that had hijacked traditional education for the purposes of radical indoctrination.

Aided by a shoestring staff, Horowitz took on an academic status quo bankrolled by millions of dollars and supported by vast apparatus extending from the Democratic Party, to the education media and the local press in every university town. Assailed by the academic Left and its allies, Horowitz also found his campaign shunned by much of the conservative intellectual establishment, including its leading journals of opinion, which attacked the academic freedom campaign when they deigned to notice it at all.

But despite the heavy odds against him, Horowitz persevered, eventually succeeding in getting a number of prominent schools to adopt the principles of his campaign and in raising national awareness about the state of abuses in academia. In his new book, Reforming Our Universities: The Campaign For An Academic Bill Of Rights, Horowitz chronicles his campaign to restore integrity to the academic enterprise in the face of overwhelming opposition and shows that while the battle for America’s universities is not yet won, it is very far from lost.

Newt Gingrich was right when he called this book "the story of how a small group of determined people, armed with the truth, can stand up to powerful, entrenched interests and make a difference." Below is an excerpt from the book.

We are also presenting our readers with a special offer: If you make a contribution of $50 or more to support this new book, we won't just send you a copy of it -- we'll also send you a set of three additional books -- Indoctrination U, Uncivil Wars and One Party Classroom. To get this special offer, click here.]

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Reforming Our Universities tells the story of the campaign for an Academic Bill of Rights, which I began in September 2003 with the goal of restoring academic standards to liberal arts programs in America’s universities. The idea was to persuade universities to adopt an “Academic Bill of Rights” for students, which was based on academic traditions that had been allowed to atrophy and fall into disuse. It was designed to ensure that instructors 1) provide students with materials reflecting both sides of controversial issues; 2) did not present opinions as facts; and 3) allowed students to think for themselves. These are not only educational rights; they are rights basic to a republic created by dissenters, whose political system is founded on respect for the pluralism of ideas.

In terms of resources available, our campaign was relatively modest. I never employed more than three full-time staff people to assist me, and for several years there was only one, my National Campus Director Sara Dogan.[1] By contrast, our opposition – mainly teacher unions and academic guilds constituted an immensely powerful political lobby. They able to draw on hundred million dollar treasuries and to rely on operatives based in every college and located in every congressional district.[2] In addition they could count on the support of the Democratic Party, the education media and the local press in every university locale.

Despite these odds my assistants and I were able to recruit hundreds of student volunteers and organize them in chapters on 135 college campuses. Together we managed in a relatively short time to achieve tangible results, bringing our issues to the attention of the public and effecting actual institutional reforms. An early assessment of our efforts by Professor Stephen Aby, a member of the American Association of University Professors and unfriendly critic, provides a reasonable summary of our accomplishments. His account appears in the preface to a 2007 book devoted to our campaign and titled The Academic Bill of Rights Debate: “In just three short years, the debate over the Academic Bill of Rights has become one of the most controversial issues in America’s colleges and universities. By November of 2006, it had already generated over 74 articles in major newspapers, at least 143 articles in all newspapers nationwide, 54 television and radio broadcasts, 47 news wire articles, 20 articles in the Chronicle of Higher Education, 73 articles in InsideHigherEd.com, dozens of articles in major magazines, and some 150,000 hits in the obligatory Google search.”[3]

There were other accomplishments as well. Within the first five years of its creation, the Academic Bill of Rights or some version of its principles were 1) written into the federal “authorization act” for higher education, and passed through the House of Representatives; 2) unanimously endorsed by both houses of the Colorado legislature; and 3) incorporated in a formal statement by the American Council on Education, an organization that represents more than 1800 colleges and universities. Pressured by our legislative efforts in Ohio, all of that state’s public universities, acting through the “Inter-University Council,” agreed to implement the Council’s statement and to provide students with formal grievance procedures to protect their academic freedom rights. Among the schools that instituted the reform were seventeen public universities in Ohio, including Ohio and Ohio State. In 2005, the Academic Bill of Rights inspired legislation in the Pennsylvania House leading to formal academic freedom hearings – the first such on record. These hearings resulted in the adoption of academic freedom provisions for students at Penn State and Temple universities. Along with the Ohio schools, these are the only universities in the United States today with academic freedom rights for students.

The campaign we launched can only be understood in the context of previous developments in higher education. The modern research university was created in the second half of the 19^th Century during the era of America’s great industrial expansion, its curriculum shaped by two innovations: the adoption of scientific method as the professional standard for knowledge, and the extension of educational opportunity to a democratic public. Before these developments, America’s institutions of higher learning were “primarily religious and moral” schools of instruction. In the words of James Duderstadt, president of the University of Michigan, “colleges trained the ministers of each generation, passing on ‘high culture’ to a very small elite.”[4] The avowed mission of these early collegiate institutions was to instill the doctrines of a particular religious denomination. It was not to foster the analytic skepticism associated with modern science but to pass on the literary and philosophical culture that supported a specific faith.

By contrast, “the core mission of the research university,” as recently summarized by one of its leaders, “is … expanding and deepening what we know.” In pursuit of this goal, “the research university relies on various attributes, the most important of which are the processes of rigorous inquiry and reasoned skepticism, which in turn are based on articulated norms that are not fixed and given, but are themselves subject to re-examination and revision. In the best of our universities faculty characteristically subject their own claims and the norms that govern their research to this process of critical reflection.”[5] This has been the credo of American higher education throughout the modern era and is still the norm in the physical and biological sciences and most professional schools throughout the contemporary university.

Liberal arts colleges within the university are the divisions through which all undergraduates pass, and have been traditionally viewed as cornerstones of a democratic society, where students are taught how to think rather than told what to think. The curriculum of the modern research university supported these objectives. It was designed to inculcate pragmatic respect for the pluralism of ideas and the test of empirical evidence, and thus to support a society dependent on an informed citizenry.

All this began to change when a radical generation of university instructors matriculated onto liberal arts faculties in the 1970s and began altering curricula by creating new inter-disciplinary fields whose inspirations were ideological, and closely linked to political activism. Women’s Studies was one of the earliest of these new fields and remains the most influential, providing an academic model emulated by others.[6] The curricula of Women’s Studies programs are not governed by the principles of disinterested inquiry about a subject but rather by a political mission: to teach students to be radical feminists. The formal Constitution of the Women’s Studies Association makes this political agenda clear:

Women’s Studies owes its existence to the movement for the liberation of women; the feminist movement exists because women are oppressed. Women’s studies, diverse as its components are, has at its best shared a vision of a world free not only from sexism but also from racism, class-bias, ageism, heterosexual bias–from all the ideologies and institutions that have consciously or unconsciously oppressed and exploited some for the advantage of others….Women’s Studies, then, is equipping women not only to enter the society as whole, as productive human beings, but to transform the world to one that will be free of all oppression.[7]

Thirty years later, the academic landscape had undergone a sea change as a result of the political pressures from feminists, ethnic nationalists, and “anti-war” activists, and the curricular innovations they were able to institute. In 2006, state legislators in Pennsylvania gathered at Philadelphia’s Temple University to hold hearings on academic freedom. Among the witnesses was Stephen Zelnick, a former Vice Provost for Undergraduate Studies and a member of the Temple faculty for 36 years. Zelnick told the legislators of his concern that Temple faculty had grown increasingly monolithic and politically partisan in the years he had been there: “The one-sidedness of the faculty in their ideological commitments and a growing intolerance of competing views [has] resulted in abuse of students, occasionally overt and reported, but most often hidden and normalized, and the degrading of the strong traditions of intellectual inquiry and free expression.”[8]

Zelnick then spelled out what this meant in terms of the instruction he had personally reviewed: “As director of two undergraduate programs, I have had many opportunities to sit in and watch instructors. I have sat in on more than a hundred different teachers’ classes and seen excellent, indifferent, and miserable teaching… In these visits, I have rarely heard a kind word for the United States, for the riches of our marketplace, for the vast economic and creative opportunities made available for energetic and creative people (that is, for our students);  for family life, for marriage, for love, or for religion.”[9]

Zelnick’s experience reflects a shift in the academic practices of liberal arts schools that is national in scope and is a transformation as dramatic as the changes that took place at the end of the 19th Century.[10] If those changes have been rightly perceived as an educational revolution, the current academic turn represents a counter-revolution — the resurrection of a curriculum that is doctrinal rather than analytic, and the return to a method of instruction in which knowledge proceeds from authority and is designed to instill sectarian truths rather than pursue skeptical inquiries into the facts.

While the new academic orthodoxies are secular, they are no less intolerant of opposing views than their religious predecessors. Their faculty adherents also assign texts to reinforce orthodoxies, while treating dissenters as unbelievers while regarding their views as not requiring serious consideration. The new academic orthodoxies teach that America is an oppressive society governed by hierarchies that are “racist,” “sexist” and “classist.” Far from being academic in the dictionary sense of “theoretical” and “not leading to a decision or practice,” the new curriculum is designed to provide cultural support for doctrines that are sectarian and political and that have immediate practical implications. Engagement in political activism is often incorporated directly into the curriculum.

For example, a course description at the University of California Santa Cruz, explains that, “the goal of this seminar is to learn how to organize a revolution.” The character of the revolution is then specified as “anti-capitalist” and “anti-racist,”[11] and the only texts provided are those that articulate and support these specific revolutionary agendas. No skeptical examination of revolution or of the critics of capitalism or of the leftwing perspectives on racism presented in the course is incorporated into its syllabus.

A sociology course in “Collective Behavior and Social Movements,” at the University of Arizona offers students credit for political activity, and provides students with a menu of leftwing organizations to serve. In the words of the official syllabus: “Here it is, activism for credit. Give four hours to a social movement organization and I’ll give you 200 points.”[12] The instructor elaborates: “Tucson has a bunch of great organizations that could use your help. For example, Wingspan has loads of things you can do for lesbians, gay men, transgendered and bisexual people right here in the Old Pueblo. Maybe you’re more interested in endangered species and ecosystem protection – check out the Center for Biological Diversity, an important and influential organization that just happens to be based in Tucson. Consider the Brewster Center, Society of Friends (Quakers), Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, Border Action Network, Humane Borders, or Food Not Bombs.”

The political corruption of the academic enterprise is hardly confined to a single university, or to one academic field. Three articles in a recent issue of PMLA, the official journal of the Modern Languages Association, give an indication of the scope of the problem. With forty thousand members, the Modern Languages Association is the largest academic professional organization, and is ostensibly concerned with literary scholarship. One of the articles in this issue, however, is titled “Get Up, Stand Up: Teaching Civil Disobedience in the Literature Classroom.” A second is titled, “Using the Civil Rights Movement to Practice Activism in the Classroom.” The third, is a dissent from these two, and is by Gerald Graff, the outgoing president of the Association. Graff notes mournfully that “it is no longer controversial that a goal of teaching should be to ‘challenge oppressions and advance social justice.’ The only pertinent ones now are technical ones about how to achieve this goal.”[13] In short, according to the testimony of the president of the largest organization of literary scholars, classroom indoctrination in leftwing political ideologies by professors of literature is now an accepted educational practice.

Graff is himself a progressive but is distinguished by his dissent from progressive orthodoxy, in particular his view that teachers should not preach one side of the ideological argument but “teach the conflicts,” allowing students to draw their own conclusions. This was the norm in not too long ago academic past, so it is not surprising that someone such as Graff who belongs to an older academic generation should defend it. I am a contemporary of Graff and it was my own collegiate experience that prompted me to begin the academic freedom campaign, whose goal is to provide institutional support for a student’s right to receive a modern scientific education and not be indoctrinated in any orthodoxy, whether it reflected the political prejudices of the right or the left.

Because the campaign I organized was about process, it was viewpoint neutral. Consequently, I began it under the assumption that I would be joined by others, liberals such as Gerald Graff among them, and not merely conservatives who were the principal victims of the current regime. But for reasons that will become clear in the ensuing narrative, I received almost no support from those quarters, and even Graff never endorsed my campaign but only suggested that the concerns it raised were important and deserved consideration.

While I was disappointed by this response, I was not surprised. What I was not prepared for was the reluctance of many conservatives to support our campaign. While conservatives had long been precise and insightful in recognizing these problematic developments in the university culture, they remained determinedly passive in their response to it.

More than fifty years earlier, William F. Buckley had published God and Man at Yale, a jeremiad lamenting the transformation of Yale from a college whose founders intended it to instill Christian values into a modern research university whose attitudes were secular and increasingly liberal. Buckley’s book was the first in a series of critiques of the university that conservatives were to write. These eventually included Alan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, Dinesh D’Souza’s Illiberal Education, Richard Bernstein’s Dictatorship of Virtue, Neil Hamilton’s Zealotry and Academic Freedom, Roger Kimball’s Tenured Radicals, and Daphne Patai and Noretta Koertge’s Professing Feminism: Education and Indoctrination in Women’s Studies, which was an account of the creation of Women’s Studies as an ideological rather than an academic discipline.

But while these were all knowledgeable and perceptive texts none of them became the basis for efforts at institutional reform. Conservatives were content to make an argument against the educational status quo in the hope that others would be persuaded to do something about it — or not. Perhaps this reflected a fatalism inherent in the conservative outlook, leaving many of its adherents content to describe and then regret a cultural fall but not support a movement to correct it. While conservatives ably made their case, very little seemed to follow.

Three years after the appearance of God and Man at Yale, Buckley became the first president of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, an organization founded by Frank Chodorov. The Institute was designed to teach the curriculum that Yale and schools like it were in the process of abandoning.[14] Its target audiences were conservative students whom it intended to reach during after-school hours. It was a plan of action typical of the conservative campus organizations that followed – the Young America’s Foundation, the Leadership Institute, Accuracy in Academia, the Eagle Forum Collegians, the Clare Booth Luce Institute, College Republicans and various conservative Christian groups. All of these sponsored conservative speakers on campus and recruited on-site representatives to distribute conservative literature. But with exception of the College Republicans whose principal focus was electoral politics, they did not create student activist organizations or conduct efforts to alter campus structures.[15] Their intent was to develop alternative institutions, not reform existing ones; their goal was to foster a traditional culture among conservative college students and develop future conservative leaders. The agenda was to educate individuals, not change the educational system.

This was also true of the adult organizations involved in higher education. The National Association of Scholars focused on legitimizing dissenting voices in the academy rather than altering the structures of university governance. The American Council of Trustees and Alumni was organized to uphold academic standards and support a quality education but did not promote system-wide reform, although this began to change under the influence of our efforts.

While I owed a debt to Buckley’s influence, my concern in organizing our campaign was different. Since Yale was a private institution which had been specifically created to transmit a Christian heritage I was sympathetic to Buckley’s distress over its transformation into a secular university at odds with the values of its founders. Moreover, Buckley was justified in his claim that Yale had severed its religious ties without a formal divorce. But unlike Buckley’s efforts, the campaign I organized was not at odds with the research university itself, nor with its secular foundations or intellectual pluralism. The research university was now an established institution. More than eighty-five percent of American college students attended publicly funded schools, which unlike Yale had been created as secular institutions. These schools were not dedicated to the transmission of religious doctrines but to the pursuit of knowledge through disinterested inquiry. My goal in launching the academic freedom campaign was to stop the erosion of these academic standards and the steady transformation of liberal arts departments into sectarian indoctrination centers for ideological movements.

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