Professors

Just like Bernard Goldberg before him, another right wing blowhard has written a book listing "dangerous" people, and by dangerous they mean liberal. David Horowitz's new book, The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Acedemics in America, is another far right attack on the far left, except that it's only aimed at professors at American universities this time, and by professors they mean liberal professors.

I saw an interview of him on Hannity & Colmes, my favorite program on television, and by favorite I mean the one I like to yell at the most. The interview was just blah, blah, liberal professors, blah, blah hurting America, blah, blah, poisoning America's youth. Hannity fellated him while Colmes sat by without offering any dissenting argument as usual because that's illegal at Fox News.

After watching the segment, I decided to find out who was on the list. I have reposted it here. Seeing that Penn State had two people on the list made my day. It was nice to see a neoconservative call us out as a haven of liberal ideology but sadly, we were no match for Columbia University (who had nine listed professors).

But why Columbia University? I would have thought Berkeley would have been number one but they only had three "dangerous" professors. Then I read Horowitz's page on Wikipedia and it all became clear. According to the page:

Horowitz went to Columbia University as an undergraduate, later taking a Master's degree in English literature at the University of California, Berkeley. Horowitz became a prominent member of the New Left movement in the United States—a break with the earlier Communist Party USA.

...

As the years went on, however, Horowitz became very disillusioned with some of the tactics of the American Left

...

Horowitz's thinking gradually became more conservative; and today he is regarded as a leading conservative advocate.

Ah, so Horowitz resents how his New York upbringing and his education at Columbia University turned him into a liberal. Makes more sense now.

Further scanning his page, I read about his current political campaign that coincides with this book. It's the "Academic Bill of Rights." The ABoR is an attempt to legislate the hiring process and promotion of academics. Bascially, the movement wants affirmative action for conservatives - funny considering conservatives are against affirmative action.

The movement wants to accurately label each candidate as "liberal" or "conservative" during the interview process and then hire and promote academics solely on their skills and merits. You have me on the skills and merits part but not with the labels. There are more than two ideologies than liberals and conservatives.

I am so sick and tired of this left vs right crap. There are very few people that I know that are hard line followers of a political party. Most of the people I know (perhaps we're an elite bunch) have the intellectual ability to think for themselves and make their own decisions in the realm of politics. So how could academics, an extremely intelligent crowd, be limited to two ideological choices?

The great majority of America is a nice hue of purple rather than a divide of blue and red. The problem is that Americans don't know this. The media continues to depict us as left vs right, blue vs red, city slickers vs rednecks, ann coulter vs al franken, jesus vs mohammed and it is seriously hurting us because the depiction is not a true portrayal. There are never just two sides to an argument let alone in political thinking.

And then there's douchebags like Horowitz who write books that pander to an ideological group to enrage their hate for the other ideological group -- and conservatives are not the only ones to do this. I wish I could draw so that I could depict Horowitz wearing a bomb as a hat.