George Leef is an idiot

But most of you knew that about this right-wing kook. His gaffe today, however, is particularly egregious:

A key finding [of a Mackinac Center (a conservative think-tank) policy paper]: although Michigan, over the period 1980-2000, spent significantly more per capita on higher ed than did other large midwestern states (Ohio and Illinois, specifically), its rate of economic growth lagged behind.

To many people, this conclusion will seem strange.

Actually, it doesn't seem strange to anyone who factors in deindustrialization and the precipitous decline of the auto industry in Michigan, which neither Leef nor the report's authors do.

Non-reflexive

While I'd like to spend some time picking apart Horowitz's latest blatherings based on cherry-picked syllabi (where, instead of looking like a shrewd critic, he comes off as someone who is over 50 years behind in the debates over epistemology and pedagogy), it's almost the weekend, and I really don't want to read any more of his inane ramblings. I did, however, want to ask a few questions about this:

The ideological claim that all gender differences between men and women, aside from anatomical ones, are rooted in social rather than biological factors and therefore can be shaped by human agency is a species of secular creationism, which is not only controversial but, as noted, flatly contradicts the findings of modern science, specifically evolutionary psychology, biology and neuroscience.

First off, I suppose that I'd dispute the notion that theories of social constructionism are "flatly contradict[ed by] the findings of modern science" (not to mention there are plenty of theories of social construction which attempt to account for biologically-derived gender differences).

Secondly, given that the proof of a completely biological source of gender (ignoring Horowitz's (quite conscious, I'm sure) unwillingness to separate the concepts of "sex" and "gender") is hardly unequivocal, does that mean classes in evolutionary psychology, biology, and neuroscience should discuss theories of social construction in their course work on, say, hormonal systems?

Read the rest of the piece and marvel at just how unsophisticated Horowitz's thinking is. It's as if Horowitz is rehashing (the losing side in) debates that were passé 30 years ago. But he's loud, and he's repetitive, and thus he's dangerous.

Cue the wurlitzer

The only thing more humorous than David Horowitz himself is the cadre of right-wing flacks he dredges up to provide him with cover. Take, for example, Paul Crespo, who "teaches political science at the University of Miami," and his "review" of Horowitz's latest pablum, Indoctrination U. One might be lead to believe that this is an honest-to-god "real" faculty member who is giving Horowitz's book a fair shake.

One would be wrong.

A little googling and one can see that Paul Crespo is little more than another right-wing shill:

He also writes regularly for Tiempos del Mundo (a Spanish-language Latin American weekly), Townhall.com, The American Enterprise Institute Magazine Online, and has written for the American Legion Magazine and the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). He is a Phillips Foundation Journalism fellow for 2003-2004.

He is an adjunct professor at the University of Miami, and does have impressive professional and academic credentials. However, teaching does not seem to be his primary profession (unlike countless other adjunct faculty members who, instead of falling back on right-wing welfare, must teach six courses at three different universities in order to make ends meet), and as such, he's never had to enter the labyrinth that professional academics must navigate. While the short biography appended to the "review" is technically accurate - he does teach courses in political science at the University of Miami - the image that it is supposed to convey, that he's a seasoned academic who happens to agree with Horowitz, is disingenuous at best. Paul Crespo is a right-wing shill. A right-wing shill with the professional experience to teach about world politics, to be sure, but a right-wing shill nonetheless. And as such, it's hard to take him seriously when he dishes out tripe like this:

[A]cademic radicals with disdain for professional standards and intellectual pluralism have created a pervasive ideological agenda that violates the basic tenets of a democratic education.

On to his "review." Personally speaking, when I see the words "book review," I typically expect a brief summary of the book, maybe an excerpt or two, some interesting questions it raised, some problematic lapses of vision, some sort of sense of how well the whole project comes off. What do we get with Crespo? On the book itself:

A hard-hitting, well documented, and persuasive description of our dysfunctional higher education system, Indoctrination U. unmasks the leftist political indoctrination corrupting America's schools.

It describes how academic radicals with disdain for professional standards and intellectual pluralism have created a pervasive ideological agenda that violates the basic tenets of a democratic education.

The biggest culprits are entrenched primarily in the social sciences and liberal arts, but biased political rants can be found regularly in other faculties as well.

David Horowitz describes his ongoing battle to reform America's educational system by reviving the moribund standards and practices established decades ago, but mostly ignored today, to restrict political indoctrination and ensure academic freedom.

[...]

Indoctrination U. is an eye-opening book. It is a case study in the political warfare methods of the radical left and the campaign to re-establish an indoctrination-free environment on our campuses. It should be required reading for everyone concerned about the future of our country.

Those are the first four and the last paragraphs of the "review." Those are the only mentions of what the book might be about. The rest of the "review" is basically a mash note to Horowitz, as Crespo breathlessly details what a Great Man our hero is, and how that horrific abstraction called "the Left" is out to destroy him. In between his unsupported claims and his clumsy attempts at hagiography, Crespo just sounds out and out daft:

Horowitz told NewsMax, "My academic freedom campaign has been assailed by teachers' unions and the organized left and they have subjected me to vile character assassination similar to that used against other prominent conservatives."

He adds, "The purpose of these attacks is to destroy us and our reputations rather than deal with the issues."

He says, "But I'm just a little guy." Then he adds, "look at what they did to Larry Summers, the liberal president of Harvard. Summers tried to re-establish standards and a bunch of radical feminist and totalitarian anti-intellectuals got him fired."

The lesson, Horowitz argues, was "cross the left and they will destroy you."

Huh. I think I was a little too gracious in referring to Crespo's piece as a mash note. That would imply that he wrote it himself, rather than recycling Horowitz's own screeds. Anyways, given the persistence of Horowtiz's attacks on "the Left" - what would most certainly qualify as "crossing them" - he's yet to be destroyed. In fact, he's so swimming in that right-wing welfare that they named a "Freedom Center" after him!

And reading Horowitz's description of the Harvard faculty as "a bunch of... anti-intellectuals" is a little too much. The reasons for Summers' resignation were, of course, much more complicated than just his stupid comments about women academics, but Horowitz and Crespo never let reality detract from their talking points.

The "review" leaves me with no real sense that Crespo actually "read" Horowitz's book, which raises two non-exclusive possibilities:

1. Horowitz's book is just a repackaging of his tired old talking points, so Crespo just had to troll those for a few choice quotes and, voilá! instant review, or
2. Horowitz's book just plain old sucked and Crespo couldn't be bothered to finish it, opting to instead copy the front flap of the dust jacket

Whatever the case may be, Crespo has provided us with a shining example of how craptacular right-wing flacks typically are.

Alas, poor Horowitz!

I'll leave the debunking of Horowitz's book-whoring FrontPage post to another place and time, but I just wanted to take a moment to draw attention to his endnotes. Now, I know that most folks will be dazzled enough by the superscript numbers in the text to ascribe scholarly legitimacy to any random diatribe, but don't you think Horowitz could have cited something other than items he either wrote or had published in one of his fora?

All they needed was a scarlet letter

Inside Higher Ed reports on a humiliating permutation of the flash mob at UNC Chapel Hill:

Ryan Burke, a student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, invites his girlfriend from North Carolina State University to meet him at the Pit, a central meeting point on his campus, for a Valentine’s Day surprise. She arrives and finds hundreds of students (some estimates top 1,000) whom he had invited via Facebook. Her boyfriend starts by introducing an a cappella group — not to sing some romantic melody, but the Dixie Chicks’ defiant hit “I’m Not Ready to Make Nice.”

When the song is done, Burke tells his girlfriend that she has been unfaithful and that he’s dumping her. They exchange harsh words — several of them four-letter epithets — while the audience watches, laughs and jeers. At one point, the crowd starts chanting “slut, slut, slut” at the woman. She fights back (verbally), telling her by-then-ex that if he needs an audience to break up with her, he must have the problem.

YouTube video of the event is here.

The article tries to suss out whether this event was real or staged, and several people interviewed for the article are rightly disturbed that so many who observed the event seem to be revelling in the public humiliation of a woman. I found this little statement towards the end of the piece to be interesting:

She also said that there were positive factors to consider. “I’m a journalism and public relations major,” Legacki said. “I was impressed by the word of mouth that catalyzed this and how it’s grown completely. To me it’s more amazing how it got to where it is than the fact that Ryan publicly humiliated Mindy,” she said. “Any time you can get a group of college students that big in one place is impressive,” Legacki said, adding that she did agree that it would be good “to figure out how to use that for better causes.”

Her caveat at the end of the quote notwithstanding, I'm struck by the speaker's lack of empathy. The need to publically humiliate a woman, and the mob enjoying the spectacle is the story (although, let's be honest, misogyny - public or otherwise - is widely tolerated in our society and is seldom "news"). At the risk of invoking Godwin, the comment seems to me to be different only by a matter of degrees from admiring how efficiently the Nazis handled that whole Holocaust deal. But I'm sure I'm an over-sensitive jerk who's too old to get the "joke."

Industrial education

The NYT exposes the dark, Satanic degree mills of the University of Phoenix. What's not to love about this institution? 300,000 students taught by a near-total part-time faculty; a "low overhead" approach to higher education; centralized course planning; professors with real-life experience in... uh,... something:

Robert Wancha, 42, a former National Guard commander who is pursuing a bachelor’s degree in information technology at the university’s Detroit campus, said that in a computer course last fall his instructor, Christopher G. Stanglewicz, had boasted that he had a doctorate but did little teaching, instead assigning students to work in learning teams while he toyed with his computer.

Mr. Stanglewicz, reached at his home, acknowledged that he had covered only a fraction of the syllabus , partly, he said, because the university required him to cram too much information into too few sessions.

“Students get overwhelmed,” he said. Mr. Stanglewicz asserted in the interview that he had earned a doctorate in economics from the University of Kentucky. But the authorities there said his name was not in their records. (Dr. Pepicello said that Mr. Stanglewicz had never told the university that he had a doctorate, and that he was qualified to teach.)

I don't know what horrifies me more: that the University of Phoenix is willing to hire any schmoe of the street without checking his credentials (or even bothering to ask, apparently), or that Mr. Stanglewicz was whipping out his faux-doctorate to dazzle the folks in "a computer course."

Education on the cheap, it sure don't look pretty.

So that explains it

h/t to jhm

In a fun tête-à-tête between David Horowitz and Michael Bérubé, we find this little nugget:

Bérubé: For this and other things, in cases where students grieve against professors for reasons that have nothing to do with politics— they have to do with sex harassment, a hostile dissertation director— there should be an ombudsperson. No question about that. My questions are two, more comments really than questions. Let me swallow my bread.
[a pause while Mr. Bérubé swallows his bread]
Student grievance is not the same thing as the firing of professors. So that analogy in the essay, I just don't buy it on its face. Some of the student grievances are justified because I've been reading the Students for Academic Freedom's Web site and some of them sound to me justified. Others are out of their birds ...

[Mr. Horowitz founded Students for Academic Freedom, a watchdog group whose Web site includes a forum encouraging college students to document when professors inject their politics into the classroom.]

Horowitz: I agree.

Bérubé: Complaining about the Iraqi flag; that's not a legitimate complaint.

[On the site, one anonymous student once complained about a professor who "talked about flags as symbols of states and argued that new Iraqi flag was not a result of a transparent and fair process. Argued as fact that new flag had similar colors to Israeli flag and that this could be problematic. Claimed as fact that other Arab societies had red, green and black in their flags. Very biased. Had no visual proof of this."]

Horowitz: If I had more money, I'd hire somebody to clean that up.

So, the reason The Professors is so riddled with errors, that his website is peppered with phantom "student indoctrination incidents," is that, despite all that Scaife-Mellon-Olin money, he can't afford to hire a fact-checker?

Why do we have to take David Horowitz seriously?

That is, of course, a rhetorical question. But honestly, the man makes shit up, as seen in this fun- and fact-filled takedown of his visit to Bloomsburg University. A sampling:

Horowitz writes:

One of the students, Jason Boyer, told me that he had been given a final exam in political science by Professor Diane Zoelle which included a required essay on the topic: Explain Why the War in Iraq is Morally Wrong. For the record, I don't have the exam in front of me and therefore this wording may be imprecise. However, Jason told me that he had to write that the Iraq War was wrong. Instead he wrote that it was right. He got a "D."

There is no Jason Boyer here. Rather, there is a Jason Walter, as Horowitz will say below, but he isn't the one who claims to have taken the exam. It is another student, X (as I will call him), who claims this. Keep in mind that X took Dr. Zoelle's class back in 2003. She has shown me the exam and it is not what the student or Horowitz reports. It is an exam with several sections, two of which are essay sections. The exam questions deal specifically with texts studied in the course. They represent scholarly topics in the field of political ideology (this was a course in political ideology), and are not expressions of the professor's personal beliefs. No question on the exam asks students to explain why the war in Iraq is morally wrong.

Students were required to choose one question topic from each essay section-the first section listed about four questions, the second listed about six. If the student was offended by a question, he could have chosen to answer another. He was not REQUIRED to answer any particular question. (As an aside, I showed X the exam and asked him if this is what he was referring to when talking with Horowitz. Now that three years have passed, the student said that he now doesn't find the question inappropriate-amazing what three years of study will do! To be sure, he remembers being offended when taking the exam three years ago, but now he sees that this may have something to do with his having then misunderstood the material or the nature of the course.)

Can we please stop treating Horowitz as a credible voice about, well... anything?

Unserious people in the Academy

Atrios has a link to a recently released study about women academics (with a bent, I take, towards those in the natural sciences).

On top of his points, which I've also witnessed, I'd add that similar pressures exist for male academics who might actually, I don't know, want to be involved in an equal partnership in raising their children (though not at the same intensity with which they burden women). I think ms. wobs and I were pretty lucky to have l'il wobs when I was still in grad school and she was working part-time. It gave me a chance to spend a lot of time in his formative years (as well as saved on childcare costs). But forget about making any sort of progress on my degree. It took me a year to take a comprehensive exam during that period. It also affected my research - I shifted the focus of my dissertation research in order to work with family-friendly professors, academics who themselves were more marginalized in our department.

Add to this the stress of raising a child on the combined incomes of a graduate employee and an adjunct writing professor at a community college, and you have a significant part of the cocktail that induced me to leave academia.

In further parsing

Our Man in DC has the breakdown on what the election results mean for higher education.

Affordable higher education

I don't like to be a scold, but you should get on over to Free Exchange on Campus to see what Our Man in DC has to say about what you can do to keep higher ed accessible and affordable.

Disingenuous

I just caught the latest Saxton ad on education (in the left-hand gutter under TV Spots: "Powerful") and noticed something a little fishy. He cites poor grades for Oregon schools from this report card on higher education (grades that are attributable to the gutting of funding for higher ed), but then proposes "reforms" that are mainly targeted at the K-12 systems. That's quite the leap.

Looks like I wasn't the only one who noticed:

Horowitz's feasible and necessary fantasies

David Horowitz was recently asked to comment on speculation that he was looking to parlay his latest google-monkey powered "research project" into a full-fledged book (that can be easily read and de-bunked within an hour sitting in the aisle at Powell's - no need to buy!). His reply [via e-mail]:

Well Free Exchange has many fantasies about what I do, what I think, and what I'm up to. In this case, I've thought about such a book, but haven't decided whether it's feasible or necessary yet -- Our websites reach a lot of people as it is.

The first sentence is clearly a classic case of Freudian projection: it's not the Free Exchange crew who harbor fantasies, but rather it's Horowitz who fantasizes himself as the stern disciplinarian who must tame the dirty, animalistic urges of not just "Leftist" professors, but whole "Leftist" universities.

Moreover, I feel pretty secure in saying that the Free Exchange gang is definitively not fantasizing about David Horowitz. Who Horowitz is, what he thinks, and what he's up to are creepy enough without putting him in leather chaps.

The second sentence is an enigma unto itself. He's thought about it, but doesn't know if it's "feasible" or "necessary?"

"Feasible?" You mean Regnery won't just print whatever crap Horowitz makes up? That the Scaife and Mellon money might dry up because Horowitz has gone too far? Or are his interns refusing to google for him because of his bizarre pacing and muttering?

"Necessary?" Listen, either the hordes of "Leftist" academics breeding in our nation's colleges and universities are a Fifth Column hellbent on installing Osama and Saddam and all their islamocommunifascinazisecularcrat buddies in the White House or they're not. The non-chalance of Horowitz's answer leads me to a couple of conclusions: 1) he's full of shit (exceedingly likely) and 2) no one's turning off the spigot on the right-wing money tap anytime soon (also likely). I'm glad the minds of college-bound students aren't too endangered by these loopy professors.

And I'm sure lot's of people look at Horowitz's websites - many of us looking for a freakshow at which we can point and laugh. But it also seems that traffic to frontpagemag.com has been steadily declining for well over a year, and discoverthenetworks.org barely registers as a blip in net-traffic.

Look, I can already tell you that Indoctrination U: The Book is going to suck. People are bored with the Horowitz-Churchill feud - he's not going to sell any books flogging that dead horse. And is anyone going to need to read a book to know that Austin is full of liberals? And for those of us in Eugene, we're bewildered - and quite frankly, I might add, a little hurt - that Horowitz went after a little-known liberal arts college in Salem when everyone in Oregon knows that it's the flagship state university down the road that harbors all the pot-smoking free love liberals bent on handing America over to the Islamists. That kind of shoddy research is doomed to to sink sales.