When The Professors was first published in February 2006, it was greeted by cries of outrage from the academic Left. The author was denounced as a reincarnation of Joseph McCarthy and his book as a “blacklist,” although no evidence existed to support either claim and both were the opposite of the truth.

Far from being a “blacklist,” the text explicitly—and in so many words—defended the right of professors to teach views that were unpopular without fear of political reprisal. The author also publicly defended the First Amendment rights of Ward Churchill, the most notable case of a professor under attack for his political views.

The very nature of the attacks, on the other hand, served in part to confirm its analysis. The Professors describe a segment of the university which has supplanted scholarly interests with political agendas and corrupted intellectual discourse in the process. Its profiles are of professors who regard educational institutions as instruments of social change and understand their task as inculcating sectarian doctrines to promote such change.

An ironic aspect of this ambition is that those who regard themselves as academic progressives are more accurately understood as academic reactionaries, determined to turn back the university clock to a time when they were largely denominational and their mission was to instill religious creeds. This process has been underway for more than three decades, with disquieting results. Under the influence of tenured radicals, American liberal arts faculties have become more narrow-minded and intellectually repressive than at any time in the last hundred years.

Today, we would call such academic practices “indoctrination,” a project antithetical to the very idea of democratic education. In a democracy, educators are expected to teach students how to think—not what to think. In teaching controversial issues, they are expected to refrain from telling students which side of the controversy is “politically correct.” Instead, they are tasked with developing students’ abilities to think for themselves.

Professional restraint is thus a condition of academic freedom as applied to the instruction of students. Fortunately, it is still observed by most members of the academic community, regardless of their political disposition. Stanley Fish, a distinguished liberal academic, has summarized this discipline with admirable clarity: “Academic freedom is the freedom of academics to study anything they like; the freedom, that is, to subject anybody of material, however unpromising it might seem, to academic interrogation and analysis... Any idea can be brought into the classroom if the point is to inquire into its structure, history, influence, and so forth. But no idea belongs in the classroom if the point of introducing it is to recruit your students for the political agenda it may be thought to imply.” 

In keeping with a consensus on academic freedom that has lasted for nearly a century, most universities stipulate that the pursuit of knowledge should be “disinterested,” that faculty should observe the principle of neutrality on controversial matters, and that they should refrain from indoctrinating their students. These precepts are eloquently set forth in the classic statements on the academic freedom of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), an organization historically associated with the academic freedom tradition that has recently strayed from that mission.

Professor M. Shahid Alam, Northeastern University

— Professor of Economics, Northeastern University, Boston

— Likens the 9/11 terrorists to America’s Founding Fathers, as men who were willing to die “so that their people might live, free and in dignity”

— Claims that the al Qaeda’s jihad is a defensive jihad against Western aggressors

M. Shahid Alam is one of the thousands of tenured academics at American universities whose intellectual guide is Marxism and who thinks that America’s terrorist enemies are really “freedom fighters” and America is a Great Satan. In an essay appearing in the December 2004 issue of Dissident Voice (“A Radical Newsletter in the Struggle for Peace and Justice”), Alam likened Mohammed Atta and the al-Qaeda terrorists who attacked the World Trade Center on 9/11 to the American patriots who defended themselves against the British at Lexington and Concord and launched a historic movement for liberty and freedom. Wrote Professor Alam: “On September 11, 2001, nineteen Arab hijackers too demonstrated their willingness to die—and to kill—for their dream.”

Professor Alam’s inflammatory and fanatic prose was published widely on the Internet. When challenged by email, he rebutted his critics with an anti-Semitic sneer: “Why is it that the only hateful mail I have received is signed by Levitt, Hoch, or Freedman?” If Professor Alam had made similar slurs about African Americans or gays, he would have been reprimanded and probably dismissed by the school administration. As his targets were only Jews, the university administration showed no interest.

In January 2005, Alam published a follow-up article in Counterpunch.org, a well-known website that supports Iraq’s terrorists as “resistance fighters” against American “imperialism.” Alam’s article was titled “The Waves of Hate: Testing Free Speech in America,” and in it, he portrayed himself as a heroically misunderstood and persecuted figure who was testing the limits of free speech while “hate websites”—he named the anti-al-Qaeda blog www.jihadwatch.org, and www.littlegreenfootballs.com—hounded him for speaking the truth. In his Counterpunch article, Professor Alam defended his claims. “In their war of independence, the Americans may not have targeted civilians, but they did commit atrocities, and they did inflict collateral damage on civilians.” Alam seemed surprised that people would take exception to his analogy: “I have since been wondering why my suggestion that al-Qaeda—like the American colonists before them—was leading an Islamic insurgency has provoked such a storm of vicious attacks.”

References:

• The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America - David Horowitz
• Some of these attacks have been described and analyzed in the author’s Indoctrination U: The Left’s War Against Academic Freedom. They are also described in articles the author has written, including “The Strange Dishonest Campaign Against Academic Freedom,”  frontpagemag.com, and “Intellectual Muggings,” frontpagemag.com
• Research: Robert Spencer