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.1 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.

In an early review of The Professors, Harvard scholars Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom offered an observation that proved prescient: “Academics on the left like to pat themselves on the back for daring to ‘speak truth to power.’ David Horowitz’s The Professors speaks some uncomfortable truths to them—to those who run American higher education today. They will hate this scathing critique, but will be hard-pressed to answer his charges.”

The exceptionally low standards displayed by the academic critics of The Professors underscore the problems it set out to address. In their attacks on the book and its author, they have subordinated intellectual principles to political ends. A crafty (and ruthless) politician once remarked: “In political conflicts, the goal is not to refute your opponent’s argument, but to wipe him from the face of the earth.” Michael Berube, among others, appears to have adopted a similar scorched-earth policy towards the author of The Professors. In a moment of candor on the academic blog Crooked Timbers, he complained about his lunch meeting with the author, which had been arranged by the Chronicle of Higher Education: “[It] grants Horowitz, and his complaints about academe, a certain legitimacy.” This legitimacy was something Berube was determined to reject: “My job is to contest that legitimacy, and to model a way of dealing with Horowitz that does not give him what he wants, namely (1) important concessions; or (2) outrage.” To implement his strategy, Berube recommended that opponents of the book resort to “mockery and dismissal.”

Professor Stanley Aronowitz, Professor of Sociology at City University of New York

— “We know that the charges against us—that university teaching is a scam, that much research is not ‘useful,’ that scholarship is hopelessly privileged—emanate from a Right that wants us to put our noses to the grindstone just like everybody else.” One of the leading figures of the academic Left, Stanley Aronowitz is a professor of sociology at the City University of New York, where he has also been the director of the Center for Cultural Studies since 1988.

Before his academic career, Professor Aronowitz was a union organizer for the Clothing and Oil and Chemical Workers unions. In February 1997, Aronowitz wrote an article in the academic journal Social Text, titled “The Last Good Job in America,” which also became the title of a book he published in 2001.

Couched as a personal memoir, this article is a self-portrait of the professor of the liberal arts as a slacker-in-residence. In his memoir, Professor Aronowitz acknowledges that City University originally hired him “because they believed I was a labor sociologist.”

As he admits, this was just a scam: “First and foremost I’m a political intellectual... [I] don’t follow the... methodological rules of the discipline.” After being hired as a sociologist, Professor Aronowitz signed up for the then-hottest new academic fad, “cultural studies,” and created the Center for Cultural Studies to escape the rigors of his original professional discipline. “Cultural Studies” provided him with a broad umbrella under which to pursue his Marxist politics and pass them on to his students.

As a member of the editorial board of Social Text and head of the Center for Cultural Studies, Professor Aronowitz is more than just a professor. He is an academic star with a six-figure salary and a publishing resume to match. In today’s politicized university, it is thoroughly in keeping with Aronowitz’s elevated academic status that his chef d’oeuvre is a book called Science As Power, whose core thesis is the view—which was last popular in the era of Joseph Stalin—that science is just an instrument of the ruling class.

Of Professor Aronowitz’s book, a reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement said: “If the author knows much about the content or enterprise of science, he keeps the knowledge well hidden.” Non-leftist readers of Professor Aronowitz’s work could hardly have been surprised in 1996 when he and his fellow editors at Social Text fell victim to a famous academic hoax perpetrated by physicist Alan Sokal.

Sokal submitted a phony paper on quantum mechanics and “post-modernism,” another intellectual fashion of the academic Left. Sokal intended to demonstrate that the magazine Social Text would publish nonsense about science if the nonsense was politically correct.51 Although the Sokal article created an international scandal, Professor Aronowitz’s university career was unaffected. Aronowitz was promoted to distinguished professor of sociology in 1998.

The “last good job in America” turns out to be the lucrative job that Professor Aronowitz has created for himself at the expense of New York taxpayers and the economically disadvantaged minorities who make up the CUNY student body. “What I enjoy most,” says Professor Aronowitz, “is the ability to procrastinate and control my work-time, especially its pace: taking a walk in the middle of the day, reading between writing, listening to a CD or tape anytime I want, calling up a friend for a chat.” Professor Aronowitz teaches only one two-hour course a week. This is a seminar on Marxism. On Mondays and Wednesdays, Professor Aronowitz does not bother to leave his house.

These are the days devoted to writing a piece for The Nation on “the future of the left,” and of course the article for Social Text on what a good job he has. For decades, Professor Aronowitz and other academic leftists have been escaping the reality of their failed revolution in America’s streets during the 1960s by colonizing the American university and politicizing its curriculum. In the course of this self-absorbed intellectual destruction, they have abused the educational aspirations of unsuspecting students, poor and well-fed alike. And even while this equal-opportunity exploitation goes on, they never lose the ability to see themselves as the victims of vast conspiracies of the political Right.

“We know,” writes Professor Aronowitz, “that the charges against us—that university teaching is a scam, that much research is not ‘useful,’ that scholarship is hopelessly privileged—emanate from a Right that wants us to put our noses to the grindstone just like everybody else.”

The conclusion to Professor Aronowitz’s memoir is naturally a call to arms, but phrased in the form of reproof to his comrades for not advancing their struggle militantly enough: “We have not celebrated the idea of thinking as a full-time activity and the importance of producing what the system terms ‘useless’ knowledge. Most of all, we have not conducted a struggle for universalizing the self-managed time some of us still enjoy.” Loafers of the world, unite!

Research: David Horowitz

Professor Leighton Armitage, Adjunct Lecturer in political science, Foothill College, California

— Believes that Jews control the U.S. government
— Believes Israelis are Nazis

Dr. Leighton Armitage is an adjunct lecturer in political science in the Business and Social Sciences Department of Foothill College in Northern California. Foothill prepares more of its students to attend nearby Stanford and other major universities than any other two-year community college in California.

Dr. Armitage’s academic expertise is in Europe and Japan, but his classroom focus is on Israel, a nation he loathes. He teaches his classes that Jewish “Nazis” control the U.S. government. He declares that Israel’s security fence is illegal, immoral, oppressive, and similar to the Ghetto Wall the Nazis erected in 1940 Warsaw to lock up the city’s Jews pending their extermination in Treblinka and Auschwitz. “Few people realize how much influence they [Jews] wield,”46 Dr. Armitage tells his students. America, he adds, is hated all around the world because of its close relationship with Israel.

With an even hand, Dr. Armitage denounces both the U.S. military’s destruction of the safe houses of Iraqi terrorists and the Israeli army’s demolition of the safe houses of Palestinian terrorists. “Have you heard what we’re doing now to houses of suspected terrorists in Iraq?” the professor asks. “We’re blowing them up. If you’re suspected of being a terrorist, your house will be blown up. Now, the Israelis do it with a bulldozer and we do it with a Howitzer and Apache gunships, so it’s different. I guess we have more fun.”

According to Dr. Armitage, America’s ills can be attributed to the fact that Jews control the U.S. electoral system. “They’re good business people, you’ve got to respect them for that, if for nothing else,” he says. “Of course, they’re buying our elections, which really pisses me off. And this stuff you learn over time, it’s not overt, no one tells you this and no one wants you to know it.” He says that when he was an intern in Congress many years ago, a congressional assistant warned him about the evils of the “Jewish lobby.”48
The Nazi analogy is ever present in Dr. Armitage’s mind: “What are [the Israelis] doing with the Palestinians, every day? They’re killing them. They’re not taking their glasses and gold fillings, and everything else, as far as I know, but they are still slaughtering these people. It’s exactly what Hitler did to the Jews.”

Dr. Armitage’s remarks have been so public and so outrageous that Foothill College President Bernadine Fong apologized for them in a meeting with the Anti-Defamation League in March 2004. But even after he had revealed himself as an anti-Semite and had thoroughly embarrassed his college—and even though he is an adjunct instructor with no tenure and can be removed from the classroom if the administration simply chooses not to renew his contract—Dr. Armitage continues to be on the faculty of Foothill.

Research: Lee Kaplan50

References:

The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America - David Horowitz