Column 3/31: Wingnuttery

Wingnuttery

Published: Tuesday, March 31, 2009

People at Tufts love thinking that they are the first to have an idea or hold a particular position, but if that’s not a tenable stance, Tufts people act this out by staking out extreme positions. This is particularly popular when it comes to politics. There aren’t a lot of moderate Democrats or conservative leaners, but there are lots of people who could be called radical. Conservatives at Tufts especially like to venture into wingnut territory.

Enter David Horowitz, wingnut extraordinaire, who came to campus on Monday to discuss ... well, since this column was submitted before his speech, I’m going to make up what he said, and feel free to fact-check me when I exaggerate or blatantly fabricate things (which is possible, but probably unnecessary given the subject matter*). The planned topic of his talk, given in Barnum 008 at 8:30 last night, was academic freedom. As a liberal peace and justice studies major, I have an odd feeling that he’s not that worried about my academic freedom.

You might remember Horowitz’s name from Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week, organized by Horowitz, which brought Daniel Pipes to campus. The gist of the week was not only to raise awareness of Islamic terrorism itself, but also to highlight what he perceived as leftist support for terror.

Besides nobly raising consciousness of the threat from Islamo-Fascism — a term that I don’t quite understand, to be honest — Horowitz has been working on academic freedom for years. When I hear “academic freedom,” I picture unfettered class discussions and a general atmosphere of open and unconditional exchange of ideas. Horowitz’s conception of the term is a bit different. In addition to blaming them for terrorism, he derides left-leaning academics for indoctrinating students rather than teaching them. For Horowitz, academic freedom means hewing to a strict conservative ideology.

To prove his claims of liberal bias in higher education, Horowitz probably told a story about a student at the University of Northern Colorado who was supposedly failed for refusing to write a paper arguing that George W. Bush was a war criminal. Well, as it turns out, the story is pure fantasy. The university disputes each piece of the story, including the assignment, the grade, and the reasons for the grade. He may have also talked about a Penn State biology class which showed Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004) before the 2004 elections, with the professor hoping to influence his students’ votes. Later, he admitted that this story couldn’t be verified and maybe could be untrue — which is the best we can hope for from Horowitz.

Unlike him, I have no problem with anyone speaking on campus — academic freedom, what it actually means, allows Horowitz to have a voice here. Good for him. But maybe we should warn him: His arch-nemesis Noam Chomsky was here this past Friday, speaking to a peace conference. In April 2005 at Columbia University, Horowitz distributed pamphlets portraying Chomsky, a linguistics professor at MIT, with a turban and long beard and the heading “The Ayatollah of Anti-American Hate.” I’ve met Noam Chomsky — he has extreme political views, certainly, but he’s really a nice, mild-mannered guy, and he’s certainly not a Muslim — not that there’s anything wrong with that. What point is Horowitz trying to make by dressing his foe in Middle Eastern garb? Unlike Horowitz, Chomsky doesn’t rely on theatrics or overblown rhetoric to make a point, and he doesn’t engage in attacks based on race or ethnicity — something else I bet you heard from Horowitz on Monday. That kind of “academic freedom” has no place at Tufts