Cue voice of Don LaFontaine: He’s back, he’s got a bionic brain, and he’s coming after the Victorian specialist in your department.
As Inside Higher Ed reported this morning, David Horowitz has a new schtick. You may remember him from the last decade, pushing the Academic Bill of Rights, which appeared in legislative bill form in Florida, among other places, promising to give students the right to sue a professor of the student didn’t like what the professor taught. He created an astroturf organization, Students for Academic Freedom, to give the appearance that there were millions, and I mean millions, of college students who felt that they were being indoctrinated in college. (The SAF “activism” timeline shows the last great victory of the SAF masses was in 2007.)
Well, he’s back with a proposal he’s calling the “Adopt a Dissenting Book Campaign.” I’d provide a link to it except none exists anywhere (not even on FrontPage). So maybe it’s just a press-release campaign, in which case IHE swallowed the bait (and maybe I did, but I can talk about the general principles involved). At least according to the IHE representation of the press-release campaign to get millions of students to talk with professors about book choices, Horowitz wants students to ask professors to change their syllabus in the middle of a term to add more reading, which presumably would be mandatory for their peers and themselves.
I know that’s not how the IHE snippet portrayed the goal. I gather it’s to get students to ask faculty to add books with other (presumably conservative) perspectives to courses. The example given was a conservative approach to the Vietnam War, presumably to balance whatever the lefty commie prof assigned.
This is much smarter than the old schtick, though maybe that’s just because we haven’t seen anything about it other than the effects of a press release. I know what Horowitz is hoping for: while a bunch of faculty will respond with, “I’ll be happy to add it to the optional readings, and if a critical mass of students finish it, we’ll talk about it in class,” someone is sure to respond in a a cryptic or curt way that will be reported as “the professor told me that there was no other side to the story.” But if it doesn’t happen, he’ll claim that he persuaded faculty to add dissenting readings to the course, and he wins.
David, in case you read my blog, I construct readings for my bread-and-butter undergraduate course so students can’t agree with everything they read for the course. I’m far from alone in this, and if a student suggests a reading, I’ll say something like the above in terms of adding it to recommended/optional readings. On the other hand, I won’t add a required book in the middle of the semester for several reasons, even if it just won an award and I think it’s fabulous: the students will complain, and it’s illegal in Florida.
That’s right: in public Florida institutions, it’s illegal to add a required book in the middle of the semester. Institutions are now supposed to publish the required books 30 days before the start of a semester, as a symbolic effort to address textbook costs. Never mind that few people in higher ed thinks this will reduce text costs, but it’s a requirement in law.
And as I said, I’m not sure this is really a campaign or an attempt to get publicity for the next poorly-written book by David Horowitz.
I wonder if Horowitz has in mind students challenging our traditional history textbooks with a Marxist or Fascist, not to mention segregationist or nativist, analysis of American history. What, exactly, would be the value of a book like the ones that provided an “analysis” claiming that blacks are inferior to whites and mulattoes are inferior to both? It doesn’t get much more dissenting than that. Any book? Really?
The Podhoretz book suggestion almost made me laugh out loud. Good luck getting 200 copies, or even 25 copies, of that one in your college book store on a few months notice! It would, however, make fascinating reading 29 years later, now that we are trading with those dirty commies. It also is not really all that controversial in that it never argues that Vietnam was a good idea, just shows how we stumbled into that quagmire. Its only flaw is that it doesn’t give enough emphasis to the role Dean Rusk played as a US Army (major? colonel?) in setting in motion US support for the return of colonialism after US soldiers had fought and died along side Ho Chi Minh to wrest control of SE Asia from the Japanese and their French colonial collaborators during WW II. Change that decision in 1945 and history would have been very different, since the Vietnamese had no interest in being a Chinese client state.