David Horowitz Quotes
Not even Sen. [Joseph] McCarthy was able to repress ideas he opposed as effectively as Harvard's hiring committees have suppressed the conservative viewpoints they despise and fear.
Horowitz, David. The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America. Regnery Publishing, 2006, p. 3.
This quotation illustrates the extreme naivety of some of the Muslim leaders. He and many Muslims actually believe that America and the West are out to assassinate Muslim scientists to prevent Islam from advancing. This is a convenient rationale for the poor scientific level of achievement in modern Islamic cultures. Bashar and other conspiracy theorists pay little attention to the many Muslim scientists who have been and are being trained in American, French, English and other country’s universities. Muslims attend the same classes and learn from the same professors as Western students. None get assassinated. Sectarian violence of Iraq Sunni and Shiite Muslims against each other has tragically taken the lives of some scientists. Almost 1000 years ago Islam and the Arabs had many of the great scientists of the world, but the intellectual stagnation brought about by extreme Islamic fundamentalism curtailed their technical development.
The security system at Los Alamos while the atomic bomb was being developed was absurd. Scientists from all over the country had to be hired quickly. Many of them had friends and relatives who had various left-wing associations; some came from Germany or had German connections. A number of the key scientists were German refugees from Hitler's persecution. The military security people, using their traditional standards, would not clear people if they had any left wing friends or associates or they came from Europe and there were no records to prove that they were not fascists or communists. Most of the refugees got out with their lives and had no records, but they were among the best scientists in the world. J Robert Oppenheimer, the scientific director, and General Leslie Groves needed the scientists as the work had to be done. Groves approved important personnel for hire pending security clearance which never came and which Groves knew would never come. Nonetheless the people were working by the time intelligence officers outside the project realized what was going on. People without clearance had some of the most sensitive jobs at Los Alamos. Not a single one of those people turned out to be a security risk or a spy. There was a spy however who had come the English scientific delegation, but the security people had cleared him. Barnett however, as Oppenheimer’s personal assistant had access to almost everything having to do with the development of the bomb. She never did get cleared for her job.
While this quotation seems bizarre to us in modern America, there was some historical truth of this in Europe. Before political parties, the Church was the dominant political force, and no professor could be appointed whose views did not coincide with those of the church. Later political parties in many parts of Europe did concern themselves with the views of professors. However, America with its strong tradition of private universities built state public universities in the mold of Harvard, Yale, Brown, Columbia and Princeton where national and local politics were not major factors of appointment and retention of professors. Today it is very rare when a state legislature or government allows politics to become a factor in appointments of professors. The University of Virginia is the most dramatic exception where governors of the state serve for 2 years and when a new governor takes office, he replaces all the trustees and the University. These then have allowed politics to become a major factor in some dramatic cases. And the Federal Universities—the military service academies—do allow political views to encroach on the faculty appointment and retention decisions. However, this is rarely partisan in the sense of Democrat or Republican. But Professors who hold views contrary to BOTH political parties are rare.
In some universities would sometimes protest the selection of a commencement speaker and demonstrate. On some of these occasions the school administration withdrew the invitation. In addition to the problem described by Beckel, the university sells out its basic intellectual commitment to hear all ideas and points of view—regardless of how repugnant or evil. Commencement speakers tend to create a bigger problem because of the custom of the university granting the speaker an Honorary Degree. Whereas it is against the academic tradition to censor a speaker and having a speaker does NOT associate the University, the faculty or the students with the views of the speaker. But the granting of the Honorary Degree does imply an institutional approval and admiration of the speaker, and that is fair game for student protest. However in the beginning of the 21st century some extreme left wing students succeeded in intimidating spineless university administrators and trustees into censoring speech and the ideas of the speaker. This was typical behavior of the right wing brownshirts of the 1930s when it was the Fascists who were prohibiting certain speakers—usually left wingers. 80 years later it was the left wing extremists engaging in this undemocratic behavior.
She was dealing with a serious campus situation where an invited speaker, Chief of Police Kelly of New York City was prevented from giving his p resentation on the controversial “Stop and Frisk” rules by student protesters who opposed the practice. Brown’s tradition of hearing anyone on the campus regardless of point of view had been broken to the distress of most students, faculty and alumni.
David Joel Horowitz is an American conservative writer. He is a founder and president of the think tank the David Horowitz Freedom Center (DHFC); editor of the Center's publication, FrontPage Magazine; and director of Discover the Networks, a website that tracks individuals and groups on the political left. Horowitz also founded the organization Students for Academic Freedom.
