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The 101 Most Dangerous Professors in America

CBN News

CBNNews.com – Colorado high school teacher Jay Bennish made national headlines recently, after comparing President Bush to Adolf Hitler.

University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill said the Americans killed on 9-11 deserved it—and it's not just Colorado. Students across the country complain about teachers and professors using the classroom to promote their own personal political beliefs.

Enough is enough, says New York Times bestselling author David Horowitz, who is fighting back. Horowitz describes "the current academic culture" as "bitterly intolerant," and he has written a new book to back up that claim. The title of that book is The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America.

David Horowitz has done an in-depth investigation of what is really happening on our college campuses, and he joins us now from Austin, Texas.

Pat Robertson: David, thank you for being with us. Your book is fascinating. As someone who himself is a college president, I understand academia. How do these guys get onto these campuses, and how do they gain power?

David Horowitz: Well, what happened to our universities is that a radical generation has moved into positions of power in the universities. Ward Churchill, who compared the victims of 9-11 to little Eichmann’s [Adolf Eichmann, head of the Gestapo and a key figure in the Nazi death camps], could not be hired or promoted to a full professor without having his entire department vote to confirm him three times. And he had to have 12 outside experts from other universities write letters of recommendation, and this is someone who has no Ph.D., and whose M.A. is in graphic arts. He is actually an artist, and yet was made full chairman of the Ethic Studies Department. It is an intellectual corruption, and it is really a political corruption that is bigger than the Enron scandal and much worse. Enron was about money. This is about young people's minds and the future of the country. With the exception of a few universities, like yours, this is pervasive. My book, The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America, [includes] secular universities and religious universities, Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, state universities, state colleges, private liberal arts colleges, and institutions from all regions of the country, and from everywhere these radicals have gotten themselves insinuated into entire departments, which they control, and the liberal arts faculties. I estimate that there are 50,000 to 60,000 radical professors who want the terrorists to win and us to lose the war on terror. They regard the terrorists as freedom fighters and America is an imperialist power that oppresses third-world people, and we are the root cause of the attacks on us.

Robertson: They are members of the Weather Underground, and some are killers and murderers?

Horowitz: Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, the leaders of the Weather Underground Terrorists, they are responsible for 30 bombings during the 1970s including the Pentagon and the Capitol. Three of their members tried to blow up a social dance at Fort Dix, which would be attended by 18-year-old draftees and their dates. Fortunately, they blew themselves up before they could detonate that bomb. Bill Ayers on 9-11 – he was interviewed by The New York Times – his only regret? He didn't bomb more. He is a full professor, a distinguished professor of early childhood education at the University of Illinois, and his wife is a law professor at Northwestern. The fact that he is a professor of education, he’s the kind of professor who taught that Colorado high school teacher all of his anti-American doctrine. That is how they get trained in education schools today.

Robertson: Larry Summers, he was Secretary of the Treasury under Bill Clinton, a Democrat, Jewish, distinguished academic, and yet he gets run out of Harvard. What happened?

Horowitz: That shows you. That is how I arrived at my figure of 50,000 or 60,000. Ten percent of the Harvard faculty voted to censure him. Larry Summers was the most powerful university president in the history of the modern research university, for all the reasons that you mention. Yet within four years, he became the first university president to be censured by his own faculty, and when they threatened to do it again, he realized he was crippled, and he was forced to resign. His sins were supporting rotc, opposing divestment from Israel, and asking Cornel West, who is one of these radical ranters, to produce a scholarly paper. That is one of the scandals. These people don’t write scholarly books. Their credentials are really fraudulent. They are just political animals; that’s all Cornell West is. Summers asked him to write a scholarly book that would be reviewed in an academic journal, and not just in TIME magazine, and West walked out of the meeting, saying Larry Summers has a problem with black people, and got a better paying job at Princeton. Cornell West makes a salary of $300,000 a year. He works six hours a week. The average full professor at a state school makes $100,000 and at a private school $150,000. They work six hours a week. They have four months paid vacation and lifetime jobs.

Robertson: Let me ask you this: what about the ratio? It started out maybe 20 or 30 years ago, conservative-liberal maybe in balance. What is it now, in the vast majority of the colleges?

Horowitz: It is already nine to one in liberal arts and social sciences. But, in the next generation, a study was done in Berkeley and Stanford, which showed for all professors, it was seven to one and nine to one, at the two schools. But among junior professors -- assistants and associates -- it is already 30 to one. That is because the left got a blacklist in place 20 years ago. It is ruthless and will exclude libertarians and believing Christians and, of course, conservatives, generally. It has been in place 20-25 years. So there is just a dwindling number of conservatives left on the faculties.

Robertson: You mentioned the search committee. If somebody wants to fill a vacancy with a candidate, there is a search committee set up. There is a chairman of the search committee, and he puts more people on and they search. How does that work?

Horowitz: It is usually composed of three members of the faculty. There might be anywhere between 100 to 800 applicants for a single job. They whittle it down to 14 who may interview at a convention, and three are invited to the campus, so the whole department can look them over. If you have a pool of 800, you can easily select people with whom you have a political affinity. The left refers to this as “revolution by search committee.” The left's idea of universities is like everything else. They are institutions to use to attack the larger society. They don't see them as schools. They see them as indoctrination and training centers.

Robertson: You said Harvard is pretty much gone, and you mentioned the Columbia Journalism School. It is dominated by Left wing all up and down the line. Do you see any hope for academia?

Horowitz: I do, because conservatives and Republicans have been asleep on this. We haven't even been in the battle. Once our students and our parties and our organizations get in the battle, we can affect it in a big way. The American public would not approve of indoctrinating young people and won’t approve of having one side to an issue. It won’t approve of the kind of harassment of students -- Christian, conservatives, and Jewish in the schools -- that goes on. No one is paying attention to this. And, as you know, I have an academic bill of rights, and we have legislation moving in a dozen states. I have hearings in Pennsylvania on academic freedom. I just came back from Kansas where they will get them there. The idea is just to shine a light on what is going on. What you are doing on The 700 Club is very important in this process. If we start fighting back, a lot can change fairly quickly because, while it will take a long time to affect the actual faculties, we can at least make them behave. There is no reason why a high school teacher should be allowed to rant in the classroom on political issues. It is unfortunate that the Colorado school system did not respond well. The teacher is back in the classroom, even though he demonstrated he had no sense of the responsibility of what a teacher is.

Robertson: David, I wish we had more time. I understand our time is running out. Ladies and gentlemen, it is a fascinating book, and take your blood pressure medicine before you read it. The book is The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America. That is just a short list of the 30,000-40,000 of them. They are like termites who have worked themselves into the woodwork of our academic society. It is just appalling.

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