Transcript of First David Horowitz-Ward Churchill Debate (audio here)

[prefatory introductions and citations]

[4:50]
Alan Nathan: How's everybody feeling tonight? You ready to rock? It's gonna happen, you know. You put these two together and forget about it. Good evening, everyone, and welcome on behalf of the Students for Academic freedom hosting their first national academic freedom conference debate tonight's event is between their chairman, author and publisher David Horowitz. David, come on out.

[applause]

And University of Colorado Boulder professor Ward Churchill. Mr. Churchill! Please. Professor.

[applause]

Co-hosting the debate are both the Young Americas Foundation and the Center for the Study of Popular Culture. Again, I'm Alan Nathan, host of Battleline, aired nationally on the Radio America Network, and it is my honor to be their moderator for this evening. We also wish to thank CSPAN for their filming of this event, and the coverage of Fox news channel.

Our theme for tonight's debate is "Can politics be taken out of the classroom, and should it be?" Also, the time breakdown will be as follows: 12 minutes to each participant summarizing their respective arguments, followed by a 5-minute rebuttal from each. After that, I'll be asking questions, to which each will be allowed a 5-mintue response, followed by the other's 3 minute rebuttal. at the end of the hour we'll open it up to questions from the audience. Now except for the theme question of the night, all other questions are unknown to Mr. Horowitz and Professor Churchill.

Let us begin. Now, let's see... The opening question to each is: Can politics be taken out of the classroom and should it be? Mr. Horowitz, we'll start with you.

[6:53]
Horowitz: The answer is: Yes it should, and of course it can. I was eighteen years in school, up through the MA level. I never once, from one teacher or one professor, one time in one class, ever heard them express a political opinion or a political point of view. When a teacher becomes a political advocate in the classroom and inflicts their prejudices, opinions, and political ideologies on students, that violates students academic freedom. Academic freedom is not about free speech; it's about free professional speech. It's about the freedom to express yourself in a professional manner within the parameters of a professional discipline and on your expertise.

Professors and teachers have tenure—that means they have lifetime jobs. Politicians don't have lifetime jobs; radio talk show hosts don't have lifetime jobs. And that's because they deal in opinion. Opinion is very important to the functioning of a democracy, but you don't get a lifetime job for expressing an opinion. You get a lifetime job for having an expertise.

The first amendment guarantees to every American the right to embarrass themselves in public. However, if you are professional, when you embarrass yourself, if you violate the professional standards, you are embarrassing your profession and your institution. Soldiers, who risk their lives to defend our first amendment rights, do not have the freedom to go into op-ed columns and give their opinions on the battles they are fighting or the war itself. If you are a pastor, and go into your church on a Sunday, and give a sermon that God doesn't exist, you will be looking for a new job on Monday, first amendment or no.

This establishes or should establish for people what we mean by professional speech. If you are applying for a job as a professor of astronomy, and in the interview you express your belief in astrology, you might not, you might not get that job. The expression of professional speech in the classroom, the discipline of not advocating your political prejudices. well you go to your doctor, you don't expect to get a lecture on the war in Iraq, so why should you get it from your English teacher? The reason you shouldn't get it from your English teacher is because your English teacher is as ignorant as you are and anybody else is in the geopolitics that led and the history that led to the war in Iraq. We're not financing professors—and professors do fairly well. The average state college professor can make up to a hundred thousand a year, and if you're a professor at Harvard, you make a 170 thousand a year. You have a four-month paid vacation, you're expected to be in class six to nine hours a week. And you have this lifetime job.

The whole idea of academic freedom is that professors do many years of research in a very specialized field and they arrive at conclusions that only a few people are able to judge, and we will protect their expert opinions. Not that we want to protect their political prejudices on any issue, ant that's whether they're coming form the right or the left, I couldn't care less. That's not the function of a teacher.

[10:57]

In a democracy, moreover, academic freedom is very important and this principle is very important, because the function of education in a democracy is to open minds, not close them around a particular ideology. There's plenty of space in our society for people to indoctrinate each other or persuade each other of their political prejudices and so forth. A democracy—an education in a totalitarian society is an indoctrination. That is, when you go to school in Havana, or some other totalitarian society or in Tehran these days, what you get is, you get a state doctrine, you get an orthodoxy and the teacher instills that orthodoxy in you.

The very basis of our democratic education is that you are taught how to think, not what to think. The teacher is supposed to teach you what the evidence is, how to assemble it, how to construct an argument, but not what conclusion to reach at the end of the argument. We are supposed to be developing—that's what our educational system is about: citizens who think for themselves. And that is why the battle to take politics out of the classroom is such a vital battle in our democracy today.

Whole areas... there's been a sea change in our universities in the last 30 years. I talked with a friend who was at Harvard, and graduated Harvard in 1979, never—like myself—ever heard a professor express a political opinion or point of view in a classroom. But in the last 30-odd years whole fields have developed which are not academic fields, that is they are not disinterested studies, for example of women, the study of women, women's studies. They are ideological fields, they are political parties within the university, Where students are taught a doctrine—which it happens in women's studies is radical feminism.

In peace studies, students are taught that the American military is bad, that America is an imperialist country, and that terrorists are—terrorism is another name—that "terrorist" is another name for "freedom fighter." These are ideological disciplines. The professors are not scholars, they are not people investigating phenomena without a preconceived conclusion, and they are a threat to the very fiber of our democracy and our educational system.

Worse yet are the K-12 schools, where you have much, students who are more vulnerable to indoctrination, but of course the issue here is not whether every student is brainwashed, the issue is what is appropriate to an academic classroom. In a high school somewhere in this—actually it was a middle school somewhere in this country—a teacher assigned a paper: "Explain why Abraham Lincoln was a racist." This is not an American assignment, if I can use that word. This is an attempt to indoctrinate students in a particular point of view, by a, in this case by a middle school teacher, who's not a scholar of Lincoln to begin with but who has an ideological prejudice against Lincoln and is inflicting this on his students.

[14:39]

A few weeks ago we all had the privilege of listening to Jay Bennish, a high school teacher in Colorado who was taped by one of his students, go into a twenty-minute rant at 14-year-olds in which among other things he compared Bush to Hitler, he said the inhabitants of the World Trade Center deserved their fates because they were FBI agents and they were also, even worse, businesspeople. Said that—[aside to some heckling not apparent in the recording] I'm glad we have some supporters of terrorism in the room—said that, he defined—'you have to understand the American economic system. Get this definition down: Capitalism. And capitalism,' he said, 'was a anti-human system because—and so was the American economic system—because we don't provide for the needs of every man, woman and child on the planet.' This is a doctrine known as communism, which resulted in the deaths of 120 million people in the last hundred years and failed economically—about 60 million of them died from famines induced by the crackpot economic theories of Karl Marx.

Now if he was expressing the—the point here is this teacher is an ignoramus. But he's teaching his, he's ranting at high school students because he has been taught an ideology, probably in the educational schools, because the education schools now teach "social justice" which is just a, it's a code for socialism or communism or redistribution of wealth, or what have you—

Nathan: [interjection in response to audience noise] Could we have some respect? Thank you.

Horowitz: —is taught in education schools, which now have a political doctrine as a requirement for getting an Ed. degree. And yet we have teacher unions across the country, which are encouraging teachers to indoctrinate students in the classroom and in their schools—I have witnessed this firsthand. We have teachers across the country who are encouraging students to cut school, to go out on demonstrations on, for example American borders, and display both the teachers ignorance [derisive cheers from audience] and the students' ignorance and I guess some members in this audience' ignorance [applause] of what constitutes a nation. There's no nation in the world that has as porous borders as the United States does now. And there's no nation in the world—whether it's a leftwing nation or a rightwing nation—that doesn't care about establishing, establishing its borders.

But the issue here really is instead of educating young people—and, as I say, it wouldn't matter to me if right-wingers were doing this, It happens that teacher unions are leftwing and most teachers these days are leftwing—wouldn't matter what the ideology was. The purpose of a—certainly of a secondary education—in a democracy is the teach, to create citizens who can think for themselves, not citizens who have politically correct ideas, who follow a party line of any particular party. And that's why, in my view, we must take politics out of the classroom. It's not only— We can, obviously, because American classrooms didn't have politics, didn't have teachers—I'm not talking about isolated instances, there was always people who don't observe the rules and standards of their professions, but we didn't have, you know, entire cohorts of teachers who thought that it was correct and appropriate teaching to indoctrinate 14-year-olds—and trust me, this is going down, this will go down to the first-grade level—in their pet political ideologies, however discredited they have been by the history, the really sad and tragic history of the 20th century.

Nathan: Mr. Horowitz, thank you very much. We appreciate that. Professor Churchill: Can and should politics be taken out of the classroom?
[19:23]

Churchill: They cannot. To examine any phenomena having to do with the political reality, the socioeconomic reality, with questions of predication in law, with any of the issues that concern us as citizens, there is by definition a political interpretation at hand. It can be one that endorses the status quo; it can be one that reflects what—in the 1950s education system, whether at the elementary level or at the university and doctoral level—was referred to as consensus history. Or it can be one that is critical, that challenges one or more, or even all of these aspects. The curriculum in these domains is inherently political, and the interpretation that is presented will be inherently the political interpretation applied by whoever is serving as instructor. There is no alternative to that.

There is no detachment, cool application of objectivity, impartiality, or any of the rest of that that was passed off at the turn of the 20th century as constituting professional standards. That is a lie; it is an impossibility. It may be a lie that's actually believed in a delusional sense by those who purport to subscribe to it, but more usually it's an exercise in cynicism, offered as apology, a way of sterilizing and sanitizing that which is inconvenient in the opinion of the greatest number of people, or a block of greatest power in a society, or to put it any other way, the status quo.

Politics in the classroom being unavoidable, the political stance of the instructor, of the professor, should be owned. There should be truth in advertising. That should be signified up front, not in order to indoctrinate students, but quite the opposite effect, to inform students before the fact of the nature of the interpretation. It should be undertaken in this fashion on the basis of extending a challenge, not that you must agree with me but you must accept the fact that there are many interpretations. You have, in the course of your life—virtually from birth at this point given the pervasiveness of media exposure—you've heard what would be called the orthodox interpretation. Occasionally, you've heard challenges within circumscribed parameters. There are many other voices and many other points of view. They're right, they're wrong, they're some combination of the two, just like orthodoxy has its elements of correctitude, its elements of falsity. This is the inculcation of critical faculty which is at issue here, to understand the inherency of political interpretation based upon certain factors having to do with existence and position economically, socially and otherwise in society.

There is no consensus, there is no homogeneity; there is no truth. And that's really what's at issue here: the subscription to the idea that that which is most popular by those most powerful or most populous somehow or another translates into cool-distanced, objectively-defined truth, and that you can measure gradient deviations from that truth according to some professional calibrated scale. This is a myth, and is a myth that precludes, ultimately, critical thought.

The nature of the university enterprise in this country has undergone an evolution. I don't know what educational system David Horowitz participated in the 1950s, but I can, since he wanted to give anecdotes, respond with an anecdote of my own. [It] comes from the eighth grade in a rural community in central Illinois—Elmwood Grade School, for those of you who want the precise information—which in the process of undertaking a lesson in civics we held a mock election for President during the Presidential campaign of 1960. Nobody knew much about the candidates, being eighth graders, but we got a little prep out of the Weekly Reader, and then we had our vote. And I voted socialist. I didn't know what a socialist was. I wasn't from New York. I was from a town of 1,400 people in the corn fields of Illinois. It just seemed like a cool thing to do —to me—at the time. So I voted it. Socialist, straight ticket.

I was detained after school for the next two weeks. That's ten detentions for having had the audacity to deviate from the norm—that is indoctrination. And the entire context of the 1950s that created the consensus history and the appearance of truth in opinion because ultimately, there being no truth per se, we all are working on the basis of opinion. The only question that adds up to professional credentials in the sense that Mr. Horowitz was using the term has to do with the nature of how informed that opinion is. But in informing opinion, no one having encyclopedic knowledge, or undifferentiated experience, there's going to be differences in outlook, and those differences in outlook and the conclusions drawn there from need to be explored if you're going to have someone who actually in the end is capable of thinking for themselves.

This enterprise that we call a university was based on a model. It's been signified in rather direct terms, certain periods in our history; it's been signified in rather less direct terms, nonetheless the model was that of the German university. And the German university was supposedly science-driven, and developed these terms through a misinterpretation of Ranke by social scientists and historians in the late 19th century to create this impression of the application of wissenschaft ["science"], the German term for that, in a way never intended by the authors. And that misapplication of the German concept of how one goes about acquiring knowledge, of knowing, was replicated in a misapplication of context.

You have something rather unique that emerged in this country as early as 1819 in the Dartmouth decision. You see, the way academic freedom is framed and preserved in European law is you have a different construction of property, which is not at the expense of private property, nor at the expense of public property. You have a completely third and separate dominion—actually you have several other dominions in European and continental law—but the one that's applicable to the university is what's called "foundation." Foundation exists in a unique form; these do not translate terminologically, perfectly from German; the conceptualization is poorly understood here. But ultimately, the university as such, to be a university has to existance in the form of property that is not owned by any entity, but within which project the property being necessary to its execution those who participate have various freeholding standings. The university in terms of property fulfills no mission. It is understood by the social whole that the undertaking of higher learning is necessary and beneficial to the society in all its dimensions. Therefore those with the knowledge to profess—not to be professional—but to know and be able to coherently profess what they deeply believe and to explain why, have an equal stake in this. They do not serve as employees of a board of directors or an administration; they're co-equal partners in making the project work, they cannot be fired for political reasons; they cannot be fired for reasons of offending the sensibilities of those with particular social position. they can only be fired by their colleagues.
[28:56]

In the 1819 decision that I was referring to, Justice Marshall redefined the form of property vestiture in the University as being something subject to—in effect, owned by—a governing board in the form of a corporation—that being the trustees, the regents, whatever—converting that freeholding status of faculty and the obligation to profess that which is believed into an employer-employee responsibility in which the functions to be served by education could be defined and were in fact defined by external sources.

Government—being a rather significant contributor to defining what the purpose of education was to be and those who had owning capacity—it employed people, being co-equal partner in some sense in that enterprise. That ultimately nullifies the academic, or at least the intellectual, endeavor, redefining academics in terms of producing a product. It was likened at one point, in Columbia Teachers College in the early part of the 20th century, to producing finished students just as a factory produces finished nails. They have utility. That utility defines their function. Their function defines the form of education they're to receive—both in terms of technical abilities that can be applied to specific purposes in the outer world, but in how they look at the world and therefore their function in the world in accordance with a predetermined truth of what is right and proper.

That needs to be challenged. That has to be challenged if there are to be things like critical faculties inculcated in a populace, that that informed citizenry that is imbued with those critical faculties to make the kinds of choices that are necessary to allow for a democratic interaction of the various elements of the society; if they do not exist, as I believe they don't, that provides a basis for them to emerge.

I have no right to indoctrinate my students, but somebody who works in a corporate boardroom a thousand miles away, having no knowledge of what it is that I know and believe, has no greater prerogative to constrain what it is that I say and allow my students to interrogate.

Thank you.
[31:44]
[applause]

Nathan: Professor Churchill, thank you. Relevant to the theme question of the night, both of our participants will be entitled a 5-minute counter-response. Mr. Horowitz.

Horowitz: Sure. If I, if I hadn't been a radical in 1960, working hard to overthrow the American system, but had been organizing students for academic freedom, I would have defended Ward Churchill in his Illinois middle school, because that was a violation of his academic freedom. As it happens, I was a Marxist at Columbia in the McCarthy 50s, and I wrote Marxist papers, and I was never singled out by my professors, and was treated the way I think all students should be treated today. 

Professor Churchill has it either-or—either support of or critical of. How about "about?" You can teach "about" a controversial issue. Politics as a subject is fine for certain classrooms where it's appropriate. Not English classrooms, but political science and—we used to have "social studies" when I was young in school. You could teach "about" a controversy, abortion would be a good example, and the professor can present both sides of the argument and teach students how to assemble the evidence, but should leave—must leave—the conclusion of a—the conclusion on a controversial issue of which there can only be opinion, up to the students themselves. That's a basic proposition.

I was in Kansas the other week, testifying about the Kansas State— At Kansas State, there's a social work program and— Social Work 510. Students sign up and they pay money, and the people of the state have financed a program that's supposed to train people in social work. It's called social welfare. It has one textbook and only one. The entire course is a chapter by chapter, class by class reading of a Stalinist cartoon called The People's History of the United States written by one Howard Zinn, a lifelong, self-declared enemy of this country, which is really irrelevant to what I'm saying, it's really irrelevant to the issue because the problem is one of the chapters, one of the classes—one of the lessons in social work is "Vietnam: the Impossible Victory." in other words, celebrating the totalitarian conquest of south Vietnam.

What does that have to do with social work? Nothing. What does this professor know about history? What is the professor's expertise in history, geopolitics, war and peace, Vietnam? Nothing. Zero. This is what's known as consumer fraud, but it is also a profound political corruption of the academic enterprise, because this professor could not do this without the support of her department, which means that the social work department is itself corrupt. And I could have told you that in advance, because when you look at the mandates that they have boilerplate— Social work is now about social justice, it's not about social work, it's not about a profession of helping people, it's about an indictment of the free market system. Can people make indictments of the free market system? Yes. But not under the pretense of an academic course and an academic subject of a professional discipline. It shouldn't be done. This corruption will damage our univer—it already has.

The University of Colorado is a school that because of a political controversy has lost tens of millions of dollars and is in, it's in crisis as we speak. I actually—since I'm referring to the Ward Churchill crisis—I defended Professor Churchill's right to go on the internet and say what he pleases, and I would defend any professor's right to do that. And I have no indication of what Professor Churchill teaches in his classroom and have not criticized his classroom performance because I don't know, I don't know what it is.

But this is an indication of the serious problem that our universities are facing. So for their own—the defense of universities in America and of our educational system we have to take politics out of the classroom, like that course at Kansas State. And I could stand here all evening and describe courses like this all across the country. I was just at Duke University. They have a course training students in Marxism called "Marxism and Society." It's part of the literature department. So it's—And the head of it is a professor of film. So these are people ignorant of economics, ignorant of sociology, ignorant of history, ignorant of the history of Marxism, who are in the college ranked fifth by US News & World Report in the nation are indoctrinating students in a theory which they don't understand and which can have no good end.
[37:30]

Nathan: And we thank you for that, Mr. Horowitz. [applause] Professor Churchill, your rebuttal.

Churchill: There's something contradictory embedded in there for the theory that students know nothing about, then perhaps they should learn it—isn't that—have to do with the acquisition of knowledge. Well, I don't know the context you were using as example, Mr.. Horowitz. In the last instance I do know my own. And by your own assessment, what the issue is in my case at Colorado has to do with things that had nothing to do with my classroom performance—in other words the posting of an opinion on a website which was never even claimed in my vita.

On the other hand, with regard to my classroom performance, I do have a college of arts and sciences best teacher of the year award for 1994; I was voted overwhelmingly by the students last spring amidst the onslaught of controversy to be the best teacher of undergraduates in the arts & sciences—an award [which] is withheld at the present time as a result of the controversy that comes as a part of the op-ed. I had the highest scores in A&S for the teaching done in the last semester. And yet, as you put it, tens of thousands, or millions, I'm not sure which you said, at this point—

[interjection by Horowitz] Millions.

—of dollars are being withheld. Why? Because there is a political determination that one is not free to voice political opinion if one is engaged in the academic enterprise, and that's a curtailment by definition of employment of your right to free speech and opinion under the first amendment. Makes it a composite. I'm supposed to adhere to a line of acceptability, convenience, comfortability, appropriate interpretation, in school, out of school, all the time—that is political repression. That is the stifling, not only of academic freedom, but of intellectual discourse, political opinion, the diversity thereof, in all dimensions of society.

That's rather problematic, I would say, in terms of the development of critical-faculty thinking-citizenry-engagement in the reality of the political discourse. So I'm not quite sure where you find a basis, a problem, in terms of the academic institution and the academic endeavor itself as opposed to a broader problem of doing exactly what you say isn't done, in a sense, which is the constraint of legitimate articulation in, as you put it, again, the appropriate classrooms. My classes are the appropriate forum. I don't teach English. I see no reason why an English teacher couldn't bring some of these issues to bear for purposes of stimulating engagement in articulation, constructing arguments, arriving at conclusions that are defensible. All things have to do with the craft of writing.

But I don't even have that consideration. In my arena it has to do with the analysis of the historical evolution of relations between different peoples in the process of constructing the United states, and interrogating them through the lens of law and policy. Making the arguments, as you put it, that come from both sides. One hardly knows how one could not represent the other side if one is talking about judicial opinion at the supreme court level from the perspective of American Indians—and I do teach American Indian studies. All of those opinions are articulated by the other side, at the level of the chief justice, and the associate justices of the supreme court. When you're talking about law, it's the formulation of reality fronted by the representative body of governance in the United States—it's the Congress speaking. Now, if we can't analyze that in its own right, and interrogate it from another perspective, we have no possibility of critical engagement. Thank you.
[42:13]

Nathan: [inaudible] Professor Churchill.... Now you're both mine. First question for Mr. Horowitz. Provided the form in class is an open one, in which the students are genuinely permitted to express dissenting opinions to the teacher, would that be a time when you might be comfortable with politics in the classroom?

Horowitz: Yes. However, the code has to be re-established that the classroom is a professional arena where political advocacy by the professor is inappropriate. At the University of Colorado I do have a—as I said I don't have an in-class example of how Professor Churchill teaches, and I do defend any—I would defend any leftist, conservative, libertarian, or what-have-you their right to, as citizens, outside the classroom, to express their political views.

A law professor at the University of Colorado in a property law class said to his class 'You all know what the 'R' in Republican stands for—it stands for Racist.' And when a law student objected, said 'We have too many Nazis like you on this campus.' That is the kind of in-classroom speech I'm referring to. I've been at—I was just at a law school, western New England Law School, 38 law professors, not a single conservative on the faculty. And by the accounts of the 12 conservative—they're actually members of the Federalist Society, law students I spoke to—the name of—if Clarence Thomas or Scalia comes up in a classroom, it comes up from the professor with sneers, gratuitous sneers, not respected. I mean you can communicate in all different ways your political prejudice and ideology, it doesn't do to just have the other side. It has to do with respecting arguments, respecting the parties to these disputes, and trying to encourage the students to think through the alternatives by themselves. You give them the equipment to do that, you don't impose your prejudices on them. That simple.
[44:41]
[applause]

Nathan: [inaudible] Thank you, Mr. Horowitz. Professor Churchill, we're going to give you three minutes for rebuttal, after which I'll then be asking you a question. Go ahead.

Churchill: Well, I think the whole purpose for interrogation is often confused with prejudice. If you have another standpoint, you're obligated to explain and defend that standpoint and that by way of demonstrating technique of critical engagement. The question is whether you're requiring the individuals who constitute the class to arrive at the same conclusion you do. You're obligated to demonstrate technique; it's called methodology; they have whole courses on it. [pause] I think I'll let it go at that. Again—

Nathan: Oh. Okay, we can move along then—

Churchill: —The purpose of a professor is to profess, not simply to impart sterile information. You can go to a trade school to get simply the delivery of the technical data. That's what distinguishes a university from a trade school and a professor from someone who teaches vo-tech. You are to have arrived at conclusions on the basis of tangible evidence that can be open to scrutiny, criticizing, and occasionally—as I know your professors did—dismissing[?] some alternative explanations of phenomena as simply ludicrous and not worth the—of being pursued because they lead to a dead end. Now if a student wants to go there they can go there anyway but you're obligated to inform them of what it is that you've learned and to profess what you've come to believe on the basis of that learning.
[46:33]
[applause]

Nathan: All right, thank you, Professor Churchill. Now.... My first question for you, Professor, is: How would you respond to critics suggesting that a teacher's politics should not be espoused to students because they're essentially a trapped audience signed-on to learn about a subject specific to that class?

Churchill: Well, there's a couple of problems there. One is, if it's a required course I think you got a different set of obligations, but also a different set of expectations with regard to delivery. Required courses tend to be building blocks, fundamentals. I don't teach those courses. If you're not teaching a course that students are required to take, I suppose—in view of the sensibilities of the bulk of the audience tonight—I should call it a market situation. You go shopping, because you're interested. and if you're not ultimately interested in the course, you probably had not ought to be in it, you do have an option to opt out; there are withdrawal periods and so forth. The only problem with that procedure would be if you actually deceived the students with regard to what your point of view, your posture, your political outlook, and other relevant factors of that sort were at the front end so they could make a informed choice as to whether that was where they wanted to be with an elective course.

Once that's out of the way and they've made that choice, you're obligated to proceed on the basis of what you've come to believe to explain, including as much information as is humanly possible within the constraints of the course time-limits and conclusions you've drawn therefrom—to profess, in other words, a part of which is eliciting comparable response from students. Take any position you want but the key here is going to have to be you need to support it. With all due respect to Fox News, do not bring me in a regurgitation of Bill O'Reilly's opinion from last night and pass it off as your opinion. Be able to defend what you're saying, that's the key to the project, that's the key to the enterprise, that in fact is the enterprise, which goes by the name of critical engagement, critical thinking, that results in an informed citizenry, capable of making the choices that an informed citizenry needs to make in order to guarantee democratic process.
[49:10]

Nathan: Thank you, Professor Churchill.

Churchill: Yes, sir.

[cross-talk]

Nathan:  One second. Mr. Horowitz, your three-minute rebuttal, and then I'll give you another question.

Horowitz: Okay, yeah.... If you're just profess—I mean, I can profess. Anybody in this room can profess. You know, turn in your tenure. Why do professors get lifetime jobs if they're just in the classroom to give their opinions on issues that they're not qualified to give opinions on in the first place, or issues that are controversial and that have no right answer? You know, Whether you're for or against abortion, whether you're for or against the war in Iraq, whether you're for or against the first world war, the second world war, is a matter of opinion and anybody can profess one side or the other. Why are students paying, you know, $4,000 a course for, you know, an informed opinion, or just for a prejudice, which is what, you know, it winds up being in the end.

And it's not really true that students can just drop out of a course. And if they do, there's a penalty. The univer— We had a student at the University of Georgia [who] signed up for a course in the First and Second World Wars and the first day of the course the professor went into a rant about how George Bush was a liar and a coward because he shirked his national guard duty, which had nothing to do with the course, and the student rightly was concerned that—being a college republican and known as a college republican—he would not get a fair shake in the course and therefore—he was a history major, and the First and Second World Wars are pretty important, you know, if your subject is history—and had to drop out. Students are a captive audience, and it's— you can't just go caveat emptor.

Also, all these universities are violating the, you know—when they sucker the parents into paying the $40,000 or $20,000 or whatever it is a year, or—some state schools are up eight, ten, twelve thousand dollars—they talk about academic freedom, they talk about professionalism, they talk about how their professors are these scholars in the fields, and then they inflict on the students social work courses which are, you know, use a cartoon textbook by Howard Zinn about, you know, Christopher Columbus—it actually starts with Christopher Columbus, which has nothing to do with social work. So this is just a question of standards. I'm sure you would want the accountants at Enron to follow accounting principles.

The issue here is: Follow academic standards and professional standards in the classroom, and these include a scholarly disinterest, and an academic approach to subjects, not using subjects as a political platform to recruit students to political causes.
[52:11]
[applause]

[52:11]
[applause]

Nathan: Mr. Horowitz, those advancing and advocating politics in the classroom argue that if we really support academic freedom then freedom of speech is an integral part of it. Consequently, how can you stop political discourse in the classroom without compromising academic freedom?

Horowitz: Well you can't stop—I thought you said—you have to make a distinction between talking about controversial subjects and political issues, and urging a commitment to one side of the controversy. That's the distinction. Stanley Fish, who was a very well-known liberal scholar—foremost Milton scholar in the country—headed the notorious Duke English department in the days of its deconstructionism and so forth, has written about this. And he said the only—a professor must not preach for the war, against the war, for morality, against morality. The professors can only preach the scholarly virtues, whatev—you know, integrity, of diligence, and so forth, candor, honesty—that's what a professor can advocate. This does not mean you cannot teach about controversial subjects. You can. You just do not see the classroom as a ground for recruiting students to your vision, which is a vision based on ideology, based on prejudice, based on opinion of the world.
[53:55]

Nathan: Okay. Professor Churchill, your rebuttal.

Churchill: Well, I don't know that I'm competent to speak to how one should teach social work, but then I suspect your credentials in that regard might be a little suspect, as well. It does occur to me that to be able to engage in bettering the social condition or situation which one's clients finds one's self it might be appropriate to have some understanding of how they got there. And knowing that the melting pot theory—which was held to be a sort of social truth for generations wasn't exactly so—the relationships between the groups that find themselves unfortunately situated—I'm sanitizing my language at this particular point—and that which might be called mainstream society could be rather appropriate. One might know how to approach one's clients in an effective way on that basis. And so perhaps reading this comic book history—which seems to be accorded a great deal of respect in certain quarters, among trained historians, for example, which some of us are not—might be brought to bear, and effectively. I don't know that I would agree that it would be appropriate for a social work course, whatever its parameters were to find in a catalog as being should consist only as a reading of Zinn, but I see no reasonable basis whatsoever to peremptorily exclude it because it has to do with historical formation of social class and ethnicity and so forth in the United States reflecting on motive and so forth and results. Nor do I see a reason to exclude it because you don't like it. [applause]
[55:58]

Nathan: Professor Churchill, our host, the Students for Academic Freedom, are passionately behind the Academic Bill of Rights with many of its principles currently incorporated into the authorization bill for the higher education act at the federal level. At its core the academic bill of rights says that, quote, "the freedom to teach and to learn depend upon the creation of appropriate conditions and opportunities on the campus as a whole, including the classrooms and lecture halls." Question: If a teacher's lecture is ever dominated by his or her own ideology, is there a potential—is there a potential—for marginalizing the subject meant to be taught because of the ideology that was taught in its place?

Churchill: Could you repeat the last part, 'the ideology that was meant to be taught as opposed to—'

Nathan: If a teacher's lecture is ever dominated by his or her own ideology, is there a potential for marginalizing the subject that was meant to be taught because of the ideology that was taught in its place?

Churchill: Ah.

Nathan: Ahhh, yes.

Churchill: Okay, now I understand the question. Well I thought I made it clear in the first instance that in effect there's going to always be a tone of ideology having to do with interpretation from the standpoint of whoever the instructor is, that's the unavoidable part. We all have as thinking beings, points of view, stations, interests, experience, backgrounds, loyalties—these all come to bear.

We're not computers. If you were going to be taught by computer, you wouldn't end up with any appreciation of the subject matter. If I'm wrong about that, do feel free to sign up for a computer course, rather than a university course, but I don't think that is the nature of the enterprise. 

Yeah, it's— it's possible for subject matter to get distorted. Of course it is. But the questions really devolve or relate themselves back I think in terms of delivery to what are the criteria that I've already outlined, which is soliciting challenge to one's point of view if you're the instructor, to facilitate that engagement in critique and not to be concerned with the idea that the right answer, your truth, whatever that may be, is the only possible answer and grade students according to that scale as if it was a math exam.

But I have another point of confusion here, that I understood Students for Academic Freedom to be a conservative organization. And the idea that the almighty federal government, the state, in other words, is going to legislate how courses are taught and who's to teach them, and according to what criteria seems rather anti-conservative to me. Or is it only things which you don't like that the government should not meddle in? Are we going to be consistent or not consistent here? Sounds rather Marxist to me, actually.
[applause]
[59:04]

Nathan: Mr. Horowitz, your counterpoint.

Horowitz: Professor Churchill has—just to go back to the previous question to begin with—shifted the ground, 'cause I never said, much as I despise Howard Zinn and his book, that that book should not be in a course, and I didn't even say that it might not be in a social work course, although would I think it would be pretty odd include in that curriculum. I described a course which is exclusively a chapter-by-chapter reading of the Zinn book. That means that that professor—like some people here think that Howard Zinn is, you know, he's their ideological prophet—and is trying to, trying to indoctrinate students under the pretense of teaching them social work. And the doctrines of Howard Zinn, which are the doctrines of a very, very crude and vulgar Marxism—I guess I've written several books on Marxism.

The, but—Professor Churchill, in discussing the welfare course, shows what a slippery slope it is once you slip the professional standard. Social work is, it's a professional discipline, and it's teaching people how to, you know, minister within the framework of—and this was about social welfare, you know, social welfare policies. What radicals want to do is to get outside the text and the discipline and start bringing in the ideologies. So we're gonna talk about the melting pot, we'll talk about institutional racism—a fantasy of the Left—we'll talk about, we'll talk about the unfair distribution of income and so forth and so on. I think that you illustrate the problem if you don't stay within strictures of a—you don't have the discipline, you don't observe the discipline, because then we can just slip into our prejudices.

The Academic Bill of Rights is not an attempt to get government to run universities. The legislation before Congress, for example, federal legislation, is a sense of Congress, which has yet to, it has just passed the House, but has yet to pass the Senate. It's an attempt to get the attention of administrators who already have academic standards and academic freedom positions that they are violated every day and in many departments, not just a few, and by whole departments. And I have shown in my testimonies before legislative committees, I begin with the academic freedom provisions that are up on the web, in the university catalog, which will say things—to give a simple one, the 1940—they'll say 'a professor may teach his point of view but must not introduce controversial matter that's irrelevant to the subject'—i.e., a little side lecture on Katrina as a, you know, as Republican racism, or the war in Iraq as, you know, an immoral event, or so forth. It's very clear, and nobody's enforcing it, nobody. And so I went to legislators because I could not go to administrators unless I have at my back a legislator saying—

Nathan: I've gotta call time. 

Horowitz: —"hey, you guys, do the right thing."
[1:02:53]

Nathan: I've gotta call time so I can ask you your question. [applause] Mr. Horowitz, this same Academic Bill of Rights also supports quote 'the values of pluralism, diversity, opportunity, critical intelligence, openness and fairness that are the cornerstone of American society.' My question to you is this: Given that politics is the art and science of government, and that government is the mechanism by which politics are exercised upon the people, would denying a teacher at least some political latitude work against some of those cornerstones of American society?

Horowitz: It depends what you mean by political latitude. As I said, a professor is free—it really depends on what you mean by political latitude. If it's about the politics, that's fine. I even think it's fine for a professor to say, you know, I prefer this alternative. I don't see anything wrong with that. What's wrong—

Nathan: So you're okay with sharing perspectives and having a point-counterpoint dialog in the classroom.

Horowitz: Of course. Of course. What's wrong is when a—

Nathan: It's all one way.

Horowitz: When a professor clearly is using the classroom to indoctrinate students in his or her preferred ideology. And I say, there are entire departments, the department of women's studies in the University of Santa Cruz, California, has renamed itself the department of feminist studies, and it tells you, when you, it says, you know, what kind of job can you get with a women's studies degree, it says, well, having learned about oppression, racism, sexism and all the other leftwing "isms," you can, you can go and work for NOW, NARAL, and so forth. It's really clear; it's indoctrination and recruitment. And go to government to change the world. That's an ideology; it doesn't have a place in an academic curriculum.
[1:04:50]

Nathan: All right. [applause] Professor Churchill, your rebuttal.

Churchill: Yeah, [inaudible] There seems to be—I don't know. It like you're rowing with one oar, David.

Horowitz: It's a big oar, my friend.

Churchill: Because, somehow or another—well, it'll get you around in a nice little circle. Lazy circle, fast circle, depends on how fast you row with that one oar. But if you wind up back in the same place without ever having examined or allowing the audience to examine the totality of the situation, which rather outweighs what you're talking about, even assuming that it's true.

I have recollection, in fact, I have the quotes from Samuel Elliott Morrison and various others of the presidents elected by the AHA making a powerful argument—and an unequivocal argument—for the need to write "patriotic history." That was the term used. And the association, professional association, having to do with the social sciences, virtually echoing that, and not once but repeatedly. For twenty years.

And we have a situation— which as a former editor of Ramparts I'm sure you're well-aware—of the CIA underwriting the preparation and publication of over a thousand scholarly texts. This is your idea of unbiased, balanced, professional scholarship? There's never been a consequence imposed as a result of that. We can take this clear back to World War I with the committee for public information, where you had the elite of American historians come in in government service and falsify history—and this is not denied. [one-second blank spot in the audio] for patriotic purposes. What happened to all that impartiality and professional standards, because these are a violation of every professional standard imaginable. 

We have at present a national archivist, which is the top station achievable by a American historian, presiding over the national archives and scholarly access to that archive who has never yet released a single document upon which he based his two major historical works. This is the cardinal violation of professional standards, but not imposed upon those who speak in a voice and arrive at a conclusion that are reinforcing of consensus history, orthodoxy, ultimately the status quo.

If you arrive at conclusions that resonate favorably, standards do not apply. it's only in a question of critique and dissent, where you question the status quo, where standards suddenly become a concern and we're all worried about politicizing the academy. That was a thoroughgoing[?] ideological [alitization?] of the academy that occurred during the period I'm talking about when Morrison was speaking, and the CIA was funding the books, and consensus history, in a term we know, it was consolidated.
[1:08:16]

Horowitz: I— I think it's you who have brought us right back to the beginning of the conversation. I think that the CIA funding scholarship was a corruption of the academic and intellectual enterprise. I happened to be in a different place when that was happening. I don't think— I think that Samuel Elliott Morrison statement is, again, a violation of academic standards. But I don't see that that changes the argument at all. I mean, you want to—and it shows the contradiction you get yourself in—you want to attack that, but then you want to establish the same thing, only on the Left. And that— [applause] I'm saying we have a society. you know, I mean our culture is very politicized—
[1:09:13]

Nathan: [talking over Horowitz] Tell you what. I'm looking, I'm looking at the clock. I gotta stick to the format to give the good people here to have a chance to have a shot at you guys. Last question. Professor Churchill. Much has been written about Aurora, Colorado's Overland High School geography teacher Jay Bennish. Now, one of his students, Sean Allen, recorded Mr. Bennish giving an in-class characterization of the United States as the most violent nation on earth, and said that President Bush's State of the Union speech was quote-unquote "eerily similar to the speeches of Adolf Hitler." My question to you is this: While you may be comfortable with politics in the college classroom, do you feel differently about the high school classrooms? Should we have different standards because the students are younger?

Churchill: There should probably be some difference in standards based upon the difference in expectations of capacity for critical engagement. You have to establish a basis once this should be done. And I'm at a disadvantage here because I have not heard the Bennish tape. Although my understanding as it was reported in print media, is that there was an imputation of statements to Mr. Bennish that he did not make. For example, he did not, himself, as I—again, as it's reported in the media—he did not refer to George Bush as Adolf Hitler; he did not make that comparison. What he said—

Nathan: [interrupting] He said the speeches were eerily similar to those of Adolf Hitler. Denotatively or connotatively, we're pretty much there.
[applause]

Churchill: I didn't see reportage on that, I can't address it. I'm—

Nathan: Well, I heard the audio tape. Trust in my veracity—he said it.

Churchill: All right.

[inaudible comment from the audience]

Nathan: Oh no, I am very inclined to beat up on this gentleman each and every week on my show. He's on my Friday— I am merciless. I'm a centrist. I want the Republicans out of our bedrooms, the Democrats out of our wallets, and both out of our First and Second Amendment rights—but that's another deal. So I want to go back to this gentleman here.

Churchill: [inaudible] think libertarians are crazy, so okay.

Nathan: But go ahead, you were saying....

Churchill: I heard that he had said— that he had said there were people out there in the world for a series of reasons that viewed George Bush essentially as Adolf Hitler, which doesn't seem to me that startling an analogy given that George Bush or Cheney—one or the other—they take turns comparing various people they don't like as heads of state to Adolf Hitler. The last one, I think, was Hugo Chavez, and I'm not necessarily the founding member of the Hugo Chavez Fan Club, that's irrelevant. To compare him to Hitler is absurd. This is a national leader. The fact of the matter is out there, there are a lot of people that look at George Bush as Adolf Hitler. And I'm not sure it's inappropriate for high school students to be aware of that fact and to come to grips with the implications of that fact. Why are they viewing him that way? They may decide it's an entirely defamatory portrayal. They may decide something else, but that is a tangible fact, reported even in the US media as being true, so why not discuss it?

[applause]

And I don't question your veracity.
[1:12:39]

Nathan: Oh, thank you. Mr. Horowitz, your rebuttal, and then we're going to open it up to the people.

Horowitz: All right. I actually heard the tape. It was a twenty-minute rant at the top of his lungs. It was nothing like the discourse that Professor Churchill and I have had here. Now, if Ward is on a platform somewhere where I am, you'll hear a very different tone. But in a classroom, particularly a classroom with 14-year-olds, this is an example of a teacher who has no idea of what the obligations and responsibilities of a teacher are, and I think it is a, it is a sad day for American education that he would be re-instated with obviously no penalty. And let me say that the young man who made this tape, and who is a hero in the battle for academic freedom, Sean Allen, is in the audience—
[applause]
[1:13:35]

Nathan: All right. You all set? Folks, we want to hear from you. Anybody have any questions? That lady with the sunglasses on her head, I believe? Please rise. For whom do you have a question? Which gentleman do you want to direct your question to?

Ruth: Okay. I'd like to direct my question to Professor Ward Churchill. My name is Ruth Malhotra*. I'm a student at Georgia Tech in Atlanta. And my question is if the goal or one of the major goals of the educational system is that we as students learn to develop a scholarly approach to the challenges we face and looking at the the empirical analysis and critically analyzing—

Churchill: Could you slow down a little bit? I'm not hearing everything you're saying.

Ruth: Sure. Okay. I'll try. My question again is if one of the major goals of the educational system especially in higher education is that we learn to develop a scholarly approach to some of these challenges we face and to the critical issues of the day, how does throwing around extreme partisan rhetoric or calling, you know, President Bush a Nazi or a Neanderthal or talking about the imperial arrogance of US and criminality of our actions—I don't remember the exact title of your work—but how does that lead us as students to a scholarly approach and a scholarly analysis to these challenges? I have a hard time understanding how that helps us accomplish that goal.

Nathan: All right. Thank you for your question.

Churchill: You take things to extremes for two reasons. One is because it reflects actual points of view and points of view that are acted upon. Those not inclined to frame things in extreme terms are compelled to consider issues differently when confronted with that, not as an abstract, although one cannot avoid abstraction in a classroom. In all probability no one who frames out an extreme argument is going to act upon that argument to the detriment of the students. Okay? That leaves it an abstraction.

Nathan: Anyone else? [pause] God almighty. The gentleman over there with the peace sign, now pointing at his head? Yes. Yes, sir. Go ahead.
[1:15:54]
[inaudible discussion in audience]

Peace Sign: Oh. I just had a question for Mr. Churchill. In light of the controversy over your, over your paper—it was a paper, right? On a website? 

Churchill: Yeah, it, well—I don't know what to call it. I mean it's electronic pulses on a screen, but yeah, in an earlier day it would have been a paper.

Peace Sign: Okay, was that through the—was that at all in the university context, or was it completely separate? Was it outside work?

Churchill: Completely separate. I wasn't even working at the university at the time, I was on leave, or bereavement leave, actually, when that happened.

Peace Sign: And I was wondering if Mr. Horowitz could then explain the connection between the money lost because I would see then that the money lost by the institution and the controversy brought down upon it is the result or the fault of the people who withdrew their money because of the professor who was working outside his position as a professor was writing a paper of his own opinion.

[cross-talk]

Horowitz: We live in a real world where people react emotionally. What professor Churchill said was highly political and highly—had a huge emotional charge for people. I, you know—the governor of Colorado is a friend of mine, and he called for Churchill's, Professor Churchill's firing over the internet article. And I wrote an op-ed piece in the Denver Rocky Mountain News saying you cannot fire a public official for expressing an opinion. We have a First Amendment; we absolutely do. But what I, what I—the point, the point of my bringing that up was this: that univer—you know, the Left always takes for granted the world that we live in. Like it can't get worse. It can get a lot worse. 

We live in a highly charged political climate; we're in the midst of a war; we have been attacked; there are Americans who, you know, are supporting the enemy. If a university—and I didn't, I didn't accuse professor Churchill of doing this—but if a university faculty decides to be political, and at Colorado, University of Colorado, there's a lot of politics in that faculty and there are whole departments devoted to radical thought, and the ratio for example, just to give you an example of how political it is—the ratio of left-wingers on the faculty to conservatives is 30 to one.

So there's been a blacklist instituted over a whole generation to exclude conservatives from the faculty, so when the people of Colorado see a left-wing, a university that's funded by taxpayers and that's left-wing and which has a radical cohort which is antagonistic to the United States in the midst of a war, you have a very volatile mixture. And what happened in Colorado is that people just withdrew their applications and—

Nathan: [interrupting] And we'll have to— I'm so sorry we're going to have to wrap it up there. Folks—

Horowitz: —My argument is that by protecting, protecting professionalism and scholarly discourse, and what this young lady said, that if you are scholars, you insulate the university from those kind of attacks. You know, go up on the internet and do what you want to do. Go out on a soap box.

Nathan: And I have to regrettably cut in. Everybody, thank you so much for being with us tonight. We appreciate it. Have a good evening.
[applause]
[1:19:30]


END OF AUDIO

* We learned today (4-12-06) that Ms. Malhotra is the chairman of the Georgia Tech College Republicans.