America's "Most Dangerous" Professors?

The group that sponsored the unveiling (the very term is a provocation not just to Muslims but also to Jews, for whom unveiling refers to the one year anniversary of a loved one's death when the tombstone is "unveiled") is called the United American Committee, a small but well-funded ultra conservative organization that seeks to warn Americans of the Islamic threat to America. It has next to no constituency on our campus. But that didn't stop it from using the university for its own ends. In fact, UAC's strategic use of the university as a platform to hold a provocative event is part of a larger trend in which outside groups increasingly use the space, and the commitment to free speech, afforded by university campuses to hold events designed for maximum exposure through maximum insult.

The media's decision that the first event wasn't newsworthy, coupled with the national attention that the "unveiling" received, points to how hard it is today for the university to fulfill its core mission of promoting not just diversity of opinion, but also of devising innovative and positive ways of transforming problematic situations. Horowitz's book--which coincided with a week straight of appearances on the Hannity and Colmes show on Fox News--only makes that job harder.

But it's not just that Horowitz's book degrades civil discourse into a verbal free-for-all (as do similar enterprises, such as The Case for Israel, by Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz, whose disdain for the truth was revealed for all to see in Norman Finkelstein's damning new book, Beyond Chutzpah); as important is the utter disregard for accuracy in Horowitz's profiles. As University of Michigan professor and frequent object of right wing scorn Juan Cole demonstrated in an interview about the book, virtually every accusation that Horowitz made about him or his views was unsubstantiated, and in fact verifiably inaccurate.

Horowitz's portrayal of my work and views are at least as inaccurate. However, in the genre of Jerry Springer "scholarship," it matters not at all if accusation have a basis in fact, only that that they're thrown into the public sphere with enough vehemence, and via the right outlets (Fox, talk radio), to "stick." In the larger public sphere this disinterest in either presenting or encountering the most accurate version has been demonstrated in spades with the James Frey-Oprah Winfrey debacle over the pseudo memoir A Million Little Pieces, which continues to sell wildly despite being exposed as a work of fiction.

Specifically, Horowitz--or perhaps it was the intern who "researched" the chapter--accused me of being “responsible for a steady stream of anti-American and anti-Israel diatribes.” This is, to say the least, a bit of a stretch, since in my last book, Why They Don’t Hate Us, has several sections criticizing the global peace and justice movement for doing this very thing. More damning, apparently, is his accusation that I am a "rock musician and Marxist." Now there's a deadly combination if there ever was one. Except that heavy metal helped bring down the Iron Curtain, not prop it up.

I also, according to Horowtiz, advocate a “quasi-Communist utopia” and a “classless society.” Sounds like these might be nice places to live, but in fact I don't even know what a quasi-, semi- or neo-communist utopia would look like. As for teaching Marx, I've been known to do it on occasion, but so do most business schools. I don't see any B-School profs on his list, however.