How to Be a "Dangerous" Professor
Are academics "biased" to the left, as David Horowitz charges? Or do they just see things more clearly than he does?
His basic assumption is that these scholars bend their scholarship to their political agenda. But in fact, with most everyone I know, it's the exact opposite. Progressive scholars have adopted their particular "agendas" because their academic research has revealed a reality on the ground—one that most conservatives refuse to accept—which demands a progressive response. Take the war on Iraq, for example, or the destruction of the environment.
The simple fact is that the world today looks a hell of a lot more like the way it's depicted by the "leftist" scholars Horowitz finds so dangerous than it does by the scholars on the right. And it's precisely this ability both to see things closer to how they really are, and to offer explanations grounded in that reality, that makes us professors so dangerous to Horowitz, or so he would have us believe.
In fact, looking at things from France, where a coalition of students, labor unions, intellectuals, and the occasional thug (or as they say in French, casseur) just defeated a rather modest proposal to increase work-place flexibility by allowing employers more easily to fire workers under 26, I'm not so sure he has anything to worry about. Because while the Left is strong enough to stop changes to France's labor laws, their victories amount to little more than fingers plugging cracks in a dam that is slowly giving way to the onslaught of neoliberal globalization.
The Chrysler dealership in the middle of the bohemian neighborhood where I'm staying, for instance, seems to be doing a nice business selling the same gas-guzzling SUVs that soccer moms all over America love to drive. And gas in France is almost twice as expensive as it is in the US. And it's not just Paris's wealthy elite that's buying them. Across France, and Germany and even Italy for that matter, SUVs are increasingly defacing the roads and the environment, showing that the citizens of "old" Europe can be just as selfish as Americans when it comes to putting their driving comfort ahead of the future of the planet.
The shock of seeing such vehicles in a city where the miniaturized Smart Car has ruled supreme the last half decade is hard to exaggerate. What is clear is that the failure of the supposedly "dangerous" French intellectual elite to offer a serious alternative to the economic status quo is an indictment against the power of the academic Left to impose progressive social change on the larger society.
If there is hope, it's coming from the "new" world—not the Americas (although there are encouraging, if confusing, signs in Latin America of a reborn Left), but rather from the Middle East, where the world's largest percentage of young people reside. Several weeks ago, I sat in a seminar room at the American University of Beirut, to listen to students describe how they are thinking outside the box to try to escape the shadow of a brutal civil war and decades-long Syrian occupation. I couldn't help thinking how much more "dangerous" these activists and their professors are to the interests of the Bush Administration than their counterparts in the US, or even France, where students at the country's elite universities went on a rampage and destroyed their own computers, copy machines and libraries.
It would seem, however, that President Bush understands the threat all to well, which is why just a few weeks ago he met with the new Prime Minister of Lebanon to discuss how to press ahead with both political and economic "reforms"—the code word for bringing Lebanon fully into the U.S. orbit. This is exactly what many Lebanese activists fear, even as they support American calls for a greater international effort to catch the killers of former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri. If Mr. Horowitz really wants to find some dangerous characters, he should forget about Berkeley and go to Beirut. There he'll find one of the major threats to U.S. global dominance, and it isn't al-Qa'eda. It's a bunch of college students who speak perfect English and know our history and culture as well as most Americans.
