Higher education and the dangerous professor: Challenges for anthropology

President Bush's press secretary warned that Americans should 'watch what they say, watch what they do' (Fleischer 2001). This bit of advice didn't bode well for university professors, especially those who feel obligated to speak out when their nation's citizenry has grave doubts about the wisdom and competence of its leaders. The subsequent declaration of a 'war on terror' and the passage of the Patriot Act have threatened the civil liberties of many citizens, and brought new fears of government intrusion into our lecture halls and seminar rooms. As US troops settled into Afghanistan and Iraq the campaign against the academy intensified. Aided and abetted by a resurgent conservative student activism on campus, this campaign accuses the American professoriate of harbouring a pervasive and long-standing liberal bias – with 'liberal' variously understood as leftist, Marxist and anti-American. Two recent studies of the political affiliation of US professors indicate that humanities and social science faculties contain a significant majority of registered Democrats and others who self-identify as liberal or left (Rothman, Lichter and Nevitte 2005, Lindholm et al. 2002). For many observers on the right this distribution implies – on the assumption that party politics inevitably intrudes on teaching and scholarship – that American campuses are 'closed shops', and that students are not being educated, but rather indoctrinated into leftist ideology. (Never mind the fact that the US is politically polarized as never before and that, as Todd Gitlin [2006] points out, 'radical leftists' have no power in Congress, the federal courts, or even the Democratic Party itself. If leftist professors have been 'indoctrinating' the next generation of voters, then they're making a real hash of it.) Numerous stories are also circulating on the internet about rampant 'viewpoint discrimination' in the classroom, manifested as left-biased reading lists and assignments, the down-grading of students holding conservative views, and other forms of intimidation and abuse (see, for example, www. frontpagemag.com and www.noindoctrination.org). The main players in this campaign against the American professoriate are several well-known conservative 'watchdog' organizations including the National Association of Scholars (NAS) and the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA). The campaign's single most militant crusader is David Horowitz, founder and president of the Center for the Study of Popular Culture. A former leftist turned conservative culture warrior, Horowitz is a source of advice on political strategy for the Bush administration. Since 2003, Horowitz' organization Students for Academic Freedom …