David Horowitz, a conservative writer and activist, spoke last night in Barnum Hall about academic freedom and liberal biases in higher education, telling an audience of around 40 that liberal professors across the country are indoctrinating students with their ideology.
Horowitz is the founder and president of the David Horowitz Freedom Center, which publishes FrontPage Magazine, a conservative online news and political journal.
His lecture, sponsored by the Tufts Republicans, centered around many themes from his book "One-Party Classroom: How Radical Professors at America's Top Colleges Indoctrinate Students and Undermine Our Democracy," published earlier this month.
In collecting research for his book, Horowitz said, he identified and studied 150 so-called "indoctrination courses" at 12 universities across the country.
These classes, he said, present opinions as if they were scientific facts.
"Until 30 years ago, education was driven by teachers who were driven to teach [students] how to think, instead of what to think," Horowitz said. "It used to be that you were taught how to formulate an argument and left on your own [to make] opinions."
Horowitz said that many classes are taught by leftist faculty members who espouse only their liberal ideologies to students.
"You can't get a good education if you're only hearing half the story," he said. "Students who suffer most are liberal or left-wing; they don't challenge their beliefs … If you're not liberal and speak out in class, you had better be able to defend yourself."
Horowitz offered an example of a class taught at the University of California, Santa Cruz about how to organize an anti-capitalist revolution.
"This is not a legitimate academic class," he said, arguing that the course did not teach about types of revolutions, their benefits or their costs. "It doesn't examine the subject."
Horowitz also referenced former Harvard University President Lawrence Summers' resignation after making two remarks that clashed with liberal ideology.
According to Horowitz, Summers' statement that women have lower mathematical ability than men was a perfectly intellectual statement backed up by research, and it only caused controversy because it did not coincide with traditionally liberal academic beliefs.
In his experience traveling to different universities, Horowitz said, about 90 percent of the faculty on any given campus consisted of liberal scholars who try to act fairly and provide students with a quality education.
Still, he believes that one major detriment of liberal faculties lies in what social psychology calls group polarization. In this sense, he said, a group of leftist professors becomes more liberal over time because the faculty members continually support each other's beliefs and are rarely challenged.
Horowitz wrapped up his lecture criticizing "leftist studies" like Women's Studies and African-American Studies on campuses across the country.
"Women's Studies programs are training students to be radical feminists," he said. "How many of you have heard that gender is a social construct? The ‘nature versus nurture' debate has been going on for years, and anyone who argues that gender is a social construct should not be allowed to teach … It's not a proven point."
A question-and-answer session following the lecture included questions ranging from Horowitz's constant attacks during the lecture on former Weather Underground radical William Ayers to the difference between liberals and leftists to the roles of sex and gender.
Tufts Republicans President Michael Hawley, a sophomore, told the Daily after the lecture that he was impressed by the turnout, which was comprised mostly of Republicans from Tufts and other local schools.
Freshman and self-proclaimed liberal William Carpenter said that Horowitz made several good points, including students' tendency to avoid sensitive topics because they might fear criticism from their professors.
Still, Carpenter said he did not completely agree with Horowitz.
"It's unfair to put everyone in the very liberal, narrow-minded point-of-view," he said. "A lot of professors are liberal but accepting of conservatives, too."
Senior Dan Hartman, a former president of the Tufts Republicans, agreed with much of Horowitz's argument. "We need to have professors stand up to the status quo, challenge those who are ideologues and bring back academic balance," he said.
Horowitz's name was featured at Tufts in October 2007, as he had a role in the national Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week, which took place at Tufts and over 200 college campuses nationwide.
