The Michael and Cathryn Borden Memorial Book of the Day.*

This one looks like a barnburner, kiddies. Check out the complete excerpt here.

The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America
By David Horowitz

David Horowitz is the author of numerous books including an autobiography, Radical Son, which has been described as “the first great autobiography of his generation,” and which chronicles his odyssey from radical activism to the current positions he holds. Among his other books are The Politics of Bad Faith and The Art of Political War. The Art of Political War was described by White House political strategist Karl Rove as “the perfect guide to winning on the political battlefield.” Horowitz’s latest book, Uncivil Wars, was published in January this year, and chronicles his crusade against intolerance and racial McCarthyism on college campuses last spring.


This is an excerpt from the introduction to David Horowitz’s new book, The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America, which will be officially released on Monday, February 13.


Trials of the Intellect in the Post-Modern Academy
In January 2005, Professor Ward Churchill became a figure of national revulsion when his impending visit to Hamilton College was linked to an article claiming that the victims of 9/11 were “little Eichmanns” who deserved their fate. Churchill’s article produced an outcry of such force that it led to the removal of the faculty head of the host committee at Hamilton and the resignation of the president of the University of Colorado where he was Professor of Ethnic Studies and Department Chair. As a result of the uproar, Churchill himself was removed as head of the Ethnic Studies Department and university authorities began an investigation into how he had acquired his faculty position in the first place.

Far from being a marginal crank, Ward Churchill was (and at this writing a year later still is) a prominent personage at the University of Colorado and in the academic world at large. A leading figure in the field of Ethnic Studies and widely published, his appearance at Hamilton in January 2005 would have been the 40th campus that had invited him to speak in the three years since 9/11.[1] The opinions expressed in his infamous article[2] were themselves far from obscure to his academic colleagues. They had first been published on the Internet in October 2001 and reflected views that were part of the intellectual core of his academic work, familiar both to university authorities in Colorado and to his faculty hosts at Hamilton. These facts made the scandal an event whose significances extended far beyond the fate of one individual to implicate the academic culture itself.

In the course of these events, several facts about Churchill’s academic career were brought to light to provide other grounds for questioning his university position. Although Churchill was a department head who received an annual salary of $120,000, he had no doctorate, which was a standard requirement for tenured positions, not to mention chairs. Moreover, his academic training had been in Communications as a graphic artist rather than an academic field related to Ethnic Studies. The Masters degree he held was from a third-rate experimental college, which did not even give grades in the 1970s when he attended. He had lied to qualify for his affirmative action hire, when he claimed on his application that he was a member of the Keetoowah Band of the Cherokee tribe. In fact, his ancestors were Anglo-Saxon and the Keetoowah Band had publicly rejected him. An investigative series by the Rocky Mountain News also maintained that he had plagiarized other professors’ academic work and had made demonstrably false claims about American history in his own writing, literally making up American atrocities that never happened.[3]

Despite these revelations, hundreds of professors and thousands of students across the country sprang to Churchill’s defense, signing petitions in his behalf and protesting the “witch-hunt” of academic “liberals.”[4] At the Indiana University Law School, Professor Florence Roisman took around a petition in Churchill’s behalf. When law professor William Bradford, a Chiricahua Apache with a stellar academic resume refused to sign the petition, Professor Roisman retorted “What kind of a native American are you?” and launched a campaign to have Bradford fired.[5] The American Association of University Professors ignored the Bradford case, but issued an official declaration of support for Churchill, invoking “the right to free speech and the nationally recognized standard of academic freedom in support of quality instruction and scholarship.”[6] Churchill made a public appearance in his own defense to a cheering University of Colorado audience of 1,500, and went on to tour other campuses where he received a similar hero’s welcome from large university crowds.[7] These events further revealed to a troubled public the extent to which radicalism at the very edges of the American political spectrum had established a central place in the curriculum of American universities.

How could the university have hired and then raised to such heights an individual of such questionable character and preposterous views as Ward Churchill? How many professors with similar resumes had managed to acquire tenured positions at Colorado University and at other institutions of higher learning? How pervasive was the conflation of political interests and academic pursuits on university campuses or in college classrooms? Why were the administrations seemingly unable to assert and enforce standards of academic excellence? Such were the issues the Churchill scandal raised.

The present volume examines a hundred university and college professors and attempts to provide a factual basis for answering these questions. The method used is similar to the scholarly discipline known in the historical profession as “prosopography,” which was defined by one of its creators and best-known practitioners, Lawrence Stone, as “the study of biographical details of individuals in the aggregate.”[8]

* WTF??? Look here.