A coalition of student, faculty and civil liberties groups has released a report that documents the numerous errors and misrepresentations in David Horowitz's new book, The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America. The report, called "Facts Count," is from Free Exchange on Campus, a coalition co-founded by the AFT. It provides a critical analysis and fact-check of the Horowitz book and comes to three overall conclusions:

• The actions for which Horowitz's book condemns professors are entirely appropriate and within their rights in an atmosphere that promotes the free exchange of ideas.
• Horowitz's research is inadequate and manipulated to fit his arguments. It is marked by inaccuracies, distortions and manipulations of fact.
• Overriding all, Facts Count asserts, is the problem that The Professors is based on faulty premises: that America's colleges and universities are failing to ensure students' academic freedom and that students lack the critical thinking skills to engage with controversial ideas.

Horowitz is a radical conservative who has been pushing state legislatures to adopt so-called Academic Bill of Rights language to protect students from a left-leaning professoriate. (See March/April AFT On Campus feature, "The New Thought Police.") With his book, he attempts to make that case that tens of thousands of college faculty are indoctrinating students and that the 101 he profiles—professors he describes as terrorists and murderers—are just the "tip of the iceberg."

Yet, as Facts Count points out, nowhere in the book does Horowitz provide proof "that a single professor teaches his or her own political views to the exclusion of all others and nowhere does Mr. Horowitz provide a single example of a student whose grade was lowered because of his or her political beliefs." Further, Facts Count notes, student voices are pointedly absent from 87 of the profiles in The Professors. Most of the profiles say nothing about what happens in the professors' actual classrooms.

In individual rebuttals to the profiles, Free Exchange researchers or the professors themselves document the errors or misrepresentations and provide a fuller, benign context for the sensational accusations of the book.

Said Robert McChesney, research professor at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and one of the so-called dangerous academics profiled in the book: "The book is clueless about how classroom teaching actually works; it would astound him to learn that many professors with strong political views--of whatever stripe--go to great lengths to provide an open classroom."

Adam Jentleson, the primary author of Facts Count and policy and advocacy manager for Campus Progress, a member organization of Free Exchange, says the faculty on Horowitz's list "are hard-working people who are being attacked on the basis of unsound evidence to advance David Horowitz's ideological agenda." If Horowitz has an argument to make, adds Jentleson, "he's doing himself and his cause a disservice by playing fast and loose with the facts."

Facts Count was released earlier this month to coincide with a rally at the University of Chicago held before Horowitz delivered a speech at a campus event. UC student government vice president Phil Caruso charged that Horowitz's agenda "threatens the principles of free thinking and cheapens our education." Despite a lack of substantive evidence, said Caruso, Horowitz "continues to call for restrictions on our professors' ability to do what they're hired to do: to foster learning through open discussion and critical thinking."

To download the report, go to www.freeexchangeoncampus.com. [Barbara McKenna]

May 16, 2006