Campus diversity and academic freedom

David Horowitz is angry. According to him, the American campus is in the grip of the far left. Consequently, such campaigns as Students for Academic Freedom are the way forward. It has been suggested that university hiring policies should reflect "balanced" quantities of Democrats and Republicans, backed up by an Academic Bill of Rights. Whatever is wrong with the (often marginal) left in the universities, more political intervention will further cut into academic freedom.

What's more, it's often hard to recognise the portrait Horowitz paints, especially outside the humanities. Instead, experience shows "...how completely (if subtly) the university is politicized by the existing power structure ... the concept of professionalism, enshrined by the current academic establishment, is revealed as wholly impotent in preserving scholarly standards of critical independence". And who tells us this?

David Horowitz.*

*See From Yalta to Vietnam (Pelican, 1971 ed.), p.21.