When The Professors was first published in February 2006, it was greeted by cries of outrage from the academic Left. The author was denounced as a reincarnation of Joseph McCarthy and his book as a “blacklist,” although no evidence existed to support either claim and both were the opposite of the truth.

Far from being a “blacklist,” the text explicitly—and in so many words—defended the right of professors to teach views that were unpopular without fear of political reprisal. The author also publicly defended the First Amendment rights of Ward Churchill, the most notable case of a professor under attack for his political views.

By contrast, the faculty radicals described in The Professors have taken the position that political activism should be an integral part of university curricula. As The Professors demonstrate, these radicals have exerted a disturbingly large influence over liberal arts studies. Entire academic programs—Women’s Studies and Peace Studies are prime examples—require students to subscribe to a left-wing ideology in order to qualify as good students and receive good grades.

Faculty radicals also dominate many professional academic organizations, including the AAUP, and seek to use their offices for political ends. Professional groups such as the American Historical Association (AHA) regularly pass formal resolutions on such public controversies as the war in Iraq. In doing so, they promote the illusion that a controversial political argument can be resolved as a matter of scholarly expertise. This is itself a corruption of the academic idea and only serves to discredit the profession. In 2007, an AHA resolution condemning the Iraq war was passed by a minority who exploited the scholarly prestige gained in historical fields far removed from the Middle East to promulgate a fashionable left-wing political judgment on current events.

Such developments in the academy threaten the very idea of an academic standard and constitute a dangerous trend in higher education. The Professors were written to identify the academic sources of this problem and to describe the attitudes behind it.

Its text consists of a series of profiles accompanied by a 17,000-word explanatory essay. The essay is divided into three analytic chapters, which outline the problem and explain the methodology. The profiles depict more than a hundred academics who, in their classroom curricula, campus behavior, or published statements, support the view that political activism is integral to the academic mission.

This activist intrusion into scholarly disciplines is illustrated by a statement made by Princeton professor Joan Wallach Scott, an influential left-wing academic and ideological feminist, who was not included in the original text: “As feminist and historian,” Scott wrote in the preface to her principal academic work, “my interest is in the operations of power—how it is constructed, what its effects are, how it changes. It follows that activism in the academy is both informed by that work and informs it.”

Scott is a member of “Historians Against the War,” and she is also a leading figure in the AAUP. From 1999 to 2005, Professor Scott was head of the AAUP’s Academic Freedom Committee, but she appears to have been concerned only with the freedom to express radical views. By her own account, her principal concerns were the fates of Professor Sami al-Arian, an indicted Palestinian terrorist (eventually deported), and Tariq Ramadan, an academic barred by the State Department because of his connection to terrorist organizations.

Scott is on record stating that all but one of the academic freedom problems the AAUP tracked from 9/11 to 2005 were instigated by the “pro-Israel bloc.”

The current president of the AAUP Cary Nelson is a well-known political activist and author of Manifesto of a Tenured Radical. During a debate at a conference in 2007, Professor Nelson said, “You cannot take politics out of my classroom any more than you can take it out of life. It’s built into my subject matter and it’s been built into my subject matter for the whole 37 years in which I’ve taught.” Professor Nelson went on to criticize what he regarded as the timidity of colleagues who refrained from expressing their political views in the classroom.

Professor Hamid Algar, University of California, Berkeley

— Professor of Persian and Islamic Studies, University of California, Berkeley

— Supporter of the Ayatollah Khomeini

— The war on terror is America’s aggression against the Muslim world.

Born in 1940, Hamid Algar has been a member of the UC Berkeley faculty since 1965. He is the biographer of Iran’s Islamic dictator, Ayatollah Khomeini, and ranks among the world’s leading historians of Islam. He teaches courses on Persian literature, the history of Islam, and Shi’ism, Sufism; he has written books and articles on each of these subjects, including more than one hundred articles in the Encyclopaedia Iranica. He is also a ferocious critic of the United States and Israel.

Professor Algar personally met with Khomeini during the latter’s exile in Paris, and again several times after the Iranian revolution of 1979. He translated many of Khomeini’s writings and speeches and wrote a book about those works, titled The Roots of the Islamic Revolution in Iran. Professor Algar considers the Iranian revolution “the most significant, hopeful, and profound event in the entirety of contemporary Islamic history.”

In an address honoring Khomeini in 1994, Algar advocated global jihad: “Let us remember the comprehensive jihad that starts with our own persons and should also embrace our communal and political lives and if necessary go to the point of taking weapons in our hands to defeat the enemies of Islam.” Algar immediately defined those enemies: “Let us remember the clear analysis of the West that Imam (Khomeini) gave us ... as a collection of international bandits . . . which has consolidated itself since Imam’s death. Let us also remember his insistence that the abominable genocide state of Israel completely disappears from the face of the globe.”

In Professor Algar’s view, there is no “clash of civilizations” between Middle Eastern Islam and the West. “That’s one of those meaningless slogans which people hold seminars and write books about,” he says, “which presumes an inherent and irreducible antagonism. But what may be underway is the launching of World War IV [with “WW III” having been the Cold War], as it’s been called, most recently by James Woolsey [former director of the CIA].”7 Professor Algar is skeptical about the U.S. government’s assurance that the current war on terror “isn’t a war against Islam.” According to Professor Algar, “‘World War IV’ clearly focuses on Middle Eastern Muslim states.”

Professor Algar sees America’s war on terror largely as a product of America’s imperialistic and aggressive impulses, which he says are aimed at fulfilling the goals of an agenda that long predated 9/11. The modus operandi, in his view, is the calculated replacement of one perceived threat—Communism—with a new perceived threat—Islam. “There always has to be a focus for hostility,” he says, “to keep the juices pumped and the military machine well supplied. Now, somewhat improbably, Islam—or Muslims and Muslim countries—are fulfilling that role of a global long-term threat.”

In Professor Algar’s view, Americans identify their adversary as “militant” Islam because “it’s not politically correct to say you’re against religion as such. Therefore, an adjective has to be supplied: militant Islam, extremist Islam, Islamic terrorism, Islamic fundamentalism, political Islam. I would say that the Muslim world, or specifically the Muslim Middle East, has been chosen not because it is strong, a menace, or a threat; but, on the contrary, because it is an extremely weak and impotent adversary.”  He gives no credence to suggestions that militant Islam chose the West as its enemy through the attacks of 9/11 and many previous acts of anti-Western terrorism. According to Professor Algar, the aggression that led to the War on Terror was instigated by the West.

In 1998, Professor Algar verbally harassed and spat on members of UC Berkeley’s Armenian Student Association, who were commemorating the genocide of Armenians by the Turks. “It was not a genocide, but I wish it were, you lying pigs,” Shake Hovsepian quoted Algar for Usanogh: Periodical of Armenian Students. “You are distorting the truth about history. You stupid Armenians; you deserve to be massacred!”

The university administration at Berkeley, whose antennae are usually exquisitely sensitive to any sign of “insensitivity” among its faculty or students, had no reaction to these remarks from its most prominent professor of Islamic studies.

References:

• The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America - David Horowitz
• Some of these attacks have been described and analyzed in the author’s Indoctrination U: The Left’s War Against Academic Freedom. They are also described in articles the author has written, including “The Strange Dishonest Campaign Against Academic Freedom,”  frontpagemag.com, and “Intellectual Muggings,” frontpagemag.com
• See also: Professors Brand, Dabashi, Massad, Mazrui
• Research: Joseph D’Hippolito