THE PROFESSORS

By David Horowitz

In 1936, Spain was ravaged by a civil war, pitting Franco’s "Nationalists" against the international Left’s "Republicans." In a radio speech, Nationalist general Emilio Mola, while speaking of his four armed columns of regulars advancing on Madrid, referred to other supporters already inside the capital whose task was to gnaw at the government from within. They were, Mola said, his "fifth column"—a description that aptly describes the cohort of lawyers and others who today are undermining this country’s attempt to protect its citizens from the scourge of terrorism.

Now, with the publication of David Horowitz’s new book The Professors, he (with the help of a team of researchers) has made the irrefutable case that there exists in virtually every college and graduate school in the United States what I call a "Sixth Column"—a cohort of America-hating academics who are poisoning the minds of their students by filling them with lies about, and hatred for, western civilization in general and American values in particular.

Lest any of Horowitz’s critics or enemies attempt to denigrate the case he makes in The Professors—as did a shallow, partisan TV talking-head recently—suffice to say that the book contains nearly one thousand footnotes and a broad and deep range of sources. Indeed, the book is unimpeachable in its proof of Horowitz’s thesis that the academics spotlighted in The Professors are dangerous people—dangerous to the young adults in their charge, and dangerous to the safety of the United States.

In his Introduction to The Professors, Horowitz begins making his case by describing in some detail the now-familiar circus of which Ward Churchill has been ringmaster. Churchill, among other things, is a self-aggrandizing America hater, a fake Indian, a plagiarizing writer, a second-hand artist, and an academic fraud who lied and schemed his way to a professorship and department chairmanship at the University of Colorado—all qualities that apparently endeared him to the far Left, whose patronage Churchill has long enjoyed.

The theme of Churchill’s entire academic career, Horowitz writes, is that: "America was like Hitler Germany, a nation dedicated to the extermination of minorities; its capitalistic economic machine starving poor people all over the world all the time. Therefore, the 'civilians' who comprised what Churchill referred to as its 'technical core'—the inhabitants of theWorld Trade Center—were little Eichmanns, cogs in a machine that churned out mass murder. (Adolf Eichmann was the Nazi bureaucrat whoorganized the shipment of Jews to the gas chambers). In Churchill’s view,t here was no 'better way of visiting some penalty befitting their participation' in the workings of America’s global economy (and thus global genocide) than incinerating Americans in their place of work." Worse even than this, much worse in fact, according to Horowitz, is "[t]hat such views could earn an individual like Churchill a full professorship at a major state university and the responsibility and power of a department chair . . . ."

And to take the point one more step forward and focus on the major theme of The Professors, Horowitz writes that Churchill’s success spoke volumes about academic corruption not only in Colorado but in the ethnic studies field. That Churchill was a sought-after speaker by universities across the country was a chilling indictment of an entire system.

That system is far worse than even most well informed Americans can begin to grasp. I spent over twenty years on one law faculty, and taught at another as a visiting professor. I had been generally cognizant of how civility and scholarship eroded in the academy during those two decades and since. None of that knowledge, however, prepared me for the revelations contained in The Professors. As Horowitz has written, "[w]hen viewed as a whole, the 101 portraits in this volume reveal several disturbing patterns of university life, which are reflected in careers like Ward Churchill’s. These include (1) promotion far beyond academic achievement . . . (2) teaching subjects outside one’s professional qualifications and expertise for the purpose of political propaganda . . . (3) making racist and ethnically disparaging remarks in public without eliciting reactions by university administrations, so long as those remarks are directed at unprotected groups, e.g., Armenians, whites, Christians, and Jews . . . (4) the overt introduction of political agendas into the classroom and the abandonment of any pretense of academic discipline or scholarly inquiry."

These "disturbing patterns" jump from the page in Chapter 1, which contains the 101 portraits of "the most dangerous academics in America."

There are those who liken the 9/11 terrorists to America’s Founding Fathers, fighting for a just cause, and those who accuse the United States of aggressive war against Islam.

There are those who support terrorists like Ayatollah Khomeni, who revere Communists like Fidel Castro, who call for an Intifada in the United States, and who supported Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait

There are former street criminals, bomb-makers and throwers, ex-Weathermen, former Black Panthers, Fifth Column lawyers, even a recipient of the Lenin Peace Prize

There are members of Islamic Jihad, Islamic fundamentalists, avowed Marxists, and self-proclaimed Leninists. There are those who believe that the United States, indeed the world, is run by a secret conspiracy of Jews. There are anti-Semites, and those who lionize Palestinian killers, and demonize Israel. There are those who view Israelis as Nazis, who consider suicide bombers martyrs, and who blame 9/11 on the United States and/or Israel.

There are those who attack the United States on the rabidly anti-American TV station Al-Jazeera, and those who believe that Cuba and Communist China are political and economic democracies.

There is one who called for a "’million Mogadishus’—the 1993 military ambush in Somalia that killed 18 Americans" and caused Clinton to cut and run, sending a message to Osama bin Laden that America would not stand and fight.

There is one whose final exam asks to "explain why the United States liberation of Iraq is ‘criminal’."

There is one who wants an independent Hispanic state in the American Southwest, and another who regards America as a "proto-fascist" state.

There are lecturers, assistant professors, associate professors, full professors, the untenured and tenured, holders of distinguished endowed chairs, and prestigious University Scholars.

And dozens and dozens more in Horowitz’s rogues gallery of academics who rant and rave in their classes to captive students, spewing hate-filled, pro-Marxist, anti-American, openly nihilistic radical Islamic propaganda.

As shocking as this is, worse yet is that it’s a mere microcosm of the academy in today’s United States. Horowitz asks: "How many radical professors are there on American faculties of higher education? According to the federal government, the total number of college and university professors in the United States is 617,000. If we were to take the Harvard case reviewed at the end of this volume as a yardstick [the recent PC-driven troubles, and now resignation, of president Lawrence Summers], and assume a figure of 10 percent per university faculty, and then cut that figure in half to control for the possibility that Harvard may be a relatively radical institution, the total number of such professors at American universities with views similar to the spectrum represented in this volume would still be in the neighborhood of 25,000 –  30,000. The number of students annually passing through their classrooms would be of the order of a hundred times that, or three million. This is a figure that ought to trouble every educator who is concerned about the quality of higher education and every American who cares about the country’s future."

And every parent.

Unbeknownst to many parents who pack their children off to college and write hefty checks that are supposed to purchase education, what they are getting for their money is not only just the opposite, it is even worse: their kids, most probably intellectually and politically tabula rasa as they enter the academy, are being brainwashed into believing that monstrous evil is the good. And they are being taught to hate the most noble nation ever to grace this earth.

For his devastating exposure of the Sixth Column’s desecrating inversion of values, and its deadly long range consequences for the United States—a nation said to be "the last, best hope of mankind"—all Americans should be profoundly grateful, once again, to David Horowitz.