The first question one might ask about the valuable new book by author and activist David Horowitz is how he limited the number to study in the title of The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America. It is a difficulty which Horowitz himself acknowledges early on.
“How many radical professors are there on American faculties?,” Horowitz asks. “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 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.”
Of the Horowitz 101, fully a tenth toil at Catholic colleges and universities, namely Georgetown, Villanova, the University of Dayton, DePaul, Saint Xavier and Holy Cross. The profiles Horowitz offers of these pedagogues shed some light on the phenomenon of institutions of higher learning that might be considered Catholic in Name Only (CINO).
From a Catholic’s perspective, the most problematic of these so-called scholars might be the dynamic duo at Georgetown’s deceptively named Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding. And, by the way, strictly following the alphabetical approach, shouldn’t the Christian part come first, especially at a Catholic university?
Rather than building on principles the two creeds have in common, such as opposition to pornography, Georgetown’s Center is shaping up to be a sturdy vehicle for Islamofacism and anti-Semitism with its chief, Dr. John Esposito, setting the tone. “There are real grievances; it is not as though we are dealing with a bunch of crazies,” Dr. Esposito said of the September 11, 2001 attacks upon the United States. “As we all know, a lot of the so-called terrorists involved in 9/11 were people who came from good families, were educated, etc.”
“One needs to ask why there was this attraction for these people.” Dr. Esposito, who delivered this analysis one year after the 9/11 attacks, is the former head of the Middle East Studies Association.
Still, he looks like a moderate in comparison to his colleague at the CMCU—Dr. Yvonne Haddad. “It is a fact that there are some Arab Christians and Muslims who are still waiting for the Jewish people to apologize for what they have done to the Palestinians,” Dr. Haddad said in 2000 on the occasion of Pope John Paul II visiting the Holy Land.
She is a consistent supporter of fronts for the Palestinian Liberation Organization and Hamas, including those that the U. S. government tried to shut down after the 9/11 attacks. In effect, the American government is perceived by Muslims to have assumed a veto power over zakat (tithe), one of the basic tenets of the Islamic faith,” she said of the crackdown on these known terrorist fronts.
For years Catholics have been able to successfully refute charges of anti-Semitism. New “Catholic” institutions like the CMCU make it more difficult to do so. Cutting schools like Georgetown off of Church support will make the job much easier. It will not hurt the American effort in the War on Terror either.
Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.
