A large chunk of the blame for the ever-deteriorating state of education goes to some of academia’s favorite targets. “Republicans have been asleep on the schools,” author and activist David Horowitz claimed at a July 9, 2010 breakfast on Capitol Hill sponsored by Hillsdale College. “We don’t have a conservative educational reform movement.”
Horowitz authored the Academic Bill of Rights and founded Students for Academic Freedom. “Curricula in virtually every liberal arts college are dedicated precisely to social change,” Horowitz writes in his recent pamphlet Barack Obama’s Rules for Revolution: The Alinsky Model. “The explicit goal of our most prestigious schools of education is promoting ‘social change,’ and even more specifically ‘social justice.’”
“The mission statements of entire universities express a devotion to social change, which is also the routine subject of commencement addresses, often given by anti-capitalist radicals such as Angela Davis and unrepentant terrorists such as Bernadine Dohrn.” Thus, it is hardly astonishing that this educational experience seldom, if ever, even achieves its stated goals.
“You may have noticed that even though there are more than 600 women’s studies departments, which are nothing more than political parties, there has never been one protest of the treatment of women in the Muslim world,” Horowitz said at the Hillsdale First Principles meeting. “I asked Ayaan Hirsi Ali if she was ever invited to speak to a women’s studies department.
“She said ‘once’ but it turned out to be a fundraiser for the American Enterprise Institute given by a trustee of the University of California.” Horowitz indicates that the reason for the dichotomy between stated aims and actual practices is simple: subterfuge.
“The Communist Manifesto is the most read text in 300 universities I’ve been to,” Horowitz claims. Horowitz, who spent more than half of his life as a “red diaper baby” turned “radical son,” himself made the philosophical journey from left to right during the Reagan years.
Along the way, he kept track of his old compadres. “I was appalled in the 1970s when all my communist friends became Democrats, like Tom Hayden,” Horowitz said at the Hillsdale First Fridays meeting.
Indeed, Hayden, according to his own website, “recently has taught at Pitzer College, Occidental College, and Harvard’s Institute of Politics.” What remains an open question is whether he left behind his old beliefs.
“During the sixties, [Students for a Democratic Society] SDS leader Tom Hayden once described the utility of the drug culture to me, although he claimed he was not a part of it,” Horowitz writes in Rules For Revolution. “Once you get a middle class person to break the law, he said (and he was thinking of students), they are on their way to becoming revolutionaries.”
Hayden, Jane Fonda’s ex-husband, has been working with students in one venue or another for about the past 40 years. Saul Alinsky, the self-proclaimed radical whose methods the president was schooled in, has been gone about that long but not forgotten.
Horowitz sheds some interesting light on Alinsky’s formative influences. “Alinsky came of age in the 1930s and was drawn to the world of Chicago gangsters, whom he had encountered professionally as a sociologist,” Horowitz writes in Rules for Revolution. “He sought out and became a social intimate of the Al Capone mob and of Capone enforcer Frank Nitti who took the reins when Capone was sent to prison for tax evasion in 1931.”
In Rules for Revolution, Horowitz unearthed what may be the definitive biography of Alinsky, Let Them Call Me Rebel by Sanford Horwitt. “Nitti took me under his wing,” Alinsky said, according Horwitt. “I called him the professor and I became his student.”
Horwitt relays the tale of how Alinsky helped left-wing radicals sandbag a future president of the United States. “College students in the 1960s and 1970s sought out Alinsky for advice about tactics and strategy,” Horwitt wrote. “On one such occasion in the spring of 1972 at Tulane University’s annual week-long series of events featuring leading public figures, students asked Alinsky to help plan a protest of a scheduled speech by George Bush, then U.S. representative to the United Nations, a speech likely to be a defense of the Nixon Administration’s Vietnam policies.”
“The students told Alinsky that they were thinking about picketing or disrupting Bush’s address. That’s the wrong approach, he rejoined—not very creative and besides, causing a disruption might get them thrown out of school.”
“He told them, instead, to go hear the speech dressed up as members of the Ku Klux Klan, and whenever Bush said something in defense of the Vietnam War, they should cheer and wave placards, reading ‘the K.K.K. supports Bush.’”
“And that is what the students did with very successful, attention-getting results.” The move left George H. W. Bush sandbagged by the Left, not for the last time.
By the way, Horowitz claims that the original title of Alinsky’s opus was Rules for Revolution rather than the arguably less incendiary one we know it by today—Rules for Radicals.
Malcolm A. Kline is the Executive Director of Accuracy in Academia.
