Print: The Chronicle: 5/6/2005: What Makes David Run

David Horowitz demands attention for the idea that conservatives deserve a place in academe

David Horowitz, one of the country's most famous converts to conservatism, is waging a one-man war against the academy. Liberal college students, he says, see their views reflected in textbooks. His kids, as he calls conservative students, have to subscribe to The National Review to get a balanced view of the world. So nearly every day, he is on the road, promoting his "academic bill of rights" -- a set of principles that he says will make universities more intellectually diverse and tolerant of conservatives.

Mr. Horowitz stands at a podium in the Ohio Statehouse, hoping to persuade the State Senate's education committee to support his academic bill of rights. A compact man dressed sharply in a brown suit and green shirt, he sports a goatee and longish hair, the only vestiges of his days as a left-wing radical. First a Republican senator lobs him softball questions. Then the hearing, held in March, takes a surprising turn. Sen. Teresa Fedor, a Democrat, says she has a list of questions. Her tone, direct, clipped, and not at all friendly, suggests she means business. "Mr. Horowitz," she asks, "what is your current occupation?"

"Writer," he answers.

If only it were that simple. David Horowitz is a former leftist turned conservative activist. At 66, he has indeed written more than 20 books, nearly all of which denounce the faulty logic of the left. A popular campus speaker among college Republicans, he is a deeply polarizing figure. In April a student threw a pie in his face as he gave a speech in Indiana.

Nearly 20 years ago he co-founded the Center for the Study of Popular Culture, a nonprofit organization based in Los Angeles that promotes conservatism. The center runs an online advocacy journal, Frontpagemag.com, where Mr. Horowitz writes a blog.

He is also the founder of Students for Academic Freedom, a national watchdog group that helps college students document when professors introduce their politics in the classroom. And he is the creator of Discoverthenetworks.org, an online database that purports to catalog all the organizations and individuals that make up what he calls "the left."

But his major focus now is his academic bill of rights, which calls on public universities to expose students to a greater diversity of views in curricula, reading lists, and campus speakers. The document, which Mr. Horowitz wrote to stop what he sees as the rampant abuse of conservative students by liberal professors, also prohibits the grading of students and the hiring or firing of professors based on their political or religious beliefs.

Universities have balked at adopting it, saying they already have such principles and procedures in place. Mr. Horowitz insists they do not follow them, and that the government should step in and force them to do so.

Critics -- including many prominent professors and traditional faculty groups -- say the bill seeks to purge liberals from the academy and to create quotas for hiring conservative professors.

"It's Orwellian," says Roger W. Bowen, general secretary of the American Association of University Professors. "He's trying to create an atmosphere in the classroom where faculty are not treated like the professionals that they are."

Although it's called an academic bill of rights, "it's really an academic bill of wrongs," Mr. Bowen continues. "The intent is to take away academic freedom."

The document itself strikes a decidedly nonpartisan tone. The problem many people have with it is the partisanship of the man who wrote it.

Republicans, not Democrats, have sponsored Mr. Horowitz's bill. Conservative students, not liberal ones, have testified in support of it. And right-wing foundations, not left-leaning ones, contribute to his center, and in turn, his campaign.

Mr. Horowitz is no Karl Rove. He does not have a large and powerful operation, nor does he rally to the Republican cause of the day, whether it's Terri Schiavo or Tom DeLay. He describes himself as moderate on abortion, libertarian on censorship, and "the most prominent conservative defender of gays" that he knows of.

For Mr. Horowitz, this battle is personal. He is feisty, single-minded, and like many a professor, loves to lecture. He is a man of contradictions. An ideologue with feelings, he is sensitive to how he appears in press accounts and admits he sometimes overreacts. While he wants desperately to be included in the academy -- for professors to assign his books and invite him to speak in classes -- he seems eager to punish it, in part, for turning a cold shoulder to his work. And although he contends his bill of rights is not a political document, it is large conservative foundations that make sure he, and the handful of people helping him, have plenty of cash for the fight.

Mr. Horowitz acknowledges that his Republican credentials might not make him the best person to lead this charge against the academy. But then again, no one else could do the job, he says. It is perfectly suited to a former radical. "Conservatives don't have this mentality of changing institutions," he says. "I have an instinct of how to fight this battle."

A Republican senator objects when Senator Fedor asks Mr. Horowitz how much money he makes. The hearing room buzzes. The committee chairwoman bangs her gavel, and the senators confer. Ms. Fedor withdraws the question. A former fourth-grade teacher, who will later say Mr. Horowitz is no different from a bully in her classroom, she remains unfazed. She peers down at her list and asks him another question: "Where do you get the majority of your funding for this campaign?"

"My motivation has to do with a young man whose parents were Communists in the McCarthy era ... ," Mr. Horowitz says before the committee chairwoman suddenly interrupts him. She tells him to answer the question.

"I'm not going to answer the question," he says.

If the senator had not cut him off, here is what Mr. Horowitz would have said: Back in the 1950s, even though he was a Marxist, his professors at Columbia University never treated him poorly because of his politics. He would have told the senators that in all his years in school -- from kindergarten to graduate school -- he never heard a teacher or professor express a political prejudice in class. Things are different now, he would have said.

The academic bill of rights may have its genesis back in Mr. Horowitz's grade school, but it really started to take shape after a December 2002 meeting with some fellow Republicans in New York. He met with Thomas F. Egan, chairman of the Board of Trustees of the State University of New York System; Peter D. Salins, the system's provost; and Candace de Russy, a member of the board, to discuss the problem of leftist indoctrination in college classrooms and how to solve it.

"I was among sort of friends," Mr. Horowitz says. "It allowed me to think aloud."

Based on their conversations, Mr. Horowitz drafted the bill, which he modeled on the AAUP's own academic-freedom statement, written in 1940. The AAUP statement says professors "are entitled to full freedom in research and in the publication of the results," as well as in classroom discussions of their subject, "but they should be careful not to introduce into their teaching controversial matter which has no relation to their subject."

Mr. Horowitz says the academy has failed to enforce that guideline for years, allowing liberalism to dominate college campuses and suppress dissenting views.

His campaign stems from "the desire to have a pluralism of ideas," he says. "I don't want the universities to be conservative. I want them to be academic, scholarly."

After earning a bachelor's degree in English from Columbia, he attended the University of California at Berkeley. He says he got bored with his graduate program and left with a master's degree in English. "Everything had been mined," he explains. There was "nothing to research that was interesting anymore."

Instead he wrote a book on American foreign policy in the cold war, a book on Marxist theory, and one on Shakespeare. In 1969, at the pinnacle of his career as a radical, he became editor of Ramparts, a leading magazine of the New Left, the 1960s political movement that was for civil rights and against the war in Vietnam. He also counted as friends such prominent figures in the movement as Tom Hayden and Todd Gitlin.

But in the 1970s, Mr. Horowitz abandoned the left. He says the murder of his friend Betty Van Patter, a bookkeeper for the Black Panthers, along with his conclusion that the antiwar movement was wrong about Vietnam, led him to embrace conservative politics.

When his politics changed, liberal intellectuals shunned him. "For 20 years, when I have written books on the left, the left has ignored me," he says. "It's just what Stalin did to Trotsky."

Prone to hyperbole, Mr. Horowitz does not mean to suggest that leftist professors are trying to kill him. He simply believes he has been blacklisted by academe. Although he says he was a "leading figure in the New Left," professors do not assign his books, nor do they refer to his work in the hundreds of courses taught on the 1960s, he says. They don't invite him to speak in those courses, either.

To gain the recognition he believed he deserved, Mr. Horowitz established the center, which features conservative programs such as catered lunches with right-leaning luminaries who discuss their latest books. "I don't have a platform in The New York Times," he says.

If he were liberal, he contends, he could be an editor at the Times or a department chairman at Harvard University. And his life story would have already been told on the big screen. Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey, his autobiography, has been out for eight years. "Someone would have made a film out of it if I was a leftist," he says bitterly.

He claims he would make more money as a liberal, too, "at least three times," what he earns now. According to the center's most recent available tax form, Mr. Horowitz received an annual salary of $310,167 in 2003. He declines to give his current income, but in addition to his salary, Mr. Horowitz receives about $5,000 for each of the 30 to 40 campus speeches he gives each year.

College Republicans always invite him. Other student groups never do. "My kids have to scrounge up the money off campus," he says, complaining that student governments pay liberal speakers more than conservative ones.

Mr. Horowitz accuses the academy of trying to keep him away from students. He still reaches some of them through the activities of his center, but one senses he would prefer the classroom. "I enjoy the contact with students," he says. "I'd enjoy teaching."

Senator Fedor asks Mr. Horowitz another question about the financing for his campaign.

"Do I get to ask a question?" he says.

"No, you do not," the committee chairwoman says.

The senator tries a different tack: "How many states are addressing a campaign?"

"About 20 states," Mr. Horowitz says. "Most of the state legislators contacted me. Rhode Island, Tennessee, Minnesota, Missouri. The one state I went to was Colorado, where I made a concerted effort."

Ms. Fedor then questions him about Students for Academic Freedom.

"I have 150 student organizations," he says. "These are not a lobby. These organizations are to defend student rights. I have three people who work for me."

Sara Dogan is one of the three. As the national campus director of Students for Academic Freedom, she helps students push for the academic bill of rights on their campuses. "We're trying to promote academic freedom and intellectual diversity," says Ms. Dogan, seated in her office in Washington.

The sign for Suite 1100, just steps from her office door, says National Hispanic Medical Association. A piece of paper taped beneath says Students for Academic Freedom. The group sublets space from the association, and Ms. Dogan has a corner office, where she works alone. From her window, the 26-year-old has a nice view of K Street.

"Most people my age are in these tiny cubicles," she says. A bookshelf filled with Mr. Horowitz's books lines one wall. A fax and copy machine sit against another.

Ms. Dogan oversees the nearly 150 student chapters of the group that have sprung up since Mr. Horowitz founded it two years ago. She runs the organization's Web site, and monitors its complaint center, where students post incidents of liberal professors harassing conservative students in the classroom. She also writes scathing responses to articles that Mr. Horowitz believes misrepresent what he has proposed.

If students have problems with a professor -- seeing their grades drop after wearing a George Bush T-shirt to class, for instance -- Ms. Dogan is often the first person they call. Some days, students call incessantly. On an afternoon in March, when many of them are on spring break, the phone rings only once.

A graduate of Yale University, Ms. Dogan worked at Accuracy in Academia, a conservative, nonprofit organization that documents cases of political bias on college campuses, before joining Students for Academic Freedom in 2003.

College Republicans have so successfully spread the word about the organization that she no longer has to do much recruiting. "Students really come to us," she says.

To start a campus chapter, students fill out a form posted on the group's Web site. Some students tell her they have 30 members, while others may have only two. "We don't really measure membership," Ms. Dogan says.

Once students have started a chapter, Ms. Dogan suggests they get others to fill out complaint forms on professors they believe are indoctrinating students, to help publicize the cause. She also suggests they see if student fees support a diverse range of campus speakers. And she recommends they meet with administrators to see if they're interested in adopting the bill.

While Ms. Dogan links Mr. Horowitz to students, Bradley Shipp connects him to state legislators. Mr. Shipp, 32, lives in Raleigh, N.C., and works out of his home. (The center itself is located on the fourth floor of an office building in downtown Los Angeles, but Mr. Horowitz prefers to work from home.) Mr. Shipp is a former political consultant with Rotterman & Associates, a North Carolina-based, Republican media-consulting firm that once worked for Mr. Horowitz and ran campaigns for Jesse Helms, the former Republican senator. Mr. Shipp now serves as national field director for Students for Academic Freedom and helps students start chapters of their own.

But his main job is scheduling. He arranges Mr. Horowitz's campus visits and meetings with Republican legislators who want to sponsor the bill.

Mr. Horowitz insists that he does not pick the states -- 16 so far -- where legislators introduce the legislation. (The bill has also been introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives as a resolution, and similar language is also in the proposed extension of the Higher Education Act.) State politicians contact him, he says. For instance, Sen. Larry A. Mumper, an Ohio Republican, called Mr. Shipp. "I don't know how he knew to call Brad," Mr. Horowitz says.

The only state where Mr. Horowitz chose to launch his campaign was Colorado, which he says he picked for the wrong reasons. After the SUNY officials he met with in 2002 told him that professors there would never support his bill, Mr. Horowitz set his sights west a year later. He hired a University of Denver law student to help him coordinate the battle in Colorado.

In the end, Colorado's legislature did not pass the bill. But the hearings and the testimony were enough to pressure public universities in the state to sign a "memorandum of understanding" last spring in which they promised to do more to follow the spirit of the document.

Mr. Horowitz has declared victory in Colorado. The government should intervene in academe only as a last resort, he says, and he hopes to see more such memoranda of understanding. Ultimately, he would prefer that universities adopt the bill themselves, he says, but that is unlikely. "I called the AAUP," he says. "My goal was 'Let's look at this. Can we try to compromise?'"

But the association was hostile from the beginning, he asserts. "If they had supported it, the universities would have supported it," he says. "There would be no battle." (Jonathan Knight, an associate secretary of the AAUP, says it is possible that Mr. Horowitz e-mailed the association a couple of years ago, but he doesn't remember.)

For the AAUP's Mr. Bowen, Mr. Horowitz is less of a concern than the legislators who are taking his bill of rights seriously. "David Horowitz himself has little power," he says, "but state legislators do."

Mr. Bowen fears that if those legislators do pass the bill, it will "put a monitor in classrooms," increase the role of government, and make litigation at the college and university level more frequent and more prevalent.

Todd Gitlin, now a professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia, also has a problem with the bill as legislation. The actual text of it is fine, he says. "If it came across my desk as a petition, I'd probably sign it." But "the attempt to rope legislatures into enforcing rules of fairness and decorum on university campuses is misguided and perverse."

"Who funds your center?" Senator Fedor asks Mr. Horowitz. She has asked this question three times in three different ways.

"Ten foundations," Mr. Horowitz says. "Thirty-five thousand people. I am less well funded than the American Association of University Professors, far less well funded than the ACLU. This is a bizarre line of questioning, if I may say so."

The committee chairwoman reminds him to stick to answering the questions.

"Well, this is an ad hominem attack that has nothing to do with the bill of rights," Mr. Horowitz says. "What are you trying to show? Do I represent the oil-and-gas lobby? Is that what this is about?"

In addition to the 35,000 individuals that contribute to Mr. Horowitz's center, several conservative foundations regularly send large checks. The most well known among them include the Sarah Scaife Foundation, which the conservative billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife runs, and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, which, according to its Web site, is "devoted to strengthening American democratic capitalism" and supports "limited, competent government."

According to the most recent tax forms available, the two foundations gave a total of $620,000 to the center in 2003. Since 1998, the two groups have contributed about $3.5-million. The center received about $3.26-million in donations in 2003, and Michael Finch, the center's executive director, says about 40 percent of that comes from foundations.

Mr. Bowen of the AAUP says that none of the foundations that contribute to Mr. Horowitz's center give to his association. "If they really were supporting academic freedom, they should be sending money our way," he says.

The board of Mr. Horowitz's center is similarly conservative. David Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union; Wayne LaPierre Jr., executive vice president and chief executive officer of the National Rifle Association; and John O'Neill, spokesman for the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, are members, as are Bruce H. Hooper, president of the Elizabeth S. Hooper Foundation, and Norman Hapke, a member of the board of the Jacobs Family Foundation, both of which contribute to the center.

Despite his ties to the Republican Party, Mr. Horowitz says his biggest disappointment is that he doesn't have liberal and nonpartisan support. "I have to take responsibility," he says. "It's just me. I'm a hot-button political partisan."

But in the next breath, Mr. Horowitz concedes that he seeks people for his board for whom he has an "affinity," and that he has never invited liberals to join. "I've tried to keep on the board people who will raise money for me," he says. "The center is a personal campaign of my agendas."

Mr. Horowitz says he made an attempt (he admits not a "tremendous" one) to ask academics on the left, such as Stanley Fish, to support his bill of rights. But when Mr. Fish, dean emeritus of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago, said no, he concluded that other university administrators would similarly decline. "They wouldn't survive being associated with David Horowitz," he says.

Fellow conservatives don't expect the bill to win liberal support anytime soon. "It's a slow process, overturning those that stand in the university's doors, guarding leftist ideology," says Joe R. Hicks, a friend of Mr. Horowitz's who served as the center's executive director a few years ago. "Hopefully, others will join him." But Mr. Hicks says he is not naïve enough to think liberals would want to change the academy or embrace Mr. Horowitz's difficult personality. "Certainly, he's a prickly individual."

He is also an obstinate one. During the hearing in Ohio, Mr. Horowitz would not name the foundations that contribute to his center, promising to mail Senator Fedor the complete list when he returned to his office.

Just after the hearing, Mr. Horowitz admits that he does, in fact, remember who gives him money. "She wanted me to say Richard Mellon Scaife," he says, standing in his hotel lobby. "I like Dick Scaife. He's been utterly demonized."

He also complains that the senator asked him about his income. "Teresa Heinz Kerry didn't give her income," he says. "It's like the sacred cow in American life. It was too personal. [The senator] said right away, 'I want to know what your motive is,' as though I'm proposing to legalize prostitution or something."

Weeks after the hearing, with the list of conservative foundations that contribute to his center in hand, Ms. Fedor calls Mr. Horowitz a political hack. "His whole organization is one big political propaganda tool for Republicans," she says.

He bristles at the accusation. "No one, not Dick Scaife, not the Bradley Foundation, told me to do this," he says. "The idea that it's a plot cooked up in their boardrooms is idiotic." He finds the notion that this campaign is his revenge on the academy similarly absurd. He says he wants a place at the table for conservatives like Dinesh D'Souza and Victor Davis Hanson, not just for himself.

"Of course it rankles," he says of the books never assigned, the invitations to speak never sent. "But it would be a complete distortion to say that this is about one man."

The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky; Quarantine, by Jim Crace; and Restoring Free Speech and Liberty on Campus, by Donald Alexander Downs

Chihuahuas Jake and Lucy, and Winnie, a Burmese mountain dog. He also has two canaries and two finches.

Married to April Mullvain Horowitz, a photographer, for seven years. They live in Los Angeles County. "I love my work space," he says. "I sit at my desk with my laptop. I listen to music. I take the dogs for a walk. Like most writers, I live in my head." He has four children from his first marriage, four grandchildren, and a stepson.

David Horowitz recently started Discoverthenetworks.org, an online database of left-wing organizations and individuals. The site includes pictures and profiles of organizations like the American Association of University Professors and professors like Cornel West. It names George Soros and Teresa Heinz Kerry among the liberal establishment's major contributors. Mr. Horowitz, of course, has contributors of his own. Here's a glimpse of his network of friends and financial supporters, and some of his projects:

The Milwaukee-based charitable organization is devoted to democratic capitalism and limited government.

Richard Mellon Scaife, the scion of the Mellon oil and banking empire, is chairman of this Pittsburgh-based charitable organization.

The New York-based philanthropic organization, started in 1953 by the late inventor and industrialist, encouraged research on public policy in social and economic fields.

A national organization that helps students track cases of professors who introduce their political views in the classroom. The group has more than 150 campus chapters in 43 states and Washington, D.C. (States without chapters are Alaska, Arkansas, Hawaii, Idaho, Mississippi, North Dakota, and Vermont.)

A Los Angeles-based, conservative, nonprofit organization. Mr. Horowitz founded it in 1988 with Peter Collier, publisher of Encounter Books, based in San Francisco. Mr. Collier and Mr. Horowitz edited Ramparts, a leftist political magazine from 1969 to 1973 and wrote several books together.

The Center for the Study of Popular Culture's online journal features Mr. Horowitz's blog and articles by conservative college students and by well-known conservative writers like Ann Coulter and Daniel Pipes.

One of the center's regular programs: a speaker series that has included the writer Christopher Hitchens; William Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard; and U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay.

States whose legislatures have introduced the "academic bill of rights," a list of principles that Mr. Horowitz says colleges should follow to make their campuses more politically diverse: California, Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Washington

David Horowitz is a former left-wing radical who converted to political conservatism. A one-time supporter of the Black Panther Party, he has canvassed the country this year to make college campuses more tolerant of conservatives like himself. He is now president of the Center for the Study of Popular Culture, a conservative, nonprofit organization "dedicated to defending the cultural foundations of a free society," according to its Web site.