What’s worse than David Horowitz’s brand of right-wing drivel giving yellow journalism a bad name? A ghost-authored Horowitz sequel, padded with over 150 witless, tendentious summaries of courses that the compilers erroneously imagine will frighten middle America into hauling the faculty up the nearest telephone pole.
The current issue of American Book Review highlights their Top 40 Bad Books. Heading the list for me is One-Party Classroom: How Radical Professors at America’s Top Colleges Indoctrinate Students and Undermine Our Democracy, by Horowitz and Jacob Laksin. Since I often can’t make time to review excellent books, I don’t usually waste pixels on bad ones. But one has to make an exception for the epic badness of Horowitz’s failed hit job.
At least the first book in this series, The Professors, gave the “101 Most Dangerous Academics in America” something to brag about in their red-diaper parent-participation preschools (whilst plotting Trotskyite mayhem from behind piled bookshelves).
This cheesy compilation is too lazy even to attack faculty scholarship. It’s little more than a list of syllabi with a shrill “I see Marxism!” appended to each — 150 times. The somnolence it produces is hard to describe.
Evidently they should have credited Google as the third author.
The Horowitz staffers tasked with compiling this stinker simply trolled online campus catalogs to yield course descriptions employing such “democracy-undermining” terms as justice, inequality, race, and feminism. Then the staffers wrote lame descriptions characterizing the syllabi as part of a plot to deprive plutocrats of their hard-earned profits.
Once I got the concept, I briefly held the flickering hope that I could read it ironically — as in, “hey, what a bunch of good classes I wish I’d been able to take in college.”
Wrong. The relentless, narrowminded prose immediately disappeared my hopes of snarky thoughtcrime.
Even if you’re sympathetic to its politics, the concrete brutalism of this compilation’s formal properties will crush your spirit in a few pages — like reading a year’s worth of your daily horoscopes straight through, or a cookbook cover to cover.
I know, I know. I’m well-known for holding such anti-democratic views as that we should all have enough to eat, health care, and free education. So don’t take my word for it. Peruse a chapter over at the Random House Web site. Just don’t say I didn’t warn you.
x-posted: howtheuniversityworks
5 Responses to Baddest of the Bad Books
demery1 - March 10, 2010 at 10:01 am
Is it a bad book, or perhaps evidence of a poor writer?The stultifying quality of the books arrangement might belong to the book, its editors, research asssistants, and in some measure to the compiler in chief. On the other hand, the failure of the evidence to prove the premise seems to belong to the author and not the book, per se. IOs it the failed execution of the project that is its downfall, or the mere fact of its existence?If reading Marx is a symptom of indoctrination, then it may be time to eliminate economics departments. Capital rates as one of the 100 best books of all time for business (along with Adam Smith, Ricardo, Keynes, and Friedman). On the other hand, Mr. Horowitz has cultivated a lovely career doing his road show on campuses, even teaming up with fellow charicature Ward Churchill for a good run.Commercial success has to count for something, and in this case the fault lies with those who purchase these rotten books. Thankfully, I assume few of those who buy them actually read them.
seiu615 - March 10, 2010 at 10:11 am
Thanks so much for this look at Horowitz’s book! David Horowitz has had a “stellar” career attacking progressive-minded professors and thinkers ever since he moved to the right in the 1980s, defending South African apartheid (before Mandela’s release from jail), the U.S. war in El Salvador and Nicaragua, Reaganomics, and so on. So now he’s aiming his attacks on those universities who still believe in open debate across a wide spectrum of ideas.
dank48 - March 10, 2010 at 12:58 pm
“What’s worse than David Horowitz’s brand of right-wing drivel giving yellow journalism a bad name?”Well, I don’t know . . . lots of things, really. Suppose “Marc Bosquet” and “left” were substituted for “David Horowitz” and “right” in that sentence. Better? Worse? Again, I don’t know. I am pretty sure, though, that this article contributes to the discussion rather little in terms of civility, good manners, and a sense of fair play. Mutatis mutandis, it reminds me of Limbaugh, Beck, and the rest of that crowd. Thomas Pynchon’s formulation “You’re so far right you’re left” works in both directions. Remember the ending to “Animal Farm.”
elder_elder - March 10, 2010 at 6:19 pm
I thought Bousquet was probably hyperbolizing until I jumped over a read a few pages. I loved the self-serving footnote on page 5: “The term ‘critical thinking’ is widely used by academic radicals as a code for Marxism and its derivative schools. It is used here to mean thinking that is openminded, skeptical of received truths, and guided by the scientific method.”This claim by Horowitz is so laughable and indefensible that one hardly knows how to respond. I despair to think that most of the audience for Horowitz’s book lacks the, ahem, critical thinking skills to see through his shucksterism.
fizmath - March 11, 2010 at 7:10 pm
Horowitz is not laughable, he is dangerous. He is creating a climate of fear to intimidate anyone who does not share his views. If you think a teacher is too leftist, then don’t pick his/her class. Duh.