Indoctrination U:The Left's War Against Academic Freedom (Hardcover)

~ (Author)
Key Phrases: academic freedom campaign, academic bill, intellectual pluralism, Academic Bill of Rights, United States, Penn State (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

In 2003, David Horowitz began a campaign to promote intellectual diversity and a return to academic standards in American universities. To achieve these goals he devised an Academic Bill of Rights and created a national student movement with chapters on 160 college campuses. Take No Prisoners is a riveting account of the reaction to Horowitz's campaign by professor unions and academic associations, whose leaderships have been taken over by the political left.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 175 pages
• Publisher: Encounter Books (March 25, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1594031908
• ISBN-13: 978-1594031908
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.1 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (27 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #468,311 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

116 of 139 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Of Rights and Character Assassination, February 18, 2007

By	Bernard Chapin "Ora Et Labora!" (CHICAGO! USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

Should Conservadom, in the spirit of positive reinforcement, ever decide to create awards for its most valuable commentators, it is quite likely that David Horowitz will be summoned to the podium each and every year until the time of his death. Few other figures have so resolutely, and creatively, battled the left over the course of the past two decades.

The cure Horowitz offers to the propagandizing of the bottom10 percent of the professorate is called The Academic Bill of Rights. The context and story behind Indoctrination U is the author's attempt to gain publicity for the proposition. Having it enacted by state legislatures was never his primary goal. What he sincerely desired was for universities to preemptively adopt its essence into their own bylaws.

The Bill itself is reproduced in an appendix. Its language is well-crafted and rather innocuous, yet one would never know this from the reaction it received from its critics. They dubbed it "crazy, Orwellian, a witch hunt," and totalitarian in nature. Their disparagement is perhaps a ruse to better enable them to protect their own privilege as tenets like, "No faculty shall be hired or fired or denied promotion or tenure on the basis of their political or religious beliefs" is not the stuff of McCarthyism. Although, should it be rigidly interpreted, a clause like, "Faculty will not use their courses for the purpose of political, ideological, religious or anti-religious indoctrination" would completely threaten the activists' way of life. Commandments like that are far more threatening than having their beloved Fairness Doctrine applied to network news broadcasts or NPR.

Those who actually discussed the initiative were generally dismissive. One proclaimed it a "solution in search of a problem." How much better off the country would be if such a view was correct. The liberal arts programs within our universities have become leftist bastions whose purpose is no longer to pursue truth. Unlike with the sciences, whose colleges are the finest in the world, numerous liberal arts departments have become completely politicized and are little more than ad hoc centers of agitprop.

Many of our tenured luminaries even question whether there is such a thing as truth or objectivity at all. Their skepticism makes for all kinds of classroom mischief as they idolatrously worship the troika of race, class, and gender. What "social justice" should mean is that the citizenry has the right to keep what they've earned, but, in the mouths of radicals, it is morphed into a description of government's attempt to pit one social group against another via an arbitrary, and authoritarian, redistribution of wealth scheme. Political correctness functions as the academy's Cerberus. It tyrannizes the marketplace of ideas and uses wonderland logic to turn its critics into peddlers of hate speech.

44 of 52 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Indoctrination U, February 27, 2007

By	Tom in Az "Tom" (Arizona) - See all my reviews

Absolutely FANTASTIC!!! This book clearly exposes the lefts agenda to use our schools and universities to program future generations to fall in line with thier political and world views. It futher shows how anyone who does not blindly follow the left are targeted and routinely subjected to various attempts at silencing them. I would recommend this book to anyone seeking the truth at what their children are really being taught in school...

68 of 83 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A corrective to the overwhelming leftist hegemony of the modern university..., February 27, 2007

By	Katy Lake (The People's Republic of New Jersey) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)

As someone who spent a good chunk of my academic life fighting the leftist obsession with stamping out any view that challenged the dominant leftist mindset, Horowitz has been an academic godsend.

It's almost impossible to imagine that the academy, of all places, does not welcome diversity of opinion if that opinion doesn't toe the left-of-center line. Once upon a time, you might be able to argue against it and not have to pay a grade penalty. That simply doesn't exist anymore.

There aren't enough centrists and conservatives in universities where you actually have an alternative. The point isn't to AGREE; the point is to encourage open debate and scrutiny.

All well and good, but as Horowitz says, there's only one train of thought running through the American academy, and it's the Totalitarian Express. If you aren't a leftist, if you don't agree with leftism, if you dissent from the leftist line, you will, sooner rather than later, pay an academic penalty for it.

That's why so much of this book focuses on an Academic Bill of Rights. It's a bullwark against a single student being steamrolled by the leftwing juggernaut that rules and runs modern academia. I can see it being of use to open debate, rather than stifle it, and the dissenting student, with it.

I just thank God that the left didn't have its act together as it does now when I went to school (back in antediluvian 1990). Yeah, the left ran the joint, but there was still a chance to have a healthy debate. From what I see now, my college years apparently really ARE the "good old days"!