July 12, 2006
 
New Report Debunks Politically Motivated Attack on ‘The Professors’ by David Horowitz
 
By HNN Staff
 
In a detailed report released last month (June 12, 2006) called “Discounting the Facts”, Jacob Laksin refutes the allegations of a union-sponsored coalition calling itself “Free Exchange on Campus” which has repeatedly and maliciously attacked the Academic Bill of Rights and its author David Horowitz, as well as Horowitz’s book, The Professors.
 
Laksin, a senior editor at FrontPageMagazine.com, is responding to “Facts Count,” a recent 50-page report on The Professors released by the Free Exchange coalition in May 2006, which claims that its author is “sloppy in the extreme” and that Horowitz’s research is “characterized by inaccuracies, distortions, and manipulations of fact.”
 
In a point-by-point refutation of “Facts Count,” Laksin exposes the allegations as a politically-motivated smear effort: “Time and again [“Facts Count”] insists that The Professors cites no evidence for a given claim when even a cursory reading of the text and its sources would confirm the opposite. Time and again, the report rebuts arguments that do not appear at all in The Professors but are the inventions of the Free Exchange authors themselves.”
 
In sum, writes Laksin, “‘Facts Count’ identifies a handful of trivial errors in a 112,000 word text, supplies many similar errors of its own, adds blatant falsehoods, misrepresents differences of opinion as matters of fact, and indulges in numerous ad hominem assaults on [the] author….On examination, none of these charges is sustained. Simply stated, ‘Facts Count’ is an intellectually sleazy and inept attempt to discredit a book whose opinions the [Free Exchange] authors dislike.”
 
Laksin draws attention to the fact that several of the professors quoted in “Facts Count” have misrepresented their past statements and writings. Thus Georgetown’s Mari Matsuda protests that she “never, not once, at any university” participated in the debate over speech codes. Citing evidence detailed in The Professors, as well as other sources, Laksin demonstrates that Matsuda’s claims cannot be reconciled with the facts; In her book, Words That Wound, Matsuda provided the legal rationale for speech codes on American university campuses, as is recognized by commentators across the political spectrum. As Laksin observes, however, Matsuda’s dishonesty did not prevent the Free Exchange authors from credulously citing her claims to impugn the veracity of The Professors.
 
Elsewhere in his report, Laksin writes that some of the charges made by Free Exchange are refuted by their own findings. For example, the Free Exchange coalition’s report criticizes Horowitz’s statement that UC-Santa Cruz Professor Bettina Aptheker “‘deeply regretted’ the fall of the Soviet system.” But when given the “opportunity to address the charges” made against her, Aptheker’s response, quoted in “Facts Count,” only confirms Horowitz’s claim.
 
The report also responds to the broader criticisms of the Free Exchange coalition, such as the claim that “Mr. Horowitz chiefly condemns professors for expressing their personal political views outside of the classroom.” “This is false,” notes Laksin, who quotes the introduction to The Professors, which explicitly states that “This book is not intended as a text about leftwing bias in the university and does not propose that a leftwing perspective on academic faculties is a problem in itself. Every individual, whether conservative or liberal, has a perspective and therefore a bias. Professors have every right to interpret the subjects they teach according to their individual points of view. That is the essence of academic freedom.” As Laksin comments: “Since these sentences appear in the introduction to the text and have been repeated by the author many times since publication, it is clear that this is not an honest error but a calculated distortion of the intentions of both author and book.”
 
As Laksin writes, while Free Exchange on Campus has masqueraded as a disinterested group of academics and students, concerned only with protecting an open dialogue on college campuses, in fact “Free Exchange is an organization created and financed by the professor unions solely to oppose the efforts of one individual, David Horowitz, his campaign to have universities adopt an ‘Academic Bill of Rights’ and his book The Professors.
 
The groups comprising the Free Exchange coalition are chiefly distinguished by their partisan commitment to left-wing political causes and their support for the politicized and one-sided academic status quo documented and critiqued in The Professors.”
 
Members of this coalition include “Campus Progress,” an organization funded by billionaire leftist operative George Soros and the Center for Campus Free Speech, a front for U.S. Public Interest Research Group (US PIRG) founded by Green Party presidential candidate Ralph Nader.
 
“Not one of the professors mentioned in the Free Exchange report appears willing to openly defend the partisan politics and political extremism that flourish in the university curriculum or to frankly acknowledge their role in promoting these developments,” comments Laksin. “This bad faith permeates the report ‘Facts Count’ and renders its title ironic indeed.”
 
Editor’s Note: For a review by HNN Book Critic David M. Kinchen of “The Professors” click here.