Dear Editor,
Having been essentially a libertarian about most things, for most of my life, I was waiting with some interest and anticipation for the presentation by David Horowitz.
The literature and e-mail passed around by the student group which invited him to speak on our campus seemed to indicate that we would be treated to a lecture on the proper place of conservatism in the academy and its role as part of the process of an education in the liberal arts.
Accordingly, I had expected an organized presentation of conservative ideas and concepts, along with thoughtful suggestions about how to more fully integrate disparate points of view into our classes and campus life. Instead, I heard a disorganized and random polemic full of gratuitous ad hominem attacks on both those present and the academic community in general, fallacies of false analogy, fallacies of false dichotomy and other gross errors of reasoning and fact which would surely earn Horowitz a failing grade in argumentation and debate, and just about any history, political science, philosophy, sociology or anthropology class which one could name.
These fallacies and attacks floated on an inchoate stew of words, comprised of equal parts incoherence, irrationality, persecution mania, and bile, seasoned with what seemed to me to be a liberal dose of Horowitz’s obvious bitterness at his virtually lifelong failure to acquire a legitimate academic position.
Having listened to him try to speak, and having witnessed his apparently congenital inability to answer a simple, direct question, I can well understand why he has been excluded from the professorate and lives in exile as a paid demagogue, a shill for whomever will pay his speaking fee.
The indirect remarks and references to and about race, gender, Nazis and Stalin, concentration camps and gulags, McCarthy and his own blacklisted communist parents only served to generate an atmosphere of grossly inappropriate and utterly irrelevant confusion. His notable lack of specificity only served to verify the comments made by my colleague, Mel Page, whom Horowitz quoted at the beginning of his talk and then dismissed as irrelevant. Instead, he convicted himself of his inadequacies by his own words, hoisted himself on his own petard.
Mainly, however, I felt great sympathy and embarrassment for the four young men in the front row who applauded ever so enthusiastically at the appropriate moments, as well as for their faculty adviser, my colleague Dr. Paul Kamolnick.
I can only think they had expected to hear a lecture by a true, conservative intellectual. Instead, it became sadly obvious that Horowitz had no prepared lecture, simply showing up, talking extemporaneously, and taking the money. I can only imagine their disappointment as they witnessed such lack of integrity and my heart goes out to them.
Perhaps next time they could invite a genuine conservative intellectual like say … George Wills or Andrew Sullivan, rather than such a painfully inadequate and inarticulate individual, who does not see that his acceptance of a fee morally and ethically necessitates that he actually prepare something to say and that he engage his audience in civil discourse.
The closing moments were in some ways the saddest of all, with Mr. Horowitz in the midst of his persecution mania, calling on his bodyguard to seize a student who was merely returning to his seat, yelling that the student was going to attack him and exiting the room as quickly as possible, so that he would not have to answer further adversarial questions from the audience.
What had begun as low theater, at that point descended to mere farce.
The actions of the young men from the club which sponsored Horowitz, attempting to physically intimidate the student after the lecture, until they saw me and quit following him, was unacceptable behavior for our institution, and should be condemned by all, no matter what their political persuasion.
Both my age and my occupation breed a certain amused cynicism about humans and their petty and pathetic motives, so let me leave you with a quote from an Elvis Costello song: “I used to be disgusted, but now I’m just amused.”
Professor Doug Burgess
Department of History

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