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NCPA Economic Policy Forum & Author Series
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On June 25, the NCPA welcomes David Horowitz, New York Times bestselling author and founder and current president of the David Horowitz Freedom Center. Horowitz has also founded the organization Students for Academic Freedom, whose self-stated goal is combatting “leftist indoctrination” in academia.
In his new book, The New Leviathan, David Horowitz and coauthor Jacob Laksin examine the growing financial power of left-wing organizations and politicians in the US revealing the richest and most powerful political machine in American history.
About David Horowitz
David Horowitz was one of the founders of the New Left in the 1960s and an editor of its largest magazine, Ramparts. Looking back in anger at their days in the New Left, he and Collier wrote Destructive Generation, a chronicle of their second thoughts about the 60s that has been compared to Whittaker Chambers’ Witness and other classic works documenting a break from totalitarianism.
In 1988, Horowitz created the Center for the Study of Popular Culture (CSPC) — renamed by its board of directors the David Horowitz Freedom Center (DHFC) in July 2006 — to institutionalize his campaigns against the Left and its anti-Americanism. The DHFC’s mission is to defend the principles of individual freedom, the rule of law, private property, and limited government. It further seeks to defend free societies in the war against their enemies, and to reestablish academic freedom in American schools. The DHFC is supported by 100,000 contributors and publishes FrontpageMagazine.com, an online magazine featuring articles on “the war at home and abroad,” which receives approximately a million visitors per month. Another DHFC website, DiscoverTheNetworks.org, is an encyclopedia of the political Left and its networks.
Horowitz has devoted much of his attention over the past several years to the radicalization of the American university. In 2003, he launched an academic freedom campaign to return the American university to traditional principles of open inquiry and to halt indoctrination in the classroom. To further these goals, he devised an Academic Bill of Rights to protect students from abusive professors. In the same year, Horowitz founded Students for Academic Freedom (SAF), which now has chapters on 200 college campuses. Asserting that, “You can’t get a good education if they’re only telling you half the story,” Horowitz called for inquiries into political bias in the hiring of faculty and the appointment of commencement speakers.
In three years Horowitz’s campaign for academic freedom was able to make intellectual diversity and academic freedom front-burner issues on college campuses across the country. In June 2005, in direct response to his campaign, the American Council on Education, which represents 2000 colleges and universities, called on its members to create grievance procedures for students who were politically harassed by their professors. In July 2005 the Pennsylvania House of Representatives voted 111-87 to create a Select Committee on Academic Freedom, which then held hearings throughout the state, which lasted until June 2006. On July 19, 2006, the Temple University board of trustees adopted a new policy, which gave students’ academic freedom rights – the first university to do so.
Horowitz has chronicled the radicalization of the American university and the way indoctrination has replaced education in four books: Uncivil Wars; The Professors: the 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America; Indoctrination U.; One Party Classroom and most recently Reforming Our Universities.
David Horowitz has spoken at over 300 colleges and universities and continues to visit more than 30 campuses a year. He has appeared on Nightline, Crossfire, Today, Hannity and Colmes, the O’Reilly Factor, Good Morning America, C-SPAN, CNBC, Fox News Channel and MSNBC. He gives hundreds of interviews yearly on radio and television.