How to battle the Left at universities

One of the most outrageous claims made by the Left is that its inability to consistently command the allegiance of the masses it claims to champion stems from its innate decency, which precludes it from utilizing the hateful methods of its evil foes.

Thus, the prodigious failures of left-liberals at talk radio and cable news cannot be laid at the feet of the Left or its unpopular causes, but because conservatives, libertarians and the rest of the right are wily, mendacious manipulators of the gullible public. How we can manage this while at the same time being stupid to the point of drooling dysfunctionality – another favorite leftist libel – is beyond me, but then, intellectual consistency is the hobgoblin of small right-wing minds such as mine.

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As with most unfounded accusations, the truth of it is to be found in the accuser, not the accused. The American Left, in politics, academia and entertainment, is invariably guilty of the very methods that it imagines and decries being used by its foes. That the average leftist has the emotional maturity of an undisciplined 2-year-old only exacerbates this tendency to wantonly project upon others that which they know to be true of themselves.

One of the reasons the Left engages so freely in wild accusations is that on a subconscious level, they know their intellectual foundation is built on factual sand. If one examines their paranoid accusations in any depth, it soon becomes clear that one of the Left's great fears is that conservatives will resort to using the same sort of proactive measures against them that they regularly use against their opponents. So, give them what they fear, I say, and David Horowitz, in company with Colorado Gov. Bill Owens, has shown the way toward breeching of one of the Left's most powerful strongholds – academia – with his Academic Bill of Rights.

The irony of diversity, that silly idol of universities and newsrooms across America, is that it is only tolerated in the most superficial manner. As long as one has the requisite numbers of women, blacks and homosexuals, one is safely diverse; never mind that there isn't a ruble's worth of ideological distinction between them. The university is easily the worst offender in this regard; the purported champions of intellectual freedom are those who hate it most.

But the Academic Bill of Rights does not go nearly far enough in assaulting what is today little more than a government-funded left-wing arsenal. What is needed is a federal Academic Fairness Doctrine, which would require every institution of higher learning in the country to establish ideological quotas for their faculties. Or perhaps I should say, ideological affirmative action. Each professor would check off one of eight boxes, Socialist, Green, Democrat, Republican, Constitutional, Libertarian, Other (Left) or Other (Right), and a college with a faculty that was not equitably balanced between the parties of left and right would suffer the loss of its federal funding.

Of course, there would be a need for an investigatory body to examine those professors who were attempting to hide their ideological roots in a vain attempt to cling to their tenure. This body, the Academic Fairness Agency, would respond to student complaints and the suspicions of fellow faculty members aroused when a purportedly Libertarian professor of literature gives a lecture on why Che Guevara had to die so that we might have universal health care. Unconstitutional? By no means! What is good for the taxpayer, the businessman and the broadcaster is surely good for the professoriat. Are they not Americans, too?

You might think I'm joking about this, but I'm not. Since the right does not require the aid of government to force-feed our views down the throats of an unwilling public, enacting this legislation is the ultimate win-win situation for Republicans and the rest of the right. But isn't this the very sort of pragmatic sell-out I regularly decry?

Not in the long run. It could be characterized as such, to be sure, except that this is an obvious case of one step back, a giant leap forward. Five years after the passage of the federal Academic Fairness Act, I guarantee the Left will be squealing for an end to all federal funding for higher education. Sometimes, one must lose the battle to win the war.