Posted by amy at March 1st, 2006

Growing up in a politically divided household, I learned early about partisan posturing and how to engage in different styles of debate. In a predominantly liberal high school, I found the easiest way to rebel was to become a Reagan Youth. In college, a cute boy introduced me to the errors of my way, at the same time a Political Science professor started indoctrinating me into the new left. A course on the history of American Feminism was the final blow and I returned home for Christmas break a radical feminist blindly quoting Marx and Guevara. I slipped further and further to the left, while ignoring the inner voices in my head that questioned many of the hypocrisies I saw before me. The two naked Marxists arguing over who owned the last piece of tofu lasagna, the Buddhist peace activist who proudly cheated on her taxes and scammed the local utilities so she could spend money on jewelry, the Earth First ecoterrorist who smoked Marlboro Reds by the carton, while screaming about the evils of big business and their lobbying ties to the Republican party. In the course of my dissertation research, I came across a book by David Horowitz, a former 1960s activist who had gone to the other side and became one of the leading critics of the new left and its aftermath.

In an early draft of my dissertation, I lashed out at Horowitz, seeing him as a traitor to the movement and to the cause. I reasoned that we couldn’t really take him seriously; he must have been a poser. As I aged and mellowed a bit, I revised and softened my references to his work, and was able to address a few of his concerns, without resorting to name-calling. But, I was always aware of my own political roots and conscious of the fact that it probably wouldn’t take much to move me back to the right.

I’ve followed Horowitz’s career, and hadn’t really thought too much about him until recently, when he published his list of the 101 most dangerous college professors. From the far left, the list is seen as a joke — you would have to assume that students would actually need to pay attention to their professors in order for their to be any real threat – and as a badge of honor, as recently as last week people were stuffing the ballots on Horowitz’s blog (http://www.frontpagemag.com/survey/vote.asp) trying to get themselves or their friends higher on the list. Then the factions started in – the feminist were urging everyone to vote for Eve Sedgwick, the African-American feminists were pushing for Angela Davis. Reading the blogs and watching the posturing was like watching the new left fall apart all over again as they engaged in a game of oppression one-upsmanship.

I don’t actually think it is a problem that American Colleges and Universities tend to “harbor” leftists, I mean honestly, there isn’t a huge market for Marxist theorists in the real world is there? When else can you play with politically impractical ideals and revolutionary ideology than in college – you certainly can’t do it in a cubicle farm on the 14th floor of some multinational widget conglomerate.

And playing with ideas is fun, it is part of how we learn and grow, for many it may be the only time in their lives where they get exposed to queer theory or Cornel West’s take on the cultural significance of rap music.

The flip side of the oppression status game the left has played so well, is the demonization of those who are different, who don’t think like you. It never bothered me when Republicans engaged in name calling – I expected them to, they never bought into the whole “celebrate difference” thing. But when the left does it, I am appalled. I’m constantly surprised when people I know and respect Republican bash in front of me. I’m suddenly sitting with Archie Bunker, complaining about “dagoes” and “spooks” waving a broad brush over what makes up slightly more than half of the American voting population. Suddenly I understand how once egalitarian revolutionaries in Africa become dictators, how neighbors could take up arms against neighbors in Yugoslavia, how civil wars happen.

The problem isn’t the bias, we all have bias and when pushed, most of us are happy to own up to it. The problem, for me, is that we are so quick to defend our bias as the correct one and that someone else’s bias is wrong, that it gets in the way of actual dialogue, in effect building up the walls and increasing the tension and polarization. The common ground becomes invisible and the difference isn’t something to be celebrated, or even discussed, it becomes something to be labeled and dismissed.

And all of this plays out in the classroom – it is why disagreements about Intelligent Design can’t be reconciled in a school board meeting but have to be fought out in courts, it is why we have state and federal governments administering irrelevant exams, rather than working with school teachers to develop curriculum that could help students learn better while still identifying incompetent teachers.

So I sit notice liberal bias in my classes, just as I notice conservative bias when I sit with my family around the dinner table. And I call my teachers and my classmates on it and I call my family on it as well. I haven’t turned into David Horowitz yet, but I understand where he is coming from and I can hold onto my name calling long enough to actually listen to what he has to say.