As the United States has waded into a conservative funk over the past five years, Brown University has sunk even deeper into the muck and rhetoric of the Right. I'm not the only one who's noticed this shift. Dinesh D'Souza, the infamous conservative author, picked up on these changes as well when he spoke on campus last month. "The kind of hard left that I usually encounter at Brown has declined, was absent or in a post-election funk," D'Souza observed, even a bit disappointedly, of his formerly progressive Brunonian audience.
Welcome to Brown University in the post-David Horowitz era. It is an era in which progressive activism on campus has slowly withered, replaced by the troubling ascendance of calls for "intellectual diversity" and "academic freedom." As anyone who is paying attention knows, intellectual diversity and academic freedom are thinly veiled stand-in phrases for increasing the conservative presence on campus and beyond. These are concepts introduced by David Horowitz, whose relationship with Brown is by now legendary. Back in 2001 when I was a first-year, Horowitz was not a widely known name on campus; that is, until he placed an advertisement in The Herald condemning reparations for slavery that many students found racist. A group of students demanded The Herald apologize and donate the price of the ad to the Third World Center. When the editors refused, the students took a run of the day's paper in protest, igniting a campus controversy and national media frenzy. While much of the campus and media turned against these students and accused them of censorship, most people were not enthralled with Horowitz, either. Many saw him as a racist provocateur, aiming to get students riled up and use the ensuing backlash to forward his conservative agenda.
Yet today, Horowitz and his ideas are no longer on the fringe - they are deeply embedded in the leadership and structure of the University. Ruth Simmons' presidency, which began in the first fall after the incident, has been shaped by Horowitz and the subsequent campus firestorm. In her 2001 convocation address, Simmons alluded to her disapproval of student reaction to the Horowitz-related events of the previous year, emphasizing an idea that would become the theme of her presidency: protection of free speech and the need for academic discourse.
In her spring semester address this year, Simmons returned to intellectual diversity, but this time with a concrete plan of action. She announced the Brown University Community Council and a fund to bring diverse speakers to campus, the first of whom was D'Souza. Simmons told the audience the question she most often gets asked in conversations with parents, alums and University supporters is, "What is the University doing about the lack of diversity of opinion on campus?" In the beginning stages of Brown's capital campaign, Simmons' focus on intellectual diversity is largely because it's a concern for potential donors who have been swayed by Horowitz's rhetoric, not because it will improve our education.
If Brown was once the politically liberal institution it is generally seen as, it is no longer that place today. Using the left's rhetoric of "diversity" and "inclusion," conservatives are successfully building a stronger presence into the structure of the University. Students for Academic Freedom, Horowitz's national campus group, successfully petitioned Brown's Office of Institutional Diversity to include intellectual diversity as part of its mission statement. In response to Students for Academic Freedom's concerns about the homogeneity of campus speakers, the director of the Office of Institutional Diversity gave funding to help the College Republicans bring conservative author Andrew Sullivan to campus. In effect, the office that was formed to address issues of diversity such as race, ethnicity, gender and disability has become part of political efforts to specifically increase right-wing voices on campus.
David Horowitz and his Students for Academic Freedom are not as silenced as he would like us to believe. Intellectual diversity and academic freedom are supported by Horowitz's Center for the Study of Popular Culture, the Individual Rights Foundation, various other foundations, think tanks and legal arms, and even the Foundation for Intellectual Diversity at Brown. Nationally, versions of Horowitz's "Academic Bill of Rights" have been introduced into U.S. Congress and almost a dozen state legislatures, including the Rhode Island Senate. This legislation would give students the right to sue professors they felt were not respecting their views in the classroom.
In their fight for intellectual diversity, conservatives are not simply claiming a right to be heard. They are clamoring for the right to not hear anything that challenges them or their power, as evidenced by the legislation that would give students the right to sue professors, all the while touting their oppression in the University setting. As Simmons remarked in her recent campus address, not including conservative voices can lead to a "chilling effect" on campus dialogue. But as Paul Krugman observed in Wednesday's New York Times, conservative political pressure has its own chilling effect on education, which is no doubt its purpose. In their crusade for intellectual diversity, Horowitz and his followers are shutting down debate by using the very language that claims to encourage it.
Erica Sagrans '05 hails from an intellectually diverse background.
