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Against conservatism: Students protest the visit of David Horowitz to Columbia University.

Twenty years ago, like thousands of other young Indians before and after, I went to the United States as a post-graduate student. I went because I wanted to see the world and because I wanted to be a writer, a novelist. Certainly, one could be a novelist without going to the U.S., or for that matter going away at all. It was just that for me going was important. When I went, I did not know how long I would stay, or even whether I would finish my course of study. Half a lifetime later, I have written two novels. I also have a Ph.D., have written a scholarly book and articles, and am still in an American university — not as a student now, but as someone who, aside from writing novels, teaches and does research on American and postcolonial literature and films. To some extent, this is simply a way to make a living — pay the rent, put rice on the table, support my movie habit. But there surely are other ways to make a living, and if I have stayed on, it is also because I have wanted to. Not just necessity but desire too has played its part.

Everyone knows about great American universities like Harvard or Stanford. However, the real achievement of the American higher education system is not to be found in such universities alone, but rather in the system as a whole. Virtually every one of the 50 States of the U.S. has its own elaborate public university system, often a combination of large research universities and smaller teaching oriented community colleges. The best of these — University of California at Berkeley or University of Texas at Austin — rival the Harvards and Stanfords in their teaching and research and in their influence over the public life of the country.

Now, all is not well in this immense system. A storm has broken out across the country’s many university campuses. Since widespread opposition to the Vietnam War on campuses in the 1960s and 70s, conservatives have perceived the influence of universities and colleges to be liberal or, even worse, radical. They have seen the university as a place where values antithetical to American conservatism flourish — where American foreign policy is routinely criticised, where support for radical feminism and homosexual lifestyles abounds, where there is unthinking acceptance of entitlements for African Americans and other racial minorities.

For many conservatives, the American university has become an institution devoted to systematically brainwashing young and impressionable minds with ideas that undermine the Western and Christian traditions on which the country was founded. Instead of celebrating the great tradition of European literature and philosophy, these conservatives complain, professors are engaged in trashing the Western classics or else teaching inferior books like those of Guatemalan Nobel Peace Prize winner Rigoberta Menchu. Where is Plato? Thomas Aquinas? Shakespeare? Vanished, neglected, or else attacked for what they stand for. So claim many influential conservatives, and now — mad as hell, as the Americans say— they have come to do battle to try and take the university back.

One of the shrillest of these battling conservatives is David Horowitz. Through the David Horowtiz Freedom Center, an organisation charmingly named for himself, he has launched the Campaign for Academic Freedom, meant, he declares “to restore academic freedom and open inquiry to college campuses”. Another eager participant in these polemics is an immigrant from India, Dinesh D’Souza, whose book Illiberal Education was one of the first to decry the erosion of Western values in university courses and textbooks.

Conservatives have not only attacked books and ideas. Lives and careers too have been threatened. Take Ward Churchill and Norman Finkelstein. Churchill is a well-known scholar and historian, outspoken in his criticism of the U.S. government’s treatment of Native Americans. Because of a high profile investigation provoked by an article he wrote criticising the U.S. regarding the terrorist attacks of 9/11 (which, it must be said, put forward some deplorable ideas on those who died on that day), he has been fired from his position at the University of Colorado. Finkelstein, himself the child of Jewish survivors of Hitler’s death camps, has been critical of U.S. and Israeli actions in West Asia. The result: he too has been fired from his job at DePaul University. I don’t mean to endorse everything that Churchill and Finkelstein have said, but in both these firings, the conservative movement has played a powerful and inappropriate role by putting enormous pressure on the administrations of these universities. They have seen the Churchill and Finkelstein affairs as opportunities to further attack the university.

So, what are we to make of this conservative assault on the university?

Certainly, the American university has been home to many famous and outspoken liberals and radicals. Noam Chomsky and Angela Davis readily come to mind. Chomsky, renowned linguist and unrelenting critic of American foreign policy, teaches at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Angela Davis was, at one time, a member of the radical militant group the Black Panthers. She now teaches at the University of California at Santa Cruz.

But the American university has also been home to any number of equally famous and outspoken conservatives. Alan Dershowitz, who, it appears, played a pivotal role in getting Finkelstein fired, teaches at Harvard University, as does conservative thinker Samuel Huntington, notorious for his ideas about a “clash of civilisations” between the West and Islam. Alan Bloom, whose book, The Closing of the American Mind, did much to stake out a conservative position on cultural issues during the 1980s, taught at the University of Chicago until his death. For every liberal or radical member of the university, it is possible to think of a conservative counterpart. For every Noam Chomsky, there is a Samuel Huntington.

Why then have conservatives targeted universities? It is difficult to agree with Horowitz or D’Souza that conservatives or conservative ideas have been censored within universities. That is certainly not what my experience of the last 20 years tells me. In fact, I think the opposite might be the case. Universities are amongst the few places where robust challenges to conservatism can still be found. And that, it seems, is enough to invite the wrath of conservatives.

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