Horowitz Didn't Condemn Universities in Campus Talk

To the editors:

With all respect to the young man who reported my remarks at Harvard Hall (News, Feb. 23), I am not the Colonel Blimp his account makes me out to be. I did not condemn "universities" as your headline writer puts it either. I deplored the situation on liberal arts faculties, which tend to be dominated by an intolerant and exclusionary professorial left. Like most liberal arts colleges, Harvard has but a handful of conservatives among its hundreds of faculty. This is inexcusable. It is the product of a hiring process that has become highly (if often subtly) political and is an abuse of students' academic freedom. This form of academic freedom classically has included the right not to have a professor's views imposed on students through their unequal relationship and for students to have access to many points of view.

There are several instance where your reporter's account does not reflect my views accurately. Let me merely cite his opening summation: "The dangerous beliefs of the New Left are destroying American universities, according to neo-conservative author David Horowitz...." What I said was that the intellectual tradition of the left provided the paradigms that caused self-styled progressive and Marxist governments to kill 100 million of their own people, in peacetime, in order to realize their impossible dreams. I further said that while utopianism is primarily now latent in the ideologies of the left, its Siamese twin nihilism, with all its socially corrosive attributes, is not. It is these destructive paradigms and these impossible dreams that are indeed dangerous and that are still vibrant in the curriculum as taught on campuses like Harvard's. DAVID HOROWITZ   Feb. 25, 1999

The writer is the president of the Center for the Study of Popular Culture.