Jay Ambrose on DePaul, campus McCarthyism

Scripps Howard's Jay Ambrose was the first mainstream media columnist to take up the cause of Thomas Klocek, the fired DePaul University professor who made the politically-incorrect mistake of defending Israel from ridiculous charges made by some Muslim students there.

Here is a March 1 Marathon Pundit blog-ography of the Klocek case.

Ambrose's latest column, Leftists in control on campus, hits a lot of home runs.

It begins this way:

Right-wing fanatics are trying to eliminate free speech in American colleges and universities, say some professors, and, oh dear, it is so frightening, so like the McCarthy era in which the innocent were hunted down and fired. Isn't it?

Sorry, but no. What's on exhibit here is the addled whining of leftists who have very nearly hegemonic control over higher education and don't like it one little bit that some conservatives are beginning to fight back. They need not worry too much, though, because it is their side that is doing the purging.

Jay then mentions the Klocek case, which is correctly points out, hasn't gotten much mainstream media attention.

I am speaking of Thomas Klocek, a non-tenured professor of 14 years' standing at DePaul University, who got into an argument outside the classroom with some pro-Palestinian Muslim students making defamatory remarks about Israel. Despite the fact that he was denied a hearing the university's standards require, he was ordered to apologize and submit to classroom-monitoring if he wanted to keep teaching. He did need the meager income, but felt he had done nothing wrong and was in effect fired.

Klocek's career was ruined because he was not politically correct. To be part of the gang at many universities these days, you are supposed to be anti-Israel and certainly not tread on the feelings of Muslim students by disagreeing with them, and he got it wrong. Funny, but Lionel Lewis, a professor at the State University of New York, Buffalo, did not mention Klocek in a typical hand-wringing op-ed piece last month about people being mean to professors because of their politics.

Ambrose hit home runs with his column, Lionel Lewis whiffs.

I'll show some mercy, even though Lewis' columns is worthy of a thorough Fisking.

Let's take a look at this excerable excerpt from that column:

The biggest threat to academic freedom today, however, may be David Horowitz.

Mr. Horowitz and the organizations he founded - Students for Academic Freedom and Campus Watch - repeatedly have alleged political bias in all aspects of academic life, most specifically in hiring and promotion (those right-of-center are "systematically excluded," discriminated against or punished). As Mr. Horowitz sees it, professors are often more involved in political indoctrination than in teaching students, and their message is always the same: "America is guilty; America is to blame."

Horowitz is right, Lewis is wrong.

Oh, Campus Watch is a wonderful site, one that I'm sure Horowitz has bookmarked on his computer. But Daniel Pipes, not David Horowitz, founded that site, however.

I'll conclude with a sales plug: Horowitz has a new book out, The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America.

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