Steinberger vs. Horowitz

This story is really old. November 2005 old, but I just got around to reading my Reed College alumni magazine and found a little article describing what sounds like a tumultuous debate at Reed--and would Reedies have it any other way?--between Peter Steinberger, dean of Reed faculty, and David Horowitz, bloviator, complete with the moderator walking out and words like ad hominem, mendacious attack and political pornographer thrown around. So after a little bit of undue clicking--I still haven't found the website for the Reed College Quest (the college paper)--I found Steinberger's Nov. 29 response to criticism that he was mean to poor ol' Dave and how that is so un-Reedie like and all because Reed is such a comfy place where people aren't ever expected to debate stuff that wasn't in the textbook. Here's some excerpts:

Horowitz sometimes takes positions that are worth considering, perhaps even adopting. But based on what I’ve read (and I’ve read far from everything; it pretty quickly became hard for me to see the payoff), even at its very best his work too often represents, in my opinion, the worst kind of polemics – a type of rhetoric in which isolated pieces of evidence in support of a thesis are presented without systematically considering potentially contradictory evidence. This is precisely what I tell my students not to do. ...

I am unable to account for the writings and claims that I have described above other than as acts of political warfare. As such, they provide, in my opinion, the necessary and unavoidable context for making sense of the Academic Bill of Rights. It’s precisely here that Mr. Horowitz’s larger point of view – all of the claims about treason and fellow travelers and subversive radicals and the undefined but rhetorically pronounced effort to link Democrats, abortion rights activists (NARAL), environmentalists (League of Conservation Voters) and the cruel, murderous minions of Stalinist regimes – all of this is absolutely essential. I have been criticized for having unfairly and without warning changed the topic of the debate; instead of the Academic Bill of Rights, I spoke about Horowitz’s work in general. But with all due respect, I firmly reject this criticism. Horowitz says on many occasions that the subversive, anti-American, totalitarian left controls college campuses. In the light of this, and in the light of Horowitz’s larger view of things, I believe it is impossible not to conclude that the Academic Bill of Rights – however innocuous it may appear – is in fact intended as a weapon in a deadly serious political struggle. If you don’t understand this fact, if you think the Academic Bill of Rights is simply a benign effort to enrich the academic life of colleges and universities rather than an attack on the totalitarian, treasonous left, then I believe you utterly fail to understand what it’s all about. The Academic Bill of Rights is literally unintelligible apart from the broader context of argument and assertion out of which it plainly emerges. And I’m not just saying this now; this is a view that I emphasized and defended in the debate. In my opinion, to have treated the Academic Bill of Rights in isolation, apart from its discursive setting, would have been intellectually dishonest, hopelessly naïve, and completely futile. One might as well try to analyze a sacrifice bunt without knowing anything about baseball. For all these reasons, moreover, it seems obvious that Mr. Horowitz should have been prepared specifically to defend precisely those arguments and assertions – his own work, recently published – that provide the absolutely essential background. He wrote this stuff; he’s accountable for it.

Lovely. As "The Perfesser" would say, "Read the whole thing"