Impasse at the MLA
By LIZ MCMILLEN
San Francisco

Anyone who needed evidence that the culture wars are far from over could find it here at the annual gathering of the Modern Language Association last week. As the response to David Horowitz's appearance on an MLA panel showed all too plainly, the culture wars haven't ended; they've just reached an ugly stalemate.

Mr. Horowitz, of course, is no stranger to the MLA. His campaign for an "academic bill of rights" and his criticism of what he says is classroom indoctrination have earned him the enmity of many scholars — not just in literary studies, a frequent target of his barbs, but in other disciplines as well. But to hear him tell it, the extreme attacks on him have blocked any real discussion. In fact, Mr. Horowitz's appearance at the MLA meeting, he said, is the first time that he has defended his views in person before a scholarly group.

And that was either cause for dismay, as some here viewed it, or a step forward for the MLA. Mr. Horowitz appeared on a panel called "Academic Freedom?" along with Mark Bauerlein, Norma V. Cantú, and Cary Nelson. It was a tightly formatted event, complete with security guards stationed at the front of the room. The speakers were given 12 minutes to make their comments, and audience members 30 seconds afterward to raise questions — limits that were actually enforced, even if it meant audience members shouting out "Your time is up!" to Mr. Horowitz as soon as his 12 minutes had passed.

Mr. Horowitz may have a point about the absence of real discussion, since the two camps seemed to talk past each other. He and Mr. Bauerlein each criticized the professoriate for not acknowledging real problems in the classroom or the ways identity politics can infringe on academic freedom. "The danger to academic freedom comes from within, not from David Horowitz, Anne Neal, or Stephen Balch," said Mr. Bauerlein, a professor at Emory University. In their remarks, Mr. Nelson, a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Ms. Cantú, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, did not respond to the supposed problems described by the other panelists; instead they offered defenses of academic freedom as essential for higher education, especially as rising numbers of adjunct faculty members lack customary protections.

But members of the audience weren't having any of it. They wanted to challenge the panel about one thing: why Mr. Horowitz was there in the first place.

"Are you now proud that you are the only organization to invite Horowitz to speak?" an angry Barbara Foley of Rutgers University at Newark asked. "Did you do your homework" about Mr. Horowitz's blog, FrontPagemag.com? she continued, to audience applause. Grover Furr of Montclair State University and a self-described "victim" of Mr. Horowitz's book The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America, said he objected to Mr. Horowitz's being invited "not because of his views but because he is a liar." Another audience member complained that out of thousands of MLA members, the organization had picked "two FrontPage columnists" for the panel.

"You have to have a modicum of respect for people," Mr. Horowitz responded. "I was in the civil-rights movement before Barbara Foley was even born."

At one point, a member of the audience could be seen giving Mr. Horowitz the finger. Brian Kennelly of California Polytechnic State University at San Luis Obispo, who presided over the event, wrote on The Chronicle's Web site that he observed an audience member repeatedly mouthing an obscenity to Mr. Horowitz — behavior he called "troublesome" and "repugnant."

Even before the session began, members of the MLA Radical Caucus handed out a statement protesting the organization's decision to invite Mr. Horowitz to speak. Mr. Horowitz "consistently misrepresents the views of academics whom he wishes to discredit," the caucus said. "He is not a scholar but a liar of the Goebbels school." Later that day, the Radical Caucus fought a resolution by Mr. Nelson to have the MLA express solidarity with scholars of both Israeli and Palestinian culture — rather than just the latter group — saying that it was "imperialist."

That kind of rhetoric may have been what Mr. Bauerlein had in mind when he said that certain professors on the left deny to Mr. Horowitz and other critics "any decent or honest motive. They don't grant them the impulse to care about young minds and the curriculum. They cast them as partisan hacks, and that's wrong."

It took the president of the MLA, Gerald Graff, a professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago, to bring the meeting back to substance. "The charge is whether professors are bullying students," he said during the question period. "I agree with Bauerlein and Horowitz that we need to have more curiosity about what's going on."

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