Take back the schools.(The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America)(Book review)

The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America, by David Horowitz (Regnery, 448 pp., $27.95)

IN most professions, winning East Germany's International Lenin Peace Prize--formerly known as the Stalin Peace Prize--isn't much of a career booster. Nor is running for vice president of the United States on the Communist party ticket. And, surely, being implicated in a hostage plot that ends in a judge's murder via a sawed-off-shotgun blast to the head cannot help matters. But these resume checkmarks have not prevented Prof. Angela Davis (who, incidentally, purchased the aforementioned shotgun only weeks before the murder) from earning one of the highest accolades bestowed by the University of California system: She is one of only seven "University Professors," with a lifelong appointment and a six-figure salary.

Professor Davis is not alone: David Horowitz's latest book, The Professors, chronicles the "research" and outrages of the 101 "most dangerous academics in America." Most of the book is devoted to a series of vignettes, from two to five pages, exposing these charlatans with their own words and actions: Nicholas De Genova, who called for a "million Mogadishus" in Iraq; Norman Finkelstein, who railed against the "falsification and exploitation of Nazi genocide"; Jose Gutierrez, who advocated killing all gringos; bell hooks (nee Gloria Watkins), whose lowercase affectation may be related to her belief that standard English resonates with "the sound of slaughter and conquest"; and many, many others.

For anyone who has monitored higher education's pulse rate even cursorily during the last three decades, the central premise of The Professors will come as no surprise: Our universities have been hijacked by a band of rabid, anti-intellectual liberals more concerned with advancing ideological agendas--usually of the "social justice" variety--than with educating students. (Predictably, both the ACLU and the National Education Association have blasted the book.)

Fortunately, however, even the "most dangerous" professors may be less dangerous than they used to be: Internet truth squads--led, sometimes, by Horowitz himself--have been exposing these academic miscreants. The information highway has penetrated the academic cloister, and the sunlight it provides may indeed be the best cure.

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