One-Party Classroom: How Radical Professors at America's Top Colleges Indoctrinate Students and Undermine Our Democracy

by David Horowitz, Jacob Laksin

“David Horowitz has single-handedly exposed the intellectual corruption that exists within the classrooms of American colleges. Like all forms of corruption, indoctrination flourishes when kept in the dark. Here, Horowitz turns on the bright lights to expose what has become profoundly wrong with our colleges and universities. We are all in his debt.”
–Ward Connerly, former regent, University of California

David Horowitz and coauthor Jacob Laksin take us inside twelve major universities where radical agendas have been institutionalized and scholarly standards abandoned. The schools they examine are not the easily avoided bottom of the barrel. Rather, they are an all-too-representative sampling of American higher education today.
Horowitz and Laksin have conducted the first comprehensive, in-depth, multiyear investigation of what is being taught in colleges and universities across the country–public to private, from large state schools to elite Ivy League institutions. They have systematically scrutinized course catalogs, reading lists, professors’ biographies, scholarly records, and the first-person testimonies of students, administrators, and faculty. Citing more than 150 specific courses, they reveal how academic standards have been violated and demonstrate beyond dispute that systematic indoctrination in radical politics is now an integral part of the liberal arts curriculum of America’s colleges. The extreme ideological cant that today’s students are being fed includes:

• Promoting Marxist approaches as keys to understanding human societies–with no mention of the bloody legacy of these doctrines and total collapse in the real world of the societies they created
• Instilling the idea that racism, brutally enforced by a “white male patriarchy” to oppress people of color and other marginalized groups, has been the organizing principle of American society throughout its history and into the present
• Requiring students to believe that gender is not a biological characteristic but a socially created aspect of human behavior designed by men to oppress women
• Persuading students that America and Israel are “imperialistic” and “racist” states and that the latter has no more right to exist than the South African regime in the days of apartheid

In page after shocking page, Horowitz and Laksin demonstrate that America’s colleges and universities are platforms for a virulent orthodoxy that threatens academic ideals and academic freedom. In place of scholarship and the dispassionate pursuit of truth that have long been the hallmarks of higher learning, the new militancy embraces activist zealotry and ideological fervor. In disturbingly large segments of today’s universities, students are no longer taught how to think but are told what to think.

Genres: Education, Politics, Nonfiction

336 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2009

About the author

David Joel Horowitz was an American conservative writer and activist. He was a founder and president of the David Horowitz Freedom Center (DHFC); editor of the Center's website FrontPage Magazine; and director of Discover the Networks, a website that tracks individuals and groups on the political left. Horowitz also founded the organization Students for Academic Freedom.
Horowitz wrote several books with author Peter Collier, including four on prominent 20th-century American families. He and Collier have collaborated on books about cultural criticism. Horowitz worked as a columnist for Salon.
From 1956 to 1975, Horowitz was an outspoken adherent of the New Left. He later rejected progressive ideas and became a defender of neoconservatism. Horowitz recounted his ideological journey in a series of retrospective books, culminating with his 1996 memoir Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey.

Reviews

[Melissa · Rating 1 out of 5]

Terrible book.

[Samantha · Rating 1 out of 5]

This was redundant and honestly just really boring. The entire book is a list of course descriptions for courses the authors have deemed too woke. I started to nod off in chapter two.

[Elizabeth Swift · Rating 3 out of 5]

The scary story of how far the radical left has come in infiltrating college campuses across the country. They no longer hide their intent to disrupt our democracy and indoctrinate our youth into believing that socialism can reach its' dream of a world where equality has been reached in every aspect of our lives. They are rewriting our history, denying the good we have done, and making our children view the country through a lie.

[John Roskelley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Much content of the book is repetitive, but isn't that the point David Horowitz is trying to make about the many Womens Studies, Feminist Studes, Multicultural Studies, African-American and Black Studies, etc. departments that are being allowed at major universities in the U.S. under false premises that their curriculums are good research and not just left-wing propaganda? I'm sure that charts could have been included showing similar programs at many more universities, but the sampling given by Horowitz is sufficient to demonstrate the failings by university administrators to either monitor what radical professors are "teaching" or voice the objections that the public would if they truly understood what is going on.

[RONWELL · Rating 5 out of 5]

What Mr. Horowitz wrote about, helped bring to life, and has spent the rest of it warning America about? It is all grown up and like the ancient seccada bugs or locust's as they are known now. They've spread and destroy everything in their path (including each other). Remember the holy hand grenade in Monty Python. This be it x1,000,000,000*100

[Jason · Rating 3 out of 5]

Book describes what honest academics aleady know to be true but are afraid to say aloud: departments of women's studies, hyphenated-American studies, peace studies, and all the courses therein are worthless. The book is very repetitive, but it's easy to skim if needed.

[Bernie Clarke · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a parent about to send a son to college it's kind of scary.