B Rub And The Liberal Arts

by Eric Rauchway

The excellent Valve is hosting a book event on Michael Bérubé's What's Liberal About the Liberal Arts. I discussed it a while back; now you can read Open U's own Virtual Don Daniel Drezner on it, here.

Dan liked the book overall, but did not buy Bérubé's refutation of the "liberal bias" theory. Dan says Bérubé focused too much on David Horowitz, which apparently Bérubé shouldn't have done because, Dan thinks, "it's very hard to take [Horowitz's] rantings about the academy seriously." (Tyler Cowen said much the same in "tak[ing] a sideways whack" at the book.)

Dan, and Tyler, must mean that it's very hard for them to take Horowitz seriously; it evidently isn't hard for others of some importance:

My classmates at Princeton passed a modified version of [Horowitz's "Academic Bill of Rights"] in a student referendum in April. In July, Philadelphia's Temple University became the first institution to officially adopt the policy. Arizona's legislature is preparing to consider a version of the bill.

The College Access and Opportunity Act, passed by the House in March and under consideration in the Senate, aims to deny federal funding to institutions -- even private ones -- that refuse to comply with ABOR's limitations on speech.

So long as anything like the foregoing remains remotely plausible, Bérubé and the rest of us ought to be taking Horowitz seriously, even if it seems like hard work.

Dan goes on to say that because Bérubé argues against "liberal bias" by disputing the significant Horowitz, "[a]s a refutation of the conservative critique, What's Liberal About the Liberal Arts leaves something to be desired." But if "the conservative critique" isn't Horowitz's complaint, what is it?