Horowitz, dangerous asshole

David Horowitz, blowhard McCarthyite, visits Penn State. Michael Bérubé of Penn State, number one on Horowitz's list of dangerous professors (Bérubé, if you don't know him, now calls himself a Professor of Dangeral Studies), documents the carnage at the end of this post.

...He won over surprisingly few hearts and minds when (as you can read on this fine website) he responded to a couple of students’ critical questions in a somewhat less than gracious manner:

To one student, Horowitz said “you are obviously deaf and brain-dead.” To another, “you don’t have the mental capacity to understand it.” Finally, in response to a question he didn’t care to answer, “what are the requirements for getting into this school!"

This might be a good time to ask why Horowitz doesn’t receive speaking invitations from professors.

See also here for a more in-depth acount of Horowitz's visit.

But, look, Horowitz is on a crusade to root out "liberal" and "dangerous" professors from the academy. His own website puts many of these professors - such as Michael - in a category with Pol Pot, Stalin, et al. The man is downright insane.

But... you never ever talk to students like Horowitz did. I've heard of some profs who do this. Taking a flight of imagination, the only pedagogical reason I can find for insulting students' intelligence is to prompt them to work harder - there is a certain sense of ivy-drenched birthright by some that one's own education allows one the liberty to disdain others'. Of course, as an incentive, it's not clear that the result would be a student that works harder. The student may very well attach a stigma to his own abilities that creates further obstacles to what might otherwise be a rather fine mind. But this is just a case of trying to give this sort of wild rhetoric the benefit of the doubt. Of course, if it's all simply about fragile egos, this doesn't mean that the prof is any less an asshole. The generation of assholery comes in different forms.

A professor who pays any attention at all knows that different students have differing capacities, methods, backgrounds and these may need molding in quite different ways in order to achieve "excellence" or whatever academic term one wishes to use. I've always found that college students are generally smart, but may not have harnessed the right ways to use their intelligence (for whatever reason) or are simply locked into the anti-intellectual strain in American culture. This molding often requires some assistance on the part of the professor balanced with allowing the student the liberty to explore various options he or she may not have ever envisioned. This can be done with subtlety and grace, as well as the occasional prod.

Professors who call their students stupid are shameless assholes. In the case of Horowitz - apart from being an asshole - it's clear that he is in no position to judge anything about the work of academics.