WARNING: dangerous column

As I've often stated, I consider myself a conservative, so I have not missed the fact that Duke's faculty is heavily weighted to the left. And I couldn't care less.

You read correctly: It doesn't bother me in the least that most of my professors are liberals. Not only that, but I take offense at the way that the Students for Academic Freedom have approached the issue, especially with regard to David Horowitz's visit to our campus Tuesday.

Let's consider the way the event was publicized. The very first poster I saw said "David Horowitz Educates Duke." The brazen arrogance of the line surprised me, and being a brazenly arrogant guy myself, that's saying something. Later posters, however, continued in the same vein. "Come hear what universities don't want you to know," read the flyers.

Then we have the event itself. There was some back and forth with hecklers (I'll get to them later), but afterward Stephen Miller delivered this gem to a hostile professor at the Q&A:

"I'm hesitant to give you the microphone considering you came here to fight the exchange of free views."

I encourage you to read that sentence one more time, just to let it sink in. That one goes in a file next to John Kerry's, "I voted for the $86 million, before I voted against it."

And that one sentence just goes to show the absurdity of the whole business. SAF wants free speech, but only if you agree with them. They want to tell us about this secret conspiracy that involves our professors shouting liberal dogma in every class, ostensibly without us noticing. They want to "educate" their professors on how to profess.

Nonsense.

Now if, as the SAF suggests, some faculty members are not objective in their grading, then that is indeed cause for concern; however, the way to deal with such a problem would be exposing the practices of that particular professor, not trying to strong arm entire departments into signing "academic freedom pledges." It would be enough for me to hear President Brodhead say that politicized grading will not be tolerated, and there's the problem solved.

To be fair, Horowitz has some valid points. Some of the professors in his "101 most dangerous" list are literal terrorists, and at least one has spent time in jail for torture. And it's undeniable that certain overly venerated institutions of the northeast are biased in a very fundamental way toward the left. But Duke is not, thank heavens, an Ivy League school, and miriam cooke (Duke's most dangerous prof, according to Horowitz's book) certainly doesn't look like a terrorist to me, even if she doesn't use capital letters in her name. If we have any problems, we can deal with them ourselves without need of a national Academic Freedom movement.

I do have some things to say about the hecklers. It seems to me that they only played into the hands of the SAF. To be ignored is the greatest insult, especially in politics, and I think pictures of an empty Page Auditorium would have stopped the foolishness much better than any catchy T-shirt slogan. And in his own way, Miller was right when he said it was beneath a professor to organize a resistance movement. Like my mother always said, it's better to just walk away, and if you're lucky, you'll make the list next time.

In any case, here's to my bid for the 101 most dangerous columnists.

Oliver Sherouse is a Trinity freshman. His column runs every other Friday.