The localisation of “dangerous” academics

During the middle 2000s the seemingly — and in some ways actually — inadequate and unconvincing responses of groups like Socialist Alternative, Socialist Worker and Resistance to the September 11 terrorist attacks turned me somewhat away from these groups. Unfortunately, what I turned to as an alternative was much, much worse than any flaws in the radical left — into reading, on the assumption of “true unless refutable”, the propaganda of the anti-democratic Republican Party.

Republican propaganda is not ipso facto internally consistent. I early on noted contradictions between The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam and the later Politically Incorrect Guide to the Middle East, accepting the former’s much more convincing view that Saudi Arabia was an extremely dangerous ally of the US. However, one of the worst examples of Republican propaganda that I partially took on board during this period was David Horowitz’ 2006 The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America. It was a standard mantra of the Republican Party that American universities are hotbeds of left-wing radicalism, and as a lover of lists I used my brother’s card to borrow The Professors from Monash.

Even reading when less critical of the extreme right, I saw many flaws in The Professors despite possessing little knowledge of the vast majority. What Horowitz’ said that I did know something about seemed extremely flawed, sometimes to the point of being absolute errors. Re-reading when one learns more has made me far more disbelieving of Horowitz’ claims, which sources like the World Socialist Web Site have demonstrated as contrary to fact.

What is really revealing is that Horowitz’ “dangerous professors” are geographically remarkably concentrated, as can be seen from the table below where the 101 “most dangerous” academics are listed by the state they worked in. In order to account for bias from institutions with many “dangerous” academics, I have included an additional column listing how many different institutions in each state had professors profiled in Horowitz’ book. Different campuses of the same university are counted as one because they are likely to be politically similar and might work together.

	Professors	Institutions
Alabama	0	0
Alaska	0	0
Arizona	0	0
Arkansas	0	0
California	16	6
Colorado	6	4
Connecticut	0	0
Delaware	0	0
District of Columbia	4	1
Florida	1	1
Georgia	1	1
Hawaii	1	1
Idaho	0	0
Illinois	7	4
Indiana	3	3
Iowa	0	0
Kansas	0	0
Kentucky	1	1
Louisiana	0	0
Maine	0	0
Maryland	0	0
Massachusetts	6	5
Michigan	2	1
Minnesota	0	0
Mississippi	0	0
Missouri	1	1
Montana	0	0
Nebraska	0	0
Nevada	0	0
New Hampshire	0	0
New Jersey	2	2
New Mexico	0	0
New York	25	9
North Carolina	3	2
North Dakota	0	0
Ohio	3	3
Oklahoma	0	0
Oregon	1	1
Pennsylvania	10	5
Rhode Island	1	1
South Carolina	0	0
South Dakota	0	0
Tennessee	0	0
Texas	5	3
Utah	0	0
Vermont	0	0
Virginia	0	0
Washington	2	2
West Virginia	0	0
Wisconsin	0	0
Wyoming	0	0
TOTAL	101	57

Although I was unable to draw a precise map as I intended when planning this post, it is striking that thirty of fifty states are not home to a single one of these academics listed as “dangerous” by Horowitz. Apart from four universities in Colorado and three in Texas, the entire area between the Mississippi and the Cascades is entirely unrepresented, as is Upper New England and even Connecticut. The Deep South has only two academics, and including Texas the remainder of the South has just eleven.

The Northeast, contrariwise, is academically home to forty-eight of the 101 most dangerous academics. More than that, a quarter worked in New York alone, and sixteen (one-sixth) in New York City alone. What this confirms is that opposition to the policies of the Republican Party is massively concentrated in a few areas, and is exceedingly weak elsewhere. For Americans who have no exposure to the ideas offered by so-called “dangerous” academics, Republican propaganda constitutes an unchallenged message, regardless of what Republican spokespeople and think tanks say.