Political columnist David Horowitz will give an Assembly Series talk at 11 a.m. Sept. 14 in Graham Chapel.
In his address, “Academic Freedom and the War on Terror,” he will discuss the importance of intellectual diversity and student rights, especially on college and university campuses.
Horowitz is the president and founder of the Center for the Study of Popular Culture in Los Angeles.
The center, with 40,000 contributors, publishes FrontPage Magazine, an online publication that features prominent conservative political analysts such as Andrew Sullivan.
Horowitz is the author of the Academic Bill of Rights, a manifesto intended to protect students’ academic freedom by removing partisan politics from the classroom. By adopting the document, an institution of higher education promises to eliminate political bias in university hiring and grading policies.
The bill has received considerable criticism from the academic community, however, largely because of its goal to make “liberal indoctrination” by professors an offense punishable by law.
Horowitz defends his document as an important and necessary pillar of academia, designed to clarify and extend existing principles of academic freedom. He says, “You can’t get a good education if they’re only telling you half the story.”
His most recent project is discoverthenetworks.com, which he launched in 2004 to act as a watchdog over liberal groups and individuals and to track liberal celebrities and their political activities.
Horowitz is perhaps best-known for his political journey from staunch leftist ideologue to conservative political commentator. In the 1960s, he was a prominent Marxist, becoming one of the founders of the “New Left” and editor of Ramparts, the movement’s largest magazine.
However, he became disillusioned with the leftist movement and embraced a conservative philosophy.
In the 1970s, Horowitz withdrew from politics and co-wrote a series of best-selling biographies with Peter Collier, including The Rockefellers: An American Dynasty; The Kennedys: An American Drama; The Fords: An American Epic; and The Roosevelts: An American Saga.
He and Collier also wrote Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts About the Sixties in 1989.
In 1997, Horowitz recounted his political journey in his autobiography, Radical Son. Later, he authored numerous other books, among them Left Illusions: An Intellectual Odyssey and Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left.
His most recent publication, The End of Time, is a personal saga that details his struggle with cancer.
Politically active on a grass-roots level, he has campaigned for the California Civil Rights Initiative, which bars governments from discrimination. In 2002, he joined another campaign to pass the Racial Privacy Initiative, to prevent government agencies from asking citizens to identify their race.
Horowitz was honored with a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1978 and received the Teach Freedom Award from former President Ronald Reagan in 1990. His work appears in numerous publications, including the online magazines Salon and Newsmax.
Horowitz earned a bachelor’s degree in English from Columbia University and a master’s degree from the University of California, Berkeley.
The lecture, co-sponsored by the College Republicans, is free and open to the public.
For more information, go online to assemblyseries.wustl.edu or call 935-4620.