An Open Letter from Graham Larkin to David Horowitz

28 January 2005

Dear Mr. Horowitz,

Thank you for your response to my recent investigation of your interest in promoting left-right balance. In it, you urge me to comment more on the specific contents of the Academic Bill of Rights, rather than on your statements in defense of the Bill. While I'm more than happy to share my thoughts on the Bill's contents, it is not easy, in the context of our exchange, to separate this material from your own arguments. Indeed, I think it would be very enlightening to show how your own way of thinking epitomizes many of the things that most trouble me about the Bill. A consideration of competing concepts of truth (or, as some would have it, "truth") should make the case.

To my mind, one of the ABOR's most unsettling features is its encouragement of epistemological relativism. For instance it states that

human knowledge is a never-ending pursuit of the truth, that there is no humanly accessible truth that is not in principle open to challenge, and that no party or intellectual faction has a monopoly on wisdom.

Further down, the Bill refers to "the uncertainty and unsettled character of all human knowledge." My gut reaction to this kind of radical relativism is a pragmatic one. As the saying goes, it's good to keep an open mind, but don't keep it so open that your brain falls out. Unlike those people who only ever put the word "truth" in quotation marks, I feel that some principles, ideas and conventions are more right than others, even in cases when their truth-value is not categorically demonstrable. Otherwise, what is to prevent us from slipping into a dangerous moral relativism?

When it comes to loosening prevailing standards of truthfulness, you certainly practice what you preach. For instance, in paragraph 11 of your latest response, you imply that you had not read a document which is written in the first person, and published in your magazine, complete with your name and an image of your signature at the bottom. After insisting that the piece was entirely ghostwritten, you go on (in the interest of denying that you never talk about balance) to disclaim any knowledge of the statement that the ABOR "demands balance in reading lists," even though you cannot deny my observation that this very passage is actually an unsourced quotation (or variation of a quotation) of something you wrote elsewhere. You wrap up this prodigious little nugget of indirection by simply "plead[ing] guilty to not paying more attending [sic] to my fund-raising mail."

To those of us who don't share your ABOR-endorsed relativism, you're guilty of a lot more than neglecting to check your mail. By the measure of the enduring civil standards upheld in reputable academic research, this kind of double- or triple-dealing is simply inexcusable. Like every academic I know, I personally make a habit of reading all first-person statements that I authorize to bear my signature. Indeed, I go so far as to actually write any such statements myself. After that, I stand behind my words. In my profession, writing one's own material, and standing behind it, is nothing short of an ethical imperative. For academics, serious writing is properly viewed as an outward sign of inner integrity -- or, as the case may be, lack of integrity. That's why we consider plagiarism and ghost-writing to be such grave offences. (Another practice that keeps us honest is linking readers to our sources by means of footnotes or other citation methods, even when these sources complicate our argument.)

In short, by academic standards, your cavalier practice of allowing your name to be attached to an influential document that you didn't write (even if it is "very obviously a direct mail solicitation," as if that matters) and your subsequent effort to shirk responsibility for the content, amount to a serious abuse of your readers' trust. Given the discrepancy between the standard academic reverence for truthfulness and your own more nonchalant attitude, is it any wonder that academics question your motivations when you try to force us to submit to "the uncertainty and unsettled character of all human knowledge?" This phrase, coupled with your own instrumental view of truth, makes me worry about how moral relativists might act on the idea of the "never-ending pursuit of the truth," or on the phrase that "there is no humanly accessible truth that is not in principle open to challenge."

Let's see how this last pronouncement breaks down in real life, by applying it to the following truth-claim.

People should always strive to be honest and free from delusion.

Does anyone care to challenge this? This statement is certainly not "open to challenge" according to my principles. I believe it to be both "humanly accessible" and absolutely, categorically true. Anyone who wants to pass blanket legislation suggesting otherwise had better come up with a pretty good explanation of what could possibly be wrong with my truth-claim, or my principles, in this particular instance.

On the subject of truth and delusion, I continue to be astonished by your persistent denial of the fact that the ABOR movement has repeatedly pushed for ideological "balance." In the face of all my evidence, you have had little choice but to back down just a little, yet you now ask

If "left-right balance" were the agenda of the Academic Bill of Rights, or the academic freedom campaign, why wouldn't it be at the center of both?

Given the facts of the matter, how can I respond, except by offering yet another example of the very term you initially denied using at all, and by choosing it from the "center" of your campaign? My latest example is a phrase in the Students for Academic Freedom Mission and Strategy statement. It asserts that

[b]ecause the university is not the arm of any political party but an institution whose purpose is to promote learning and the exchange of ideas, student programs of a partisan nature should be fair and balanced [my emphasis].

There you have it. That pesky "b" word again, and once again in an explicitly political context. Are parts of the SAF Mission Statement also ghostwritten, and full of things that its authors (whoever they may be) didn't mean to assert? Or is this sentence something that you're willing to stand behind? If you do admit to the reality of this call for "balance," how will you then reconcile it with your insistence that the "balance" issue isn't (as you now rephrase it) "at the center" of your freedom campaign? If a "Mission and Strategy" statement isn't "at the center" of the movement's agenda, then it's a funny kind of mission statement.

Thank you for your attention. I look forward to any future responses.

Graham Larkin
Stanford University, Department of Art & Art History
CA-AAUP VP for Private Colleges and Universities

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