I think the best comparison for Horowitz would be to someone who has converted to Christianity from militant atheism. The former militant atheist assumes that because his unbelief was due to a sense of being angry with the Christian God, then every person who doesn’t believe in the Christian faith has similar motivations.

It basically amounts to a failure to understand that there are different people in the world.

Sheesh, it’s like they don’t know how to write a BS paper and then cruelly mock the professor in private.

As to the latter, one of the best things that happened to me in graduate school was getting chewed out (and I mean literally yelled at)in a seminar on Kant by the late George Schrader, Jr., who was offended by my Strawson-influenced perspective on the text and who was, at the time, having us read Kant in conjunction with Wilhelm Reich’s “The Mass Psychology of Fascism.” What was helpful about his anger was that it shocked me into reconsidering not so much Kant as what it meant to seriously engage in the study of a philosophical text. It would have been possible to see his treatment of me as abusive, I suppose, and as reflecting either a left-wing or an anti-analytic ‘bias’. (His reading of Kant was certainly politicized, and the department was engaged in a sort of civil war over ‘analytic’ vs. ‘continental’ conceptions of philosophy.) I was grateful (and still am) that he cared enough about his subject and his students to get mad and yell.

I disagree. Becoming belligerent is bad teaching, period, and if you deal with “touchy” subjects you spend a lot of time preparing the ground and figuring out how to do it that people can learn something and discussions will not get personalized or divisive. Despite these efforts you still sometimes get tough situations, usually because of political disputes that break out among students that they want you to resolve. But if that happens you’ve got a pedagogical failure, because once people get into food-fight mode learning stops.

Teaching ideas requires getting people to the point that they can see what is smart in ideas they don’t agree with, and you don’t do that without giving them a range of ideas and a sense of genuine productive debate. There are few things more destructive to this than the idea that teachers are mere advocates for one or another kind of politics.

Or even mere advocates of larger doctrines: in reply to Mr. Labonne, for example, I’d note that I do want students to understand what the Enlightenment is and where it comes from and what its enormous strengths are, and it’s actually hard to do that if they don’t also grasp the points made by critics like Blake or Burke.

It’s not useful to try to collapse these controversies into the Enlightenment versus the 17th century. It’s also insulting to religious thought to equate it with the past or with the likes of Mr. Baxley.

I vividly remember the intolerant conservative stranglehold on my graduate department, and even my university.

Fully half of the dozen professors in our department, and almost all of those who had a say in running things, were right-wing nut jobs. They relentlessly pushed their extreme views—in and out of the classroom.

I remember the department chair who spent a whole two hours of a graduate seminar ranting about the evils of Jesse Jackson.

I remember the professor who spent an entire seminar expounding upon the physical and intellectual inferiority of women.

And then there was the department neo-Con—meaning neo-Confederate, in his case. At least that professor usually confined his apologetics for Southern racism to private conversations rather than wasting our class time with his ranting.

I remember the brilliant young professor they purged when they found out he hung out with too liberal a crowd on his own time.

The atmosphere at the university as a whole was little better. I particularly remember the Republican hecklers who came to disrupt talks by insufficiently conservative visiting speakers. The university administration never saw fit even to criticize those assaults on free speech.

Despite being surrounded by real academic bias every day, it never occurred to me to whine and pout and cry. I sucked it up and got on with life. So these pathetic mewlings from conservatives who imagine they are being dissed simply disgust me. Grow up, already!