Late last year, I had <a href=”http://chronicle.com/free/v53/i16/16a00801.htm”>lunch with David Horowitz</a> on the <i>Chronicle of Higher Education</i>’s dime, and this world-historical event was noted on <a href=”https://crookedtimber.org/2006/12/05/horowitz-v-berube/”>this very blog</a>. Alas, not everyone understood what I was trying to do in that little encounter. Moreover, those who did understand my approach, including various CTers, disagreed as to whether I did the right thing. <a href=”https://crookedtimber.org/2006/12/05/horowitz-v-berube/#comment-181414″>Harry</a> thought I pretty much blew it, whereas <a href=”https://crookedtimber.org/2006/12/05/horowitz-v-berube/#comment-181433″>Henry</a> thought I took exactly the right tack. Which is fine, really, because as you’ve already gathered, I seem thoroughly incapable of winning universal assent to stuff I say. I’m tempted to blame this on <i>the very structure of language itself</i>, but much of the time it’s my fault; my tactics misfire, I misgauge the occasion. And sometimes people just disagree with me.
But here’s what I was thinking at the time: OK, I’ve agreed to meet David Horowitz. In this context — the <i>Chronicle</i>, as opposed to <i>Hannity & Colmes</i> — this grants Horowitz, and his complaints about academe, a certain legitimacy. My job, therefore, is to contest that legitimacy, and to model a way of dealing with Horowitz that does not give him what he wants: namely, (1) important concessions or (2) outrage. He feeds on (2), of course, and uses it to power the David Horowitz Freedom Center and Massive Persecution Complex he runs out of Los Angeles; and most of the time, we give it to him by the truckload. Liberal and left academics need to try (3), mockery and dismissal, and thereby demonstrate, as I put it <a href=”http://www.michaelberube.com/index.php/weblog/its_just_lunch/”>on my blog</a>, that when someone tries to blame tuition increases on Cornel West’s speaking fees, that person needs to be ridiculed and given a double minor for unsportsmanlike bullshit.
