I have been a philosophy professor for about 27 years. In a nutshell, David Horowitz is right. We absolutely do need a Student Bill of Rights to ensure not just academic freedom, but reasonable discourse in general. As things are, with the ever-growing strength of Relativist Studies and all its permutations, the steady march forward of scientifically dubious Psychologies, and the leftist propaganda implicit in Service Learning curricula, PC hokum now tends to squelch logic and reasonable discourse on just about any day in the hallowed halls of the Humanities, in particular, and throughout the University in general. The more interesting question, though, is how this came to be.

My sense is it occurred when Humanities professors — Philosophy, Literature, and History — abdicated their professional responsibility to teach and analyze great works on their own terms and began instead to yearn for the prestige they imagined existing in the Social Sciences. Suddenly we in the Humanities wanted to be scientists too, albeit pseudo-scientists, but scientists nonetheless. After Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud had proclaimed philosophy is praxis, God is dead, and morality is merely sublimation, we foolishly lost our way. After World War II and up until the advent of the Political Correctness revolution of the 1970's, the discipline of Philosophy, for example, had been reduced in most American universities to the analytic logic chopping of moral arguments, existential/phenomenological bewilderment and the spinning of Aristotelian metaphysical arguments for theologians in a godless world. All real social advancement appeared to be happening in the Sciences, even the limping Social Sciences.

These were times of despair for the Humanities: "Why couldn't we be scientists like the Psychologists and Sociologists?" Then from the Social Sciences came structuralism, which allowed us in the Humanities to analyze all books in the context of linguistic structures rather than in terms of what the books actually said. But better was on the horizon. As if by magic, our final salvation arrived in the form of post-Freudian/post-structuralist/post-modernism. All books were now magically transformed into "texts" and all texts were meta-texts. Beyond all odds, we now believed we had been deigned "scientists." The world had become our oyster. Old Humanities had entered the game again and had become a new branch of Science: Subjectivist Science. We had some serious science work to do. In our newly deigned scientific minds, Humanities departments would root out all those silent social diseases. We would cure academia of the heartbreak of Phallo-logo-centrist, patriarchal, post-colonial, marginalizing oppressive Late Capitalism. Oh yes, now that we in the Humanities were scientists, too (even if only in our own minds), by golly, we were going to change some things. And we did.

We teamed up with the Social Sciences and together became the self-officiated doctors and subjectivist scientists of social disorder. The 70's, 80's, and 90's had delivered the rebirth of Humanities. Anything could be science so long as we said it was. Since Knowledge itself was now defined as a cultural artifact, we believed we could even reject objective science itself in the name of our subjectivist scientific demonstrations of the oppressiveness of objective science to marginalized peoples and underrepresented genders. Now we in the Humanities, with the mercenary aid we had received from Psychology, the limping sister of Biology, could define and then enforce standards of mental and social health by our own dialogical methods. Even more important, with the patina of Psychology, we then began to enforce our politically correct standards through the strength of this new designation of Humanities as a subjective cultural "science." Now, in the Humanities, we too could diagnose social disease and discover new truths about poverty and gender and multiculturalism. As self-designated post-modern scientists, we in the Humanities could now find and define oppressed people any way we chose.

No longer would we even have to read mere books. Oh no, not nearly science-y enough for us, now that we joined forces with the Social Sciences. We would now deconstruct "texts" with our new found voice, long silenced by the patriarchy. And as we worked our way into administrative positions, we soon began to dominate the very means of truth determination in the University. As Lawrence Summers discovered, we even began to use our special subjective post-modern science to squelch objective science. It didn't matter if planes designed by feminist epistemologists would never fly; they would be validated. After all, now we subjectivist scientists were the only scientists who had this new specialized ability to diagnose any text, every text, any thought, and every thought with some variety of mental/social illness. The patriarchy was everywhere and we would bring down the new hammer against them, the new Maleus Maleficarum.