ABSTRACT
This chapter brings the debate about the place of political activism in the university, and particularly in the classroom, up to the present. It focuses on the polarization of debate in the twenty-first century. I suggest that the unmeasured hostility between right (standing against political activism on campus) and left (standing for political activism) has been fueled by the personal experience of certain academics who underwent profound conversions in their ideologies. In purging themselves of their past views, these converts have contributed to the rhetoric of denunciation which is now characteristic of American academic life. The chapter examines the Ward Churchill controversy and the controversy over the Academic Bill of Rights sponsored by David Horowitz as examples of polarization. The chapter also reveals how an organization, the AAUP, converted from the “anti-political orthodoxy” to a politically radical position.
