Conservative Icon Dead At 86; David Horowitz’s Journey Included Calling out Marxism at Bates College

Twenty-five years ago famed conservative David Horowitz got invited to lecture at Bates College – and then got scolded by the dean who’d brought him to campus.

The dean had actually wanted to expose students to the conservative viewpoint so he bravely invited one of the world’s best-known rightists to campus.

Horowitz, a native of New York City, died this week at age 86 at his Colorado home after a long battle with cancer.

From 1956 to 1975, he was an outspoken adherent of the New Left, later rejecting progressive ideas and becoming a defender of neoconservatism.

Horowitz recounted his ideological journey in a series of retrospective books, culminating with his 1996 memoir Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey.

In 1999, Horowitz wrote a column for Salon.com recalling his visit to Bates, where he said the dean who’d invited him to lecture was welcoming and cordial, even inviting him to lunch before his speech.

But after the lecture and once Horowitz got back to California, he got a letter from the dean, scolding Horowitz for sandbagging him with an ad that he had taken out in the student paper the day before his lecture.

The dean hadn’t seen the ad until after Horowitz left campus. If he had, Horowitz suggested, the dean’s invite likely would have been rescinded.

“The ad announced that the dean was inviting students to attend my evening talk,” Horowitz later explained in a column for Salon. “It then continued with the following headline: ‘Marxism is a resurgent doctrine in the former Soviet empire and apparently on American campuses too.’”

Taking out that ad wasn’t the only fun Horowitz had when it came to Bates College.

The day he got there for his nighttime lecture he decided to audit one of the school’s classes.

He tells what happened next:

“After the class, I went up to the teacher and said that while I admired her pedagogy in advising the students that she wasn’t there to tell them what to think but to teach them how to think, I thought that by assigning an ideological Marxist tome as the course’s only text, she was working at cross-purposes with that goal,” he recalled. “She said: ‘Well, they get the other side from the newspapers.’ This education was costing the students’ parents $30,000 a year in tuition alone.”

Horowitz told Salon’s readers that “my visit to a small Maine college revealed the intolerant closed-mindedness of politically correct faculty and their indoctrinated students.”

He had decided to include Bates as one of several colleges he was going to appear at during a multi-college tour.

Horowitz said he did the tour to try to see how much college life had changed since his days of youthful academia in the 1950s.

At Bates, the topic of his lecture was “the intellectual tradition of the left is bankrupt and its hegemony at Bates is an abuse of academic freedom.”

(Now there’s a guy who knows how to be the hit of the party and do it with a smirk.)

In Horowitz ‘s obituary Wednesday, The New York Times’ headline called him a “leftist turned Trump defender.” He played an important role in shaping the thinking of Donald Trump’s deputy chief-of-staff for policy, Stephen Miller.

AmericanThinker.com recently called him “an American prophet.”