This article was completed in collaboration with Joe Sampson's Journalism 202 class. Click here to listen to the original audio version of this project by Kyle Moler.
Miami University's "radical" professors indoctrinate students and undermine democracy, according to David Horowitz, author of One Party Classroom, which released last month.
The book profiled 12 universities and 150 courses Horowitz believes to be pushing radical agendas on students, including several from "Mobilize U.," Horowitz's nickname for Miami.
Miami's department of black world studies included two of those courses. The department, according to Horowitz, promotes theories instead of teaching them.
"It's an insult to black people and an insult to the university that that department is run the way it's run," Horowitz said. "It's just a political operation operating at the fringe extreme of the political spectrum, and its intellectual level is below the basement."
Horowitz also said the department's involvement in activism prevents students from thinking outside the box.
Rodney Coates, former director of the department of black world studies and one of the professors named by Horowitz, said he disagrees.
"Engagement for me involves students working in the real world, seeing the real applications of the theories, the ideas and such that are being discussed," Coates said.
Two courses in the women's studies program also made Horowitz's list.
"Women's studies is just a left-wing political party, you know, it has nothing to do with academic work because it insists on a doctrine," Horowitz said.
That doctrine, Horowitz said, is the radical feminist view that gender is not biologically formed, but socially constructed.
Madelyn Detloff, director of the women's studies program, said gender is more complicated than that.
"The basic division that Horowitz makes between biology as some sort of, this land of undisputed facts, would be not how a biologist would, who has studied endocrinology or gender and sex differences-they're studying that," Detloff said. "If it were a fact we wouldn't study it."
Facts in general seem to be the main area of dispute between Horowitz and Miami's faculty.
Horowitz said what he had written was documented and indisputable, but professors maintain his data was inaccurate and outdated.
Yvonne Keller, another professor named by Horowitz, has not taught at Miami for years and Detloff has not taught Women's Studies 301 since 2002. Miami also does not have a department of women's studies, rather it is technically a program.
Professors said these errors are proof Horowitz did not check his facts. They also said they wonder how Horowitz, who has not visited Miami since 2002, knows what's going on inside their classrooms.
"For someone who has never sat down and talked with me, for someone who has never talked to any of my students, for him to have written what he wrote, well let's say that he must have a crystal ball that would make some of our witches and magicians very proud," Coates said.
According to Horowitz, he didn't need a crystal ball or to visit classrooms, all he needed was a syllabus.
