A Failed Hit Job

One-Party Classroom (2009) by David Horowitz and Jacob Laksin. What's worse than the kind of right-wing drivel that gives yellow journalism a bad name? A ghost-authored sequel, padded with over 150 witless, tendentious summaries of courses that Horowitz erroneously imagined would frighten Middle America into hauling the faculty up the nearest telephone pole. At least the first book in this series, The Professors (2006), gave the "101 Most Dangerous Academics in America" something to brag about in their red-diaper parent-participation preschools (whilst plotting Trotskyite mayhem from behind piled bookshelves). This book just goes after the syllabi, not the scholarship of the faculty, and the somnolence it produces is hard to describe. Evidently, they should have credited Google as the third author. The Horowitz staffers tasked with compiling this stinker simply trolled online campus catalogs to yield course descriptions using such democracy-undermining terms as "justice," "inequality," "race," and "feminism," then wrote lame descriptions characterizing the syllabi as part of a plot to deprive William Gates and Dick Cheney of their hard-earned profits. Once I got the concept, I briefly held the flickering hope that I could read it ironically—as in, "hey, what a bunch of good classes I wish I'd been able to take in college." Wrong. The relentless, narrow-minded prose thoroughly poisoned any hope of snarky thoughtcrime. Even if you were one of the twits sympathetic to the political angle of this failed hit job, the concrete brutalism of its formal properties would crush your spirit in a few pages—like reading a year's worth of your daily horoscopes straight through, or a cookbook cover to cover.