David Horowitz, the right-wing flamethrower, died on April 29. I recall very well when he brought his act to Dartmouth in an attempt to smoke out campus radicalism. I suspect he went away disappointed.

Both campus security and Hanover police officers were present to quell any disturbance. As members of the Dartmouth community stood in a queue, a campus group helpfully distributed a page of Horowitz’s greatest hits. 

“The Palestinians are Nazis,” Horowitz declared in 2011. “Every one of their elected officials are [sic] terrorists.” He was also on record as saying that, “Women have a lower aptitude in mathematics than men, and that is a scientific fact.”

Barack Obama was a perennial target. Horowitz described the former president as “an evil man,“ and added: “Obama is an anti-American radical and I’m actually sure he’s a Muslim, he certainly isn’t a Christian.”

I remember thinking, Mr. Horowitz, I’ll make you a deal. I won’t tell you who is or is not a Jew. You don’t tell me who’s a Christian.

The event was introduced by the head of Dartmouth College Republicans, who, perhaps out of embarrassment, neglected to introduce himself. He opened with paeans to political civility and polite discourse and bemoaned the “tyranny of the majority” on campus. He warned that any attempts to disrupt the event “will not be tolerated.”

The ostensible title of Horowitz’s lecture was “Identity Politics and the Totalitarian Threat from the Left.” It turns out that was the most cogent statement of the entire evening. As nearly as I could tell, Horowitz wanted to discredit those he considered the enemies of Israel.

“The entire Palestinian cause is based on a series of monstrous lies,” along with two maps of the Middle East, were projected behind him. However, it wasn’t at all clear what the maps were meant to demonstrate. The talk itself was less a lecture than an occasion for Horowitz to hurl insults and invective.  

Part of Horowitz’s schtick was that he was one of the “founders” of the New Left who saw the light and became a conservative. Despite the grandiosity of that statement (founder of the New Left?), Horowitz’s political conversion made him a darling of the far right.

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, Horowitz and his organization trafficked in “hate and misinformation,” especially against Muslims and college professors, whom he accused of being “communists and pro-terrorists.” The tagline for his magazine read, “Inside every progressive is a totalitarian screaming to get out.”

Many of the Dartmouth students in attendance sought peaceful ways to protest Horowitz’s hate speech, and their behavior was largely purposeful and restrained. Several wore headphones and did homework, while others walked out at various times.

Horowitz, predictably, took the bait. He railed against “the stupidity of the leftists” and remarked about a woman who left the lecture, “another self-inflicted ignoramus.” 

When several students silently unscrolled a banner, Horowitz raged, “Can we take those signs away from these jackasses? I want those signs destroyed and those people expelled.” So much for the totalitarian left.

Horowitz’s most remarkable statement of the evening, repeated more than once, was, “Nobody is oppressed in America.” (Later, when I asked him about that statement, reading from my copious notes, Horowitz denied saying it.) He also asserted there was no pay gap between men and women, and declared, “The only serious race war in America is against white males.”

Donald Trump says something remarkably similar these days.

The ostensible reason for inviting Horowitz to campus was to foster debate. I heartily concur with that sentiment. Any vibrant intellectual community needs a robust exchange of ideas, and I was prepared to engage with his arguments.

But Horowitz, flinging out red meat one-liners like a riverboat gambler, presented no argument. I even felt a tiny (tiny!) bit sorry for him. It must be difficult to be a professional provocateur when you can’t stitch together consecutive, coherent thoughts.  

If the purpose of bringing Horowitz to campus was to root out radicalism, I have to question the premise. Radicalism? On campus? Any campus? Hmmm.

When I was in graduate school, I participated in actions calling for Princeton to divest from South Africa in the days of apartheid. At Columbia, I addressed a rally in support of higher wages and benefits for support staff. But that’s about all I’ve seen in terms of campus protests in more than four decades of teaching—nothing at all like the student demonstrations of the 1960s and early 1970s.

I’m afraid Horowitz’s outrage, whether sincere or feigned, was misplaced. Dartmouth, let’s recall, is home to the infamous Dartmouth Review, the breeding ground for such future Trumpists as Laura Ingraham and Dinesh D’Souza. Besides, let’s face it, any campus in the throes of forsaking arts and humanities in favor of STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) is unlikely to serve as a breeding ground for campus radicals. 

Sorry, Mr. Horowitz, but I think we could use a bit more radicalism on campus. Where’s the outrage over mass incarceration? Where’s the indignation over this administration’s immigration policies, its dismantling of environmental protections or the Supreme Court’s willful disregard for the First Amendment? 

Yes, the war in Gaza generated some student protests, but school administrators responded forcefully and have effectively discouraged further demonstrations. At Dartmouth, the president called in a battalion of state and local police.

Why do we see so little radicalism on campus at Dartmouth or elsewhere? I suspect the reasons are complex, but they almost certainly include the expectation of many students (and parents) that the purpose of a college education is to prepare for a lucrative career. 

Too many view education in transactional terms: We pay a hefty tuition; you guarantee my child will secure a golden future. Another reason I’ve heard frequently from students is that they fear that an arrest record or even a social media posting will come back to haunt them when applying for a job or graduate school.

A liberal arts education is meant to unsettle assumptions and prejudices, to challenge shibboleths, both left and right. It teaches the art of asking questions, something precluded by David Horowitz’s antics. It teaches that authority must always be scrutinized and, at times, confronted.

At its best, a liberal arts education includes a bracing exchange of ideas, sometimes as a prelude to action and sometimes merely for the intrinsic value of engaging in critical thought. In today’s world, I can think of nothing more radical.