David Horowitz, the right-wing Savonarola, takes an unholy interest in higher education. One of his pet projects is a so-called Academic Bill of Rights, which he is agitating for states to enact into law (no takers yet). His avowed aim is to muzzle lefty professors, who, Horowitz claims, are running amok--dominating faculties, bullying conservative students and promoting their radical agendas in the classroom. Colleges that fail to sign on to the bill of rights would be monitored by state officials and politicians.

In February Horowitz tossed another log on the auto-da-fé, publishing a book called The Professors (Regnery), which, the subtitle boasts, reveals "The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America." Normally, we can leave Horowitz's effusions to his claque, but a couple of our contributors reported (rather boastfully, we thought) that they'd made the list. That caused us to wonder who else among our regulars made the cut. So we put intern Dean Powers on the case, and after combing the data bank he came up with twenty-seven Nation names in the Horowitz book. Among them, they have contributed a total of 255 dangerous articles, editorials and/or reviews to our pages.

We were initially pleased that so many of our writers made the grade. This is the kind of list a muckraking, status quo-shaking magazine like The Nation should be on. We thought about suggesting to our advertising people that they take out a series of ads bragging, "The Nation--America's Most Dangerous Magazine, says David Horowitz."

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