Students for Academic Freedom

1015 15th Street, NW, #900
Washington, DC 20005
www.studentsforacademicfreedom.org

Founded: by David Horowitz in June 2003
National Campus Director: Sara Dogan (formerly Sara Russo)
Affiliated with: David Horowitz, Center for the Study of Popular Culture, and Frontpagemag.com.
 

SAF's Issues:

• SAF was created as part of a campaign by David Horowitz to pass the "Academic Bill of Rights" and combat liberalism and Democrats on college and university campuses.
• SAF's founder David Horowitz claims that American colleges and universities are "indoctrination centers for the political left" and that many higher education professors "hate America."
• SAF suggests that students investigate the professors at their schools for "bias" by searching voter registration records, create a spreadsheet of the data and send it to SAF.
• SAF claims that conservative students and professors are "blacklisted" at their colleges and universities.

SAF's Activities:

• SAF is promoting the "Academic Bill of Rights" nationwide to pressure schools that receive state funding to implement affirmative action-like programs to hire conservative professors. SAF claims that Georgia, Colorado and Mississippi are "on the verge" of getting legislators and university boards to ratify the bill. According to SAF, "Our goal is to get more than 500,000 signatures — 10,000 per state — to present to lawmakers, alumni, regents and administrations across the nation!"
• SAF organizes campus chapters. As of June 2004 they list chapters at 135 schools nationwide, including Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Duke, Brown, UCLA, UC-Berkeley, U. Wisconsin-Madison, Missouri, Emory, Georgia Tech, Michigan and American University.
• SAF distributes and promotes the booklet "Unpatriotic University" which Horowitz describes as "a wealth of information about the bias in hiring, the anti-American rhetoric, and the shutting out of conservative points of view both in classrooms and on speakers' platforms." (Horowitz's Center for the Study of Popular Culture publishes the booklet.)
• Promotes Front Page Magazine's book store which includes titles such as David Horowitz's "Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes," books by Charles Murray, Sean Hannity, Daniel Pipes, as well as many anti-Islam and anti-Clinton books. Front Page Magazine publishes controversial columnist Ann Coulter.

Updated July 2004