* Coalition of more than 20 organizations that united in 2006 under the name Free Exchange on Campus, to attack David Horowitz’s newly published book, The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America
“The Indoctrination Lobby” is a descriptive title that Discover The Networks assigned to a coalition of more than 20 organizations that united in 2006 under the name Free Exchange on Campus (FEC). FEC was formed for a single purpose: to attack David Horowitz’s newly published book The Professors. The book’s critics consisted chiefly of tenured radicals in the academy as well as their apologists outside the academy. The Indoctrination Lobby, or FEC, fell under the latter designation.
Horowitz’s book called attention to activist professors whose political mission: (a) abrogated longstanding principles of academic scholarship and academic freedom, and (b) resulted in an ideologically biased curriculum. In short, Horowitz advocated real academic diversity — the kind of political and intellectual pluralism that would make a truly “free exchange” of ideas on campus possible. FEC, by contrast, was content to accept the status quo — where leftist faculty members, who outnumbered their conservative colleagues by an enormous margin on U.S. campuses from coast to coast, were free to indoctrinate their captive audiences of 18- to 22-year-olds.
Consisting of teachers’ unions and leftwing political action groups, FEC was funded in part by George Soros‘s Open Society Institute and the American Federation of Teachers.
To read a comprehensive profile of FEC, click here.
Most of FEC’s member groups were extremely well-funded and thus were able, in turn, to ensure that their overall coalition was financially sound. Below is a list of these member groups. In parentheses, next to the name of each group for which financial information was available, is a dollar figure indicating the organization’s total assets during (in most cases) the 2006-07 time period:
FEC has been largely inactive since 2007.