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Ever since I took Tom Emerson’s course on political and civil rights and liberties at Yale Law School in the late 1950s, I have thought of myself as a First Amendment absolutist. I still do, even though I understand that technically there can be no such thing.

After I became editor of The Nation in the late 1970s (I’m now emeritus), I thought of myself and the magazine as independent, even though I know that we are somewhere on the liberal-left end of the political spectrum (but that, of course, is at least partly because the country has drifted so far to the right.)

The Nation (and I) had no problem supporting the ACLU’s position in the early 1980s defending, on civil liberties grounds, the neo-Nazis’ right to march in Skokie, Illinois. And I might mention that in the 1950s–the height and depths of the McCarthy period–I believed in the rights of Communists and others accused of so-called subversion to teach, write movies, work for the government, and all the rest.

When, a couple of years ago, I took on the chairmanship of the Columbia Journalism Review, some in the blogosphere, and a letter-to-the-editor writer or two, raised the question of whether the former editor of The Nation could preside over an impartial media-monitoring journal. I pointed out at the time that one of my predecessors at CJR had previously been the editor of Fortune and Money and somehow managed to put out a distinguished journal. Could a former editor of The Nation do so as well? Only time would tell.

I mention all of the above by way of declaring my interest, as the English say, in what follows: the dangers to civil liberties on college campuses from both the left and the right.

During the McCarthy years, the issue was academic freedom, and the principal danger was from the right, in the sense that the government (in the form of Congressional investigators backed up by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI) put pressure on colleges and universities not to employ Reds or even those who refused on principle to cooperate with the investigators because they didn’t want to name names, didn’t believe these retrograde committees had the right to inquire into political and personal beliefs, and didn’t want to concede any legitimacy to those they regarded as opportunistic inquisitors embarked on a political wrecking expedition.

During the 1980s and 1990s, those on the right claimed that the principal danger to the free flow of ideas on campus was from the left. They blamed multiculturalism and the practitioners of identity politics–feminists, gay rights activists, black nationalists, and even supporters of affirmative action–whom they believed dominated academia and enforced their politically correct party line through informal intimidation and the corrupt distribution of various academic plums.

These allegations always struck me as overblown and largely unproven, but The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on America’s Campuses, by Alan Charles Kors and Harvey Silverglate, abundantly documents that such charges were not entirely without substance. For instance, speech codes, prohibiting speech that ‘offends,’ have served to insulate the self-appointed spokespersons of these groups from criticism and the need to debate debatable subjects. As civil-liberties activist Wendy Kaminer has written regarding the sensibilities of the oppressed: “Who’s oppressed? Just about everyone except the Caucasian heterosexual males who don’t claim to be disabled. Never mind that you’re at Harvard; if you’re a non-Caucasian or female, then, like a woman in Afghanistan you can claim to be oppressed.”

After the cold war and the culture wars came 9/11 and, on campus, the so-called language wars. In the name of combating terrorism, right-wing personalities and groups (some of them already in place) began to target individuals (like Ward Churchill at the University of Colorado, who gave a speech referring to World Trade Center victims as “little Eichmans”) and departments (like Middle East and Asian Languages and Civilization at Columbia). They argued that the individuals ought to be banned from teaching or tenure and that the departments, which they regarded as biased, ought to be purged and/or forced to hire more ‘balanced’ faculty who would teach in the approved manner.

Groups with names like Accuracy in Academia, Students for Academic Freedom, Students for a Better America, Education Watch, and Professors Watch all seemed to agree with Campus-watch.org that there were too many professors “who love bin Laden and hate America.” One even offered to pay students for taping and turning in the guilty. (“$100 to Rat Out Rad Profs,” proclaimed a New York Post headline.) A so-called Academic Bill of Rights was introduced in something like seventeen state legislatures, including, in its most extreme version, Arizona’s, where a Senate Committee proposed a bill that would ban professors from “endorsing, supporting or opposing any candidate for local, state or national office”; endorsing or opposing litigation; and advocating “one side of a social, political, or cultural issue that is a matter of partisan controversy.”

Recently, the Zionist Organization of America filed a civil-rights complaint with the U.S. Civil Rights Commission against UC Irvine. The organization sought to “protect” Jewish students from the Muslim Students Association, which had sponsored lectures with titles of such dubious taste as “Hamas: The People’s Choice,” “Israel: The 4th Reich,” and “Zionism Hijacking Judaism.” The Commission issued a report recognizing the right of Jewish students to be protected from anti-Semitism.

Is all of this cause for concern? Of course. And yet I feel that most of the ‘oppressed,’ including the Jewish community, can take care of themselves. I also tend to agree with UC Irvine’s Jon Wiener that many of these misleadingly named right-wing campus watch groups turn out to be paper tigers: a majority of them are fronts for the fundraising activities of former lefty–now neocon righty–David Horowitz, who presides over a right-wing think tank, deceptively titled The Center for Popular Culture, and who last year published a book called The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America. Here it is incumbent upon me to say, I made the cut! (Although I was flattered to be included, factual errors aside, I don’t believe I or, for that matter, most of my fellow dangers earned the honor. But then again, I have a conflict of interest.)

Are civil liberties on college campuses in danger? Always. It was not so long ago that students at Brown actually seized and destroyed copies of the campus newspaper containing an ad by provocateur Horowitz opposing reparations for African Americans. But to ask whether the pendulum of danger has swung left or right may be to ask the wrong question. David Nasaw, executive director of CUNY’s Center for the Humanities, will tell you that perhaps he is in a special situation, but he worries more about federal, state, and other intrusions on faculty autonomy than he does about attacks from the left or right: “What I worry about is what happens at state and community colleges where there is no tradition of faculty autonomy, and where more and more college and university presidents want to behave like high school principals and run their own show.”

Although there is no longer a McCarthy or Hoover to symbolize the federal government’s intrusions on faculty prerogatives, Ellen Schrecker, author of No More Ivory Towers, a leading study of McCarthyism on campus, has written that in some respects the situation today is more dangerous: “McCarthyism dealt mainly with off-campus political activities. Now they focus on what is going on in the classroom. It’s very dangerous because it’s reaching into the core academic functions of the university, particularly in Middle Eastern studies.”

Jonathan Cole, the former provost of Columbia, who has documented in these pages how the U.S. Patriot Act has inadvertently kept scientists from doing their research, believes that actions the federal government has taken in the name of national security suggest that we may be in for more federal repression. He pointed out that Columbia University’s budget, in the early 1950s less than $50 million, is now roughly $2.4 billion, more than a quarter of which comes from the federal government. Even as I write this, The New York Times is reporting on what The Chronicle of Higher Education has called “the IRBs wars.” The so-called Institutional Review Boards (IRBs), originally set up by the federal government to protect human subjects from abuse, as in the notorious Tuskegee syphilis study, are now intruding on the research techniques of sociologists, journalists, and oral historians, among others. The requirement that subjects fill out consent forms, and the micromanagement of the questions scholars may ask, is something new in the academic firmament. So new that legal scholars have argued that the requirement of prior approval may violate the First Amendment.

Where does this leave us? Neither the Right nor the Left enters this fray with clean hands. But those like Horowitz, who trespass on the heretofore sacred precincts of classroom autonomy, pose a greater danger to democracy than those they complain about. As the historian David Brion Davis has said, over time the countersubversives invariably do more damage than the alleged subversives they set out to disable. But in assessing the dangers to civil liberties on campus, we should look not only to the left and to the right of us, but also at what used to be called, in another context, the Vital Center, which includes the state itself.