Politics & Power Quote by Juan Cole

Cole’s line is doing two things at once: drawing a boundary around academic freedom, and naming the political move that threatens it. By invoking David Horowitz - a prominent conservative activist who pushed “Academic Bill of Rights” proposals in the 2000s - Cole isn’t debating an abstract principle. He’s flagging a particular campaign to recast universities as partisan machines that require external “correction.”

The phrase “I don’t accept” matters. It’s not “I disagree,” which would invite a seminar-style exchange; it’s a refusal of the premise. Cole treats the demand for “predetermined political balance” as category error: research isn’t a talk show panel, and scholarship isn’t supposed to satisfy a quota of ideological viewpoints. His subtext is that “balance” is being smuggled in as a neutral-sounding justification for state oversight - a kind of soft censorship that doesn’t ban ideas directly but pressures institutions to hire, fund, or publish to meet an imposed symmetry.

“Government should impose” is the moral trigger. Cole frames the threat not as campus debate getting rowdy, but as power moving downward from the state into knowledge production. That context is crucial: post-9/11 culture wars, accusations of liberal bias, and legislative efforts to monitor curricula. Cole’s intent is defensive but strategic: he’s warning that once scholarship is evaluated by its political ratio rather than its methods and evidence, the university stops being a place where arguments are tested and becomes a place where arguments are managed.