Politics & Power Quote by David Horowitz

Horowitz’s line is built like a calm syllogism, but it’s really a cultural indictment in the form of a compliment. By granting doctors a baseline of professional neutrality, he borrows the authority of medicine - a field we’re trained to see as rigorously credentialed, ethically bound, and, crucially, accountable to clear outcomes. Then he pivots to the punch: professors, in his telling, have forfeited that same social trust. The contrast is the engine here. One profession is framed as service-oriented and rule-governed; the other as discretionary, ideological, and therefore suspect.

The intent isn’t merely to criticize individual faculty behavior. It’s to reclassify higher education as a kind of soft power institution: less a place of knowledge production than a site of moral and political formation. “Minister equally” is carefully chosen. It casts medicine as quasi-sacred caretaking, while implicitly accusing academia of selective care - grading, mentoring, admissions, hiring - filtered through belief. The subtext is grievance politics with a professional sheen: the listener is invited to feel like a patient who can’t switch hospitals, trapped in a system where gatekeepers have opinions about your soul.

Context matters. Horowitz rose to prominence as a conservative activist focused on perceived left dominance in universities (think campus speech battles, “Academic Bill of Rights,” and the post-9/11 culture wars). The quote works because it exploits a real asymmetry: professors do have interpretive authority, and outcomes in education are harder to measure than in medicine. It’s persuasive precisely where it’s weakest - collapsing a diverse academy into a single ideological actor, and treating “professionalism” as apolitical performance rather than an ethic contested in every profession, including medicine.