Horowitz Vs. Churchill, Round 1

PirateBallerina live-blogged the debate.

Expose the Left has video of Horowitz and Churchill appearing on Hannity & Colmes.

More on the initial "meeting" of these rivals:

WASHINGTON — The University of Colorado and professor Ward Churchill are examples of a "sea change" in academics in the last 30 years, in which leftists now dominate U.S. colleges and impose their opinions on their students, academic critic David Horowitz said during a debate Thursday.

Churchill argued Horowitz is wrong to assert that there is standard that can be applied to decide what is appropriate to teach.

"There is no consensus, there is no homogeneity, there is no truth," Churchill said.

Horowitz, an author and critic of American colleges, and Churchill became archrivals after an essay Churchill wrote likening some Sept. 11 victims to a notorious Nazi caused a national furor over academic freedom and university hiring practices.

The two met on stage before more than 200 cheering students and others at George Washington University Thursday to debate whether teachers should voice their political opinions in the classrooms.

The debate was the opening event of a Students for Academic Freedom conference, a group Horowitz chairs.

As Shakespeare said, these "debates" are "full of sound and fury, signifying nothing". Churchill will not convince any of Horowitz' adherents to change their minds, and it is highly unlikely that Horowitz will alter the worldview of the Churchill sycophants. Each man has a very distinct point of view, but it appears that apart from asides and grudging acknowledgement of the other's viewpoint, this really amounts to nothing more than simultaneous monologues, with little to be gained, other than the comical sight of seeing the two on the same stage at the same time, perhaps.

An updated story confirms these observations--Churchill, Horowitz smack each other with kid gloves:

WASHINGTON — If people expected to see a bloody clash between a fire-breathing liberal and a ranting right-winger, that was some other monster movie.

Instead, two equally controversial men — liberal University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill and conservative author David Horowitz — put on a genial display of good manners and polysyllabic brilliance on Thursday night in a much-hyped debate about ideology in the classroom.

Organizers billed the event on stage at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., as "Academia's Royal Rumble." The two combatants struck one another with the longest words they could find — many of them so long they would not fit on a standard reporter's notebook.

Yet another take here.