In the first place, this whole University of Northern Colorado fairy tale is not just a "mistake". Go. Read. And once you can understand that part of it, well, here's a second example of Horowitz in action:
... Horowitz has gotten probably the most mileage out of an anecdote about an exam question asking students to “Explain why George Bush is a war criminal.” There are, shall we say, certain problems with that 2-year-old accusation, prompting an aggressive correction yesterday from Horowitz. But this incident doesn't quite capture how egregiously willing Horowitz has been to promote unproven allegations against largely defenseless professors. For that, you've got to talk about Oneida Meranto, who has taped evidence that a claim against her is utterly false -- a fact that Horowitz has still not acknowledged.
Meranto is a political science professor at Denver's Metropolitan State College and has received perhaps more grief at Horowitz's hands than any other professor. After Horowitz spent large parts of September and October in Colorado grooming and training student complainants, a student named George Culpepper raised various charges against her at a hearing held by Colorado Senate President John Andrews. Meranto contradicted him in a Denver Post article, saying (in the Post's words) that he "dropped her class because he hadn't done enough of the work and knew he couldn't pass"; Culpepper then sought her dismissal, arguing she had violated his privacy rights.
After Culpepper wrote an article for Horowitz's FrontPageMag.com condemning "Leftist Professor" Meranto, she began receiving death threats. A university investigation found in August 2004 that there was no basis to Culpepper's claims, although it criticized her for the privacy violation. Then, two days into the '04-'05 school year, another student, William R. Pierce, filed another grievance against her. As The Chronicle of Higher Education reported, Meranto had begun taping her lectures by then and easily disproved Pierce's complaint. By that time, of course, Pierce had written about it for FrontPageMag.com and raised it at yet another Andrews state senate hearing. Horowitz staffer Sara Dogan wrote a lengthy rebuttal to the Chronicle's story well after the tape had come to light, and managed not to mention this rather important point (not to mention the claim in Metro State's newspaper that Culpepper bragged of planting a student in Meranto's class). In an interview just last week, Horowitz said to me that "[Meranto] was entirely the aggressor."
Cue right-wing whining, "Well, come on, that's only two ...".
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