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Weber’s primary concern is with large classrooms in which the professor (as German professors still do to some extent) lectures without interruption and is vulnerable to the temptation of expounding his own views without fear of contradiction. Thus, he concentrates on the professor’s responsibility. He isn’t writing about undergraduate seminars in which the value to the student of the seminar depends not only on the professor, but on the other students. I’m going to go out on a limb here, and suggest that this means that students, insofar as they are engaging in a limited form of mutual education, also take on a limited version of Weber’s vocational responsibility, and it is the professor’s duty to enforce this. Students who persistently and belligerently refuse to recognize in principle that other points of view may potentially hold some truth prevent seminars from becoming genuine intellectual exchanges, and need to be discouraged, if necessary in very strong terms, from so doing

His main line of attack is that of the standard political hack, concocting a farrago of innuendoes, half-truths and out-and-out lies in order to beat down those whom he sees as his political opponents. However, when he’s attacked in the same terms as those he himself engages in, he’s perfectly happy to appeal to academic norms of reasoned debate in order to accuse his accusers of themselves being politicized. When academics on the contrary try to engage him in reasoned debate, they’ve lost the battle before they’ve started it. They grant his (often preposterous) claims a credibility that they don’t deserve, and set themselves up to have the bejasus beaten out of them through distortion, selective editing etc.Thus, it’s not the kind of debate where the reasoned adducement of facts and academic expertise serves any useful purpose (especially as the status of academic expertise is itself what’s at stake). Nor, on the basis of the material record, is adherence to these norms likely either to chasten Horowitz towards better behaviour or to edify the audience.

Because Horowitz is able to use the low standards of political debate, while demanding that his intellectual opponents adhere to the high ones of academic argument he wins either way.