Recent Op-Ed on Minnesota "Academic Bill of Rights" legislation

Posted below is a copy of my recent (4/15/05) Duluth News Tribune Op-Ed on the proposed "academic bill of rights" legislation now under consideration in Minnesota.

'Academic bill of rights' would stifle free thought

Under the sponsorship of Sen. Michele Bachmann, R-Stillwater, and Rep. Ray Vandeveer, R-Forest Lake, the Minnesota legislature is now considering adoption of conservative activist David Horowitz's so-called "Free Speech for Faculty and Students Bill of Rights" (introduced as SB 1988).

Under the pretense of protecting academic freedom, the bill, one of 21 introduced nationally, requires that state college and university faculty "make students aware of the existence of serious scholarly viewpoints other than their own through classroom discussion or dissemination of written materials," and that students "shall not be discriminated against on the basis of political, ideological, or religious beliefs."

In addition, the bill seeks to guarantee that universities "maintain a posture of organizational neutrality with respect to methods, facts, and theories which have been validated by research," and that faculty "shall not be hired, fired, promoted, granted tenure, or denied promotion or tenure on the basis of political, ideological, or religious beliefs."

While the bill's language appears innocuous enough, its intentions, and that of the campaign it represents, are far more insidious.

Horowitz, the former radical turned conservative, wrote the "academic bill of rights" as a public relations stunt to discredit public higher education by attacking university faculty members for leaning to the political left (which is true) and for using their positions to indoctrinate students with liberal propaganda (which is patently false, though nonetheless a popular claim with the conspiratorial right). It's also a legal means for remaking the university in his own ideological image. Along with Students for Academic Freedom, the national student group he founded, Horowitz aims to intimidate individual faculty members, hiring and tenure committees, and entire departments and colleges with fear of legal reprisal for accusations by conservative students of liberal bias in the classroom. To this end, students are encouraged, in the SAF Handbook, to collect complaints about faculty members from departments that are "known for their partisan leanings," including cultural studies, women's studies, and English literature, and "to a lesser degree," sociology, history, and my own field of political science.

These collected complaints would be used both to "introduce the student body to SAF" in order to "recruit new members" and to use them "as a valuable resource" for creating the appearance of a genuine problem when lobbying for academic bill of rights legislation.

In suggesting that students are somehow denied their academic freedom whenever their professors hold opposing political views, and in further implying that conservative students are now being made to suffer for their political views, the bill is utter nonsense. The departments I know are home to far more diversity -- ideological and methodological -- than are either the mass media or any of the institutions of American government, and while we all have political opinions, a characteristic that we share with other educated professionals, the idea that we would force these upon our students even if we could is simply insulting.

We professors take great pride in encouraging our students to examine multiple sides of any issue and to critically examine arguments and evidence regardless of their source. This pedagogical commitment has, in itself, brought related charges in the past, when those on the political right who sought to diminish our academic freedom accused us of promoting "moral relativism" for encouraging our students to think for themselves rather than promoting their favored set of moral or political values. In mandating a formalized review process for the hearing of student grievances, which already exists at the University of Minnesota, the bill seeks to manufacture the appearance of faculty abuse of power unchecked by existing university processes -- a divorce from reality that plainly seeks to score political points rather than to address any genuine need or problem.

The unfortunate fact is that academic freedom is currently being threatened on many American college campuses, but Horowitz and his puppets are hardly the champions of such freedom that they portray themselves as being. In an era in which any criticism of U.S. foreign or domestic policy is decried as "treason" by right-wing pundits and in which conservative students are encouraged to collect dossiers on their professors for questioning the official party line on contemporary moral and political issues, greater attention to the threats to academic freedom -- and the consequences of failing to adequately protect against those threats -- is indeed warranted, and hopefully this campaign will help heighten public awareness of the critical role of free thought and discussion, for students and faculty, in higher education.

The Orwellian doublespeak of the academic bill of rights should not fool us into uncritically accepting as true the false allegations that it implies, and should not be allowed to intimidate into silence those with whom these "defenders" of academic freedom disagree.