The firing of Ward Churchill for academic incompetence and fraud is long overdue. The fact that the chairman of the Colorado University regents said it was “not an easy decision to make” reminds us how this scandal lifts the lid on the vast corruption of the academic process that tenured radicals have accomplished in the last several decades.
Churchill had no academic credential to be hired in the first place. His degree was an MA in graphic arts — he was a painter — bestowed by a rinky dink experimental college which is now defunct. He got an affirmative action job designated for “native Americans” even though he is an Anglo-Saxon and his tribal membership was also based on his extremist leftwing views and has since been repudiated by the tribe in question.
It took the national scandal of his infamous 9/11 essay to get the university to even address his malfeasance. The scandal led to the convening of a panel of professors who found that Churchill was a liar, a plagiarist, and not a scholar at all. The entire Ethnic Studies department at Colorado U is composed of Churchill clones and worshippers, but don’t hold your breath that anyone is going to look into their academic performance. And Churchill will have his day in court aided by the American Civil Liberties Union which shares his belief that America is the Great Satan and should be brought down by every means possible.
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]]>Free Exchange On Campus is a teacher’s union front that pretends it is concerned with academic freedom. In fact it is concerned with suppressing academic freedom, in particular the academic freedom of students to be taught by professionals who are scholars and not proselytizing ideologues. But in a recent post, Free Exchange reveals that it is also part of the racist left which will defend race specific codes that privilege designated racial groups.
Ward Connerly is trying to remove racist practices from Missouri public institutions by passing an initiative that prevents discrimination by government on the basis of race. This is exactly the battle we fought in the Sixties against the jim crow laws in the south. It’s what Brown v. Board of Education was about, and it’s what Martin Luther King preached. This legacy has been betrayed by the Free Exchange/Daily Kos leftists who are totalitarians to the core and want government and other political agencies to determine how our students think and which students are to receive privileges based on their skin color. Of course not all people of color are to be benefited by the left’s apartheid system. Sri Lankans and other Asians are designated “white” — the skin color of the devil and are to be denied equality under the race laws that Free Exchange is so desperate to defend.
]]>I did not object to Loewen’s text being included in a class in American Studies. I objected to it being the only required historical text for a course in American Studies taught by a professor of English literature. Here is what I actually wrote: “The sole historical text assigned for this course is James Loewen’s Lies My Teacher Told Me. This book is not a scholarly work, but — as the title suggests — a sectarian polemic against the traditional teaching of American history and against what the author views as the black record of the American past.” My point was that under Penn State’s academic freedom provisions, teachers are obligated to provide students with texts that enable them to “think for themselves.” This agenda was not served by providing them with a single extreme and ill-informed polemic like Lies My Teacher Told Me.
Loewen’s response to my view that his book is not a scholarly work is that it has footnotes. Every book I have ever written is footnoted, but I do not presume to present myself as a professional historian because I have written books on historical subjects. Nor would I call myself a professional sociologist simply because I have written footnoted books on the subject of race. Ann Coulter and Al Franken provide endnotes for their arguments but this does not make Godless: The Church of Liberalism or Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them scholarly works. The point I was making was that a course in American Studies, taught by a professor credentialed in English literature ought to have had a scholarly rather than a polemical account of American history as its sole required text. The issue here is standards, not some slight to Loewen’s amour propre.
Loewen claims I invented a quote from him describing the contents of his book, while conceding that it is a fair representation of what he thinks. He calls this an “outrage.” Actually, I didn’t invent the quote. It is verbatim one of the chapter descriptions from his book and can be found on his website here (chapter 8): http://www.uvm.edu/~jloewen/content.php?file=liesmyteachertoldme-toc.html
Loewen wants to know if I now have different views about the events in Guatemala and Iran than I did when I wrote The Free World Colossus more than forty years ago. The answer is yes.
Loewen’s contentions about Columbus summarize the problem I have with the use of his book as a college text at all, let alone as the sole historical text for a course in American Studies. He claims that Columbus made two innovations that were revolutionary, robbing and subjugating indigenous peoples to the point of extermination and creating the slave trade. I pointed out that Columbus did neither (and I don’t agree with him about Columbus as he falsely claims).
Loewen tries wriggle out of the first gaffe by ignoring the Aztecs who were racist imperialists indigenous to the hemisphere and then by explaining that Roman imperialism was benign. This is impressive ignorance, even for James Loewen. Consider this well-known passage from Tacitus: “It is difficult not to remember what another rebel leader, in the highlands of Scotland, is to have said about the Romans before he, too, was defeated: ‘They rob, kill and rape, and this they call Roman rule. They make a desert and call it peace.’ This famous quote has become the very definition of the pax romana. So even if we accept Loewen’s view of what Columbus did, he wasn’t the first – even in this hemisphere — and far from being a revolutionary departure from the past it was more like humanity as usual.
In making these momentous errors, Loewen has been misled by a passionate hatred for his own country unchecked by historical knowledge. The fact that other leftist academics have such low intellectual standards as to consider his work scholarly and assign it in classes or that professional historical associations have become so politicized as to confuse political correctness with accurate scholarship and reward him with honors is regrettable. But that doesn’t change the facts.
Loewen’s evident pain in publishing this article is something like the pain of a jilted lover. Yes I was once a deluded leftist like him, hypercritical of the world’s greatest democracy, and ready to turn a blind eye towards the crimes of indigenous peoples. But I put off these childish things long ago and learned to appreciate the fact that the world was more complex than “progressives” dreamed. I would be more interested in his complaints, now, if he showed the slightest aptitude for intellectual argument. I have actually written entire books explaining why I am no longer the man who wrote The Free World Colossus. I am waiting for the leftist who is up to taking them on.
Who’s Distorting History? Me or David Horowitz? You Decide.
By James W. Loewen
(Mr. Loewen is a sociologist and author most recently of, Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism, published by The New Press.)
Having been left off David Horowitz’s academic prom card of The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America, I felt jilted, until I read his “Breaking the Law at Penn State” (later retitled “Breaking the Rules at Penn State”) at his e-magazine, FrontPageMag.com, 1/22/2007. Earlier Horowitz had prodded the Pennsylvania House to set up a ‘committee on academic freedom’ to ensure that courses at state colleges provided students with more than one point of view. Now, because my bestseller, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong, is the primary text for a Penn State course, Introduction to American Studies, Horowitz is outraged. At FrontPageMag he spends two pages distorting my book.
He begins by disparaging it as “not a scholarly work.” No reader would guess that Lies is carefully documented with 56 pages of double-columned endnotes.
He then charges:
Loewen laments “[h]ow textbooks misrepresent the U.S. government and omit its participation in state-sponsored terrorism.”
I indented that sentence because I quoted Horowitz, and he used quotation marks because he quoted me … only he didn’t! He even put brackets around “h” to imply that he changed my capital H to his small h. But most of the “quoted” words are not in Lies My Teacher Told Me at all!
The word “terrorism” appears just once in the book. I listed six attempts by the U.S. government to assassinate heads of state or bring down foreign governments (Iran, Guatemala, Lebanon, Zaïre, Cuba, and Chile). Then I wrote:
The United States government calls actions like these state-sponsored terrorism when other countries do them to us. Other than “state-sponsored terrorism,” Horowitz leaves out my sentence and substitutes another that he simply made up — within quotation marks! I actually agree with the words he put in my mouth on this point but doing so is still an outrage.
Accordingly, I do oppose attempts by our government to assassinate or bring down foreign leaders. Back in 1975, the Church Committee came out unequivocally against assassination attempts by our government. So did President Ford, three different CIA heads, and every witness who testified before the committee (see “Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders,” Interim Report, Govt. Printing Office, 1975). Back then, David Horowitz condemned such acts too. For example, he stressed that the government of Guatemala that we overthrew by force in 1954 was elected democratically, while our intervention led to “a decade of dictatorship and right-wing rule” (The Free World Colossus, 163). Lies My Teacher Told Me cites one of the CIA officers responsible for engineering that coup.
[He] agreed later that overthrowing elected leaders is a short-sighted policy. Such actions provide only a short-term fix, keeping people who worry us out of power for a time, but identifying the United States with repressive, undemocratic, unpopular regimes, hence undermining our long-term interests.
This is Realpolitik analysis. I argue that the blowback from our nondemocratic interventions is rarely in our national interest in the long run. Does Horowitz disagree?
The new Horowitz, now right-wing himself, goes on in his FrontPageMag article to misquote me again:
According to Loewen, the lies teachers told him result from facts being “manipulated by elite white male capitalists who orchestrate how history is written.”
This time, he gets my words right, but by taking them out of context, he actually reverses my meaning!
In context, I am assessing various reasons why high school history textbooks are so bad. Could it be because the secondary literature in history (the monographs in the library) is so biased? No, I reply, that literature is now pretty good. “[P]erhaps an upper-class conspiracy is to blame,” I then suggest.
Perhaps we are all dupes, manipulated by elite white male capitalists who orchestrate how history is written as part of their scheme to perpetuate their own power and privilege at the expense of the rest of us.
No, I conclude, “To blame the power elite for what is taught in a rural Vermont school or an inner-city classroom somehow seems too easy.” I go on to point out something Horowitz himself has decried: If the upper class controls everything, then why are many history and education professors leftists? Indeed, I note “the upper class may not even control what is taught in its ‘own’ history classrooms” — upper-class prep schools. “In sum,” I conclude, “power elite theories may credit the upper class with more power, unity, and conscious self-interest than it has.”
Note that this conclusion is exactly opposite what Horowitz claims I say!
Incidentally, if you want to find out the reasons why U.S. history textbooks are so bad, read Lies My Teacher Told Me. But I must warn you, I suggest several possibilities, so you will have to make up your own mind. Ironically, it is precisely this discussion that Horowitz denies that I supply. Hence, he charges, a course based in part on my book violates Penn State’s academic freedom policy which defines an appropriate academic instruction as training students to think for themselves…”
Next Horowitz attacks my chapter on Christopher Columbus. He writes, Loewen summarizes the achievement of Columbus in these words: “Christopher Columbus introduced two phenomena that revolutionized race relations and transformed the modern world: the taking of land, wealth, and labor from indigenous peoples, leading to their near extermination, and the transatlantic slave trade, which created a racial underclass.”
I did write those words. And though they are not my summary of Columbus’s achievement, which comes later in the chapter, I’ll stand by them. Are they wrong? Horowitz makes only two nitpicking criticisms. First, he says that Columbus did not invent the taking of land, wealth, and labor, leading to the near extermination of indigenous peoples; the Romans did it first. I thought Romans typically made the peoples at the edge of their empire pay tribute. When they fully conquered them, they then ruled them through their existing local leadership, sometimes allowing those leaders to become citizens of the empire. But perhaps Horowitz is right and the Romans nearly exterminated the peoples they subjugated, replacing them with Italians. My point was not about Rome, but about Columbus, and about Columbus, Horowitz agrees with me. Second, Horowitz says there already was an intercontinental slave trade (which of course there was) although he agrees that Columbus began the trans-Atlantic trade, which indeed created a racial underclass. These two “criticisms” prompt him to conclude that my account is “certainly not an accurate view of the historical record.”
The most general attack Horowitz levels is that I have written an “amateur text” that is “extreme, uninformed, polemical.” Not so. I am no amateur. I have a Ph.D. in sociology from Harvard University. In case Horowitz thinks I’m an amateur because my doctorate is outside history, he needs to know that the American Historical Association put me on one of their prize committees, while the Organization of American Historians named me a “Distinguished Lecturer.” Moreover, specialists in each area I treat find nothing surprising (and nothing extreme, uninformed, or polemical) in mywork. A Civil War historian might be surprised to learn that Columbus started the trans-Atlantic slave trade but will not challenge what I wrote about the Lincoln/Douglas debates. And so forth. Horowitz is simply ignorant of the secondary literature in American history.
Finally, who is Horowitz to call me an “amateur?” On what is he professional?” So far as I know, he has no doctorate in any field, and certainly not in American history.
I want to conclude more in sorrow than in anger. When David Horowitz first published The Free World Colossus, I thought it important enough to buy in hardbound. While far too positive about Communist states like Cuba, it accurately showed the problems stemming from U.S. support of dictatorships. I knew Horowitz had gone right-wing in recent years, but I looked forward to reading a recent book of his, as time permitted. No more. His distortion of my book lacks integrity as well as scholarship. I can learn from an honest negative appraisal, but Horowitz does not make a single sound criticism of my work.
Postscript I sent a slightly shorter version of the foregoing rebuttal to the editor of FrontPageMag. As I had anticipated, he did not have authority to publish or not publish it and emailed it on to Horowitz himself. Horowitz replied:
This is typical for the left. Loewen doesn’t understand the difference between opinions and facts, in this case between having different opinions about the facts. To take only one example: I do not misrepresent Loewen’s position on America as a state that sponsors terrorism and on textbooks that fail to mention this. Loewen actually concedes both points in his email while managing to complain that I am unfair to him. Leftists like Loewen are such obsessive liars that they don’t even notice that they are lying. I see no point in posting an article that repeats the positions I described Loewen as holding while at the same time insisting that he doesn’t hold them, in order to carry on this absurd dialogue. If he has a substantive point to make, I’m happy to hear it.
Aside from the fact that no leftist ever called me leftist, I will leave it to readers to decide whether Horowitz or I have scored more substantive points in this ‘exchange.’ Amazingly, Jamie Glazov, Horowitz’s puppet editor at FrontPageMag, implied that Horowitz’s reply amounted to a serious offer to write something else for the e-magazine. I replied, “I have dealt with enough publications to know the difference between ‘r & r’ (revise and resubmit) and a rejection, though I admit I have never received as nasty a rejection as David’s.”
We can conclude that David Horowitz does not value more than one point of view when that one point of view is his. ‘Academic freedom’ plays no role at FrontPageMag.
]]>Censorship at Temple
Monday, April 30, 2007
If you need any more evidence of the threat to free expression posed by David Horowitz’s campaign for an Academic Bill of Rights, consider the example of Temple University, where Horowitz and conservative friends called for a ban on allowing the Honors Department to send out an announcement about an anti-war protest on campus. What, exactly, is wrong about announcing events on campus?
http://collegefreedom.blogspot.com/2007/04/censorship-at-temple-if-you-need-any.html
Response from David Horowitz: What is it that you don’t understand about institutional neutrality? Why is it so difficult for people on the left to imagine what it would be like if the university were dominated by conservatives who had the same disregard for professionalism that leftists seem to have and used the university as a recruiting platform for the right? This is not about the expression of ideas. It’s about an unprofessional approach to the university as an institution.
John Wilson: First, I’m not sure that institutional neutrality is a more important value than freedom. But let’s assume that it is. However, there are two kinds of institutional neutrality. Your view of institutional neutrality says that any “biased” events must be prohibited from any sponsorship or promotion by the university. My view of institutional neutrality says that the university should promote and sponsor events of any viewpoints.
An example: every college has a news office. Should a news office be prohibited from promoting an event unless it is politically “neutral” whatever that means? Or should a campus news office promote a wide range of events regardless of the viewpoint expressed?
If you can show me that Temple refused to promote events organized by conservative students, then you would have a valid claim that institutional neutrality has been violated (however, the appropriate response would be moral suasion, not appeal to some formal rule). Unless you can show me some kind of viewpoint bias, I have to reject your approach to institutional neutrality. You are no longer demanding equal treatment, you are demanding the prohibition of ideas deemed “political”–and who do you trust to decide that something is “neutral” and something else isn’t? What exactly is the harm caused by knowing about an event.P.S. Do you mind if I post your comment and my response to my blog?
David Horowitz: I would be willing to consider the promotion and sponsorship of a variety viewpoints if I saw the slightest commitment on the part of university administrations and people like yourself to the principle of equity in regard to existing programs — invited speakers, commencement speakers, allocation of departmental budgets to forums representing more than one (left) viewpoint. I have never objected to college news offices promoting campus events. I do object to groups of professors organizing students for political agendas using university facilities. It transforms their scholarly roles into political roles and interferes with the teacher-student relationship which is the core of their professional responsibility. There are plenty of town hall type arenas where professors can exercise their citizenship rights. We expect doctors, DMV employees, social security administrators and so forth to behave professionally and politically neutrally while they are on the job. Why should teachers be an exception? Yes, you have my permission to print my comment and then this exchange on your blog. Thanks for asking.
John Wilson:
The key principle of a university is freedom, not equity. Thus, any student or professor should be free to invite any speaker; we should all reject the idea of an administrator deciding to limit one point of view because of an “equity” principle. And you can’t impose a ban on political expression simply because you don’t trust universities to promote your view equally. You have the responsibility to promote your own ideas and allow freedom for any perspective.
Now, there is a desirable goal of “equity” in the sense that hearing different and competing ideas promotes learning. So we should figure out ways to encourage more conservative views in academia (as well as more centrist and liberal and radical ideas in many cases). But you don’t achieve true equity by sacrificing freedom. Banning an administrator from promoting an anti-war protest doesn’t do anything to encourage the debate of ideas or make contrasting conservative ideas heard.
The reason why universities are different from other kinds of jobs is that the discussion of ideas (including political ideas) is one of the core job duties of a professor. If discussing ideas is essential to a university, then punishing professors who do so in unpopular ways will be destructive to the essence of a university. We need to figure out how we can encourage faculty and students to express more controversial ideas in and out of class, rather than seeking to silence them.
However, I also believe in freedom for other employees. Consider doctors. Even though the debate of ideas is not a core function of a doctor, they should nevertheless be free to speak on the job. There is absolutely nothing in the Hippocratic Oath or the American Medical Association code of ethics prohibiting a doctor from expressing controversial political ideas on the job. Maybe it’s not good for a doctor or professor to express a particularly stupid political idea on the job; but in that rare case, we have a system of counterspeech and public criticism that should always be preferred to government regulation and administrative censorship.
David Horowitz: You are dead wrong. Of course equity in regards to views on controversial matters is a core principle of education in a democratic society. The reason the university forum is now so one-sided is that there is a political determination to make it so. This has nothing to do with education or knowledge. It has to do with politics, and it is a corrupting influence on the academic enterprise and has resulted in the lowest intellectual standards in American universities ever. The fact that you do not see this or see it only partially is a big part of the problem. No one on my team by the way has called for a ban on political expression as you assert. I have made many overtures to the AAUP to work together on areas we can agree on — as for example the positive things you say in your responser about encouraging under-represented conservative voices. I have yet to get a response out of the organization. The moment the AAUP is ready to work constructively on this issue, I’ll be there to work with them. You haven’t thought through the doctor analogy. You go to a hospital to get medical help regardless of your politics or religion. If the hospital staff inflicted their politics or religion on you I am sure you would quickly see the problem. Yes, the university deals in ideas. All the more the reason why it should approach ideas in a professional manner — dispassionately, skeptically and fairly. Agitating for political goals in an educational context is the quickest way to destroy those values. I will have this posted on Students for Academic Freedom and in my Replies to Critics archive.
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]]>In a victory for academic freedom at Temple University, Provost Richard Englert took prompt action after he was notified by the Temple College Republicans that the official Honors Department listserve was used to send out a blatantly partisan anti-war email. The victory was somewhat tempered by the provost’s insistence that the email did not violate the university’s recently adopted academic freedom policy, but that it was simply a matter of “failure to comply with a process for administrative review.”
The email message which urged students to attend a protest of “The U.S. Occupation of Iraq” was forwarded to the entire Honors Department listserve by Temple employee Jackie Everette on March 14.
A flyer attached to the email contained vehement anti-war and anti-military language, exhorting students to “Come together with Temple Anti-War to demonstrate and speak out against the 4 years of butchery of Iraq.” The flyer claimed that the Iraq war has resulted in “Over $365 billion wasted” and the “use of tons of depleted Uranium causing long-term consequences to civilians and soldiers.” Students were instructed to meet at noon on March 16th at the Bell Tower on campus to engage in a protest of the war.
In an April 17 letter to Temple University Provost Richard Englert, Jack Posobiec, the former chair of the Temple College Republicans, urged the provost to investigate the matter as a violation of Temple’s newly-adopted academic freedom policy.
“Temple students are not well-served by the Temple Honors Department advocating a partisan political agenda,” Posobiec wrote. “On behalf of myself, [Temple College Republicans President] Ryan McCool, and Temple Students for Academic Freedom, I implore you to take the necessary actions to explain Temple University Policy 03.70.02 to the Temple Honors Department, and to ensure their compliance with this University Policy.” Temple University’s Board of Trustees adopted policy 03.70.02 on “Student and Faculty Academic Rights and Responsibilities” last August following an unprecedented year-long process of legislative hearings inspired by Students for Academic Freedom. At the time of the hearings, not a single public university in the commonwealth of Pennsylvania provided student-specific academic freedom guarantees to its student body or provided students with a grievance procedure specifically to challenge such violations. Policy 03.70.02 remedied that situation at Temple by granting students the right to file a grievance if their academic freedom is violated.
One clause of the policy relevant to the email controversy states, “Students should be free to take reasoned exception to the information or views offered in any course of study and to reserve judgment about matters of opinion.” A partisan email sent through official university channels to an entire departmental listserve violates this standard.
“It’s frustrating as a conservative student to constantly have liberal policies shoved down your throat, especially when it’s an academic department like the honors department which had a duty to remain neutral,” said Temple College Republicans Chairman Ryan McCool. “If the College Republicans were holding a conservative event such as a pro-life rally, I sincerely doubt that the administration would be so quick to use University resources to announce it.”
Following the receipt of Posobiec’s message, Englert responded to the College Republicans, acknowledging that the email shouldn’t have been sent out. “I have determined that the posting of this announcement was the clear result of error by a staff member whose primary goal was to be helpful to a student who requested immediate action,” Englert wrote.
Englert additionally stated that he has “asked our Vice Provost for Undergraduate Studies to review the appropriate processes for listserv postings with all staff and administrators in the Honors Program.” But the Provost denied that the listserve posting violated the University’s academic freedom policy, insisting, “I see the present case as a failure to comply with a process for administrative review.”
While the College Republicans are grateful that the immediate situation has been addressed, they are concerned about the provost’s failure to view the anti-war email as an issue of academic freedom.
“This blatant violation of academic neutrality at Temple University, in spite of the highly-publicized academic freedom policy now in place on campus, illustrates the urgent need for other schools to adopt Academic Bills of Rights to protect their students’ academic freedom,” said Students for Academic Freedom Chairman David Horowitz. “While I commend Provost Englert for taking prompt action on this issue, I urge him to reconsider the question of whether Temple’s academic freedom policy applies in this case.”
Students for Academic Freedom is a national initiative dedicated to restoring academic diversity and educational values to America’s institutions of higher learning. The organization recommends that colleges and universities adopt an Academic Bill of Rights to ensure that these principles are respected. The Academic Bill of Rights is available on the organization’s website at www.studentsforacademicfreedom.org.
]]>The following papers have so far printed Siddique’s article:
1. Washington Post
2. Houston Chronicle
3. North Carolina News & Observer
4. Salt Lake Tribune
5. Tallahassee Democrat
6. Newsday
To the editor:
Asheesh Kapur Siddique’s recent article for the Washington Post attacking the Academic Bill of Rights (Free Speech Under Threat on Campus, 10/29) contains so many factual errors and outright falsehoods that I am astounded that it made it into print.
In an obvious contradiction, Siddique claims that the ABOR would both “inject partisan politics into our classrooms” and would prevent students from evaluating “the merits of ideas and arguments for ourselves by banning ‘political’ or ‘anti-religious’ speech from classrooms.”
In fact, the ABOR would neither ban political speech nor require it. Instead the Bill states that “Faculty will not use their courses for the purpose of political, ideological, religious, or anti-religious indoctrination.” This does not mean that controversial or political ideas cannot be discussed, only that they should conform to the academic freedom policy of the American Association of University Professors which states that teachers “should be careful not to introduce into their teaching controversial matter which has no relation to their subject.” Does Siddique have a problem with this?
Every example Siddique provides to show how the ABOR would supposedly restrict speech, such as preventing discussion of evolution in a biology class or of the Iraq War in a course on the modern Middle East, are cases that are explicitly protected under the Academic Bill of Rights.
In one false passage, Siddique writes, “The College Access and Opportunity Act passed by the House in March and under consideration in the Senate, aims to deny federal funding to institutions—even private ones—that refuse to comply with ABOR’s limitations on speech.” This is false. The Act passed by the House in March contains four brief clauses stating the “sense of the Congress” that students should not face discrimination in academic settings for their political, intellectual or religious beliefs. There is no enforcement measure built into the act, and certainly no attempt to deny funding for noncompliance.
It is regrettable that the Washington Post should have chosen to publish a piece that is so poorly researched and so misleads readers on an important educational issue.
Sincerely,
Sara Dogan
National Campus Director
Students for Academic Freedom
Prof. Simon points out that academic freedom places limits on professors’ speech in the classroom, forbidding them from “spout[ing] off on religion or politics when it has no relation to the subject” they are teaching. Yet he fails to mention that this key principle of students’ academic freedom is almost entirely absent from student handbooks at universities across the nation. When it is cited at all, it is only in faculty handbooks which students have no cause to consult.
Simon seriously misrepresents the Academic Bill of Rights, when he claims that David Horowitz “has suggested that all theories should be provided equal time in the classroom.” David Horowitz has never made such a suggestion. His Academic Bill of Rights states that “exposing students to the spectrum of significant scholarly viewpoints on the subjects examined in their courses is a major responsibility of faculty” (emphasis added). It says nothing about providing equal time for any views, or teaching theories regardless of academic merit.
Similarly, there is nothing in the Academic Bill of Rights (or in the state resolutions inspired by it) that threatens “government oversight” of curricula, as Professor Simon claims. These resolutions are merely designed to ensure that existing academic freedom guidelines are enforced and that students are aware of their rights. If Prof. Simon truly believes his own statements about academic freedom, he should enthusiastically support the Academic Bill of Rights. In any case he should not misrepresent it as he has in this column.
Sincerely,
Sara Dogan
National Campus Director
Students for Academic Freedom
Freedom: It’s one thing conservatives and liberals can agree on. Americans love freedom and will generally fight to the death for it. But mention academic freedom, and somehow the patriotic feeling fades into partisan divisiveness.
As a university professor I have been struck by the number of articles and op-eds on this subject, and how divorced they are from the reality I see on university campuses. So I’d like to dispel some myths.
Myth #1: Professors can say anything they want in the classroom.
Academic freedom carries with it academic responsibility. It is not the right to say or do anything in a classroom. You can’t spout off on religion or politics when it has no relation to the subject you are teaching. What professors do in the classroom must have an educational purpose grounded in respect for students and learning and in knowledge of the discipline.
Academic freedom does give us tolerance for different approaches to teaching, and this allows us to be creative in our efforts to engage the minds of our students. But there are limits. You can’t insult or verbally abuse students when they give an answer you don’t like. You can’t intimidate or place students in danger.
When professors go over the line, whether or not a student complains, university administrators take it seriously, and will sanction a professor appropriately. Expulsion from the classroom is one option that has occurred on my campus. Intolerance is not tolerated.
Myth #2: Professors indoctrinate students.
This myth is based on two false assumptions. First, professors have an inordinate power to shape the political and religious views of our students. Second, liberal professors teach things that will convert students to leftist causes, and conservatives teach things that will cause students to adopt right-wing views.
Professors do influence students. We work hard to open minds, to educate, to get students to think critically and independently. When I read the conservative attacks, though, I sometimes wish I had the power they assume I possess. If only I were so powerful, I would implement my master plan and convince students to read assignments before class, speak up in discussion, and study for exams sometime before midnight the previous day.
The fact is that professors have little impact on the political or religious values that students hold. We are not their parents, and we are not rock stars. Besides, we understand that the best way to educate is not to “indoctrinate” but to get students to look at issues from new perspectives, to get them to be critical thinkers, and then let them make up their own minds.
Do our students become liberal ideologues? A few will. And a few others will become conservative reactionaries. So goes the intellectual diversity of our free nation. However, my experience tells me that students will, ultimately, think for themselves. They will make their own decisions based on the values they’ve brought from home, the values of their peers, and the intellectual skills they’ve cultivated in their education.
Early in my career, after teaching a course that addressed the ethics of nuclear war, a student, who was an Army major who worked with nuclear weapons, told me that before taking my class, he believed it would always be wrong to use nuclear weapons. However, because of our class discussions, he had now changed his mind.
Though this went against my personal ethical views, it was a compliment to my ability to teach.
Myth #3: “Balanced” teaching is better.
David Horowitz, the leader of a group that attacks academic freedom, has suggested that all theories should be provided equal time in the classroom. This sounds deceptively fair, but it would mean that a public health professor would have to give all sides of the issue of whether smoking causes cancer. Do we really want professors to teach all sides, or do we want them to teach what their scientific discipline says is the best knowledge of the time?
I have another problem with this “balanced” approach, which has even found its way into bills before state legislatures. In most areas of knowledge there are dozens of theories, some more plausible than others. Do I really have time to teach all of these?
One of the most common student complaints about professors is that we are too boring. If they think we’re boring now, just wait until I have to teach them 14 different theories on the causes of war for the sake of perceived balance rather than scientific relevance.
Myth #4: Higher education needs government oversight.
The argument here is that higher education is so dominated by liberals that it’s necessary for government to ensure that the curriculum is fair and balanced and that students are protected from indoctrination.
The problem with this idea, as countries without academic freedom have learned, is that politics will substitute for science and alter the curriculum to reflect the ideology of the people in power.
It is important that professors be judged by academic peers and administrators, not politicians with partisan agendas. Do you want politics to dictate what is taught to your future medical doctor, our civil engineers, your child’s teachers? Why is it that the best minds from places like the Middle East and China, where there is no academic freedom, come to study in the U.S.?
If we legislate classroom content at the college level, we deprive students of the most up-to-date knowledge and deprive professors of the ability to teach effectively. We would become purveyors of popular, non-controversial views, not pursuers of knowledge, understanding, and creativity.
In America we have been wise to preserve academic freedom. It has given us the best higher education system in the world and produces, overall, the most advanced basic and applied research.
We in the academic profession will keep fighting to preserve these traditions. Our system is not perfect (some of us are still boring!), but it produces better students and scientific discoveries than any other.
Marc V. Simon is associate professor and chairman of the department of political science at Bowling Green State University.
]]>The Presidency is to be commended for publishing Kermit Hall’s “A Cautionary Tale of Academic Rights and Responsibilities” (fall 2005), which addresses the issues raised in the Academic Bill of Rights, of which I am the author. President Hall is right that the legislative success of this bill is the result of a growing movement among conservatives generally, and Republican legislators in particular, for reform in the administration of our university system.
He also is right that it is important for administrators to address the various issues fueling this movement in order to protect the credibility of the academic community and insulate institutions of higher learning from irresponsible public attack. Those issues-which I define as a lack of intellectual diversity on faculties and in curricula, abusive use of the classroom for nonacademic agendas, and lack of equity in the distribution of student activities funds-are driving my call for reform.
An important step toward accomplishing these ends would be to stop treating the reform movement as adversarial to the core interests of the university, and to open a dialogue on the issues themselves. As a leader of this movement, let me assure the readers of this magazine that I share their interest in protecting the integrity of the academic enterprise. I think that any fair-minded reader of the Academic Bill of Rights will acknowledge that great care has been taken to preserve the independence of the university and respect its academic freedom traditions. My reform efforts are about restoring to the university the liberal values and professional standards that I believe have been eroded by political activists in the academy over the last several decades. One of my concerns is that this be accomplished without endangering the independence of the university, which is a cornerstone of what we all mean by academic freedom.
The opponents of my Academic Bill of Rights have misrepresented my agendas and thus misled many in the academic community into the position of defending an indefensible status quo. For example, the academic freedom guidelines of many universities all over the country include a memorable sentence taken from the American Association of University Professors’ (AAUP) 1940 Statement of Principles on Tenure and Academic Freedom: “Teachers are entitled to freedom in the classroom in discussing their subject, but they should be careful not to introduce into their teaching controversial matter which has no relation to their subject.” The purpose is to prevent activist faculty from using the classroom to promote overtly political agendas. Yet when this very statement was incorporated into Ohio Senate Bill 24 (a legislative version of the Academic Bill of Rights), it was attacked by AAUP, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the teacher unions as an attempt by legislators “to restrict professors’ speech.”
The issue, of course, is not free speech; it is professionalism. It is a question of what is appropriate discourse for a professional instructor in a class-room. There is a reason why tenure and academic freedom are linked in the original AAUP statements. The privilege of tenure is given to academics because they are professionals, bound to respect the tenets of academic freedom. The privilege derives from the fact that they are experts in certain fields of knowledge and that society recognizes that, in order to pursue knowledge in their professional fields, they must have the freedom and independence to do so. But when an English prefessor declares in a classroom that the war in Iraq is immoral, this professor is not expressing a professional judgment based on his or her field of expertise. Such a professor is merely venting a personal opinion not grounded in any professional expertise.
Professors’ opinions about the war in Iraq may be correct (or incorrect) but that is irrelevant to the fact that they are not speaking in the classroom as knowledgeable professionals, which is what they were hired to do. Instead, they are adopting partisan positions that distance them from the students who disagree with their opinions, and damage their ability to teach those students. This is an abuse of the classroom. It is an attempt to influence the students over whom they have significant institutional authority, including grading power, in a way that existing academic freedom guidelines specifically prohibit. Unfortunately, incidents like this occur frequently in contemporary college classrooms. Such abuses more often than not pass without notice or comment from university officials. The remedy is to reassert and enforce academic freedom guidelines that would prevent such abuses.
It is true that I myself can fairly be described as a “neo-conservative” in politics-though I am not enamored of the label. But that does not mean that the Academic Bill of Rights has some hidden neo-conservative agenda. In matters of academic reform, I am a pragmatist and a liberal. My model for academic freedom is the Columbia University I attended in the late 1950s (class of ’59)-at the tail end of the McCarthy era. My parents were Communists and I wrote my Columbia papers from a Marxist perspective. Yet, my professors treated me no differently from how they treated other students and never once that I can remember expressed a political point of view in the classroom. I am grateful to my teachers for their professionalism and would like to see their level of professionalism restored to university classrooms. That is the true agenda of my campaign.
No fair-minded reader of my Academic Bill of Rights (text available at www.studentsfor academicfreedom.org) will miss the fact that every one of its sentences reflects the principles and perspectives of the academic freedom tradition that was established with AAUP’s 1915 General Report on the Principles of Tenure and Academic Freedom.
Before publishing the Academic Bill of Rights, I vetted it with Stanley Fish, the former dean of the University of Illinois at Chicago and he approved every word of it. What Professor Fish did not approve was my decision to take the bill to legislatures. I share many of his concerns about legislatures, but the reality of university politics is that without the leverage of legislation, no university administration would have considered the issues I am trying to raise. The opposition from radical faculty members would be too strong. If I had not made the decision to go to legislatures, no one would be talking about these issues now. There would not be an article about the Academic Bill of Rights in a magazine like The Presidency.
That said, I do not believe legislatures are suited to fixing the academic problems that need to be addressed. Only the university itself can do this. That is why when the American Council on Education issued its June 2005 statement on academic freedom, I was the first person to endorse it. I endorsed it because even though it did not include everything I would have wanted, I am a pragmatist in this reform effort and understand that without the goodwill and cooperation of university administrations, nothing positive can be achieved.
Last October, the Inter-University Council of Ohio, representing 15 of the state’s largest public universities, agreed to embrace the ACE statement if the state’s legislators would agree to withdraw their legislation, which they did. The legislature in Colorado and the Colorado state university system reached similar agreement, as have educators and legislators in Tennessee; another agreement is pending with one of the largest university systems in the country. These agreements represent the steps toward solutions that I would like to see.
This is easier said than done. The inertia in any university system is bound to be great. However, the dangers of not doing anything, of not moving forward, are even greater. I can assure you that the movement I have begun is not going to be satisfied with the status quo. Republican legislators have been through the educational system and have experienced the harassment that faculty radicals frequently mete out to their conservative students. They are becoming increasingly familiar with the Ward Churchills who inhabit every faculty in this country and who constitute a public relations disaster in waiting if these issues are not addressed. They will not be satisfied by rhetoric alone. The positive side of this is that the concrete actions they are asking for are entirely within the guidelines of academic freedom that universities already embrace.
Universities can insulate themselves from adverse public reaction to these programs by taking steps to (1) strengthen the academic professionalism of their faculties and courses; and (2) promote the values of intellectual diversity. The public understands that the university should be a marketplace of ideas. It will understand and make allowances for individuals who go off the deep end on either side of the spectrum. It will have less patience for institutions that are entirely one-sided and do not reflect the intellectual pluralism that Americans expect of their institutions, particularly institutions of learning. If universities enforce professional standards and foster intellectual diversity in the liberal arts, humanities, and social sciences, they will find public support on both Sides of the political and cultural divides. The Academic Bill of Rights is designed to make that happen.
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