A Victory in Florida · 31 March 2005
House Bill 837 would remedy this situation mandating that, "Students, faculty, and instructors have a right to be fully informed of their rights and their institution's grievance procedures for violations of academic freedom by means of notices prominently displayed in course catalogs and student handbooks and on the institutional website."
Current Academic Policies Which Support the Academic Bill of Rights
Students for Academic Freedom has continued to conduct research on existing academic freedom policies and guidelines and has repeatedly found that they support the language and intent of the Academic Bill of Rights.
One such policy statement was released just this past January by the American Historical Association, whose Statement on Standards of Professional Conduct explicitly acknowledges the importance of presenting multiple perspectives in the classroom and warns professors to refrain from introducing irrelevant controversial material into class discussions.
"Multiple, conflicting perspectives are among the truths of history. No single objective or universal account could ever put an end to this endless creative dialogue within and between the past and the present," the Statement declares.
The AHA also offers explicit guidance on teaching, and it is here that the resemblance to the Academic Bill of Rights is most apparent.
The Statement notes, "Integrity and teaching means presenting competing interpretations with fairness and intellectual honesty….The political social and religious beliefs of history teachers necessarily inform their work, but the right of the teacher to hold and express such convictions can never justify falsification, misrepresentation, or concealment, or the persistent intrusion of material unrelated to the subject of the course" (emphasis added).
The italicized phrase is crucial, because it is identical to a phrase in the Academic Bill of Rights which has been singled out by the AAUP and other opponents as an unwarranted "restriction" on professors' free speech. Far from being unwarranted it is a phrase lifted from the AAUP's own academic freedom guidelines, and which has now been shown to be supported by the AHA as recently as this January.
The AHA statement continues: "Furthermore, teachers should be mindful that students and other audience members have the right to disagree with a given interpretation or point of view. Students should be made aware of multiple causes and varying interpretations. Within the bounds of the historical topic being studied, the free expression of legitimate differences of opinion should always be a goal. Teachers should judge students' work on merit alone" (emphasis added).
Our full report on the AHA's statement can be found here .
We have also examined the Academic Freedom policies of Pennsylvania State University and have discovered that they too contain prohibitions against professors using the classroom as a soapbox to spread their personal political views.
Policy HR 64 on Academic Freedom from the Penn State Policy Manual states:
"The faculty member is entitled to freedom in the classroom in discussing his/her subject. The faculty member is, however, responsible for the maintenance of appropriate standards of scholarship and teaching ability. It is not the function of a faculty member in a democracy to indoctrinate his/her students with ready-made conclusions on controversial subjects. The faculty member is expected to train students to think for themselves, and to provide them access to those materials which they need if they are to think intelligently. Hence, in giving instruction upon controversial matters the faculty member is expected to be of a fair and judicial mind, and to set forth justly, without supersession or innuendo, the divergent opinions of other investigators."
Lest this statement not be clear enough, the manual continues, "No faculty member may claim as a right the privilege of discussing in the classroom controversial topics outside his/her own field of study. The faculty member is normally bound not to take advantage of his/her position by introducing into the classroom provocative discussions of irrelevant subjects not within the field of his/her study." [reference: http://guru.psu.edu/POLICIES/OHR/hr64.html#A]
These policies make absurd the objections of critics who claim that the Academic Bill of Rights would unfairly restrict professors' right to free speech in the classroom. As we have shown, the existing policies on many campuses are much more stringent in forbidding partisan speech and propagandizing than our Bill or any of the state legislation inspired by it.
So then why do we need an Academic Bill of Rights? We need it because these existing policies are usually hidden away in faculty handbooks or obscure sections of the university regulations where students are unlikely to find them. They are often phrased as faculty responsibilities, and not as student rights, and there are no grievance procedures available to students whose professors have failed to live up to the standards set for them. The Academic Bill of Rights would remedy this disconnect between existing policy and practice.
For more information on Students for Academic Freedom or to start a chapter, please contact Sara Dogan in our Washington, DC office at 202-393-0123 or at Sara@studentsforacademicfreedom.org.
Yours in Freedom,
Sara Dogan
National Campus Director
Students for Academic Freedom
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