Response to the Plain Dealer Bureau article by Sara Dogan: · 03 March 2005
As the National Campus Director of Students for Academic Freedom, the organization responsible for the Academic Bill of Rights which inspired Ohio Senate Bill 24, I am answering the blatant misrepresentations in your recent article ("Legislator wants law to restrict professors," 02/20).
The article notes that Senate Bill 24 would forbid "classroom talk on topics not related to the course" and says that lawmakers in Colorado "have already killed similar bills."
These assertions are false. What Senate Bill 24 actually says is that "Faculty and instructors shall not infringe the academic freedom and quality of education of their students by persistently introducing controversial matter into the classroom or coursework that has no relation to their subject of study and that serves no legitimate pedagogical purpose." This is a far cry from the article's assertion that all discussion of subjects unrelated to course topics is forbidden.
Nor have lawmakers in Colorado killed versions of this bill. In Colorado, our bill passed that state's House Education Committee and was well on its way to becoming law when its sponsor, Rep. Shawn Mitchell, agreed to withdraw it in exchange for the commitment of Colorado's university leaders to sign a Memorandum of Understanding agreeing to institute the key principles of the Academic Bill of Rights in their respective educational institutions.
The Colorado legislature then passed a joint resolution commending the university presidents who signed the Memorandum and establishing cooperation between the universities and the legislature to ensure that the terms of the Memorandum are being met. We consider these actions to have resulted in a great victory for academic freedom in Colorado, hardly the defeat which your article implies.
Finally, ACLU representative Christine Link's comment cited in the article that the bill would essentially create a quota system so that for each liberal speaker the university would have sponsor a conservative, is her invention and has nothing to do with the bill. The text of the bill states only that a university "shall provide its students with a learning environment in which the students have access to a broad range of serious scholarly opinion pertaining to the subjects they study," and in fact forbids the use of quotas by stating that "faculty and instructors …shall not be hired, fired, promoted….on the basis of their political, ideological, or religious beliefs."
Sincerely,
Sara Dogan
National Campus Director
Students for Academic Freedom
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