Students For Academic Freedom

SAF: Ryan Call Letter to RMN · 12 September 2003

by Ryan Call
Colorado Coordinator for Students for Academic Freedom

Dear Editor,

You have done your readers a disservice by misreporting the efforts of Students for Academic Freedom to promote intellectual diversity in Colorado. Your editorial "Political Quotas in Higher Education?" (9/9/03, Rocky Mountain News) is about some other organization not ours. No one in this state - neither our students nor the Republican officials mentioned in your paper are promoting any such thing. We are asking for the principle of intellectual diversity to be honored in our Colorado schools - not quotas, not even "balance," but diversity.

Your editorial, in other words, is about a straw man that the Rocky Mountain News has crated both in your editorial and in the tendentious and imaginative report by Peggy Lowe ("GOP take on 'leftist' education." (9/6/03). Even a cursory glance at the Students for Academic Freedom mission statement (available on our website at www.studentsforacademicfreedom.org) or the Academic Bill of Rights will show that our entire emphasis is the promotion of intellectual diversity and academic freedom. The idea of a hiring quota for conservatives is pure invention. The Academic Bill of Rights specifically rejects the idea that anybody should be hired on the basis of their politics: "No faculty shall be hired or fired or denied promotion or tenure solely on the basis of his or her political or religious beliefs." The entire document is a call for tolerance and respect for intellectual difference in higher education. Nothing could be clearer, yet your news story and editorial both distort this reality on the basis of no evidence whatsoever.

The idea of hiring quotas has been expressly and repeatedly rejected by Governor Owens, Senator Andrews, Tim Foster, and every Republican official cited in the September 6th "news" article. An apology to these gentlemen is in order.

Your editorial correctly identifies the problems of intellectual conformity and political harassment in Colorado's higher education system and refutes the argument for why there are few conservatives in higher education. But it is mistaken in contending that the legislature has no role in encouraging better educational values. By this reasoning government has no interest in promoting racial diversity or gender diversity either.

Since taxpayer dollars go to support higher education, the General Assembly is in a unique and influential position to encourage universities to adopt policies that promote values like academic freedom, and that will create an environment on our college campuses where different views and perspectives are respected. Legislators and university administrators have a responsibility to promote these values They are part of their educational mandate.

Ryan Call
Students for Academic Freedom

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