Thought Police in the Lecture Hall

By Asheesh Kapur Siddique
Saturday, October 28, 2006; Page A15

Universities are the bulwark of democratic societies -- places where individuals with diverse viewpoints come together to learn and to produce new knowledge for addressing social concerns, free of ideological interference. But these centers of freedom are under attack from people who want to inject partisan politics into our classrooms.

Led by activist David Horowitz, some conservatives are pushing for the adoption of an "Academic Bill of Rights" (ABOR) across America. The bill takes the form of student resolutions or legislative proposals claiming to protect the academic freedom of college students from ideological indoctrination by professors.

My classmates at Princeton passed a modified version of the bill in a student referendum in April. In July, Philadelphia's Temple University became the first institution to officially adopt the policy. Arizona's legislature is preparing to consider a version of the bill.

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.

In truth, these efforts only hurt the students they purport to help. Horowitz and his backers aren't protecting our rights; they're impeding our educations. The Academic Bill of Rights would substitute political correctness for the free exchange of ideas on campus by preventing faculty and students from discussing fresh or controversial ideas in class. It would restrict what professors can teach and what students can learn.

This exchange between teachers and pupils lies at the heart of liberal education. But ABOR's backers argue that professors presenting new ideas might "indoctrinate" or offend students. Their bill denies us the right to evaluate the merits of ideas and arguments for ourselves by banning "political" or "anti-religious" speech from classrooms.

College students are much smarter and more capable of distinguishing between propaganda and informed opinion than Horowitz and his supporters think. We have a right to learn about any issue our knowledgeable professors deem important to our intellectual growth. This proposal would curtail students' discussion of topics deemed "politically controversial" and liable to "offend" a sensitive classmate.

How can I learn about the modern Middle East in my political science classes if my professor isn't allowed to discuss the "controversial" topic of the Iraq war and its regional effects? Should my biology instructor be prevented from teaching evolution out of fear of offending a creationist classmate? And why should schools allow some left-wing campus agitator in Economics 101 to file a complaint because a lecturer discusses market efficiency rather than Marxist theories of labor?

All these scenarios are possible at institutions cowed into incorporating Horowitz's restrictions into their academic policy. The bill's vague language invites any student with an ideological agenda to use its provisions to politicize syllabi and restrict campus speech.

No disgruntled individual has a right to inhibit everyone else's ability to learn. Youthful skepticism about received wisdom is, of course, essential for intellectual maturation. And a student who puts forth an unpopular argument in class or on an assignment should not be disparaged by an instructor or given a bad grade.

But almost every university has policies prohibiting such harassment along with independent appeals procedures to protect both students and the integrity of the academic environment. Horowitz's restrictions, in contrast, would invite outside monitoring of the classroom, creating hostility between students and professors, and politicizing the intellectual environment at school. It would allow the whims of partisan legislators, rather than the judicious advice of knowledgeable PhDs, to dictate what and how young adults learn.

My classmates and I want our elected leaders to focus on addressing our real concerns when it comes to getting an education -- student loans, skyrocketing tuition and the post-graduation job market. We don't want them making it harder for us to learn by restricting the free exchange of ideas on campus.

The writer is a senior at Princeton University.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co ... 01104.html

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I don't understand how the legislators are getting off on this equality in the classroom bullshit. Didn't they do the same thing in Florida? If young people can vote, they can certainly think for themselves.

Empirical observation suggests otherwise.

I could see how this could be a problem amongst student populations who lean too far one way or the other....like my school for instance. Lubbock was rated the number one most conservative city in the country last year and I feel pretty confident in saying that the majority of the student population here disagrees with the theory of evolution.

EDIT:

Me not included.

The problem isn't free speech. The problem is professors that absolutely cross the line when it comes to the classroom. When you fail Tolstoy simply because the professor refuses to read your essay based on politics, my freedom of speech is being infringed upon. Not his.

But lets be honest here, the only classes that really matter are math and science where politics play no part whatsoever. Fuck Liberal arts.

My university has certain "university requirements" designed to create more "well-rounded" students, and we're basically forced to take a few liberal arts courses. My engineering GPA is almost 3.8, but my humanities and other non-required courses drag my overall GPA down to about 3.6.

I've been fortunate enough to only take one class that was really overly-political, and while the professor did a commendable job remaining neutral, it became pretty clear after awhile what his personal opinions were, and many of the students in the class were simply mindless sheep. I can see how it can become a problem with teachers who have a hard time grading objectively.

I've had left leaning professors before. I seriously do think I've lost a letter grade in a couple classes, but this guy was absurd. I took the class in the run up to the war, he knew I was a Marine, I was out spoken about the war a number of times. He used War and Peace, the Sevastople Sketches and some other works from that period in Tolstoy to dig up politics. He showed the beginning of Blackhawk Down one day, and we got in some pretty heated arguments. I had...a near perfect grade in that class leading up to the final essay, when the day came to turn in the final essay, he REFUSED to accept my essay simply by the title and first paragraph of my essay. I recieved an incomplete, fought it for weeks, he lied to the college of liberal arts and the college of engineering, and after two quarters my I turned into an F.

Gotta love academics, eh? What was so controversial about Black Hawk down? - it appeared to me to portray the Rangers and the whole American operation favorably.

Black Hawk Down was supported by the military; the US military had the right to veto any aspect of the film they chose, so many people see it as American propaganda based on the fact that the military could have (and, as it is assumed, did) remove any aspect of the film that might have portrayed them in a negative light. Some things people find inaccurate are the fact that the movie doesn't depict as many civilian casualties as probably occurred, etc.

The film did however present the difficulties of such operations when it repeatedly depicted the somali militiamen as being mixed in among civilians. And then of course there's the scene with the somali woman who picks up a rifle and is subsequently shot by a Ranger who pleads that she not do so. What do you want to be shown, Rangers shooting babies in the face at point blank range? Anyone who, after seeing that movie, didn't assume that some civilians were killed in the crossfire isn't terribly bright.

I would imagine that the reason that only small arms and limited strafing runs were used is that the military leadership was concerned about civilian casualties. One might even go so far as to say that that concern about civilian casualties and the subsequent limitations on the rules of engagement and vehicles employed resulted in more American deaths than might have otherwise occured.

I for one don't feel that the actions taken by the military in Somalia were the most wise, but I don't know if you can claim that the Soldiers and Marines on the ground acted in an immoral manner.

David Horowitz was a pinko commie in his college days, but is now a fairly prominent conservatives. I guess all those evil professors at Berkeley and Columbia (along with his communist parents) didn't do a good enough job "indoctrinating" him.

crimethink
doubleplusungood
unperson
rectify!

spotlight fallacy

God damn, genius Princeton student. You figure that out all by yourself? You think Horowitz doesn't know this?

Thinking students make poor Republicans, evangelicals, and soldiers.

ideological indoctrination

is that what we call learning these days?

my sister is a sociology professor, and her university is very conservative. she has run into many problems with her students jsut not listening to her, but more importantly, not listening to her about the requirements of the class.

she recently had a student who turned in a final report, and it was entirely unacceptable. not because of the content, though the content was a hot refutal of everything my sister was teaching, it was was unacceptable because it was comprised of half sentences, big blocks of other people's writing, and not a product one would expect from a college level student.

my sister (kindly) gave it back to her to rewrite it, encouraging her to continue to question what she had learned in class, but also making it clear that a final report in her class has to meet certain requirements.

the student went to the dean and tried to get my sister fired. needless to say, the report spoke for itself, and my sister is still teaching.

i think i'm going to read 1984 again so i can get ready for the inevitable.

I don't think anyone's saying students should be able to hand in bad papers.

This bill is not that far removed from that very idea, based on its wording.


here's the link for the entire proposed bill http://www.house.gov/ed_workforce/issue ... ummary.htm

As is typical of many bills introduced, there appears to be a great amount of intelligent reforms proposed, but then the Academic Bill of Rights portion is piggy-backed in and creates the controversy with the bill.


** "Protect students’ rights and personal privacy. The bill will strengthen protections for student speech and association rights to promote academic freedom and foster intellectual pluralism. The protections, modeled on the concept of an Academic Bill of Rights, reflect a consensus reached with the higher education community and advocates for student speech rights who agree that college campuses should be a place for a free exchange of ideas, and students should not be discriminated against based on political perspective or ideology. The bill will also protect individual students’ privacy rights by prohibiting the creation of a “unit record” system, a massive federal database that could collect and maintain personal, individually identifiable data about all students enrolled in postsecondary education."


The problem that this poses is that is is far too open to interpretation. It creates a situation that promotes ignorance. Say you're taking a WWII history class and decide to do your final paper on the "myth of the Holocaust". Is that protected political perspective or idealogy? To me what this says is that a professor would no longer have the ability to correct someone who has no idea what the hell they are talking about because their incorrect opinion or idea would be protected.


LW, post your rejected paper if you have a copy. I'd like to see what it was your prof. rejected.

I can't remember the specifics of why the professor showed Blackhawk Down. He only showed the very opening of it, where the warlords start shooting civilians and taking the food and our boys in the chopper can't do anything about it.

He didn't for it to be political, but when I actually factually explained what happened, and why it happened, it did.

I have my War and Peace essay from that class, but I don't think I have my final essay anymore. That was on a desktop I had that I reformatted and gave to my sister. I'll check and see if I got it hidden away on my harddrives though. I know, right now, on my new laptop, that I don't have it.

Oh, and yeah, David, you're in fine form in this one.

You don't seem to run with the evangelical crowd, so I can't imagine you'd take issue with that part of his statement.