You still clearly have not read the ABOR or studied the arguments from both sides.
Here are a couple of basic texts you need to digest before going any further.
In Defense of Intellectual Diversity ·
10 February 2004
By David Horowitz--The Chronicle of Higher Education, 02/10/04
This article by David Horowitz and the two following (Sarah Hebel's "Students for Academic Freedom: A New Campus Movement" and Stanley Fish's "Voice of the Opposition") all appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education. They represent the ongoing debate over Horowitz's Academic Bill of Rights and fight for intellectual freedom in our institutions of higher learning - The Editors.
I am the author of the Academic Bill of Rights, which many student governments, colleges and universities, education commissions, and legislatures are considering adopting. Already, the U.S. House of Representatives has introduced a version as legislation, and the Senate should soon follow suit.
State governments are also starting to rally around efforts to protect student rights and intellectual diversity on campuses: In Colorado, the State Senate president, John K. Andrews Jr., has been very concerned about the issue, and State Rep. Shawn Mitchell has just introduced legislation requiring public institutions to create and publicize processes for protecting students against political bias. Lawmakers in four other states have also expressed a strong interest in legislation of their own, based on some version of the Academic Bill of Rights. Students for Academic Freedom is working to secure the measure's adoption by student governments and university administrations on 105 member campuses across the country.
The Academic Bill of Rights is based squarely on the almost 100-year-old tradition of academic freedom that the American Association of University Professors has established. The bill's purposes are to codify that tradition; to emphasize the value of "intellectual diversity," already implicit in the concept of academic freedom; and, most important, to enumerate the rights of students to not be indoctrinated or otherwise assaulted by political propagandists in the classroom or any educational setting.
Although the AAUP has recognized student rights since its inception, however, most campuses have rarely given them the attention or support they deserve. In fact, it is safe to say that no college or university now adequately defends them. Especially recently, with the growing partisan activities of some faculty members and the consequent politicization of some aspects of the curriculum, that lack of support has become one of the most pressing issues in the academy.
Moreover, because I am a well-known conservative and have published studies of political bias in the hiring of college and university professors, critics have suggested that the Academic Bill of Rights is really a "right-wing plot" to stack faculties with political conservatives by imposing hiring quotas. Indeed, opponents of legislation in Colorado have exploited that fear, writing numerous op-ed pieces about alleged right-wing plans to create affirmative-action programs for conservative professors.
Nothing could be further from the truth. The actual intent of the Academic Bill of Rights is to remove partisan politics from the classroom. The bill that I'm proposing explicitly forbids political hiring or firing: "No faculty shall be hired or fired or denied promotion or tenure on the basis of his or her political or religious beliefs." The bill thus protects all faculty members -- left-leaning critics of the war in Iraq as well as right-leaning proponents of it, for example -- from being penalized for their political beliefs. Academic liberals should be as eager to support that principle as conservatives.
Some liberal faculty members have expressed concern about a phrase in the bill of rights that singles out the social sciences and humanities and says hiring in those areas should be based on competence and expertise and with a view toward "fostering a plurality of methodologies and perspectives." In fact, the view that there should be a diversity of methodologies is already accepted practice. Considering that truth is unsettled in these discipline areas, why should there not be an attempt to nurture a diversity of perspectives as well?
Perhaps the concern is that "fostering" would be equivalent to "mandating." The Academic Bill of Rights contains no intention, implicit or otherwise, to mandate or produce an artificial "balance" of intellectual perspectives. That would be impossible to achieve and would create more mischief than it would remedy. On the other hand. a lack of diversity is not all that difficult to detect or correct.
By adopting the Academic Bill of Rights, an institution would recognize scholarship rather than ideology as an appropriate academic enterprise. It would strengthen educational values that have been eroded by the unwarranted intrusion of faculty members' political views into the classroom. That corrosive trend has caused some academics to focus merely on their own partisan agendas and to abandon their responsibilities as professional educators with obligations to students of all political persuasions. Such professors have lost sight of the vital distinction between education and indoctrination, which -- as the AAUP recognized in its first report on academic freedom, in 1915 -- is not a legitimate educational function.
Because the intent of the Academic Bill of Rights is to restore academic values, I deliberately submitted it in draft form to potential critics who did not share my political views. They included Stanley Fish, dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago; Michael Bérubé, a professor of English at Pennsylvania State University at University Park; Todd Gitlin, a professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia University; and Philip Klinkner, a professor of government at Hamilton College. While their responses differed, I tried to accommodate the criticisms I got, for example deleting a clause in the original that would have required the deliberations of all committees in charge of hiring and promotion to be recorded and made available to a "duly constituted authority."
I even lifted wholesale one of the bill's chief tenets -- that colleges and professional academic associations should remain institutionally neutral on controversial political issues -- from an article that Dean Fish wrote for The Chronicle ("Save the World on Your Own Time," January 23, 2003). He has also written an admirable book, Professional Correctness (Clarendon Press, 1995), which explores the inherent conflict between ideological thinking and scholarship.
Since the Academic Bill of Rights is designed to clarify and extend existing principles of academic freedom, its opponents have generally been unable to identify specific provisions that they find objectionable. Instead, they have tried to distort the plain meaning of the text. The AAUP itself has been part of that effort, suggesting in a formal statement that the bill's intent is to introduce political criteria for judging intellectual diversity and, thus, to subvert scholarly standards. It contends that the bill of rights "proclaims that all opinions are equally valid," which "negates an essential function of university education." The AAUP singles out for attack a phrase that refers to "the uncertainty and unsettled character of all human knowledge" as the rationale for respecting diverse viewpoints in curricula and reading lists in the humanities and social sciences. The AAUP claims that "this premise ... is anti-thetical to the basic scholarly enterprise of the university, which is to establish and transmit knowledge."
The association's statements are incomprehensible. After all, major schools of thought in the contemporary academy -- pragmatism, postmodernism, and deconstructionism, to name three -- operate on the premise that knowledge is uncertain and, at times, relative. Even the hard sciences, which do not share such relativistic assumptions, are inspired to continue their research efforts by the incomplete state of received knowledge. The university's mission is not only to transmit knowledge but to pursue it -- and from all vantage points. What could be controversial about acknowledging that? Further, the AAUP's contention that the Academic Bill of Rights threatens true academic standards by suggesting that all opinions are equally valid is a red herring, as the bill's statement on intellectual diversity makes clear: "Exposing students to the spectrum of significant scholarly viewpoints on the subjects examined in their courses is a major responsibility of faculty." (Emphasis added.)
As the Academic Bill of Rights states, "Academic disciplines should welcome a diversity of approaches to unsettled questions." That is common sense. Why not make it university policy?
The only serious opposition to the Academic Bill of Rights is raised by those who claim that, although its principles are valid, it duplicates academic-freedom guidelines that already exist. Elizabeth Hoffman, president of the University of Colorado System, for example, has personally told me that she takes that position.
But with all due respect, such critics are also mistaken. Most universities' academic-freedom policies generally fail to make explicit, let alone codify, the institutions' commitment to intellectual diversity or the academic rights of students. The institutions also do not make their policies readily available to students -- who, therefore, are generally not even aware that such policies exist.
For example, when I met with Elizabeth Hoffman, she directed me to the University of Colorado's Web site, where its academic-freedom guidelines are posted. Even if those guidelines were adequate, posting them on an Internet site does not provide sufficient protection for students, who are unlikely to visit it. Contrast the way that institutions aggressively promote other types of diversity guidelines -- often establishing special offices to organize and enforce all sorts of special diversity-related programs -- to such a passive approach to intellectual diversity.
At Colorado's Web site, for example, one can read the following: "Sections of the AAUP's 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure have been adopted as a statement of policy by the Board of Regents." Few people reading that article or visiting the site would suspect that the following protection for students is contained in the AAUP's 1940 statement: "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."
Is there a college or university in America -- including the University of Colorado -- where at least one professor has not introduced controversial matter on the war in Iraq or the Bush White House in a class whose subject matter is not the war in Iraq, or international relations, or presidential administrations? Yet intrusion of such subject matter, in which the professor has no academic expertise, is a breach of professional responsibility and a violation of a student's academic rights.
We do not go to our doctors' offices and expect to see partisan propaganda posted on the doors, or go to hospital operating rooms and expect to hear political lectures from our surgeons. The same should be true of our classrooms and professors, yet it is not. When I visited the political-science department at the University of Colorado at Denver this year, the office doors and bulletin boards were plastered with cartoons and statements ridiculing Republicans, and only Republicans. When I asked President Hoffman about that, she assured me that she would request that such partisan materials be removed and an appropriate educational environment restored. To the best of my knowledge, that has yet to happen.
Not everyone would agree about the need for such restraint, and it should be said that the Academic Bill of Rights makes no mention of postings and cartoons -- although that does not mean that they are appropriate. I refer to them only to illustrate the problem that exists in the academic culture when it comes to fulfilling professional obligations that professors owe to all students. I would ask liberal professors who are comfortable with such partisan expressions how they would have felt as students seeking guidance from their own professors if they had to walk a gantlet of cartoons portraying Bill Clinton as a lecher, or attacking antiwar protesters as traitors.
The politicized culture of the university is the heart of the problem. At Duke University this year, a history professor welcomed his class with the warning that he had strong "liberal" opinions, and that Republican students should probably drop his course. One student did. Aided by Duke Students for Academic Freedom, the young man then complained. To his credit, the professor apologized. Although some people on the campus said the professor had been joking, the student clearly felt he faced a hostile environment. Why should the professor have thought that partisanship in the classroom was professionally acceptable in the first place?
At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a required summer-reading program for entering freshmen stirred a controversy in the state legislature last fall. The required text was Barbara Ehrenreich's socialist tract on poverty in America, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America (Metropolitan Books, 2001). Other universities have required the identical text in similar programs, and several have invited Ehrenreich to campus to present her views under the imprimatur of the institution and without rebuttal.
That reflects an academic culture unhinged. When a university requires a single partisan text of all its students, it is a form of indoctrination, entirely inappropriate for an academic institution. If many universities had required Dinesh D'Souza's Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus (Vintage Books, 1992) or Ann Coulter's Treason: Liberal Treachery From the Cold War to the War on Terrorism (Crown Forum, 2003) as their lone freshman-reading text, there would have been a collective howl from liberal faculties, who would have immediately recognized the inappropriateness of such institutional endorsement of controversial views. Why not require two texts, or four? (My stepson, who is a high-school senior, was required to read seven texts during his summer vacation.)
The remedy is so simple. Requiring readings on more than one side of a political controversy would be appropriate educational policy and would strengthen, not weaken, the democracy that supports our educational system. Why is that not obvious to the administrators at Chapel Hill and the other universities that have instituted such required-reading programs? It's the academic culture, stupid.
The Problem with America's Colleges and The Solution
03 September 2004
By David Horowitz
FrontPageMagazine.com | September 3, 2002
Universities are among our most important social institutions. They educate our youth, train future leaders, provide information and research, advance scientific and medical knowledge, generate technological innovation, and shape the attitudes that define us as a people. Yet universities are also anomalies in our national framework. Vital as they are to the functioning of our democracy, they are themselves undemocratic.
Overall, there is little or no accountability on the part of these institutions to the wider community that supports them and underwrites the affluence to which their principals have become accustomed. Whether private or public, whether operating under the aegis of state-appointed boards or private corporations, universities are effectively ruled by internal bureaucracies, which operate under a cloak of secrecy and are protected from oversight by privileges and traditions that date back to feudal times.
Thus, academic hiring committees are elitist and self-selecting, and function like medieval guilds to insulate themselves from external scrutiny. Once an academic hire is made, faculty "tenure" provides lifetime employment to the competent and the incompetent, the scholar and the ideologue alike. This means that outside the hard sciences and practical professions, there is no bottom-line in the university for bad ideas or discredited doctrines. Working in combination with these academic realities, the tolerant attitudes of a free society have made it possible for ideological minorities in the social sciences and related fields to enforce a political conformity otherwise incomprehensible in a modern democracy.
As a result, while the red and blue electoral map reveals an America that is almost evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats, in the nation's universities Republicans (and conservatives) have become almost as rare as unicorns. In most schools, Republicans are less well represented than Greens, Marxists and sects of the far left. This is an indefensible situation with far-reaching implications.
"Diversity" may be one of the contemporary university's most cherished values, but university officials with near universality have interpreted diversity to mean anything but a plurality of viewpoints - arguably the most important diversity of all. What is knowledge if it is thoroughly one-sided, or intellectual freedom if it is only freedom to conform? And what is a "liberal education," if one point of view is for all intents and purposes excluded from the classroom? How can students get a good education, if they are only being told one side of the story? The answer is they can't. Even for $30,000 a year.
In the spring of 2002, a dinner was held at Harvard to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Salient, a conservative campus paper not supported by the university. One of the dinner speakers was the Salient's lone faculty sponsor, Professor Harvey Mansfield - so notorious for being the only outspoken conservative at Harvard that this oddity was the focus of a New York Times feature story. The other speaker was National Review managing editor Jay Nordlinger, whose talk was titled, "The Conservative on Campus:" I attended the University of Michigan, class of '86. To say the place was soaked in political correctness is to say too little. You got the clear sense that if you weren't careful in what you said or did things could turn out badly for you. Ideology - not scholarship, not learning - was king on that campus ("dictator" would be a better word.)
A fellow student who took chemistry, physics, and the other hard sciences came back to the dorm one day to say that one of his instructors had spent the whole session talking up the Communist guerrillas in El Salvador. This was in math or some similar subject. Professors and - even more - teaching assistants were using their lecterns as political podiums. They were proselytizing and indoctrinating. I thought this was wrong - quite apart from my own political beliefs, which were just forming. I thought: "You know, I wouldn't do this, if I had this power, this responsibility - the academic lectern."
Political indoctrination in the classroom and the exclusion of conservatives from college faculties are violations of academic freedom and an offense to the very concept of a liberal education. The introduction of political agendas into the curriculum is a product of forces unleashed in the 1960s, which have consciously transformed universities into the political monoliths they have become.
It is time to remind ourselves that not so long ago the consensus of educators was that political indoctrination in the classroom by professors of whatever persuasion was an unacceptable abuse. The 1967 "Joint Statement on Rights and Freedoms of Students" adopted by the American Association of University Professors clearly states that the "freedom to teach and freedom to learn" are inseparable. Responding to a controversy over a course at UC Berkeley in the spring of 2002, UC Chancellor Robert Berdahl said, "It is imperative that our classrooms be free of indoctrination - indoctrination is not education." Unfortunately, there is virtually no college administration today - including that of UC Berkeley - that is willing to defend this student right.
What can be done about the current state of affairs? The answer begins with the recognition that this situation has developed because of the public's inattention to what happens inside the institutions that its tuition fees, tax dollars, and voluntary contributions make possible. The remedy lies first in insisting on greater scrutiny of these institutions, and second on resolving that the abuses will be corrected.
The Center for the Study of Popular Culture in conjunction with other interested organizations is therefore launching a "Campaign for Fairness and Inclusion in Higher Education." Its agenda is to call on university administrations to implement the following five demands:
1. Conduct an inquiry into political bias in the hiring process for faculty and administrators, and seek ways to promote fairness towards - and inclusion of - diverse and under-represented mainstream perspectives;
2. Conduct an inquiry into political bias in the selection of commencement speakers and seek ways to promote fairness towards - and inclusion of - diverse and under-represented mainstream perspectives;
3. Conduct an inquiry into political bias in the allocation of student program funds - including speakers' fees - and seek ways to promote fairness towards and inclusion of diverse and under-represented mainstream perspectives;
4. Institute a zero tolerance policy towards the obstruction of campus speakers and meetings and the destruction of informational literature distributed by campus groups.
5. Adopt a code of conduct for faculty that ensures that classrooms will welcome diverse viewpoints and not be used for political indoctrination, which is a violation of students' academic freedom.
Some may be skeptical of an appeal to university authorities, to solve a problem which they have helped to create. We believe, however, that the principles of fairness and inclusion resonate so deeply with the American people and the American character that they will find a response in the university community. Chancellor Berdahl's statement is evidence of this potential. But because the violation of student and faculty rights has been so long-standing and systemic, we are appealing directly to the trustees and state-appointed governing bodies of these institutions as well.
We call on state legislatures in particular to begin these inquiries at the institutions they are responsible for and to enact practical remedies as soon as possible. We do not think this would pose any significant problem for academic freedom. Quite the contrary. The principle of diversity is well established in federal law and has been accepted by virtually all existing collegiate administrations. By adding the categories of political and religious affiliation to Title IX and other existing legislation, the means are readily available - without jeopardizing the integrity and independence of the university system - to redress an intolerable situation involving illegal and unconstitutional hiring methods along with teaching practices that are an abuse of academic freedom.
Philosophers' Empty Suits
By Sara Dogan
FrontPageMagazine.com | Monday, August 15, 2005
What follows is a response to the American Philosophical Association's attack on the Academic Bill of Rights. This attack is typical of the entire academic campaign against the Academic Bill of Rights which, as we have pointed out previously, is almost entirely based on misrepresentation of what the bill actually says and a conflation of proposed legislation with the bill itself. Thus it has been claimed (falsely) that the Academic Bill of Rights would impose political criteria on the academic curriculum. In the first place, the Academic Bill of Rights is a proposed university policy. The legislation has been initiated because universities are not interested in holding their faculties to their own academic freedom standards. In the second place, all the legislation proposed is in the form of resolutions and therefore would also not impose any political restrictions on academic behavior. We recently invited two professors -- Russell Jacoby and Kevin Mattson -- to debate these issues in FrontPage magazine. Both professors began by advancing arguments based on the standard misrepresentations of the opposition to the Bill of Rights. Unfortunately just as the discussion moved to real questions, both professors withdrew. At this point in the general debate with our opponents we are forced to conclude that their intellectual case against the Academic Bill of Rights is non-existent.--DH
Response to the American Philosophical Association
By Sara Dogan
The American Philosophical Association’s new report “Threats to Academic Freedom” issued by the Committee for the Defense of the Professional Rights of Philosophers, echoes the tired and faulty rhetoric of the American Association of University Professors in criticizing the Academic Bill of Rights and the academic freedom campaign it has inspired.
False Allegations
Many of the allegations made against the Academic Bill of Rights and our organization, Students for Academic Freedom are demonstrably false. The report claims that our organization’s website maintains a complaint center where students “are invited to post instances of liberal bias they have experienced.” This is simply untrue. The instructions for this site which are entirely non-political state: “If your rights have been abused in a college course (e.g. unfair grading, one-sided lectures, stacked reading lists), please report this abuse.” Several students have reported complaints about conservative professors to our site, which have been posted.
The introduction to the complaint site also underlines the reasons for its existence, which bear no relation to the APA’s critique, notably that we are “providing this bulletin board to illustrate the kinds of complaints that students have….Opponents of the Academic Bill of Rights have widely misrepresented it as giving students a license to sue professors and/or legislators a right to step in and fire professors or tell them what they can or cannot do. The Academic Bill of Rights does no such thing. Ideally we are asking universities to adopt these policies which are fully in accord with the principles of academic freedom established in American education over the last 90 years. Universities should put their own grievance machinery in place for assessing student complaints and providing a means of redress.”
The report’s authors again reveal themselves to be ignorant or simply disregardful of the facts when they claim that according to SAF, “Support for abortion rights and environmental legislation and intolerance of religious faith (e.g. opposition to teaching intelligent design along with evolution) are also considered evidence of liberal bias.”
This is manifestly untrue. Students for Academic Freedom has supported a liberal student at Foothill College in California whose conservative ethics professors used the classroom to indoctrinate students in anti-abortion views, including forcing students to look at pictures of aborted fetuses. We have asserted publicly multiple times, that since creationism is not a scientific theory it has no place being taught in a science course. Professors should not be using their positions of authority in the classroom to advocate any political position, whether it is pro-or-anti environmental legislation, or pro or anti abortion rights.
Other allegations in the APA report are stated with little or no supporting evidence. “On some other campuses, zealous support for the ABOR has led to SAF and Young Republican sponsored vigilante action against faculty perceived as having demonstrated liberal bias: hate-mail campaigns, disruption of instruction by unauthorized cancellation of classes, red-baiting, and the labeling of faculty who oppose the war in Iraq “terrorist sympathizers.” No specific examples of any of these behaviors are provided in the APA report. Given this lack of context, the APA puts readers in a precarious position to judge the truth of these allegations or their seriousness. It is impossible to tell whether the legitimate activities of our organization (encouraging students to contact their professors or administrators about problems) are simply being exaggerated or whether the actions of unrelated individuals are unfairly being attributed to our organization.
The report urges its members that if “ABOR-related incidents” occur on their campuses they should “prevent an escalation of irrationality and rhetoric, insofar as possible.” A good place to begin would be to revise this alarmist report with its irresponsible and unfounded claims.
Misconstruing the Academic Bill of Rights
Both the content and effects of the Academic Bill of Rights are misrepresented by the APA report which bases its conclusions on the faulty analysis of the American Association of University Professors. According to the report, the Academic Bill of Rights would result in “redefining academic freedom and altering the structure of accountability in higher education (emphasis in original).” The report also claims that “the diversity and ‘plurality of methodologies and perspectives’ it would require of colleges and universities is measured by political affiliation, not academic judgment.” Finally, the report states that the Academic Bill of Rights bears a “superficial and misleading representation” to the policies of the AAUP, most notably the 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure, and would “shift responsibility” for implementing principles of academic freedom “from faculty to government.”
We have already answered and refuted each and every one of these false accusations and done so numerous times because they have been repeated by others. Our response to the American Association of University Professors statement can be read in full here. Interestingly, while we have posted the AAUP’s statement in full our site, the AAUP has not returned the courtesy by posting our statement on theirs. This deliberate omission has helped to mislead organizations like the APA.
Our argument in brief: The Academic Bill of Rights does not redefine academic freedom or misrepresent the AAUP policies, but rather seeks the enforcement the AAUP principles by codifying them not just as faculty responsibilities (which can be ignored) but also as student rights. Any serious criticism would be addressed to this reconception and not to red herrings like the alleged consequences of intellectual pluralism, a principle that is already recognized if not always honored.
This past June, the American Council on Education in conjunction with 27 other higher education organizations (including the AAUP), issued a statement affirming this key principle of the Academic Bill of Rights and calling on universities to implement it on their own campuses. “Intellectual pluralism and academic freedom are central principles of American higher education,” read the statement. “Neither students nor faculty should be disadvantaged or evaluated on the basis of their political opinions.” The statement also called for the creation of grievance procedures so that students and faculty members will have the means to redress violations of their academic freedom.
The language in the ACE statement is strikingly similar to that of the Academic Bill of Rights, yet the APA and the AAUP still falsely claim that the principles cited in the Academic Bill of Rights are at odds with the traditions and precedents of academic freedom in our nation.
As David Horowitz’s response to the AAUP statement points out, it is false that the Academic Bil of Rights “invite[s] diversity to be measured by political standards that diverge from the academic criteria of the scholarly profession,” as both the APA and the AAUP claim. “The Academic Bill of Rights does no such thing,” Horowitz writes. “It expressly rules out measuring anything in the university by political standards. Article 1 of the bill states quite clearly, “No faculty shall be hired or fired or denied promotion or tenure on the basis of his or her political or religious beliefs.” In other words, the bill forbids use of the very political categories that the AAUP claims it invites.”
As for the final accusation -- that the Academic Bill of Rights would shift the responsibility for enforcing academic freedom principles from academics to government officials -- one needs merely to read the text of the Academic Bill of Rights to find that this is not the case. As David Horowitz recently stated in a published interchange with Ohio University Professor Kevin Mattson who made the same error: “The Academic Bill of Rights does not even mention legislatures. The opposition to it that is based on this presumption … is based either in ignorance of what it says, or groundless speculation on what it means, or in bad faith…. The Academic Bill of Rights … was proposed by me as a policy for universities themselves to adopt and [thus] has nothing to do with legislatures, and [legislative] bills….. The Academic Bill of Rights can be adopted directly by universities – which would end the need for legislation.” In other words, the only reason for legislative redress is the refusal of university administrations and faculties to implement principles of academic freedom they already recognize. On the other hand, at this point in time all the legislation is in the form of non-binding resolutions and is not statutory. The remedy for this concern is therefore obvious: Codify the existing principles of academic freedom, applying them to students as well as professors and put in place a grievance machinery to enforce them. The APA should be calling for this rather than contributing to an opposition campaign that will make statutory remedies inevitable.
In Conclusion:
It is ironic that the report’s authors choose to quote from various Supreme Court decisions in an effort to undermine the Academic Bill of Rights, when all of the quotes serve to support it.
One of the jurists quoted, Justice Felix Frankfurter, wrote: “A university is characterized by the spirit of free inquiry….Dogma and hypotheses are incompatible, and the concept of an immutable doctrine is repugnant to the spirit of a university.”
Compare this statement with the following from the Academic Bill of Rights:
“From its first formulation…the concept of academic freedom has been premised on the idea that human knowledge is a never-ending pursuit of the truth, that there is not humanly accessible truth that is not in principle open to challenge, and that no party or intellectual faction has a monopoly on wisdom. Therefore, academic freedom is most likely to thrive in an environment of intellectual diversity that protects and fosters independence of thought and speech.”
The members of the American Philosophical Association should read and analyze the Academic Bill of Rights—not because, as the Defense Committee claims, it distorts long-held principles of academic freedom—but because it would restore them to their proper place in the academy.
the allegation of spying on professors is a pure concoction Coke, made by the very people who feel terribly threatened by the possibility of a real diversity and interplay of ideas being reinsituted in the American academy.
By the way, Amy Goodman is an anti-American radical who frequently hosts people on her show of the ilk of Noam Chomski, Norman Finklestien, Michael Moore, and members of the 9/11 conspiracy theory movement. In other words, inveterate fellow travelers, anti-Semites, and pro-Jihadist leftists.