David Horowitz wrote two long articles (Part I) (Part II) a few days ago which details all the work he has done in trying to get the Academic Bill of Rights passed to protect students from the ultra-liberal Professors that inhabit most of our Universities. He goes into great detail about the smear job being done on him from InsideHigherEd.com and other’s in an attempt to stomp out any success for the students. There is a lot to digest in his two articles but he summarizes one such incident:
A student complains about an exam question and I report her complaint. Instead of looking into the complaint, my opponents and detractors claim that I invented the student, the professor and the exam question itself. When these tactics fail, the critics accuse me of putting words into students’ mouths and conducting a witch-hunt of academic liberals. Both the original canard and the malicious spin are then spread across the Internet by professor unions and their allies as though they were facts. The goal of these efforts is to deny that such abuses exist, or to claim that they are so rare as to require no remedies other than those already in place; moreover, the students’ advocate and the sponsor of reform is in fact a liar who wants to discredit professors and restrict their speech.
He then depicts the ludicrous situation where a Committee is formed to look at giving students a Bill of Rights but find no such widespread complaints from students about professors…..why would that be? Read on:
In October the Republican majority on the Committee on Academic Freedom was presented with a draft report on its proceedings. The report was submitted by Representative Gib Armstrong the author of the legislation creating the Committee. The “Summary of Testimony” contained in the report revealed that when the hearings began not a single public university in the state of Pennsylvania had a provision to protect students’ academic freedom. The report noted that in response to the hearings, two major universities – Temple and Penn State – had already adopted new academic freedom policies that were in fact specific to students.
[…]On the first day of the hearings, the Committee Chairman, Rep. Tom Stevenson, declared in so many words that the committee would not look at specific abuses involving students and professors:
This committee’s focus will be on the institutions and their policies, not on professors, not on students.[3]
One of the prime reasons the committee did not focus on student complaints was explained in the finding of the draft report that there was no university-provided basis or procedure for such complaints. Students had no formal academic freedom rights; there was no grievance machinery to deal with student academic freedom complaints, and students were not informed by the university that professors had any obligations to respect intellectual diversity, to refrain from harassing students for their political views, or to assign texts reflecting more than one perspective on controversial matters – all of which were concerns of the academic freedom campaign.
Then when the Committee was set to vote on the matter, a Republican who has sided with the Democrats on this issue engaged in some, ahem, "shredding" of pages:
The night before the actual vote one of the Republican defectors, Representative Lynn Herman, rewrote the draft report. In doing so, he removed all references in the recommendations to the need to create “student-specific rights,” and inserted a ludicrous conclusion – that abuses of student rights were “rare.” Of course they were rare – students had no rights and no grievance procedures through which to air their complaints, and therefore no protection from faculty reprisals.
Herman also deleted the entire “Summary of Testimony” in the report, which documented the absence of student protections in existing university regulations. The cynical nature of this scam was so transparent that Herman did not even bother to replace the deleted section with a different version. The final report therefore contains no summary of what actually transpired at the hearings.
No coverup there huh?
David goes into even greater detail into all the smears that InsideHigherEd site and its editor Scott Jaschik has done on him in an attempt to make him look foolish, and in so doing making the issue look foolish.
Jaschik quoted my response out of context in order to make me look both ridiculous and … a liar. The context Jaschik suppressed is as follows: Universities have elaborate procedures and spend tens of millions of dollars per school to inform students of their rules against sexual and ethnic harassment and to provide them with grievance procedures and diversity programs to handle and encourage their complaints. Reporters like Scott Jaschik conduct their inquiries into abuses that universities may have missed. But there are no such procedures and orientations dealing with intellectual diversity and political harassment, and reporters such as Scott Jaschik are not really interested in them. On the other hand, if students were being sexually harassed but did not come forward because there were no sexual harassment rules or grievance procedures, or provisions against ethnic abuse, one can be sure that Scott Jaschik and his reporters would be on the case.
What these episodes demonstrate is the lengths to which my academic opponents are willing to go to protect their ability to use the classroom to advance their political agendas, even at the expense of their students’ educations.
Read both articles, well worth your time to find out the extent the academic left in this country will go in stifling debate.
I find it quite curious why these liberals feel so threatened by giving students the right to have opposing viewpoints WITHOUT having anything negative happen to them.
Wonder why that would be?
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