More harm than good

With recent controversies over Harvard President Larry Summers' remarks about women and the sciences and University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill's essay calling the victims of 9/11 "little Eichmanns," academic freedom has been a recent topic of much media and political speculation.

One development on this front is the proposal in Congress and in 20 states, including Pennsylvania, of an "Academic Bill of Rights." Inspired by conservative activist David Horowitz and his organization, Students for Academic Freedom, these bills -- which are opposed by the American Association of University Professors -- purport to ensure academic freedom in higher education. While provisions vary from bill to bill, for the most part they do the exact opposite.

The model legislation that Horowitz proposes would prohibit professors from discriminating on the basis of political or religious beliefs in grading, would prevent them from introducing "controversial" material into classrooms "that has no relation to their subject of study" and would require professors to present a range of "serious scholarly opinion." Such legislation would also prohibit universities from taking political or religious beliefs into account in hiring and tenure decisions.

On their face, at least some of these provisions seem reasonable. Academic freedom and academic responsibility are necessarily paired, and these are guidelines that reasonable professors should follow on their own. However, not only are these bills based on faulty premises, but creating policies to formalize this responsibility is a cure worse than the disease.

First, these bills are based on the assumption that professors are unfairly liberal. Typical methods used to argue this point include researching professors' voter registration and campaign contributions, which show that there are, in fact, more liberals in the humanities and social sciences than there are conservatives.

So yes, surprise, surprise, there are liberals in the English Department. However, this situation reverses itself dramatically when one enters the business school. Moreover, such statistics do not show that conservatives are rejected for hire or tenure at a higher rate than liberals. It is possible that the critical inquiry that academia demands attracts more liberals than conservatives.

Not only is the premise faulty, but these proposals could do more harm than good. Should students be able to sue or initiate a formal complaint process against a professor because they felt they deserved a better grade? If professors are afraid that their grading decisions will be constantly second-guessed and that they will be punished if they give out low grades, grade inflation is sure to result.

What's more, if opposing views must be taught, then which and how many opposing views? What subject matter is too controversial under these laws? How does one know whether a professor downgraded a student for political perspectives as opposed to poor performance? This should be the discretion of professors rather than administrators or the legal system. These bills strip away academic freedom from universities rather than enhance it.

Truthfully, political persecution has long been a scapegoat for shoddy scholarship. For example, conservative academic Charles Murray was considered by many to be a victim of liberal orthodoxy when his book The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life was first released and widely criticized. However, on closer examination, the criticism was academically warranted for the book's use of faulty statistical techniques to create a non-existent finding.

Similarly, in promoting the Academic Bill of Rights, David Horowitz has trafficked the story of Ahmad al-Qloushi, a conservative student at Foothill College in California. Al-Qloushi claimed that he received a bad grade on a political science essay because of his pro-American views. However, when the essay was reviewed by two separate conservative political science professors, they reported that al-Qloushi earned his lousy grade for poor writing and his failure to answer the question posed.

Realistically, these bills are not about academic freedom, but about imposing a new type of political correctness, a PC-ethos that says fair-minded academics cannot criticize a conservative point of view for any reason. Honestly, are we really to believe that a conservative activist has the principle of academic freedom more at heart than the American Association of University Professors?

The right does not really want to promote opposing views in all circumstances; there is hardly an outcry over the lack of Marx in business classes. In fact, Horowitz's model legislation reads, "In the humanities, the social sciences and the arts, the fostering of a plurality of serious scholarly methodologies and perspectives should be a significant institutional purpose," noticeably leaving out business schools and other strongholds of campus conservatism. Conservative activists are trying to make classrooms more conservative, not more balanced.

Academic freedom and academic responsibility are both critical for successful academic work. These "bills of rights," however, do not uphold these vital principles; they betray them.

Kevin Collins is a junior Political Science major from Milwaukee. ...And Justice For All appears on Tuesdays.

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