Overall the, academic freedom is good parts of the transcription were great! I doubt anyone here would argue with that. Here are some problems though and the major sticking points come from these:
It is not an education when a mid-term examination contains a required essay on the topic, Explain Why President Bush Is A War Criminal, as did a criminology exam at the University of Northern Colorado in 2003.
A valid topic for a criminology class especially one dealing with international law. How better to put a students objectivity to the test by making them build a case against their own president. Clearly a case of allowable controversy used in the classroom legitimately. The problem is that he mixes this invalid objection with a valid one:
It is not an education when a professor of property law harangues his class on why all Republicans are racist as happened at the Colorado University Law School in 2004.
Clearly a violation of the academic responsibilities of a professor. I hope something was done about this. But then we bookend it with another invalid criticism:
It is not an education when a widely-used required Peace Studies textbook, described by the professor as a masterpiece, explains that the Soviet Union was a force for peace in the Cold War and the United States was not, that revolutionary violence is the only justifiable violence, and that the United States is the greatest terrorist state and does so without making students aware that there are other interpretations of this history and other views that should be considered on these matters. This extremist text, Peace and Conflict Studies, written by two university professors who explain in their preface that they are partisans of the political left is the required academic textbook for students in the Peace Studies course at Ohio State University (Marion).
CLEARLY Peace Studies is a special topics class and nothing that any student would be forced to take for any reason. We had plenty of those classes available when I went to school and they are necessarily the fringe and unimportant classes that few if any take except for personal interest. Also, in those classes, often there would be many texts that were covered often carrying opposing views because there is no hard curriculum for those kinds of classes. No mention was made of this being the exclusive text of the class.
Here then rises my first objection. If there are so many examples of this, why are two of them chosen that need a stretch and play of words to make them seem extreme? In school I was glad for the times I was forced to challenge my established thinking. I consider those times, albeit uncomfortable at the time, some of the greatest learning experiences of my life. How much easier would it have been for that criminology professor to make everyone build a case for Saddam Hussein as a war criminal? That would have been way too easy and not required his students to think out of the box at all.
Three principal objections have been made to the Senate Bill 24, all of them groundless. The first is that the Bill would impose political standards on higher education. This is an invention of opponents of the Bill, whose text could not be clearer on this matter: students [shall] have access to a broad range of serious scholarly opinion pertaining to the subjects they study. In other words, the standards imposed by the Bill are scholarly not political.’
Here he totally misses the point. That excerpt from the bill is NOT objective in regards to what is considered serious scholarly opinion. Who decides this? The law makers? Judges? Public opinion?
Here then is my second major objection. What determines serious scholarly opinion needs to be decided by accreditation boards and the scholars in the field. This is how it works now and there is already a system in place to punish schools that don’t follow this. They do not receive or maintain their accreditation.
What this is doing is removing one of the important components of academia which is the self imposing checks derived from competition and placing them in law. Imagine if we started telling manufacturing companies that there was only 1 legal way to make a widget rather than allowing them to compete with each other to produce a better and better widget; each step of the way ensuring quality and innovation.
This ties into my overall objection which no-one has yet to respond to which is what reason a conservative has to impose this extremely non-conservative legislation? When it comes to the arena of business or commerce there is no way a republican would be caught dead fighting so hard to impose similar restrictions. Conservatives are well known for their stance wanting less government oversight on many issues so what is the difference here? Why should we ignore the religious and political extremism demonstrated by this person with regards to this supposed neutral legislation as a motivating factor?
The AAUP has particularly singled out the following clause in the Senate Bill for disapproval: Faculty and instructors shall not infringe the academic freedom and quality of education of their students by persistently introducing controversial matter into the classroom or coursework that has no relation to their subject of study and that serves no legitimate pedagogical purpose. According to the AAUP and opponents of the Bill generally, this stipulation is an infringement of the free speech rights of professors.
In fact, the issue here is not the free speech rights of professors as private citizens, but what is appropriate to a classroom, and in particular what form of discourse constitutes indoctrination as distinct from education.
The sticking point here is that when a professor crosses the line and starts ranting about politics in an engineering class that he needs to loose his job. What this legislation would do is all of the sudden make their coursework a civil liability. This will stifle speech in the classroom and discourage people from teaching in higher education which always has a hunger for more quality instructors.
There are certain things you should be civilly liable for. In my job I am civilly liable for the purposeful or accidental release of medical information. I can be sued if I make a programming error that causes patient records to be made public or sent to an unauthorized third party. This is a case where that makes perfect sense. Taking a professor to court for what he/she says in the classroom that is not related to his/her topic is a direct violation of free speech. Granted, he/she is not protected from being fired for ignoring his/her responsibility as an instructor but in no way should there be any possibility of civil discourse against an instructor
The reasons for enacting Senate Bill 24 are that too many faculty members at our universities no longer observe their responsibility to teach and not to indoctrinate students; that university administrations no longer enforce their faculty guidelines on academic freedom;
This has yet to be demonstrated. Bare links do not count on this board. Assertions count even less.
and that the existing guidelines are not codified as student rights; as result students currently have no way to redress their grievances.
How about we require universities to install a grievance process for students to use when issues like this come up rather than institute sweeping legislation and unnecessary government involvement? Of course no one could suggest this because any institution of higher learning worth its salt already has this and to impose anything less than what is being offered will not satisfy the religious and political extremist goals of the speaker.
In this situation legislatures have a fiduciary responsibility as the elected representatives of the taxpayers who fund these institutions -- to step in and provide a remedy.
This is correct but misguided. It is first their responsibility to determine objectively that there is a situation needing remedy. If this has already been done then there should be no problem for either you or Faith to link to a committee report detailing the state of academic freedom in state schools of higher education.
Here lies my last objection. While making law, legislators should be asking the question of where is the evidence of need for this law. That is why they (should) make committees and entertain lobbying efforts and commission studies to determine what is actually true rather than irresponsibly constructing legislation without objective knowledge.
Far be it from me to question favoring the few glossy examples of a politician with an agenda over an objective bi-partisan commission on the real state of our institutions of higher learning.
{minor spelling edits and such}
This message has been edited by Jazzns, 06-09-2005 09:19 AM
FOX has a pretty good system they have cooked up. 10 mil people watch the show on the network, FOX. Then 5 mil, different people, tune into FOX News to get outraged by it. I just hope that those good, God fearing people at FOX continue to battle those morally bankrupt people at FOX.
-- Lewis Black, The Daily Show
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