Nickdfresh
04-16-2006, 11:30 AM
Stifling academic freedom
Professors and colleges threatened by accusations of radicalism
By LIONEL LEWIS
Special to The News (http://www.buffalonews.com/editorial/20060416/1059180.asp)
4/16/2006
http://www.buffalonews.com/graphics/2006/04/16/0416viewsa.jpg
Associated Press
Lynne Cheney, wife of Vice President Dick Cheney, was the founding chair of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, one of the groups working to stigmatize liberal professors.
A Web site of an organization of UCLA alumni has a number of profiles "exposing" the university's "most radical professors," those "actively proselytizing their extreme views in the classroom."
One "buried treasure," it said, "never had to actually leave the theory-based fantasy world of college to pursue a real job." His criticism of contemporary social issues is described as the "brainless sort."
Most recently, the organization offered $100 to any student who turned over "full, detailed lecture notes, all professor-distributed materials, and full tape recordings of every class session."
In the face of legal action by the UCLA administration, the plan was dropped, but the events at UCLA are not that unusual. In Colorado and Indiana, as a result of widely publicized allegations by students of left-wing bias in the classroom, a number of faculty members received hate mail, and at least one received a death threat.
The situation locally has been more restrained. Some students have claimed that there is discrimination on campus against right-leaning students. Last spring an activist in the organization UB Republicans publicly complained that one of his instructors made a disparaging remark about Republicans in class, and a history major recently lamented: "It's hard being a conservative at such a liberal school - but I'm in school to get good grades."
In the fall, it was reported that UB undergraduates have begun working with conservatives at other SUNY campuses to gather enough complaints so that the Board of Trustees would take action to, as one put it, protect "the intellectual, political and religious beliefs of students and teachers."
There are a number of organizations across America today whose self-appointed purpose is to "monitor" (others call it inform on or spy on) professors. There are efforts in at least 20 states and at the federal level to make it the law to check up on professors. So far, such legislation passed only in Georgia. Last July, the Pennsylvania House of Representatives passed a resolution supporting such a law.
This year in New York, largely through the efforts of SUNY trustee Candace de Russy, a similar bill was introduced to the Senate Higher Education Committee to amend the education law. De Russy has argued that
Freedom • from H1
"leftist ideologues . . . dominate . . . the faculty of our graduate schools of education, and the history and "studies" departments of our colleges and universities." She has written of the "Byzantine, monopolistic, academically destructive, and often tyrannical control of so many parts of contemporary higher education by the left."
Harassing academics for their political views has begun to exact a toll on campus life. Suspicion and distrust, always a part of campus culture, have been exacerbated. The number of grievances on campuses has grown exponentially. So have lawsuits.
Cold War redux
American campuses are under siege, just as they were during the Cold War years.
During that unhappy time, the careers of scores of academics were threatened because of their purported political beliefs. Then, as now, the intrusion of political tests into the classrooms on some campuses had a chilling effect on all campuses.
Some who were victimized, like Owen Lattimore at Johns Hopkins and Philip Morrison at Cornell, were nationally known academicians; most were not. For example, in 1952, an instructor who had been on the faculty at Columbia University for 17 years who had opposed American foreign policy in a number of public forums and refused to tell the Senate Internal Security Committee whether she was or had ever been a communist, was not reappointed after the Board of Trustees adopted regulations "limiting the number of annual appointments which may be granted." Not only was she not renewed, but as a result of the board's devious plan designed to get her off campus, a number of other faculty members also had to be terminated.
In 1954, at Rutgers University, the distinguished anthropologist, public intellectual and known liberal Ashley Montagu was fired after an important alumnus complained to the administration that in an off-campus lecture, he had made censorious remarks about the eventually disgraced Sen. Joseph McCarthy, the Wisconsin Republican who headed investigations into communist infiltrations of American institutions.
The dread and suspicion so evident during the Cold War seem to have returned, this time, so far, without government sanctions. In the spring of 2005, an assistant professor at Yale was notified that his contract would not be renewed. He claims it was because he was a publicly visible anarchist. The university refused to discuss the matter.
An instructor at Columbia remarked in a "teach-in" that the war in Iraq might involve "a million Mogadishus" [in reference to a conflict a decade earlier in Somalia in which 18 U.S. soldiers were killed], and was publicly chastised by the university president and provost.
In a recorded message to those who called the university's main switchboard asking for the instructor, the president stated that he was "appalled" by the "outrageous comments." The provost agreed that he too was "appalled" and "ashamed."
Who's behind the criticism
To understand the tenuous situation of the American professoriate, it is important to look at the national organizations working to stigmatize and punish professors.
One is the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA), launched by individuals in or close to government. The most active of these is Lynne V. Cheney (former chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and wife of the vice president). She was, in fact, ACTA's founding chair. Its present chair and president also held senior positions at NEH.
ACTA's animus toward the American campus is most visible in a report it issued just months after 9/11, in which acts and speech from "moral equivocation to explicit condemnation" by faculty and students are detailed. As ACTA sees it, "the message of many in academe was clear: blame America first."
Here are two quotes from a section at the beginning of the report:
"Imagine the real suffering and grief of people in other countries. The best way to begin a war on terrorism might be to look in the mirror;" and "This war can end only to the extent that we relinquish our role as world leader, overhaul our lifestyle and achieve political neutrality." This is about the extent of the evidence that professors "blame America first."
ACTA's major piece of research is presented in a document titled "Survey Reveals Pervasive Political Pressure in the Classroom," and subtitled "Students: 49% Report Professors Preach Rather Than Teach." The second sentence reads: "Almost one-third - 29 percent - feel they have to agree with professors' political views to get a good grade." The claim is made that the "survey clearly shows that faculty are injecting politics into the classroom."
Of the sample, 49 percent agreed with the statement: "On my campus, some professors frequently comment on politics in class even though it has nothing to do with the course;" 29 percent agreed with the statement: "On my campus, there are courses in which students feel they have to agree with the professor's political or social views in order to get a good grade;" and 48 percent agreed with the statement: "On my campus, some professors use the classroom to present their personal political views."
Horowitz groups
Although the survey items ask about campuses, inferences are drawn about professors or courses. Moreover, students are reporting their perceptions, not their experiences. On over 70 percent of campuses, there are no reported incidents of political pressure on students. We have no idea how many courses or professors this refers to on the other campuses.
ACTA's president has also testified to government officials about "the severe political imbalance" of college and university faculties and "politicization of the classroom."
Perhaps the individual and organizations most a threat to academics and academia is David Horowitz and two groups he founded, Students for Academic Freedom and the Center for the Study of Popular Culture.
Horowitz and members of his organizations have repeatedly alleged political bias in all aspects of academic life, most specifically in hiring (Republicans and those right-of-center are "systematically excluded") and in assessment (faculty and students who are not left-of-center are discriminated against or punished).
As they see it, the professoriate is often more involved in indoctrination than in teaching. As he writes in an edited volume, "The Hate America Left," "this left . . . is out demonstrating on American campuses, with "teach-ins' against the war. It is proselytizing students with a message that is always the same: America is guilty; America is to blame."
Horowitz has been vigorously promoting his Academic Bill of Rights - a manifesto to rein in activist professors - by lecturing on and off campuses, organizing students and lobbying opinion makers. Since they were founded in medieval Europe, university faculties have largely decided what is taught and how. Under Horowitz's Academic Bill of Rights, they would cede this power to politicians and other policymakers who could, for example, determine if the reading material for a course was "balanced" or "appropriate."
Horowitz has publicized aberrant incidents, making them appear to be the norm. If there are no facts, he fabricates. For example, several times he has repeated the unsubstantiated charge that a biology professor at Pennsylvania State University used a class session to show the Michael Moore documentary "Fahrenheit 9/11."
Attempting to show his balance, on a number of occasions he has repeated a story - for which there also is no evidence - about a student in California who supported abortion rights being punished with a low grade by a professor who opposed them.
Horowitz has been effective in convincing many that "the intellectual independence of faculty and students" and "the principle of intellectual diversity" would be in jeopardy without the protection of his Academic Bill of Rights. The fact that legislation has been introduced or is pending in 20 states and in Washington, D.C., is testimony to his efforts to label professors as dangerous because some of them sometimes question the received wisdom.
A healthy mix of opinions
In sum, what one hears from contemporary critics of academics and academia is that:
1. "Colleges and universities are politically one-sided."
2. There is "an absence of intellectual diversity on American campuses."
3. There are "too many left-wing faculty," too many "radicals" on campus.
4. Conservative voices are "suppressed" in the classroom.
5. The "radicals' irrational hatred of America" poisons campus life.
There is no objective research to support any of these assertions. At bottom, the American campus remains a healthy mix of different opinions, cultures and viewpoints.
Lionel S. Lewis, a professor emeritus at the University at Buffalo, is the author of "Cold War on Campus" and "The Cold War and Academic Governance."
Professors and colleges threatened by accusations of radicalism
By LIONEL LEWIS
Special to The News (http://www.buffalonews.com/editorial/20060416/1059180.asp)
4/16/2006
http://www.buffalonews.com/graphics/2006/04/16/0416viewsa.jpg
Associated Press
Lynne Cheney, wife of Vice President Dick Cheney, was the founding chair of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, one of the groups working to stigmatize liberal professors.
A Web site of an organization of UCLA alumni has a number of profiles "exposing" the university's "most radical professors," those "actively proselytizing their extreme views in the classroom."
One "buried treasure," it said, "never had to actually leave the theory-based fantasy world of college to pursue a real job." His criticism of contemporary social issues is described as the "brainless sort."
Most recently, the organization offered $100 to any student who turned over "full, detailed lecture notes, all professor-distributed materials, and full tape recordings of every class session."
In the face of legal action by the UCLA administration, the plan was dropped, but the events at UCLA are not that unusual. In Colorado and Indiana, as a result of widely publicized allegations by students of left-wing bias in the classroom, a number of faculty members received hate mail, and at least one received a death threat.
The situation locally has been more restrained. Some students have claimed that there is discrimination on campus against right-leaning students. Last spring an activist in the organization UB Republicans publicly complained that one of his instructors made a disparaging remark about Republicans in class, and a history major recently lamented: "It's hard being a conservative at such a liberal school - but I'm in school to get good grades."
In the fall, it was reported that UB undergraduates have begun working with conservatives at other SUNY campuses to gather enough complaints so that the Board of Trustees would take action to, as one put it, protect "the intellectual, political and religious beliefs of students and teachers."
There are a number of organizations across America today whose self-appointed purpose is to "monitor" (others call it inform on or spy on) professors. There are efforts in at least 20 states and at the federal level to make it the law to check up on professors. So far, such legislation passed only in Georgia. Last July, the Pennsylvania House of Representatives passed a resolution supporting such a law.
This year in New York, largely through the efforts of SUNY trustee Candace de Russy, a similar bill was introduced to the Senate Higher Education Committee to amend the education law. De Russy has argued that
Freedom • from H1
"leftist ideologues . . . dominate . . . the faculty of our graduate schools of education, and the history and "studies" departments of our colleges and universities." She has written of the "Byzantine, monopolistic, academically destructive, and often tyrannical control of so many parts of contemporary higher education by the left."
Harassing academics for their political views has begun to exact a toll on campus life. Suspicion and distrust, always a part of campus culture, have been exacerbated. The number of grievances on campuses has grown exponentially. So have lawsuits.
Cold War redux
American campuses are under siege, just as they were during the Cold War years.
During that unhappy time, the careers of scores of academics were threatened because of their purported political beliefs. Then, as now, the intrusion of political tests into the classrooms on some campuses had a chilling effect on all campuses.
Some who were victimized, like Owen Lattimore at Johns Hopkins and Philip Morrison at Cornell, were nationally known academicians; most were not. For example, in 1952, an instructor who had been on the faculty at Columbia University for 17 years who had opposed American foreign policy in a number of public forums and refused to tell the Senate Internal Security Committee whether she was or had ever been a communist, was not reappointed after the Board of Trustees adopted regulations "limiting the number of annual appointments which may be granted." Not only was she not renewed, but as a result of the board's devious plan designed to get her off campus, a number of other faculty members also had to be terminated.
In 1954, at Rutgers University, the distinguished anthropologist, public intellectual and known liberal Ashley Montagu was fired after an important alumnus complained to the administration that in an off-campus lecture, he had made censorious remarks about the eventually disgraced Sen. Joseph McCarthy, the Wisconsin Republican who headed investigations into communist infiltrations of American institutions.
The dread and suspicion so evident during the Cold War seem to have returned, this time, so far, without government sanctions. In the spring of 2005, an assistant professor at Yale was notified that his contract would not be renewed. He claims it was because he was a publicly visible anarchist. The university refused to discuss the matter.
An instructor at Columbia remarked in a "teach-in" that the war in Iraq might involve "a million Mogadishus" [in reference to a conflict a decade earlier in Somalia in which 18 U.S. soldiers were killed], and was publicly chastised by the university president and provost.
In a recorded message to those who called the university's main switchboard asking for the instructor, the president stated that he was "appalled" by the "outrageous comments." The provost agreed that he too was "appalled" and "ashamed."
Who's behind the criticism
To understand the tenuous situation of the American professoriate, it is important to look at the national organizations working to stigmatize and punish professors.
One is the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA), launched by individuals in or close to government. The most active of these is Lynne V. Cheney (former chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and wife of the vice president). She was, in fact, ACTA's founding chair. Its present chair and president also held senior positions at NEH.
ACTA's animus toward the American campus is most visible in a report it issued just months after 9/11, in which acts and speech from "moral equivocation to explicit condemnation" by faculty and students are detailed. As ACTA sees it, "the message of many in academe was clear: blame America first."
Here are two quotes from a section at the beginning of the report:
"Imagine the real suffering and grief of people in other countries. The best way to begin a war on terrorism might be to look in the mirror;" and "This war can end only to the extent that we relinquish our role as world leader, overhaul our lifestyle and achieve political neutrality." This is about the extent of the evidence that professors "blame America first."
ACTA's major piece of research is presented in a document titled "Survey Reveals Pervasive Political Pressure in the Classroom," and subtitled "Students: 49% Report Professors Preach Rather Than Teach." The second sentence reads: "Almost one-third - 29 percent - feel they have to agree with professors' political views to get a good grade." The claim is made that the "survey clearly shows that faculty are injecting politics into the classroom."
Of the sample, 49 percent agreed with the statement: "On my campus, some professors frequently comment on politics in class even though it has nothing to do with the course;" 29 percent agreed with the statement: "On my campus, there are courses in which students feel they have to agree with the professor's political or social views in order to get a good grade;" and 48 percent agreed with the statement: "On my campus, some professors use the classroom to present their personal political views."
Horowitz groups
Although the survey items ask about campuses, inferences are drawn about professors or courses. Moreover, students are reporting their perceptions, not their experiences. On over 70 percent of campuses, there are no reported incidents of political pressure on students. We have no idea how many courses or professors this refers to on the other campuses.
ACTA's president has also testified to government officials about "the severe political imbalance" of college and university faculties and "politicization of the classroom."
Perhaps the individual and organizations most a threat to academics and academia is David Horowitz and two groups he founded, Students for Academic Freedom and the Center for the Study of Popular Culture.
Horowitz and members of his organizations have repeatedly alleged political bias in all aspects of academic life, most specifically in hiring (Republicans and those right-of-center are "systematically excluded") and in assessment (faculty and students who are not left-of-center are discriminated against or punished).
As they see it, the professoriate is often more involved in indoctrination than in teaching. As he writes in an edited volume, "The Hate America Left," "this left . . . is out demonstrating on American campuses, with "teach-ins' against the war. It is proselytizing students with a message that is always the same: America is guilty; America is to blame."
Horowitz has been vigorously promoting his Academic Bill of Rights - a manifesto to rein in activist professors - by lecturing on and off campuses, organizing students and lobbying opinion makers. Since they were founded in medieval Europe, university faculties have largely decided what is taught and how. Under Horowitz's Academic Bill of Rights, they would cede this power to politicians and other policymakers who could, for example, determine if the reading material for a course was "balanced" or "appropriate."
Horowitz has publicized aberrant incidents, making them appear to be the norm. If there are no facts, he fabricates. For example, several times he has repeated the unsubstantiated charge that a biology professor at Pennsylvania State University used a class session to show the Michael Moore documentary "Fahrenheit 9/11."
Attempting to show his balance, on a number of occasions he has repeated a story - for which there also is no evidence - about a student in California who supported abortion rights being punished with a low grade by a professor who opposed them.
Horowitz has been effective in convincing many that "the intellectual independence of faculty and students" and "the principle of intellectual diversity" would be in jeopardy without the protection of his Academic Bill of Rights. The fact that legislation has been introduced or is pending in 20 states and in Washington, D.C., is testimony to his efforts to label professors as dangerous because some of them sometimes question the received wisdom.
A healthy mix of opinions
In sum, what one hears from contemporary critics of academics and academia is that:
1. "Colleges and universities are politically one-sided."
2. There is "an absence of intellectual diversity on American campuses."
3. There are "too many left-wing faculty," too many "radicals" on campus.
4. Conservative voices are "suppressed" in the classroom.
5. The "radicals' irrational hatred of America" poisons campus life.
There is no objective research to support any of these assertions. At bottom, the American campus remains a healthy mix of different opinions, cultures and viewpoints.
Lionel S. Lewis, a professor emeritus at the University at Buffalo, is the author of "Cold War on Campus" and "The Cold War and Academic Governance."