NOTE: The day before the Pope Center for Higher Education Policy’s conference on academic freedom, held Oct. 16, 2004,at the McKimmon Center of North Carolina State University, the following e-mail was sent out to N.C. State faculty in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences. The conference was spoken of as a “most critical issue before us” at N.C. State, because speaker David Horowitz’s “Academic Bill of Rights” contains “carefully chosen language” that “does not fully expose the agenda behind it.” But although it’s nowhere to be found in the text (not that such a thing ever stops today’s professors of English), the author announces: “the real agenda — imposing political litmus tests on course content.”
Here is the e-mail in full:
Dear CHASS Faculty:
Dean Linda Brady met with CHASS faculty senators today to start thinking about how we can all best communicate with one another and with you about issues of importance to our college. We all agreed to meet periodically and also to pass news of import to you.
The most critical issue before us this month is the arrival of conservative activist David Horowitz on campus for a day-long conference tomorrow. than a year ago, is the leader of a movement claiming that universities are overwhelmingly dominated by a liberal ideology, that conservative students and faculty are being harmed and punished for their views, and that universities and colleges should voluntarily adopt measures to correct this imbalance. If they do not, Horowitz and others say, universities and colleges should have such measures imposed upon them — either by university boards of trustees, or by state or national legislation. Georgia State Senate passed a non-binding resolution using the language of the Academic Bill of Rights; university administrators in Colorado adopted the provisions voluntarily in exchange for having the bill pulled out of the legislature there; it is in committee in the U.S. House of Representatives.
A number of us on Faculty Senate have good reason to believe that the Pope Center for Higher Education, a self-appointed watch dog over higher education in North Carolina, is planning to introduce a bill very similar to Horowitz’s into the state General Assembly. The Pope Center is sponsoring Horowitz, among others, at its day-long conference tomorrow (Oct. 16) at the McKimmon Center, entitled “Freedom and the American Campus.” If you visit the Pope Center’s website at http://www.popecenter.org, you’ll be able to read at greater length the general philosophies behind the Pope Center’s support of Horowitz and others, as well as view the speakers and topics featured at this conference.
The Faculty Senate had already started to play an active role in ensuring that if this “Academic Bill of Rights” is introduced in North Carolina, it does not go far. Tuesday, Oct. 5, it passed a resolution on Academic Freedom (http://www.ncsu.edu/faculty_senate/r3-0405.htm). For Horowitz’s bill is neither academic nor protective of rights. Should Horowitz’s bill succeed, either legislatively or through voluntarily [sic] adoption, it would undermine faculty professional autonomy and academic freedom more generally. As AAUP leader and Stanford Professor Graham Larkin noted: “Such legislation would be a very dangerous incursion on academic freedom, for all kinds of reasons. To begin in the broadest terms, I don’t think anyone should ever be forced to conform to the kind of simplistic, two-sided worldview that Horowitz is, in effect, trying to pass into law.”
The carefully chosen language of Horowitz’s Academic Bill of Rights does not fully expose the agenda behind it. If you visit Students for Academic Freedom, at this site, you will more fully understand the bill’s mission. SAF’s motto is “You can’t get a good education if they’re only telling you half the story.”
Horowitz, in pushing his bill in Colorado and protesting the academic freedom campus code of one of the state colleges there, wrote the following about the code: “Even the casual reader of this [campus code] statement will not that this is about academic freedom for professors not students. There is not a word in [this campus code] that would protect students from the abuses of ideological faculty who confuse the university with a political platform and education with indoctrination. This is why the Academic Bill of Rights is necessary and why only the actions of legislators will begin the necessary process of reform.” (“The Battle for the Bill of Rights,” FrontPageMagazine.com, Oct. 15, 2003).
We should note here that the University of North Carolina Board of Governors’ code on academic freedom includes protection of students specifically in its wording.
The American Association of University Professors, which has fought consistently and hard against this bill, has also consistently held that academic freedom can be maintained only so long as faculty remain autonomous and self-governing. Notes the AAUP: “We do not mean to imply, of course, that academic professionals never make mistakes or act in improper or unethical ways. But the AAUP has long stood for the proposition that violations of professional standards, like the principles of neutrality or nonindoctrination, are best remedied by the supervision of faculty peers.”
By repudiating this basic concept of faculty autonomy, the Academic Bill of Rights alters the principles of neutrality and nonindoctrination in ways that contradict academic freedom as advanced in standards and practices that the AAUP has long endorsed. Horowitz’s bill even demands that professional societies — not under the control of state legislatures — “should maintain a posture of organizational neutrality with respect to the substantive disagreements that divide researchers on questions within, or outside, their fields of inquiry.”
The oft-stated reason for the need for this bill is that conservative students are being abused or indoctrinated by university professors and administrators. This charge has been vastly exaggerated for political gain. According to the U.S. Census, 17.2 million students were enrolled on campuses across the United States in 2003. The two most popular sites claiming widespread abuses of students — noindoctrination.org and studentsforacademicfreedom.org — have had difficulty gathering more than a miniscule number of complaints. From September 2002 to September 2004, for instance, noindoctrination.org lists a total of 149 complaints. That represents two years of “data gathering.” Students for Academic Freedom lists a total of 132 complaints between January and September of this year. The sparseness of any credible data here — between the paucity of students writing in, the often-questionable credibility of their charges, and the anonymity of their complaints, may account for the need of Horowitz’s group and others like it to constanty recycle just a few stellar anecdotes.
It is the responsibility of the faculty, in cooperation with administration, to ensure compliance with professional standards. No one is claiming here that abuses do not ever occur. The question is who is best able to set standards and follow through. While we all know of examples of abuse of power in the classroom and beyond, the university itself has better and fairer ways, for both faculty and students, of dealing with such instances. Between course evaluations, classroom observation, the noted ability of our students to talk to associate department heads, department heads, or the provost himself, to say nothing of the review processes and protections built into the university — students have numerous options for protection from abuse.
Courses and curriculum go through a lengthy process of review and transformation within the university system. While we should not pretend that every single course meets our own personal view of what is a worthy object of study, it is the scholarly peer process that should reign — not intervention by a small minority of outsiders bent on controlling and transforming the university system. Of course, this is the real agenda — imposing political litmus tests on course content.
A final charge launched is that the university is dominated by liberals, and that conservative professors are either not hired, or actively punished for their views during the promotion and tenure process. Our system of hiring and tenuring faculty, while never perfect, is complex and multi-faceted. Research productivity and quality, teaching ability, and departmental needs, emphases and visions are only a few of a multitude of factors that go into the hiring process. The promotion and tenure process is even more complex. The Academic Bill of Rights sets out a number of seemingly benign suggestions and restrictions for hiring and tenuring faculty that once again over-legislates a system that isn’t broken. These “suggestions” amount to oversight and control of an academic process by people remote from the concerns of specific departments, removed from the consequences of their decisions, and resolved to promote a political agenda.
To conclude, we all look forward to a robust and multi-faceted conversation on these issues. We believe that the true principles of academic freedom will ultimately be victorious. But we as faculty need to take action in what is sure to be a struggle over the future of higher education.
Best,
Cat Warren
CHASS Faculty Senator
Assoc. Prof., Department of English
Director of Women’s and Gender Studies
cat_warren@ncsu.edu