Academic Bill of Rights
To the editor:
I have been following with great interest the debate over the Academic Bill of Rights and the purported threat of political indoctrination by “liberal” faculty members on college campuses, including ours. The front-page article in Monday’s Statesman about David Horowitz’s speech to the Utah Federation of College Republicans offered new and alarming insights into the movement to combat this threat.
I was disheartened to see that the newspaper repeated David Horowitz’s claim that a USU student received a failing grade on a paper for challenging a liberal view of the war on Iraq, without any substantiation of the accusation nor an attempt to tell more than one side of the story.
It may be true that this happened – if so, the professor should surely be counseled and reprimanded, though not necessarily fired for a first offense. However, it may not be true at all.
For example, in some of my classes I assign papers asking students to express their opinions on sometimes controversial topics, using concepts and ideas they’ve learned in the course to back up their ideas. I don’t care what their “answer” is to the problem, only that the arguments show that they’re learning facts and theories from the course. Still, every few years a student will complain of receiving a poor grade for expressing a view that doesn’t fit mine. (Or at least that don’t fit what the student thinks my views are- I sometimes present viewpoints that aren’t my own if I don’t feel they’ve otherwise been adequately represented in classroom discussions). In every case, however, the poor grade had nothing to do with the student’s opinions, but rather reflected the student’s inability to relate his or her views to the course content.
That’s my job: to help students learn to use the existing body of knowledge and thought to develop and express important ideas. If I fail to do that, that’s when I ought to be fired.
One problem at Utah State is that our students have had less exposure to “liberal” ideas, so as faculty we may be obligated to present more of those regardless of whether students want to hear them. I’m amused that Mr. Horowitz and his supporters believe there’s a threat in Utah of political indoctrination from the left. We live in a very conservative state, in a nation where conservatives control both houses of Congress and the White House. How likely is it that intelligent, thoughtful, adult students will be brainwashed into liberalism (whatever that is)?
I don’t doubt that on average, USU faculty members are less conservative than the student body and state political system. After all, we come from all over the world, reflecting a greater geographic and educational diversity than the students and public we serve. But we’d hardly be classified as a “leftist” faculty when compared to universities across the country. At any rate, it should be healthy for students to hear more viewpoints – if for no other reason than it helps them understand those whose opinions differ, so that they can craft more effective arguments for their various causes.
But Mr. Horowitz and his supporters aren’t interested in exposing students to diverse opinions. They’re interested in suppressing them. That’s happened before in this country, most recently in the decade immediately following World War II. The excesses of the McCarthy Era are a national embarrassment, especially in how unsubstantiated accusations were made publicly in ways that destroyed the careers and even the lives of many people who failed to express the “right” viewpoints. The statements of people like David Horowitz seem to reflect a desire to return to that dismal page in our history. All students, no matter how conservative their views, should be terrified of such a prospect and should work to avoid repeating those mistakes.
Mark Brunson797-2458