Newsletter

January 2007

After The Academic Bill Of Rights

David Horowitz

In
September 2003, I began a national campaign to persuade universities to adopt an
academic bill of rights, aimed at extending traditional academic-freedom
protections to students and restoring objectivity and fairness to classrooms.
Mounting such an effort is not easy. Getting the issue of campaign finance
reform on the national radar, for example, reportedly required some $120-million
and the work of several major public-interest organizations. My campaign
consisted of two staff members and myself, and a budget to match.

Yet
three years later, the issues that I raised the lack of intellectual diversity
on campuses and the intrusion of political agendas into the curriculum have
become topics of discussion at colleges throughout the country. This July,
moreover, Temple University became the first institution to adopt a student bill
of rights as a response to my challenge.

How
did this happen? Oddly enough, no small part of my success can be attributed
to my opponents’ tactics.

The
American Historical Association and other organizations passed resolutions
condemning my bill as an attempt to impose political controls over academic
hiring and the curriculum. Representatives and members of the American
Association of University Professors and the American Federation of Teachers
denied any problem existed and described my campaign as "Orwellian," a "grave
threat to the fundamental principles of academic freedom" and "worse than
McCarthy." Joan Wallach Scott, former chairwoman of the AAUP’s Committee on
Academic Freedom and Tenure, compared my proposals to the educational policies
of Communist Russia, fascist Japan, and the Third Reich. Although unintended,
the extravagance of such claims ensured that my campaign would get national
attention.

Suppose my opponents had focused the argument instead on modifying points in my
bill to suit the distinct needs of academic institutions. If universities had
stepped forward to accept those modified reforms, what legislator would have
been willing to propose redundant legislation? Who would have cared about my
campaign?

The
second problem that my opponents created for themselves lay in the extreme
nature of their claims. My assertion, hardly mine alone, that the university
environment is heavily skewed to the political left should have been
uncontroversial. If it had been received as such by my opponents, the discussion
would then have focused on whether the disparity mattered, and what, if
anything, should be done.

Instead, my opponents forced me to prove the obvious. My study which I
admitted was a crude survey of the party registration of faculty members at 32
elite universities was challenged. The challenge inspired more studies, this
time conducted by social scientists like Daniel B. Klein, associate professor of
economics at Santa Clara University, that were methodologically sophisticated
and took in much larger samples. The result? We now have an empirically sound
picture of just how one-sided university faculties have become.

My
opponents’ third problem has been the absurdity of their charges. I have never
called for the firing of liberal professors; I am not seeking political control
over personnel decisions or the curriculum; I am not concerned about protecting
students from exposure to the liberal biases of professors; and I have not
invented faculty abuses of students so as to make a nonexistent case. (There is
a difference, need I point out, between repeating a student’s claim, which when
challenged could not be substantiated, as happened in one incident in
Pennsylvania, and attempting to deliberately deceive people that such problems
exist.)

In
short, my critics’ attacks, instead of killing my campaign, have lent it
credibility at least among those serious enough to weigh the facts and arguments
for themselves.

My
opponents have also consistently aimed their intellectual arrows at the wrong
targets, allowing me to proceed with my agenda without any substantive
opposition. In a September 17 article in The New York Times, for example,
Michael Brub, a professor of literature at Pennsylvania State University,
expressed concern about a legislative committee that I inspired, the
Pennsylvania Committee on Academic Freedom, which held hearings in the state. He
noted that during the hearings Penn State "revealed that it had received all of
13 student complaints about political ‘bias’ over the past five years on a
campus with a student population of 40,000."

My
response to that point? If there are just 13 abuses per campus at the top 100
universities, that would add up to 1,300 over five years. A study by the
historian Lionel Lewis of academic persecutions during the McCarthy era (which,
according to Lewis, lasted nine years) found only 126 faculty members involved
in academic-freedom cases at 58 institutions nationally. Those cases led to an
estimated 69 terminations, of which 31 were resignations at a single institution
after it established a loyalty oath. Yet small as that number may appear among
the thousands of universities and hundreds of thousands of professors, the
author concluded, "It is apparent that their chilling effect on the expression
of all ideas by both faculty and students was significant, although in fact
there is no way to measure adequately their full impact."

I
think most people would concur: The chilling effect is the issue, not the
absolute number, although each case is cause for concern. The real question is
whether universities are set up to deal with such problems through established
and well-publicized procedures. Brub did not discuss whether a policy and a
grievance system to handle such abuses exists at universities such as Penn
State. In point of fact, Penn State has an admirable academic-freedom policy,
but it can be found only in the Human Resources Policy Manual, which pertains to
employees. The 40,000 Penn State students at University Park are probably not
only unaware of the manual’s existence, but if they were to consult it, they
would find that the policy does not apply to them.

So
while Brub and his colleagues have been covering for administrators who do not
want to deal with such problems, I and the Pennsylvania committee have focused
on the lack of university policies to protect students from abuses. From that
point of view, the result of the hearings was an unqualified victory for the
academic-freedom campaign. In the aftermath, Temple adopted its new policy,
"Student and Faculty Academic Rights and Responsibilities". That provided the
missing protections for students, along with a grievance process specific to
academic-freedom violations something no other university that I know
has. It also established a reporting system that goes directly to the
administration, precluding faculty members from closing ranks at the expense of
student petitioners.

National awareness of the academic-freedom issue and the adoption by one
university of a worthy student bill of rights bring to a close the first phase
of my campaign. I have achieved what I set out to accomplish. The legislative
measures that I proposed were a means of urging universities to do the right
thing and were never intended to impose standards on them. The purpose of the
measures was to put the issue of student rights on the public agenda, and they
did just that.

The
second phase of my campaign will be a national effort to persuade other
universities to follow Temple’s example and adopt academic-freedom policies that
protect students as well as faculty members. Putting in place a reasonable code
of behavior, along with an adequate grievance process to handle complaints, will
strengthen universities in these fractious times. If universities are seen to be
encouraging intellectual diversity and protecting political and cultural
minority groups from attack, they will receive public support. That is in the
interest of everyone, liberal people as well as conservative ones, faculty
members as well as students.

My
new campaign will also focus on the collapse of academic standards in fields
where political agendas instead of scholarly values have come to shape
curricula. I do not claim to be infallible in conducting research about the
issue, but I caution my critics against repeating previous mistakes. Politically
corrupted academic standards are an issue, and everybody knows it. How else, for
example, could Ward Churchill be elevated to a position of prominence as a full
professor and chairman of the ethnic-studies department at a major research
university like the University of Colorado at Boulder?

This is no small problem. At the University of Wisconsin at Madison, a lecturer
whose expertise is African languages and literature is teaching conspiracy
theories in an introductory course on Islam about September 11, when a
scientific understanding of what happened that day must rely on expertise in
metals and fuels. Public outcry in Wisconsin over the appointment, which
administrators are defending on the grounds of free speech, has already
damaged the university. What about professional speech? What about the scholarly
expertise that is supposed to underlie academic privilege and tenure? If the
university does not support its own professional standards, the public’s elected
representatives will set standards for it. Such legislative interventions are
undesirable but will be an inevitable result of persistent university
irresponsibility in those matters.

I
therefore invite the AAUP and others to join me in forestalling such steps by
pressing universities to enforce professional standards on rogue elements in
their faculties. Instead of claiming that no abuses exist, they should try to
help remedy them. They should focus any criticisms of me on how I describe
particular abuses and the solutions that I propose to correct them. If that
should happen, a lot of wind would be taken out of my sails. But then a lot of
good would be accomplished, and for me that would be satisfaction enough.

David Horowitz is the president of the David Horowitz Freedom
Center

The Chronicle Review, Volume 53, Issue 12, Page B20.