Making the Bad Lady Shut Up

This article is adapted from a previously published piece on abu al-fin blog

In an excellent demonstration of the motto of leftist higher education: "Free speech for me but not for thee," the Chronicle of Higher Education has fired a blogger who was paid to contribute a contrary viewpoint. She was fired for publishing a viewpoint that was too contrary for the comfort of the academics to whom the Chronicle of Higher Education caters.

The Chronicle of Higher Education has fired our former editorial-page colleague, Naomi Schaefer Riley, for a blog posting on the Chronicle's website that offended 6,500 professors. Well, they're not all professors yet, but they are members of what calls itself the "higher-education community," for which the Chronicle is its trade paper. As best we can make out, the Chronicle's editor, Liz McMillen, fired Naomi Riley for doing what she was hired to do—provide a conservative point of view about current events in academe alongside the paper's roster of mostly not-conservative academic bloggers. _WSJ

Ms. Schaefer Riley tells the story from her point of view:

Recently, the Chronicle of Higher Education published a cover story called "Black Studies: 'Swaggering Into the Future,'" in which the reporter described how "young black-studies scholars . . . are less consumed than their predecessors with the need to validate the field or explain why they are pursuing doctorates in their discipline." The "5 Up-and-Coming Ph.D. Candidates" described in the piece's sidebar "are rewriting the history of race." While the article suggested some are skeptical of black studies as a discipline, the reporter neglected to quote anyone who is.

Like me. So last week, on the Chronicle's "Brainstorm" blog (where I was paid to be a regular contributor), I suggested that the dissertation topics of the graduate students mentioned were obscure at best and "a collection of left-wing victimization claptrap," at worst.

For instance, the author of a dissertation on the history of black midwifery began her research, she told the Chronicle, because she "noticed that nonwhite women's experiences were largely absent from natural-birth literature." Another graduate student blamed the housing crisis in America on institutional racism. And a third argued that conservatives like Thomas Sowell, Clarence Thomas and John McWhorter have "played one of the most-significant roles in the assault on the civil-rights legacy that benefited them."

The reaction to my blog post ranged from puerile to vitriolic. The graduate students I mentioned and the senior faculty who advise them at Northwestern University accused me (in guest blogs posted by the Chronicle editors) of bigotry and cowardice. The former wrote that "in a bid to not be 'out-niggered' [their word] by her right-wing cohort, Riley found some black women graduate students to beat up on." (I confess I don't actually know what that means.) One fellow blogger (and hundreds of commenters) called my post "racist."

Gina Barreca, a teacher of English and feminist theory at the University of Connecticut, composed a poem mocking me. (It begins "A certain white chick—Schaefer Riley/ decided to do something wily.") MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry spewed a four-minute rant about my post, invoking the memory of Trayvon Martin and accusing me of "small-mindedness."

Scores of critics on the site complained that I had not read the dissertations in full before daring to write about them—an absurd standard for a 500-word blog post. A number of the dissertations aren't even available. Which didn't seem to stop the Chronicle reporter, though. And 6,500 academics signed a petition online demanding that I be fired.

At first, the Chronicle stood its ground, suggesting that my post was an "invitation to debate." But that stance lasted for little more than a weekend. In a note that reads like a confession at a re-education camp, the Chronicle's editor, Liz McMillen announced her decision on Monday to fire me: "We've heard you," she tells my critics. "And we have taken to heart what you said. We now agree that Ms. Riley's blog posting did not meet The Chronicle's basic editorial standards for reporting and fairness in opinion articles."

When I asked Ms. McMillen whether the poem by fellow blogger Ms. Barreca, for instance, lived up to such standards, she said they were "reviewing" the other content on the site. So far, however, that blogger has not been fired. Other ad hominem attacks against me seem to have passed editorial muster as well. _Naomi Schaefer Riley_in_WSJ

The suppression of free speech on university campuses is being contested on a daily basis by FIRE -- the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. But the suppression of ideas and speech by publications and information outlets is a more difficult enemy to overcome.

Fortunately, the internet provides a number of ways to expose and counteract the grand project of information bias that infiltrates and permeates modern societies.

The Government is Not the Country

My kind of loyalty was to one's country, not to its institutions or its officeholders. The country is the real thing, the substantial thing, the eternal thing; it is the thing to watch over, and care for, and be loyal to; institutions are extraneous, they are its mere clothing, and clothing can wear out, become ragged, cease to be comfortable, cease to protect the body from winter, disease, and death. _Mark Twain_quoted_in_Ain'tNobody'sBusinessIfYouDo

When Al Fin philosophers first discussed this concept, long ago, few persons were able to grasp the idea that a person could be independent of a government or king, a prince or duke, a lord or overseer. The founders of the young American republic discovered the concept, and later popular writers such as Mark Twain helped to propagate the spirit of liberty to later generations. But the idea never truly caught on in Europe, Asia, Africa, or most of South America. Oceanian nations New Zealand and Australia possess a fair share of independence-minded persons, as does Canada. The USA probably contains the most adherents to philosophies of liberty than any other nation -- both in terms of absolute numbers and in proportionate terms.

But the numbers have diminished with the years, and clearly even in the US, there were not enough lovers of liberty to prevent the onslaught of the Obama - Pelosi green reich of dieoff leftist hyper-statism. Personal and economic freedoms are being siphoned off in the name of social justice and environmental justice, and soon Americans may find themselves stripped of their beloved freedoms of speech and association -- just like Europeans, Russians, citizens of Muslim countries, and the Chinese.

The government is not the country. The government derives its powers from the consent of the people. If the government seizes its powers against the consent of the governed, it loses its legitimacy.

Multicultural, multi-ethnic, multi-religious, multi-ideological countries are difficult to govern. The US Constitution is the most sophisticated instrument of government for a pluralistic nation that has yet been devised. Unfortunately, the current government of the US is largely antagonistic toward the very aspects of the US Constitution which provide the vital protections to a nation's pluralism.

Modern governments presume too much, attempt too much, seize too much authority and power. This has almost always been true of governments past a certain size, prior to the US Constitution. Now, even in the US, limits on government are being hammered away by power-hungry despots of unlimited ambition.

The US Tea Party movement is largely despised and reviled by the mainstream media and the pseudo-intelligentsia of academia, politics, and culture. And yet the US Tea Party represents perhaps the last best chance to prevent a massive and irrevocable schism between the slaves-of-the-state and the dwindling but still potent students of liberty.

The incredible economic growth of the US throughout the 19th and 20th centuries illustrated the power of a free people to innovate and produce. As that freedom has been gradually shut down by the growth of the state, the innovation and the ability to produce within the limits of extant technologies, has steadily diminished. Government economic statistics are, of course, not trustworthy -- you must read between the lines and make significant corrections in order to understand the underlying reality.

The government is not the country. Most governments have become over-sized parasites upon the country, and must be cut down to size before they suffocate the life out of the country. How will this "cutting down" be accomplished? That is a good question.

Free Speech in Europe? Fuggedaboudet!

Netherlands legislator Geert Wilders was recently deported from the UK without being allowed to give his scheduled presentation at the House of Lords. Unlike the UK, the US allowed Wilders free access to the country. The following is excerpted from his 23 Feb 2009 speech in NYC.

Thank you very much for inviting me. And – to the immigration authorities – thank you for letting me into this country. It is always a pleasure to cross a border without being sent back on the first plane.

Today, the dearest of our many freedoms is under attack all throughout Europe. Free speech is no longer a given. What we once considered a natural element of our existence, our birth right, is now something we once again have to battle for.

As you might know, I will be prosecuted, because of my film Fitna, my remarks regarding Islam, and my view concerning what some call a ‘religion of peace’. A few years from now, I might be a criminal.

...Today, I come before you to warn of a great threat. It is called Islam. It poses as a religion, but its goals are very worldly: world domination, holy war, sharia law, the end of the separation of church and state, slavery of women, the end of democracy. It is NOT a religion, it is an political ideology. It demands your respect, but has no respect for you.

There might be moderate Muslims, but there is no moderate Islam. Islam will never change, because it is built on two rocks that are forever, two fundamental beliefs that will never change, and will never alter.

...Their disdain of the West is so much greater than the appreciation of our many liberties. And therefore, they are willing to sacrifice everything. The left once stood for women rights, gay rights, equality, democracy. Now, they favour immigration policies that will end all this. Many even lost their decency. Elite politicians have no problem to participate in or finance demonstrations where settlers shout “Death to the Jews”. Seventy years after Auschwitz they know of no shame.

Two weeks ago, I tried to get into Britain, a fellow EU country. I was invited to give a speech in Parliament. However, upon arrival at London airport, I was refused entry into the UK, and sent back on the first plane to Holland. I would have loved to have reminded the audience of a great man who once spoke in the House of Commons. In 1982 President Reagan gave a speech there very few people liked. Reagan called upon the West to reject communism and defend freedom.

...Our enemies should know: we will never apologize for being free men, we will never bow for the combined forces of Mecca and the left. And we will never surrender. We stand on the shoulders of giants. There is no stronger power than the force of free men fighting for the great cause of liberty. Because freedom is the birthright of all man. _AtlasShrugs

Wilders is under 24 hour a day armed guard, particularly when in his home country, The Netherlands. That is the price of free speech for one who wishes to stay alive in Europe today. Pim Fortuyn and Theo van Gogh paid the price for their free speech in Europe. Wilders and Ayaan Hirsi Ali are living under constant threat of Islamic violence, as is the entire continent of Europe.

Update: Wilders in NYC at a small gathering with extended discussion.


From a post at Abu Al-Fin

FIRE Kicks ASS!! See It and Believe It

If you are unfamiliar with FIRE--the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education--you owe it to yourself to watch this new Fire.org video. FIRE works for the type of idea-filled university environment that typifies the ideal for education.

The ideal university is filled with debate, dissent, and heresy--in the best "Freeman Dyson" sense of the word.

If you are a college student, potential student, potential parent of a student, or a college alumnus, you need to be very, very concerned about current campus administrative attitudes toward free speech rights of students and faculty.

FIRE takes on the fascists of higher education head on. And sooner or later, the fascists are going to back down. Every. Time.

FIRE is not the only organisation to champion the rights of free speech on North American campuses, but it is the vanguard non-partisan organisation that will simply not be deterred.

The Decline of US Universities

American Universities suffer from a momentous decline in functionality. Academia suffers from a deep rot that has spilled over into the media and popular culture. Stuart Taylor explains:

the cancerous spread of ideologically eccentric, intellectually shoddy, phony-diversity-obsessed fanaticism among university faculties and administrators is far, far worse and more inexorable than most alumni, parents, and trustees suspect.

Another hyperbolic, conservative rant about liberals in academia? Perhaps I should confess my biases. I do dislike extremism of the Left and of the Right. But I have never been conservative enough to vote for a Republican presidential nominee. And the academics whose growing power and abuses of power concern me are far to the left of almost all congressional Democrats.

...The PC sickness goes far beyond intolerance of dissent. It also has a pervasive effect on course offerings. History departments, for example, offer fewer and fewer traditional courses such as political and diplomatic history, to make room for courses portraying history as a tale of unrelieved oppression of minorities, women, the poor, gays, and everyone else by privileged white males.

Academia's "diversity" obsession is founded on hostility to diversity of opinion. To most academics, "diversity" is a code word for systematic preference of minorities and women over white males in all walks of life. The preferred groups include many faculty members who are manifestly unqualified for their positions and whose websites read like a "Saturday Night Live" parody of wacky professors.

...Over the decades, academic extremists have taken over more and more departments, like cancers metastasizing from organ to organ. For example, the 88 Duke professors who signed a disgraceful April 2006 ad in the school paper spearheading the mob rush to judgment against falsely accused lacrosse players included 80 percent of the African-American studies faculty; 72 percent of the women's studies professors; 60 percent of the cultural anthropology department; and lots of professors in romance studies, literature, English, art, and history.

...Only in American academia could still another elite university -- Cornell -- proudly hire away and tenure a character such as Farred after he had proved himself a malicious buffoon. "We are very enthusiastic about Professor Farred, whose work everyone in this department has long admired," remarked Cornell English Department Chairwoman Molly Hite.

In academia today, a professor who falsely smears his university's students as racists is a hot commodity. And hate means never having to say you're sorry.

National Journal


The dysfunctional intolerance of opinion diversity and dissent by professors and administrators on US campuses requires a firm response. FIRE provides an extremely useful "within the system" response to the monkeys of academia. But merely reminding the perverted princes and princesses of intolerance that their actions and policies must conform to the US Constitution seems too mild a reply to the monkeys. Something more memorable seems called for.

Anyway, there is something about the absolute job security of tenure that appears to make the monkeys reckless and intolerant. Ben Franklin stated that those who trade liberty for security deserve neither. Intolerance should not be provided to professors and administrators who prey on young minds--before their brains have fully matured, and before they have been able to incorporate enough life experience to weigh the ideas of their brainwashers.

We are exposing these intolerant academic monkeys to the public eye, but are their enough effectual persons extant in the public to take proper action?

American Universities Running Scared--Academic Monkeys Don't Want You to Watch This Film!

Why are American Universities trying to prevent the public from looking behind the scenes into campus suppression of free speech? Indoctrinate U. is an indy film produced by young filmmaker Evan Coyne Maloney. But Maloney has been sued by a major US university to prevent him from providing "Indoctrinate U." online. What is it about "free speech" that these academic monkeys cannot understand?

For now, Maloney's earlier film on free speech on campus is available online at Google Video. I will keep the film at the above link as long as Google keeps it online. If you have not seen Indoctrinate U., you can request a viewing at this link.

THEFIRE.ORG is a legal organisation dedicated to defending students' free speech rights. Attorneys at FIRE are accustomed to confronting academics and administrators who are seemingly unaware that the US Constitution applies on campuses. The recent U. Delaware attempt to run concentration/indoctrination camps from within its own student recidence halls is just one example of the egregious abuse of students' rights that universities seem to feel is within their power.



American universities have become bastions of intolerance and indoctrination. Parents who lovingly spend their life savings for a child's education should demand much more from a university than an academic lobotomy and brainwashing. Society should do the same.

The one-sidedness of university administrations and faculty in terms of political/philosophical points of view and financing of extra-curricular activities, lectures, films etc. to students, has crippled the modern students' ability to see more than point of view, or to persuasively argue his own perspective to intelligent and informed persons.

This is the opposite approach to that which universities should adopt. The diversity of ideas is the only form of diversity that is meaningful in education. By restricting students to one perspective, the students have been lobotomised. Too, too bad.

Leftist Intolerance Running Rampant At Universities

The University experience has become more about enforcing ideological purity than about teaching students to think clearly and independently.

The latest conflict in the academy between freedom of expression and ethnic and sexual diversity took place at Vassar College recently when minority students called for the banning of a school newspaper called "The Imperialist" because it criticized the creation of special social centers for minority and gay students.

...As is commonly known, events of this kind have been multiplying at universities over the last decades. The New York Times article that reported the incident reminds us of a low moment in 1997 at Cornell when university administrators defended as "symbolic" speech "the burning of conservative newspapers that printed a provocative article." There have been so many instances of this kind in recent years that an organization called the Foundation for Individual Right in Education (FIRE) was established in the nineties to watchdog campus freedoms.

....the same temperament that issues a fatwa on Salman Rushdie for his Satanic Verses, or threatens Danish cartoonists with death for insulting Islam, animates the American passion, on behalf of political or religious pressure groups, for suppressing offensive speech. People who believe their feelings have been hurt share the same DNA as those who believe their faith has been insulted. Both groups demand or inflict punishment considerably in excess of the original offense.

....But there has also been a continuing tension between the need to speak what is perceived as the truth and the need to protect minority feelings--between the need to achieve excellence (now known as "elitism") and the need to maintain an illusion of egalitarianism (now known as "political correctness")--and this has inevitably led to some kind of speech suppression.

....Given the history of dissent in the academy, one would have expected that university students and university professors would also have cherished these freedoms, and would also have fought to protect them, but that seems to be less and less the case. In the fifties, the liberties of many universities were suspended under pressure of McCarthyism. Today, they are under siege from their own faculties, administrations, and student bodies.

Source

Those who question the frequency and importance of academic intolerance need to spend some time at the FIRE website. Go through the archives and read the details of the many cases FIRE has undertaken.

At one time, academic freedom and free speech on campus were important to leftists. Now it seems more important to leftists to shut down free speech on campus--in an attempt to create groupthink, clone think--the type of thinking that grew and typified the monstrous genocides of Pol Pot, Stalin, Mao, Hitler, and the other social engineers responsible for forced deaths of tens and hundreds of millions.

Given time to grow, leftist intolerance as is seen on modern university campuses would tend to become like those examples. This becomes particularly clear when one observes the growing alliance between leftist groups and islamist groups that support muslim terror. The fact that such alliances appear on the surface to be contradictory and unworkable does not erase their existence. Expediency is a powerful motive, when two apparently conflicting groups share a common enemy.

Academic Bill of Rights--Where to Go from Here

Yesterday I presented the problem of the "indoctrination university"--a place for students to go to be brainwashed rather than to be taught different styles of thinking and viewing the world, so as to be able to forge their own unique style.

The Students for Academic Freedom have published on their site the Academic Bill of Rights, as a guideline for universities who seek to bring open-mindedness back to universities, to replace the politically and philosophically one-sided hyper-bias of current universities in North America.

.....Academic freedom consists in protecting the intellectual independence of professors, researchers and students in the pursuit of knowledge and the expression of ideas from interference by legislators or authorities within the institution itself. This means that no political, ideological or religious orthodoxy will be imposed on professors and researchers through the hiring or tenure or termination process, or through any other administrative means by the academic institution. Nor shall legislatures impose any such orthodoxy through their control of the university budget.

This protection includes students. From the first statement on academic freedom, it has been recognized that intellectual independence means the protection of students – as well as faculty – from the imposition of any orthodoxy of a political, religious or ideological nature. The 1915 General Report admonished faculty to avoid “taking unfair advantage of the student’s immaturity by indoctrinating him with the teacher’s own opinions before the student has had an opportunity fairly to examine other opinions upon the matters in question, and before he has sufficient knowledge and ripeness of judgment to be entitled to form any definitive opinion of his own.” In 1967, the AAUP’s Joint Statement on Rights and Freedoms of Students reinforced and amplified this injunction by affirming the inseparability of “the freedom to teach and freedom to learn.” In the words of the report, “Students should be free to take reasoned exception to the data or views offered in any course of study and to reserve judgment about matters of opinion.” ....

Source.

If you read the ABR carefully at the link above, you will see that it does not call for any type of faculty quota. I will quote from the ABR below so that you can see exactly what is being called for:

1. All faculty shall be hired, fired, promoted and granted tenure on the basis of their competence and appropriate knowledge in the field of their expertise and, in the humanities, the social sciences, and the arts, with a view toward fostering a plurality of methodologies and perspectives. No faculty shall be hired or fired or denied promotion or tenure on the basis of his or her political or religious beliefs.

2. No faculty member will be excluded from tenure, search and hiring committees on the basis of their political or religious beliefs.

3. Students will be graded solely on the basis of their reasoned answers and appropriate knowledge of the subjects and disciplines they study, not on the basis of their political or religious beliefs.

4. Curricula and reading lists in the humanities and social sciences should reflect the uncertainty and unsettled character of all human knowledge in these areas by providing students with dissenting sources and viewpoints where appropriate. While teachers are and should be free to pursue their own findings and perspectives in presenting their views, they should consider and make their students aware of other viewpoints. Academic disciplines should welcome a diversity of approaches to unsettled questions.


5. Exposing students to the spectrum of significant scholarly viewpoints on the subjects examined in their courses is a major responsibility of faculty. Faculty will not use their courses for the purpose of political, ideological, religious or anti-religious indoctrination.



6. Selection of speakers, allocation of funds for speakers programs and other student activities will observe the principles of academic freedom and promote intellectual pluralism.



7. An environment conducive to the civil exchange of ideas being an essential component of a free university, the obstruction of invited campus speakers, destruction of campus literature or other effort to obstruct this exchange will not be tolerated.



8. Knowledge advances when individual scholars are left free to reach their own conclusions about which methods, facts, and theories have been validated by research. Academic institutions and professional societies formed to advance knowledge within an area of research, maintain the integrity of the research process, and organize the professional lives of related researchers serve as indispensable venues within which scholars circulate research findings and debate their interpretation. To perform these functions adequately, academic institutions and professional societies 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.

Many people when first exposed to the concept of intellectual diversity, assume that those who are ideologically being actively excluded from faculties would naturally call for an affirmative action or quota policy, to ensure the inclusion of their own political point of view on faculties. As you can see by reading the Academic Bill of Rights, that is not the case.

Unfortunately, going from the present absurdly skewed and biased system, to a more principled and inclusivist, and less biased, system, will not be easy. The faculty stands ready at the barricades to repel all invaders to their sacred ground of power and indoctrination.

Rationality does not signify here, for these faculty defenders live in the post-modern world, the post-rational world as it were. These will be interesting times on the battlefields of academic freedom. You have to watch the definitions, because in the post modern world, words no longer mean what you think they mean.
:-)See also the website for FIRE--the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education.

Intellectual Diversity on Campus--What Went Wrong?

Universities were never meant to be the indoctrination centers for political correctness they have become. In "The Elusive Goal of Intellectual Diversity," award winning science fiction author Orson Scott Card discusses the current pathetic state of intellectual restrictiveness that is almost universally present on North American university campuses.

....As a friend of mine on the faculty of a western university wrote not long ago, "higher education may have other litmus tests for ideological conformity, but the you-better-believe-in-diversity test is the only one that isn't hidden."

Ironically, the result of this absolute insistence on a commitment to diversity is ... a lack of diversity.

When the administration and faculty have all had to make the same affirmation in order to get their jobs, how likely is it that anyone will use their "academic freedom" to question a doctrine that they have already declared they believe in?

....Here and there, however, students are beginning to rebel against the pious cant that they hear from their relentlessly establishment teachers.

For instance, at Utah State University, student officers voted for an "Academic Bill of Rights." The goal was to "support intellectual diversity" on campus, and it called for such things as:

"Faculty will not use their courses for the purpose of political, ideological, religious, or non-religious indoctrination."

"Selection of speakers, allocation of funds for speakers programs and other student activities will observe the principles of academic freedom and promote intellectual pluralism."

More at Source.

Or take this Chronicle.com oped discussing the Academic Bill of Rights, promoting Intellectual Diversity.

By adopting the Academic Bill of Rights, an institution would recognize scholarship rather than ideology as an appropriate academic enterprise. It would strengthen educational values that have been eroded by the unwarranted intrusion of faculty members' political views into the classroom. That corrosive trend has caused some academics to focus merely on their own partisan agendas and to abandon their responsibilities as professional educators with obligations to students of all political persuasions. Such professors have lost sight of the vital distinction between education and indoctrination, which -- as the AAUP recognized in its first report on academic freedom, in 1915 -- is not a legitimate educational function

Source.

When "search committees" look for new faculty members, they are actually looking for more faculty members who think the same way as the search committe thinks. This leads to monolithic intellectual conformism in a faculty, which harms students' ability to function in the real world.

Former leftist radical turned conservative rabble-rouser David Horowitz has made a cause of intellectual diversity on campus. Recently Horowitz visited Duke University to give a talk on intellectual diversity among faculties. But a professor of women's studies had a surprise waiting for him--a bevy of women students prepared to laugh, heckle, and take off their shirts to distract attendees from Horowitz topic. I wish young women students would do that for me when I give a lecture or talk. That type of distraction I could deal with.

This CFIF commentary gives even more insight into the sad lack of range of intellectual challenge provided for students on the modern PC campus.

College students love to complain about how campuses are removed from "reality," which is generally defined as living in subsidized housing, sleeping on a park bench, or working in a makeshift medical clinic in Africa. But these same students seem completely oblivious to how far removed their campuses are from the rest of the nation’s political discourse. In the country as a whole, Democrats and Republicans are almost evenly split, but studies indicate that academic faculties are often skewed at least 10 to 1 in Democrats’ favor. My law school’s faculty of more than 100 includes only one registered Republican. On many campuses, students are more likely to find a Marxist professor than a conservative professor. It’s not unusual to hear a professor assert that Ronald Reagan systematically and deliberately spread AIDS to homosexuals, or that George W. Bush is not legitimately our president; many professors at my law school quite convincingly contend there is no such thing as a free-market economy and that law itself is completely indeterminate.

The most disturbing aspect of this phenomenon is how students on both sides of the political spectrum — most paying astronomical tuition — are being shortchanged. Schools often structure their curricula around professors’ specialties; thus when liberal thought is so drastically overrepresented, it is bound to overshadow necessary curricula. During most of my terms as an undergraduate, the journalism school I attended offered at least three advanced courses on race, poverty, gender or the evils of the death penalty, but not a single class on editorial writing.

Although many classes attempt to examine issues from both sides, conservative arguments are bound to be less convincing when rarely advanced by anyone who believes them. This is regrettable for both conservative and liberal students — for conservatives because they are not taught the most defensible form of their arguments and for liberals because their own views are not adequately challenged. Sure, students can make an effort to push the envelope themselves, but shouldn’t the bulk of that burden belong on the faculty? After all, they are the ones paid to foster diversity of thought.

Professors with a point of view are not incapable of teaching two sides of an issue — in my experience, many do a remarkable job. But not all professors are so open-minded; some blatantly intend to inculcate students with their political views. For example, last year a Citrus College professor required students to write anti-war letters to President Bush, and a Colorado professor asked students to write an essay explaining why the President was a war criminal. Students who refused or expressed different opinions received no credit. Sometimes professors offer such assignments for extra credit, but is that really a proper option — those who think like me get extra credit, and those who don’t, please keep it to yourself?

Maybe one Berkeley professor had it right in adding to a course description: "conservative thinkers are encouraged to seek other sections." Although the professor later apologized, one can almost appreciate the initial honesty in admitting up front that a course is designed in furtherance of a professor’s point of view.

Source.

This is a fascinating topic that is playing itself out on campuses across america. It is obvious to me that the leftist end of the spectrum has overwhelming control of most university campuses--and intends to consolidate and increase that control. It is up to more level headed minds who are actually concerned about the quality of education modern North American students receive, to attempt to provide more balanced offerings on more and more campuses.

Visit Students for Academic Freedom for more information. Another good resource is FIRE--Foundation for Individual Rights in Education.