Academic Freedom Without Limits

Campus Report ^ | January 7, 2008 | Bethany Stotts

[bs9021]

Chicago, Ill- In arranging a series of panels on academic freedom in the classroom, the Modern Language Assocation (MLA) hosted a panel on French and Francophone studies, Chicano literature, and Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transsexual Queer (LGBTQ) issues to discuss barriers to academic freedom. Largely avoiding discussions of students’ academic freedom, the panel argues that, especially among politicized subjects, professors’ academic freedom is threatened by student evaluations, scarce tenure, and even their own professional code of ethics.

Code of Ethics

“Professional ethical standards, in other words, can be put into service when an institution deems fit to curtail academic freedom when it comes to controversial or unpopular issues such as [the Ward Churchill] case,” said Jesse Alemán, a Professor of Chicano Literature at the University of New Mexico (UNM). He argues that there is an inherent conflict between the professional (academic) code of ethics and affiliation with outside communities, and “this is where our ethical responsibility as that small minority of tenured, Ph.D. but colored, might run counter the ethical limits of academic freedom that seek to determine the best behavior of the academic community...”...

As the only speaker on the panel to address student academic freedom, Alemán described it as a strategy by which radicalized students can audit the classroom for race discrimination. “But—and this is my main thesis—we must also foster an open intellectual space for students of color to challenge, critique, and expand on the notions of race that are circulating in the classroom, be it fellow students, course curricula, and reading materials, or the assumptions of even the most well-meaning of them,” he said....

[RightWingConspirator]

Tenure has kept jerks like Ward Churchill around well beyond when they should have been thrown out the door. Also once tenure is achieved, these profs tend to take the RAAF (Retired As Active Faculty) program and many become useless drones.

I say eliminate tenure.

[glide625]

I say eliminate the universities.

[NDNBill]

“dateline Washington, DC. Members of the Modern Language Association, having been kicked out of various military basic training programs, having failed to receive any private industry responses to their one line resumes due to grammer and spelling errors, have settled into the only available positions now open to them by weaseling their way into political indoctrination positions as instructors and professors at colleges and universities where they now recieve huge salaries via government grants. These grants often include subsidies for payment of utility bills, household rent, car insurance and a way of padding their resumes, making them more attractive to various government agencies who are always searching for job applicants who have demonstrated their profound lack of competence in all other fields of endevour.” sarc.

[wintertime]

I say eliminate the universities.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

I agree!

It is now time to thoroughly and completely reform our colleges and universities and/or completely shut them down and create new ones. ( I seriously mean this!) While we are working on this, we should completely shut down our government K-12 schools as well!

From pre-K through graduate school our nation’s education system is one large Marxist dialect indoctrination camp!

A nuclear suit case bomb is never going to destroy freedom. Instead we will become slaves in the voting booth!

[WKB]

(We can survive a nuclear suit case bomb but freedom will not survive if the Marxists succeed in indoctrinating the next generation of voters!)

Why don’t you just make that your
tag line and you won’t have to type it
on every post?