Academic Rights Bill Wronged

Accuracy in Academia ^ | September 13, 2010 | Malcolm A. Kline

[AccuracyAcademia]

One would think that with the evidence of academic bias stacking up more overwhelmingly by the decade that the higher education establishment would welcome any attempt to introduce a bit of intellectual diversity to their campuses, especially since they claim to be committed to same. Guess again.

“Since the students who hosted me were almost invariably conservative, it was also my custom to ask them how many professors they could identify who were likely to sponsor their group,” author and activist David Horowitz discloses in his latest book. “The question provided me with a rough estimate of the number of conservatives available to counsel and support them.”

“Almost invariably the answer was ‘two or three.’” The dominant faculty Left feels no such constraints.

We’ve usually discovered that they are the source of such inhibitions on an ever diminishing conservative minority. Early in the decade, Horowitz crafted a proposal designed to empower students and “take politics out of the classroom,” an effort he describes in Reforming Our Universities: The Campaign For An Academic Bill Of Rights.

Ultimately, his Academic Bill of Rights (ABOR) was a set of recommendations. Chiefly, ABOR recommends that:

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.