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Posted on 04/07/2005 7:25:42 AM PDT by beyond the sea
Free speech advocate David Horowitz urged Florida legislators Tuesday to pass a bill that would restore freedom of speech on college campuses long dominated by liberal faculties.
"It is not the place of teachers to force conclusions on controversial matters," Horowitz told the House Education Council, according to the Palm Beach Post. "This is not a controversial bill. It has been made controversial by people who have a vested interest in keeping universities as their political platforms."
Crafted by Horowitz and introduced in the Legislature by Rep. Dennis Baxley, the bill seeks to rectify the suppression of conservative thought on Florida's college campuses.
Florida Governor Jeb Bush has expressed support for the bill, calling Horowitz a "fighter for freedom."
"The idea that speech rights are given comfortably to one side but not the other is wrong," Bush told the Post. "Universities need to be sensitive to the fact that some people feel their rights are restricted and they feel isolated."
The bill provides that students should not "be infringed upon by instructors who persistently introduce controversial matter into the classroom that has no relation to the subject of study and serves no [teaching] purpose."
Baxley insists it will protect the rights of conservative Florida college students, some of whom testified Tuesday about prejudices they say they fell victim to at the hands of liberal professors, according to the Post.
"I find it humorous that we are pretending our universities are not bastions of liberal thought," said Baxley, who is the chairman of the House Education committee. "Conservative students have to go underground or face retribution."
Horowitz has been conducting a nationwide campaign to win the right of free speech for students. The Baxley bill is modeled after legislation promoted by his Students for Academic Freedom.
Despite protests by liberals that the nation's colleges and universities are not locked in a stranglehold by far-left faculties, a recent study demonstrated the extent of their domination of most institutions of higher learning.
As reported by NewsMax in the March 29 piece Study Confirms College Profs Are Left-Wing, the study, funded by the Randolph Foundation and appearing in the March issue of the Forum, an online political science journal, found that:
# Seventy-two percent of those teaching at American universities and colleges are liberal and just 15 percent are conservative – by their own description.
# Fifty percent of the faculty members surveyed identify themselves as Democrats and 11 percent as Republicans.
# It's even worse at the nation's most elite schools, where, according to the study, 87 percent of faculty are liberal and 13 percent are conservative.
Jeb also promised to sign a very good gun bill and openly expressed his views on gun ownership and self protection..
Pretty amazing for any politican to state openly what he did
very impressive..
Its a shame, but I'll never be able to take anything Jeb Bush says seriously anymore after his abject cowardice and utter failure to do the right thing during the Terri Schiavo atrocity.
And how would this proported bill be worded such that professors of math and science can require correct answers ?
Pathetic that anyone thinks a legislature can protect students from perceived intimidation attempts. This is another example of the gov thinking it can tell people what to say and not say, even tho they haven't said it yet.
The best defense for these students is to vote with their feet - refuse to take the courses of these professors or to attend these schools. Or remove tenure for professors.
Jeb ... oh I dunno.. he seems like a coward now...
Agreed. I don't know what they plan to do. More smoke, eh.
I'm just wondering how this liberal monopoly on thought on campus can be ended somehoh. I don't see how it can be.
Jeb comes out swinging ...... for David..... but not for Terri?
Honestly, it's hard to understand though what any legislation can do about this bizarre epidemic of college liberalism.
Don't donate to your alma mater. Let them know why.
Don't send your kids to anything but a reliably conservative or balanced school. Or use distance learning/correspondence college courses for a degree.
Let your state legislators know that radical professors should not be supported on your tax dollars. The right-to-life crowd made politicians sensitive to spending tax dollars at places like Planned Parenthood; why can't conservatives do the same against tenured radical college profs ?
Paul Krugman has some thoughts on this....
An Academic Question
It's a fact, documented by two recent studies, that registered Republicans and self-proclaimed conservatives make up only a small minority of professors at elite universities. But what should we conclude from that?
Conservatives see it as compelling evidence of liberal bias in university hiring and promotion. And they say that new "academic freedom" laws will simply mitigate the effects of that bias, promoting a diversity of views. But a closer look both at the universities and at the motives of those who would police them suggests a quite different story.
Claims that liberal bias keeps conservatives off college faculties almost always focus on the humanities and social sciences, where judgments about what constitutes good scholarship can seem subjective to an outsider. But studies that find registered Republicans in the minority at elite universities show that Republicans are almost as rare in hard sciences like physics and in engineering departments as in softer fields. Why?
One answer is self-selection - the same sort of self-selection that leads Republicans to outnumber Democrats four to one in the military. The sort of person who prefers an academic career to the private sector is likely to be somewhat more liberal than average, even in engineering.
But there's also, crucially, a values issue. In the 1970's, even Democrats like Daniel Patrick Moynihan conceded that the Republican Party was the "party of ideas." Today, even Republicans like Representative Chris Shays concede that it has become the "party of theocracy."
Consider the statements of Dennis Baxley, a Florida legislator who has sponsored a bill that - like similar bills introduced in almost a dozen states - would give students who think that their conservative views aren't respected the right to sue their professors. Mr. Baxley says that he is taking on "leftists" struggling against "mainstream society," professors who act as "dictators" and turn the classroom into a "totalitarian niche." His prime example of academic totalitarianism? When professors say that evolution is a fact.
In its April Fools' Day issue, Scientific American published a spoof editorial in which it apologized for endorsing the theory of evolution just because it's "the unifying concept for all of biology and one of the greatest scientific ideas of all time," saying that "as editors, we had no business being persuaded by mountains of evidence." And it conceded that it had succumbed "to the easy mistake of thinking that scientists understand their fields better than, say, U.S. senators or best-selling novelists do."
The editorial was titled "O.K., We Give Up." But it could just as well have been called "Why So Few Scientists Are Republicans These Days." Thirty years ago, attacks on science came mostly from the left; these days, they come overwhelmingly from the right, and have the backing of leading Republicans.
Scientific American may think that evolution is supported by mountains of evidence, but President Bush declares that "the jury is still out." Senator James Inhofe dismisses the vast body of research supporting the scientific consensus on climate change as a "gigantic hoax." And conservative pundits like George Will write approvingly about Michael Crichton's anti-environmentalist fantasies.
Think of the message this sends: today's Republican Party - increasingly dominated by people who believe truth should be determined by revelation, not research - doesn't respect science, or scholarship in general. It shouldn't be surprising that scholars have returned the favor by losing respect for the Republican Party.
Conservatives should be worried by the alienation of the universities; they should at least wonder if some of the fault lies not in the professors, but in themselves. Instead, they're seeking a Lysenkoist solution that would have politics determine courses' content.
And it wouldn't just be a matter of demanding that historians play down the role of slavery in early America, or that economists give the macroeconomic theories of Friedrich Hayek as much respect as those of John Maynard Keynes. Soon, biology professors who don't give creationism equal time with evolution and geology professors who dismiss the view that the Earth is only 6,000 years old might face lawsuits.
If it got that far, universities would probably find ways to cope - by, say, requiring that all entering students sign waivers. But political pressure will nonetheless have a chilling effect on scholarship. And that, of course, is its purpose.
Originally published in The New York Times, 4.5.05
Re: the quasi "liberal" fascist/nazi academic psychopathic left: Excerpt from today's article at indystar.com:
Activist hit by pie at Butler lecture
David Horowitz, president of the Center for the Study of Popular Culture, had just started a lecture at Butler when he was hit by a pie. -- Kevin O'Neal / For The Star
By Kevin O'Neal
kevin.oneal@indystar.com
April 7, 2005
A conservative activist who criticizes what he calls the leftist domination of college campuses was struck with a pie Wednesday night at Butler University.
David Horowitz, president of the Center for the Study of Popular Culture, had just started a lecture at Butler when he was hit.
[...]
P.S. Butler University needs a huge march of Emails from FR!
Re: the quasi "liberal" fascist/nazi academic psychopathic left: Excerpt from today's article at indystar.com:
Activist hit by pie at Butler lecture
David Horowitz, president of the Center for the Study of Popular Culture, had just started a lecture at Butler when he was hit by a pie. -- Kevin O'Neal / For The Star
By Kevin O'Neal
kevin.oneal@indystar.com
April 7, 2005
A conservative activist who criticizes what he calls the leftist domination of college campuses was struck with a pie Wednesday night at Butler University.
David Horowitz, president of the Center for the Study of Popular Culture, had just started a lecture at Butler when he was hit.
[...]
I graduated from Pitt back in '68. It's pretty amazing to hear the stories the past few years from campus about how whacko liberal they have become.
The country is in trouble when two or three generations of this socialist brainwashing takes place. By the time the kids get mugged by life and turn conservative, it may be too late for them and all of us.
That is sheer idiocy by Krugman. (What else is new?)
You hear that all the time, it's just an attempt to discredit and stigmatize the religious right of the Republican party and Republicans in general. Republicans and conservatives, as far as I've seen the past decades, care much more about facts, science, and truth than the Dems./liberals.
Jeb knows he has some serious fence-mending to do with conservatives because of his mishandling of the Schiavo murder. Otherwise his political career is history.
I think it's over, and maybe it should be.
GOOD FOR YOU!!!
Go Jeb and David!
Thanks for the ping.
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