[SteveH]

As a conservative who teaches at a pretty liberal campus, I'm concerned when the government gets involved.

This is a red herring. The government is already involved. Academics are simply loathe to admit it. However, do the mental exercise. What happens when an altercation between a prof and a student happens? Naturally, given the imbalance of power, the student is flunked out. The university then encourages the student to perform a "grade appeal." The grade appeal process in most cases is a kangaroo court resulting in a denial of the appeal. The courts are lax in overseeing this area of administrative law-- see Kaplin, William, "A Legal Guide for Student Affairs Professionals" (with Barbara A. Lee) (Jossey-Bass, Inc., 1997). Case law is weighted towards cut and dried cases of academic lack of merit, without regard to invididual student rights, which therefore become devalued since there is no incentive in the courts to uphold them. The universities know this and take advantage of this (most universities taking taxpayer funds in doing so), hence the 'Ward Churchill' phenomenon will become more frequent (not less frequent) with time, unless and until the problem is fixed.

The modern university is no longer a place of higher learning. It is a place in which, by and large from the student perspective, collectivist political indoctrination runs unchecked. This is counter to principles that some may be familiar with-- just to take one example, 'no taxation without representation' comes to mind.

[LS]

Well, you simply have no clue as to how it is on university campuses. First, in ANY confrontation/discrepancy between a student and a prof, you cannot be "flunked out" for disagreeing with a point of view in most cases. I've been involved in LOTS of grade appeals, and 90% of the time, it involves a failure on the professor's part to specify what constitutes a grade. For ex., if a prof says "class participation" is 20%, that's a big problem, because it means agreeing or not agreeing with a prof results in your grade. In those cases---barring other mitigating circumstances---the appeal usually goes with the student.

However, I've found few of these. Usually the case is that a student is over-protected by the parents, chose not to do a majority of the work, then sought an "out" through some flaw in the prof's grading structure. It has never, in my 20 years, been political---on either side.

Now, I admit my little university isn't Vassar or Berkeley---but I did my Ph.D. work at UC Santa Barbara, and found the profs, even the lefties, extremely fair in their grading and class structure. I took a class at Arizona State from one of the leading feminist lefties and even she was fair.

Beware letting the state government decide what is, and what is not, legitimate classroom material. They mean well, but trust me on this: it will result in far more oppression of conservatives than libs. I am pretty much left alone, and even though I'm outnumbered in my department 10 or 12 to one, I more than hold my own. Some other profs spend much of their time trying to refute what I've explained to my students. But that's good. Let 'em.