Posted on 01/11/2006 5:54:22 AM PST by SJackson
Before I begin, I want to say that I am honored and grateful to the Committee for inviting me. These hearings are historic in their concern for the health of academic freedom on our college and university campuses, and I thank you for allowing me to participate. But I also want to express my concern about statements that have been made by some members of this Committee which raise a question as to whether those members are actually interested in what I and others who have come before this committee have to say, or whether they think this is all just a “colossal waste of time,” and a “hunt for Bigfoot.”
These comments were made at the very first session of these hearings and they have been repeated to reporters since then. The comment about the hearings being a “waste of time” was actually made at the conclusion of testimony by David French, who is one of the nation’s leading advocates for the First Amendment rights of college students. David French testified that all but two of the public universities of Pennsylvania, with a collective student body of well over a hundred thousand, have instituted regulations that violate the constitutional rights of every one of those students. I am sure that most members of this committee will be concerned about protecting the constitutional rights of Pennsylvania students in institutions funded by the taxpayers of this state. I am sure they will agree that ensuring that those rights are protected is not a waste of time.
In his testimony, David French described a free speech case at Shippensburg University which he successfully litigated and in which the court found that Shippensburg administrators had indeed violated the Constitution with their speech code. The identical speech code – word for word – is incorporated in the administrative regulations of other Pennsylvania institutions of higher learning for which this legislative body is responsible. In other words, not only have the administrators of Pennsylvania universities violated the law in the first place, but they have continued to do so even when the courts have ruled against them on the issue. I am sure that most members of this committee will regard this as a serious matter and not a waste of the committee’s time.
The most pressing matter for this committee to examine is the failure of the administrators of Pennsylvania’s institutions of higher learning to respect and observe federal and state law and their own regulations pertaining to the academic freedom of their students.
The committee could well begin the business of remedying this situation by attending to David French’s observation that no state university in Pennsylvania ever informs its students of their basic rights in regard to academic freedom. The committee will have done a good day’s work if it persuades the administrators of Pennsylvania’s institutions of higher learning to inform Pennsylvania students of their basic rights in regard to academic freedom.
It is not a waste of time for legislators to be concerned when Pennsylvania institutions of higher learning consciously restrict the rights of more than a hundred thousand Pennsylvania students and violate their constitutional guarantees. Nor is it a waste of time for legislators to be concerned when academic administrators continue to do so even when apprised by the courts of their violations.
At the Pittsburgh session of these hearings, National Association of Scholars president Stephen Balch presented lengthy testimony detailing the violations of academic freedom by Pennsylvania public universities. Balch identified entire academic departments that are engaged in advocacy and indoctrination rather than education. He presented to the committee university hiring profiles that specify that a candidate be politically correct – for example that they advocate “social justice” which is a generally recognized code for socialism. It is a violation of state and federal law to hire or fire individuals on the basis of their political beliefs, yet many Pennsylvania institutions of higher learning do exactly that. These are disturbing realities that should be of pressing concern to a committee that represents the voters and taxpayers of this state in matters of education.
I apologize for the candor of these opening remarks but the seriousness of the circumstances, in my view, make them necessary. I do not intend to waste the time of this committee. My testimony will show that individual professors, individual courses, entire departments, and university-wide programs at Temple University violate standard academic freedom guidelines, including Temple University’s own academic freedom guidelines. Moreover, Temple administrators cannot be unaware of these violations, yet do nothing to correct them.
My name is David Horowitz. I am a well-known author and media commentator and am the president of the Center for the Study of Popular Culture, a non-profit supported by the contributions of 40,000 individuals. I am the creator of a national organization called Students for Academic Freedom which has chapters on 150 campuses nationwide, including several in the state of Pennsylvania. I am also the author of the Academic Bill of Rights, which has already changed the educational policies of Colorado, Ohio and Tennessee, and which has been grossly misrepresented before your committee by the representatives of the American Association of University Professors, the Provost of the University of Pittsburgh and others. I will return to this issue in a moment.
In the course of the last twenty years I have spoken on over 300 campuses and have personally interviewed several thousand students concerning the academic freedom issues we are here to discuss. Among Pennsylvania campuses I have visited are the University of Pennsylvania (three times), Penn State, Penn State Worthington, Duquesne Law, Villanova, West Chester, Lehigh, Swarthmore (twice) and Dickinson.
The Academic Bill of Rights is a codification of existing academic freedom policies whose spirit is embraced by all modern research universities and most colleges – private and public -- in the United States. My bill differs from these existing guidelines only in that it specifically recognizes the academic freedom rights of students.
Under the present system, academic freedom has been interpreted to mean mainly the protection of faculty – with which I have no quarrel. Existing academic freedom templates are written primarily in terms of the protection of the intellectual freedom of professors on the one hand and on the other the responsibilities of professors to behave professionally and in a manner that does not violate the academic freedom of students. The change I have proposed is that where faculty is said to have responsibilities, students should be said to have rights. In other words, if a professor is instructed by university guidelines not to introduce partisan politics into the classroom -- as professors at Temple University are -- I believe this should also be regarded as a student right. And every student should be made aware of his or her right in this matter. Students should have a right to have their professors behave professionally and not behave as political salesmen in the classroom. But many of them, and an increasing number of them, now do.
At the November 10 hearings of this committee, Provost James Maher, of the University of Pittsburgh, testified that he was concerned about the Academic Bill of Rights. Provost Maher is obviously an intelligent and dedicated civil servant with the best academic intentions. Nonetheless Provost Maher misrepresented the Academic Bill of Rights beyond recognition in his testimony. Provost Maher testified that the “[Academic] Bill of Rights “would create a situation where every course that raised an issue that was controversial would have to give essentially equal weight to every viewpoint” [p. 26 l. 11-16.]. Obviously this would make teaching impossible. But the Academic Bill of Rights says nothing of the kind. Provost Maher’s characterization is false. The Academic Bill of Rights does not insist that all points of view be represented. Instead, it says, in so many words, that “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 ideological, religious or anti-religious indoctrination.”
The meaning of this text could not be clearer. On issues that are controversial, professors should make students aware of the existence of more than one scholarly view – with the emphasis on scholarly. Not all views. Just more than one. And it should be a scholarly view. Not all views are worthy of attention and the Bill takes specific note of this. The clear intent of the Bill is that students should not be left with the idea that a professor’s perspective on controversial issues in the humanities or the social sciences must be taken as a gospel. I’m sure everyone on this committee would agree with that. Even those who think this is all a waste of time.
Provost Maher’s false impression of the Academic Bill of Rights is the result of a nation-wide campaign against the Bill, which has been conducted by professor-unions, like the American Association of University Professors, who are intent on defending the status quo. This campaign has been exceptionally dishonest relying not on reasoned disagreement with the reforms the Bill is proposing, but on misrepresenting them as something they are not. For example: Contrary to what has been asserted to this committee by hostile witnesses, the Academic Bill of Rights would not impose legislative control of academic decisions; it would not give students equal rights with teachers; it would not ban controversy from the classroom and it would not force teachers to teach unscholarly, unscientific points of view like Holocaust denial or Intelligent Design. All these charges have been made against the Academic Bill of Rights before this committee. All of these claims are demonstrably false.
The Academic Bill of Rights can be simply summarized as an effort to restore the principles that the academic profession has traditionally honored but in all too many cases no longer observes -- as the testimonies by David French, Stephen Balch and Steven Zelnick have amply demonstrated. The Academic Bill of Rights is furthermore an attempt to express and codify as student rights what are already recognized as faculty responsibilities in regard to academic freedom.
The Academic Bill of Rights has already had a positive impact not only on legislatures, but on the universities themselves. It has prompted the American Council on Education, for example, to adopt a new and welcome policy statement on academic freedom. The American Council on Education is a national organization that represents all the state and private universities in Pennsylvania. On June 23, 2005, the American Council on Education issued a new statement of principles on academic freedom. I would like to read to you a brief description of this event which appeared in the October-December issue of The Presidency, a magazine for university presidents. It was written by Kermit Hall – who is a Professor of History and also the president of the Albany campus of the State University of New York:
In June 2005, the American Council on Education and 27 other higher education organizations issued the Statement on Academic Rights and Responsibilities. The Statement was a pragmatic response by the higher education establishment to the escalating challenge posed by its neo-conservative critics and their most ardent advocate, David Horowitz.. … Horowitz is … the chief architect of the Academic Bill of Rights, a document designed to protect college students from becoming victims of political intolerance. While Horowitz’s name does not appear in either the statement or in the press materials that accompanied its release, he was the ghost at this banquet.[1]
The article goes on to say that the health and credibility of universities depend on their ability to respond to the challenges raised by the Academic Bill of Rights and the movement it represents. I quote: “Only when higher education is willing to address squarely the question of whether there is a political imbalance in faculties, one-sided course readings and campus speaking events, or the existence of an oppressive campus orthodoxy, will we command full legitimacy.” Those are the words of President Hall. That is what we are discussing in these hearings, which if conducted in good faith and wisely, will serve to strengthen academic institutions throughout this state.
The American Council statement declares that “intellectual diversity is central to a higher education,” and further that there should be no political discrimination against students, and finally that there should be grievance machinery for students who feel they have been discriminated against. One easy step that this committee could take to strengthen the public institutions of higher learning in this state would be to recommend that they implement the recommendations of the American Council on Education.
Temple University is itself a member of the American Council on Education. But it has done absolutely nothing to implement this academic freedom policy. That is why your committee has been created. That is why legislation – perhaps merely in the form of a resolution expressing the will of the legislature -- is needed to remind universities like Temple of its responsibilities to the citizens of this state. If, as trustees of the state system of higher education in Pennsylvania, you fail to act in this matter, the good intentions of the American Council on Education will remain just that – intentions, and Pennsylvania’s institutions of higher learning will be the weaker and the worse for it.
Can legislation regarding academic freedom work without interfering with university governance? This is a question that has been put to this committee with a resounding answer in the negative. But in fact there is already legislative oversight of universities in Pennsylvania with which those who raise this objection -- the opponents of HR 177 and the Academic Bill of Rights -- have no quarrel. Laws like U.S. Title IX restrict universities that receive federal funding concerning whom they admit as students, whom they appoint as professors, and which programs they must discontinue, based on sex discrimination. Racial discrimination and sexual harassment laws tell universities what kind of attitudes members of the academic community can and cannot display towards certain minorities and women; all are already on the books. All these regulations require hundreds of millions of university dollars, in the aggregate, to enforce; and all have been supported by the opponents of HR 177 and the Academic Bill of Rights. It seems that government intervention is good when it comes to securing some rights and some freedoms, but not intellectual rights and intellectual freedoms.
The fact is that all the legislation we, as proponents of academic freedom and intellectual diversity, have proposed thus far has been in the form of resolutions, not statutory requirements. If there is goodwill on the part of university administrators, resolutions will suffice. For example, in the Ohio Senate, a resolution (Senate Bill 24) was introduced to implement provisions of the Academic Bill of Rights. The legislators sponsoring the resolution were then approached by the Inter-University Council of Ohio, representing the 17 largest private and public universities in the state. The universities wanted to know if the legislative sponsors would withdraw their bill if the universities would sign an agreement to implement the statement on academic freedom issued by the American Council on Education.
The legislative sponsors of Senate Bill 24 said yes, and the statement was signed. In order to ensure that the agreement is actually implemented, we are now urging the Ohio Senate to create a committee similar to the one that has been created in Pennsylvania. This is a reasonable way to fix a serious problem without injuring the independence of the universities. Similar agreements have been made that affect the entire public higher education system of Colorado.
Now to the situation at Temple. Temple University has an official Academic Freedom Policy. It is based in its entirety on the 1940 Statement on the Principles of Academic Freedom and Tenure of the American Association of University Professors. Unfortunately, Temple University is typical of the public universities in this state in that it does not enforce its own policy. It is also typical in that its academic freedom policy is stated exclusively in terms of the rights and obligations of professors and does not mention the rights of students.
This committee could pass a resolution urging Temple administrators to remedy this omission. All state universities and colleges in Pennsylvania should codify student academic freedom rights, and all university administrators should take their academic freedom policies seriously.
Here is the preamble to the Temple Policy on Academic Freedom:
1. Academic Freedom
All members of the faculty, whether tenured or not, are entitled to academic freedom as set forth in the 1940 Statement On Principles of Academic Freedom and Tenure by the Association of American Colleges and the American Association of University Professors as follows.
The handbook then quotes the three paragraphs of the 1940 AAUP statement. This is Temple’s academic freedom policy. One of the three paragraphs specifically addresses the issue of academic freedom in the classroom. Its words are identical to statements in the academic freedom policies of the University of Pittsburgh and Penn State University. I quote:
Teachers are entitled to freedom in the classroom in discussing their subject, but they should be careful not to introduce into their teaching controversial matter which has no relation to their subject.
This principle is violated every day on every campus in this state, and at Temple University specifically. I can say this with confidence because I have interviewed at least a hundred students in this state and every one of them has been in a class or in several classes in which their professors have railed against George Bush, the war in Iraq, and the policies and attitudes of Republicans and conservatives. This may be a small sample in absolute terms, but the fact that a hundred percent of the sample has been subjected to proselytizing by professors in the classroom is telling. Many professors seem to find it necessary to make speeches against the Bush Administration in classes whose subject matter is not American presidents, the administration of George Bush, or the war in Iraq. During the last election season these violations of academic freedom became epidemic, yet I am not aware of a single case where a university administration has stepped in to correct these abuses or even to re-state the academic freedom policy of the university itself and thus to remind professors and students that under existing Temple guidelines this is not appropriate classroom discourse for Temple faculty.
Here is a comment taken from an interview we conducted with a Temple student: “The Chairman of the History Department, who is my adviser, told me during advising that ‘If Bush gets re-elected we will have a fascist country.’ He [told me] he will be scared for his survival and will consider possibly moving to Canada. That’s scary coming from a history professor.”
It is also entirely unprofessional. This student was in his adviser’s office for a “graduation review” – that is, for advice on the courses he needed to complete his major and graduate. This particular student also observed in the interview: “All the professors had Kerry [election] signs on their [office] doors…. Every single door to the offices, all the professors had a Kerry sign….We also have ‘God Is Not A Republican’ signs all over campus.”
Several members of this committee have asked administrators testifying before it how many complaints they have received from students about problems like this, and whether in fact there have been any such complaints. The administrators couldn’t think of one. I ask you to consider whether if you were a political science student at Temple and a Republican, and went to your adviser’s office, who happened to be the chairman of the department, and heard him say in a totally inappropriate context that if George Bush were re-elected we would have a fascist country, and if you saw on every one of your professors’ office doors an “Elect John Kerry” sign, whether you would take steps to complain publicly about these facts. Would you decide to go over their heads to a Dean or Provost? My guess is that like most students you would grin and bear it and get on with your academic career. The same would be true of a Democrat student in an academic environment where all signs and all political expressions by people in authority were Republican, and where your faculty adviser said that if John Kerry were elected President, the terrorists would soon be in our backyard.
I view this issue in a personal way. I went to Columbia University in the McCarthy Fifties. My parents were Communists and I wrote my school papers from a Marxist point of view. Yet I was never singled out as a Communist the way conservative students are regularly singled out by their professors. In fact, I don’t ever remember a professor expressing a political point of view in any class I ever had. I am grateful to my Columbia professors for their professionalism and wish that all students would have the same educational privilege of academic neutrality that I had. I hope you will urge Pennsylvania’s institutions of higher learning to give their students a fair shake as well.
As Stephen Balch testified to this committee, state universities in Pennsylvania (as elsewhere) spend tens of millions of dollars each year, and do so every year, to inform their students that sexual and racial diversity are fundamental university values and that harassment on the basis of gender and race will not be tolerated. They insert these values into orientation sessions; they put them into student handbooks, and prepare literature to inform students about them. But these same universities do not spend a single penny on promoting the value of intellectual diversity – even though the American Council on Education has called this “central to a higher education,” and even though somewhere buried in faculty handbooks on most university websites lip service is paid to this core principle of academic freedom.
This committee will do a great service to the intellectual health of colleges and universities in its charge if it will make a report recommending that these universities appropriate sums for programs that will foster intellectual diversity on their campuses comparable to those they already spend on racial and gender diversity. Additionally, you could recommend that universities amend their diversity mandates, which now cover race and gender, to include “diversity based on political and religious affiliation.”
It is not only students who are in the dark about the academic freedom rights of students. Dean Brown of California University, which is part of the Pennsylvania state system, testified to this committee that the injunction to professors not to persistently introduce controversial matter that has no relation to the subject is a problem for him. What Dean Brown said is this “The questionable part of House Resolution 177 is that it specifies that faculty may not introduce controversial subjects when they’re inappropriate, but it gives no mechanism or means for determining who gets to say what is controversial.” (p. 111, l. 1-6)
Dean Brown is a thoughtful and informed university administrator. Yet he is completely unaware that the statement about not introducing controversial matter irrelevant to the subject is quoted verbatim from the 1940 Statement of Principles of Tenure and Academic Freedom of the American Association of University Professors, or that it is a core principle of most universities in the state of Pennsylvania including Penn State and – as we have already seen – Temple, and has been for decades. Moreover, Dean Brown’s statement shows that he does not understand the principle, which does not say that all controversial matter is inappropriate to a classroom, but that controversial matter which is irrelevant to the subject is inappropriate to the classroom, as for instance telling your students that George Bush is a fascist or the war in Iraq is wrong, in a class that is not about the Bush presidency or the war in Iraq.
Dean Brown’s ignorance of the academic freedom principles of his own university reflects widespread ignorance of these principles among university administrators. Since Dean Brown obviously discussed his presentation with the President of California University and no doubt its legal counsel, this indicates that the entire administration at California University is ignorant on this matter. Since no administrator has even commented on the numerous violations of this principle during the last presidential election and the war in Iraq, it is probable that almost no one in the administrations or on the faculties of the Pennsylvania state system is aware that students have the right – according to their own regulations – not to have their professors inflict on them controversial opinions that have no relation to the subject matter of their classes.
Nor is this just a Pennsylvania problem. In the state of Ohio, the entire public campaign against the Academic Bill of Rights was waged on the basis of exactly this misinterpreted sentence about controversial matter that is irrelevant to the subject being taught. The ACLU and the AAUP and the NEA and the AFT all said this language would restrict professors’ speech – as though this restriction on professors’ speech were not a self-imposed professional discipline already enshrined in the academic freedom guidelines of every major university in Ohio. In fact, the Cleveland Plain Dealer ran a headline “Legislators Seek to Restrict Professors Speech.”[2] The reference was to the same sentence in Senate Bill 24 about controversial matter irrelevant to the subject, which was taken verbatim from the 1940 AAUP guidelines and which is inscribed in those very words in the academic freedom guidelines of nine of the eleven public Ohio universities. This is how badly the opposition has misrepresented our modest proposals for academic reform.
The problem we are facing in our universities is that they have lost sight of their own professional responsibilities. When HR 177 gently reminds them of those responsibilities they attack HR 177, even though the responsibilities are specified in the regulations of their own policy handbooks. This committee’s task, like that of HR 177, is to issue a wake-up call to the colleges and universities in this state to become aware of their responsibilities – to take a look at their academic freedom guidelines and begin observing them.
At the November 9th hearings of this committee, Representative Lynn Herman, whose district includes Penn State University, asked Stephen Balch about the Penn State policy governing academic freedom, which is even more forceful and precise than the Temple policy. Allow me to quote a part of the policy: “No faculty member may claim as a right the privilege of discussing in the classroom controversial topics outside his/her own field of study. The faculty member is normally bound not to take advantage of his/her position by introducing into the classroom provocative discussions of irrelevant subjects not within the field of his/her study.”
Representative Herman wanted evidence that this policy is not being enforced at Penn State. This is a reasonable and important question, and I will answer it. As I mentioned earlier, I have visited the Penn State campus and interviewed students there, and I can state with confidence that the professors at Penn State do introduce controversial issues into their classrooms, when they have no relevance to the subject matter, with the purpose of advocating one side of these issues.
Here are two testimonies we received in writing from two different students at Penn State:
I’m taking a Women Studies class because I thought it’d be a good class to take. Yesterday I was in class and people were giving presentations about women’s issues and one group decided to do abortion. The next thing I know, we’re spending the whole period learning about how abortion should be completely legal and that it’s a good thing for society to abort babies and that people need to learn how to say the word “abortion” because women should be proud of the fact that they’ve had one. The professor made us start chanting “abortion, abortion,” and to be honest, I started to cry. There was no place in that class for my pro-life opinion. The one time I did raise my hand to say that I disagreed with abortion and that it shouldn’t be shoved down my throat, the professor completely cut my opinion down and said that people like me shove their beliefs down their throats and are keeping women down, etc. etc. I don’t get how I’m shoving my opinion down their throats when they’re making me chant “abortion” at 9 am. – Kelly Keelan
Here is the second statement:
I had a professor in a Biology Science class, which has absolutely nothing to do with politics, go off on a 20-minute lecture about how Bush was a horrible president and had misled the people and that if I supported the war in Iraq, I was a bad, ignorant person. - Anonymous.
Some Penn State instructors appear to think that there is no difference between education and indoctrination. Here is a statement from the official website of a sociology instructor at Penn State: “I’m open about bringing my ideology into this classroom because I see that all educational systems are ideological to the core.” This instructor is the co-director of the Race Relations Project at Penn State and teaches Sociology 119, which is called “Race and Ethnic Relations.” Yet, on his academic website he boasts that, “I never seriously studied race or ethnicity while in college, and I never took an undergraduate or graduate course in the topic.”
Is this the standard of professionalism and Penn State?
I do not expect the committee to rely on my testimony alone on an issue as important as whether professors abuse their authority in the classroom to advance their non-academic agendas. The question the committee should ask is why isn’t the university itself interested in finding out the answer to this question? In areas like gender and race, the universities are aggressively urging their student bodies to become aware of the issues of racial and gender diversity and to bring such problems to the appropriate grievance committees they have created. Why aren’t they doing this in regard to intellectual diversity and students’ academic freedom?
Many universities have professor evaluation forms for students to fill out in regard to their professors’ performances in class. Why not add the categories of respect for intellectual diversity and the observance of professional standards in regard to controversial issues in the classroom? I urge this committee to recommend the adoption of such evaluation forms for all public Pennsylvania universities.
To continue reading this testimony, click here.
Notes:
[1] Kermit Hall, “A Cautionary Tale on Academic Rights and Responsibilities," The Presidency, October-December 2005.
[2] Reginald Fields, "Legislator Wants Law to Restrict Professors," 02/20/05.
The organization Students for Academic Freedom has created a website at www.studentsforacademicfreedom.org with a bulletin board where students can post complaints about their classes and professors can respond. Here is a complaint from a Temple student about a course in the English Department. Remember this is listed in the Temple catalogue as a course in English literature:
This professor always had something negative to say not only about the Bush Administration, but about conservatives in general. She stated on one occasion that it is impossible to be a moral capitalist. She stated that the US does not have the right to say anything about the Taliban’s record of oppressing women because the US oppresses women too. She said that Communism and Capitalism are the same thing. On one occasion, I began to feel physically sick from her misrepresentation of facts, and on numerous occasions I stood up to her and tried to advocate my opinion. She’d cut me off in mid-argument.
Here is a teacher using an English class to express her personal political prejudices. This is a form of consumer fraud, since this professor has no professional expertise in the subjects she is addressing and since the course is not billed as a course in capitalism or the oppression of women. It is a violation of the academic freedom of her students.
Here are some random posts from Temple students at the Internet site www.RateMyProfessor.com which reflect similar disregard for Temple’s own Academic Freedom Policy.
In regard to a Middle Eastern History course a student wrote:
· We learned NOTHING about the Middle East. All [the professor] did was talk about political economy and liberalism.
In regard to an English professor a student wrote:
· Extreme liberal feminist. During class discussions, she’ll shoot down what you say if it disagrees with her views.
This is an English class, not a class in Women’s Studies.
In regard to a political science class a student wrote:
· A girl in our class lost her uncle in the 9/11 attack. [The professor] insulted her uncle, student started crying, then she kicked her out of the classroom. This was a week after 9/11. No joke.
In regard to an English professor a student wrote:
· She’s always in a bad mood and isn’t open to hearing your opinion, so don’t bother giving it (unless you're anti-bush b/c then you're her best friend). She is Anti-Bush big time.
This is an English literature class, not a class in politics.
In regard to an anthropology course a student wrote:
· Had to change my conservative standpoint on the final paper to save my grades. Got an A for writing a liberal paper, which I still don’t believe in. How’s that for college?
Incidents like these don’t take place unless there is a university culture supporting them. That is why academic freedom policies protecting students from political indoctrination have to be stated, and codified as student rights, and enforced. Since the university administrations at Temple and elsewhere in the state have failed to do this, it is the responsibility of the legislature, which funds these institutions, to see they honor these already established principles by implementing them.
On the other hand, Temple's Academic Freedom Policy is itself deficient. It does not even mention the principle of intellectual diversity, which the American Council on Education has called “central to a higher education.” We hope this Committee will insist that Temple University – and all state universities and colleges in Pennsylvania -- embrace and implement the principle of intellectual diversity, which is essentially what academic freedom is about. HR177 explicitly states that “Academic freedom is likely to thrive in an environment of intellectual diversity….” But Temple University’s policy does not include a statement like this, and its academic programs regularly violate the principle.
For instance, Temple provides a “writing-intensive two course sequence” called “Intellectual Heritage” which is required of all Temple students and which includes a focus on Enlightenment, Romantic and Revolutionary Thinkers. The Revolutionary Thinkers include Darwin, Marx and Freud. Professors involved in the course have posted guides for students on a department webpage called “Faculty Perspectives on Marx.”[1] Most of the faculty guides provided on this webpage are explications of Marx’s writings without critical comment. In all I counted about 30 sample exam and study questions provided by the professors relating to Marx. Every one of them prompts the students to explain what Marx said in the way you would expect students to explain the theories of a scientist like Isaac Newton, whose hypotheses were established by real world experiments that proved them valid, and have been confirmed by scientists ever since.
Here is a sample guideline suggested by one Intellectual Heritage Professor: “Marx presents an astute understanding and critique of Capitalism. Is it convincing?” The question does not say, “Marx analyzed capitalism. Is his analysis convincing?” This so-called question tells the student what to think: Marx wrote a wise critique of capitalism. Are you convinced? What if you’re not convinced, and suppose you encountered the question on an exam. Are you going to contradict your professor and risk a possible repercussion to your grade?
This is not education; it is indoctrination.
Not one of the faculty-provided guide questions asks students to consider that all economies run by Marxists have failed – and have failed catastrophically. Marxist regimes have caused the economic impoverishment of billions of people. They have produced man-made famines and human suffering on an unprecedented scale. Yet, insofar as I could discern, not one professor contributing to the Temple Intellectual Heritage Department website has bothered to mention this. Not one.
In fact, the chairman of the Political Science Department, who has provided an extensive study guide for students on the Intellectual Heritage Department website, explicitly denies that the acts committed in the name of Marx have anything to do with Marx or his ideas. “The collapse of authoritarian communism,” he writes, “means the death of Marxist-Leninism [which] has little to do with classical Marxism.” This would be news to Vladimir Lenin. Nonetheless, the professor has a point which is a legitimate one – that Marx thought socialism would occur in developed capitalist societies. But Marx also wrote that backward Russia might be the first country to implement his ideas. The point is that these are controversial issues, and yet what the Temple faculty has done – as reflected on this website -- is to remove the controversy from the curriculum and present a one-sided view of Marx which fails to make students aware that there are very different alternative views.
The faculty treatments of Marx on the Intellectual Heritage Department website lack the basic apparatus of academic inquiry. No critical literature on Marx and Marxism is offered. There is no confrontation with the most serious question that a thinker like Marx poses, since his ideas have had a vast and vastly destructive impact on the history of mankind, namely, did these ideas lead directly to the murder of 100 million human beings and the poverty of billions? Judging from the Intellectual Heritage webpages, Temple students are not even aware that this question needs to be asked.
This is not education; it is indoctrination.
To be fair, Professor Stephen Zelnick who teaches this course has provided a guide which indicates how capitalist societies have responded to Marx’s challenge in a way that reflects positively on their flexibility, and negatively on Marx’s analysis.[2] Professor Marc Stier has also provided a guide-page called “Failure of Revolutions” which faces the fact that Marx’s predictions about revolution have been refuted by history. But this is the way Professor Stier sets up his discussion and defines how it will proceed:[3] “We can understand the failure of a revolution to occur as Marx predicted in Marx’s terms. The conditions that Marx expected to bring about a revolution did not arise. And we can give a powerful social class based explanation of the failure of those conditions to arise.”
In other words, even though Marx was wrong, he was right, and we can all be Marxists – or neo-Marxists – now.
This is not education; it is indoctrination.
An education would include the question “If Marx failed to foresee the conditions he predicted would end capitalism correctly, might not his entire theory of capitalism be false, including the “powerful social class based explanations” of capitalism he offered? If you are a political ideologue this is not a question you want to ask. But if you are an academic it is a question you must ask.
One explanation for the missing question lies in the guideline provided by the Political Science Department chairman on this website. “One of the main problems in studying Karl Marx,” he explains, “is that most contemporary theorists interpret Marx in their way -- the point is to interpret Marx in his way.” In other words, students are to approach Marx not as critics of Marx but as students of Marx.
This is not education; it is indoctrination.
Think about the statement the Political Science Department chairman made about the irrelevance of the collapse of Communism for Marxism. His explanation is that Marxist revolutions took place in the wrong countries – countries that were not democratic and not economically developed -- and therefore Marx is not responsible for the application of his ideas. That Marxist socialism -- state control of the economy -- might lead inevitably to totalitarian regimes does not even occur to this professor and is not a question his students will ever be asked to consider.
Indeed, if a student were to raise this question independently, he might very well get an “F” from this professor. Because to raise this question – even in the face of 100 million dead from Moscow to Addis Ababa – is, in the view of the Chairman of the Political Science Department at Temple, “not to understand Marxism,” because classical Marxism has no relation to what was done in its name.
This is not education; it is indoctrination.
The Intellectual Heritage program is not the only Temple sequence that fails to observe basic academic guidelines. The First-Year Writing Program at Temple describes itself as having been designed “to provide Temple students with a comprehensive experience of writing to learn and learning to write.” Because it is intended as a course to teach students the basics of English composition it is provided by the English Department. The one year course is covered by “English 40” and “English 50” and is taught mainly by graduate students in English whose professional expertise is the English language and literature.
However, the First-Year Writing Program also has an ideological agenda which has nothing to do with expertise in the English language. This is the “writing to learn” part of the course. Its goal is to indoctrinate students in radical views on gender, and to a lesser extent on race. Nor is this agenda concealed from Temple administrators or the students themselves. The First-Year Writing Program handbook clearly states: “English 40 focuses on writing within a single theme (gender) and disciplinary approach.” (English 50 adds a research component to the theory provided in English 40). In fact a few sections, called English 40R, have an explicitly racial theme, which fulfills a university requirement that all Temple students take a course in race.
Professor Steven Zelnick was a director of this program. In his testimony before this committee, Professor Zelnick noted the concern of one opponent of the requirement who thought “that since so many sections would be required to accommodate the entire student body, teaching would end up in the hands of graduate students who were likely to be angry and inexperienced in teaching and especially in teaching difficult material to a captive and possibly resentful audience.” Professor Zelnick testified, “That prediction has come to pass, unfortunately, and sections are now taught by inexperienced instructors who have abused their assignment."
The approved required texts for the First-Year Writing program are ideological texts whose agenda is to articulate and defend the views on gender held by radicals in general and by radical feminists and race theorists in particular, even though some allowance is made for other views.[4]
From the perspective of academic freedom, there are two things strikingly wrong with this course, which is required of all Temple students. The first is that it is unprofessional. English teachers are not experts in the sociology of gender or race. The official course handbook for the English composition sequence candidly acknowledges the complexity of its subject: “We will be using gender [and gender roles in American culture]…because it is both relatively simple (everybody has one) and extremely complex in terms of how gender impacts people’s lives and identities, feelings, and behaviors.” But if this is an extremely complex subject, why is it being taught by amateurs who have no professional training in the subject, and why do the readings overwhelmingly reflect one side of what is a controversial issue?
This is not education; it is indoctrination.
An education would first of all stick to the subject. If the task is to teach students how to write, the texts should be composed of writers who know how to write, not writers picked for their political views on race and gender. Professionalism is at the heart of the academic freedom issue. Professors are granted tenure because they have developed an expertise in a field of knowledge. This is why they have lifetime jobs: Because tenure protects their freedom to pursue inquiries in their area of expertise. But when English instructors pontificate on the war in Iraq or the sociology of gender they are not sharing their expertise. They are sharing their ignorance and their prejudice and that is all. This is a form of consumer fraud, which is being practiced on the students at Temple and the taxpayers of this state. I hope the committee will look into this issue and consult with Temple administrators on how to remedy it.
Another university-wide program administered by Temple, which fails to meet the most basic test of intellectual diversity and academic professionalism, is the Temple University summer reading program, for all incoming freshmen. Freshman are assigned a text to read over the summer which is then discussed in class in the fall semester, often with the author being invited to campus. The program was created in 2002 and three of the four texts which Temple has required its freshmen to read since then have represented radical leftwing viewpoints, while the fourth, fits fairly comfortably a leftwing frame of reference. In other words, the principle of intellectual diversity has again been ignored.
In 2002, Temple’s required summer reading book was Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser. The author was invited and paid a substantial fee to speak to students on campus. Fast Food Nation is an assault on the fast-food industry by a leftwing ideologue at war with the free market system. Fast Food Nation was selected by the London Guardian -- a well-known left-wing newspaper -- as one of the top ten “anti-capitalist books.”[5]
The principles of academic freedom of course do not preclude the inclusion of anti-capitalist books on student reading lists. What they do preclude is force-feeding students one-side of a controversial issue as though it were the only one. When Temple University puts its imprimatur on book like this for incoming freshman, the message of the author of that book has maximum impact. It is – or should be – the responsibility of academics to open students’ minds not to close them.
The Temple required book for 2003 was Lies My Teacher Told Me by James W. Loewen, who was also invited to Temple to speak and was part of a panel sponsored by the history and social studies and education departments. [6] This book is a radical diatribe against the United States. According to Loewen, the lies teachers told him result from facts being “manipulated by elite white male capitalists who orchestrate how history is written.” A typical Loewen chapter is called “1493: The True Importance of Christopher Columbus.” Loewen summarizes the achievement of Columbus in these words: “Christopher Columbus introduced two phenomena that revolutionized race relations and transformed the modern world: the taking of land, wealth, and labor from indigenous peoples, leading to their near extermination, and the transatlantic slave trade, which created a racial underclass.”
Again the problem is not assigning a book, even one as historically wrong-headed (Columbus did not originate the practice of conquering lands and the destruction of indigenous peoples for example – ask the Greeks who were victims of the ancient Persians) or as malicious as this one. The problem is that it is the only book that Temple freshmen were given that year with the imprimatur of the institution itself – in other words, that no texts with alternative viewpoints are required.
The Temple required book for the following year, 2004 was Caucasia, a novel by Danzy Senna and was part of an official theme for the 2004 freshman year titled “Color and Character.” Senna was invited to campus and forty professors took part in leading small discussion groups with freshmen during the first three weeks of the semester.[7]
Caucasia is a narrative told from the viewpoint of a girl name Birdie in the 1970’s who is dealing with the racial issues of the time, but again from a narrowly leftwing perspective. The book’s political agendas are carried by the main characters. Birdie’s mother is an anti-capitalist radical on the run from the F.B.I., and her father is a “Black Power” intellectual. A main character says, “We got to raise our children to know how to fight. There’s a war going on…we got pigs in the White House, and pigs patrolling the streets.” (page 15). Birdie’s Mother describes immigration authorities as “Fascist murderers, monsters,” (page 21) and laments television news for “Spreading lies about Castro.” (page 50). She justifies terror, praising the actions of a radical who blew up a police car, saying, “We live in disgrace. We slaughter our own and we slaughter people overseas who don’t think or look like us…and the only way to get people’s attention is to do something drastic.” (page 86) Birdie herself says, “My mother swore that I’d be the first child raised and educated free of racism, patriarchy, and capitalism.” (page 138)
The extremist views in this book parallel the leftwing ideas of the Loewen text of the previous year and the Schlosser text of the year before that. Caucasia is presented to all incoming freshmen with the imprimatur of Temple University and no text with an alternative viewpoint is provided.
The fourth in the chronological sequence of four Temple required freshman texts, which was assigned this year, is West of Kabul, East of New York by Tamim Ansary, who was also invited to speak on campus.[8] Like Caucasia, this book is an autobiographical account of the writer’s experiences in a bi-racial family; his mother is Caucasian and his father is Afghani. This book is not an ideological text like the others, but neither is it a conservative text that would provide some intellectual diversity to this program.
The question this Committee must answer, is why a state institution which is formally dedicated to educational values has established a reading program for incoming freshmen which consists of books that are mainly expressions of radical thought. Surely a commitment to educational purposes would entail at that the university assign two books – rather than one -- in controversial areas like race and the meaning of American history rather one. My high school son was assigned seven summer reading books, so this not an unreasonable request.
It may be objected by some that the radical texts are merely the occasion for stimulating discussion. But certain facts mitigate against such a generous interpretation. If these books were meant to stimulate critical discussion, why aren’t critical questions about them formally included in the syllabus? Why aren’t critics of these books also invited to campus to stimulate such a discussion? At the same time, a number of scientific studies have shown that at schools like Temple, professors with a conservative or libertarian viewpoint are a vanishing breed. In some areas like sociology, anthropology and the humanities, fields whose representatives are likely to be included in these programs, the ratio of liberals to conservatives ranges from 10-1 to 30-1. Ratios like this are not conducive to stimulating discussions exploring diverse points of view.
In this connection, I would recall to you the testimony of Stephen Zelnick a former Vice Provost of Temple University and former chairman of the English Department to this committee: “As director of two undergraduate programs, I have had many opportunities to sit in and watch instructors. I have sat in on more than a hundred different teachers' classes and seen excellent, indifferent, and miserable teaching... In these visits, I have rarely heard a kind word for the United States, for the riches of our marketplace, for the vast economic and creative opportunities made available for energetic and creative people (that is, for our students); for family life, for marriage, for love, or for religion.”
It is my hope that the Select Committee will recommend a policy that all state university required reading programs include the requirement of diverse texts on subjects of controversy.
To sum up these observations: Temple University has an Academic Freedom Policy. It is regularly disregarded. There are no readily available or effective means for members of the Temple community to address the violations of academic freedom that occur regularly in Temple classrooms and are integral to entire Temple courses like the Required Summer Reading Program, the Freshman Year Writing Program and the Intellectual Heritage Department.
Temple University has no policy stating that “intellectual diversity is central to a higher education,” to use the words of the American Council on Education statement of June 23, 2005.
Students at Temple have no explicitly granted academic freedom rights.
Temple University has not taken steps to make students aware (in orientation sessions, in student handbooks) of the Temple academic freedom guidelines that instruct professors not to introduce controversial matter that is irrelevant to the subject into their classrooms.
Courses at Temple are permitted to violate the canons of professional conduct by allowing instructors to teach subjects that are not part of their academic expertise.
All these problems need to be addressed.
Tenured professors at Temple have lifetime job security and the taxpayers of Pennsylvania give them good salaries -- $105,714 a year for the average full professor at Temple. The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania grants professors these privileges in order to get the best and most professional research and teaching expertise possible. Every academic institution in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania has clearly defined and explicit expectations of its professors which qualify them to receive these privileges. Professors are expected to be trained experts in well-defined scholarly fields of inquiry; they are expected to adhere to professional standards in the classroom and to principles of academic freedom.
The state of Pennsylvania needs to hold public academic institutions which are funded by taxpayers to account in fulfilling these expectations, specifically:
1) That professors will teach their subjects of expertise.
2) That in teaching their subjects in the classroom professors have responsibilities as professionals who are in positions of authority dealing with students; that these responsibilities are different from their rights as citizens; and that the difference must be strictly observed.
3) That professors will not use their classrooms to advocate their personal and partisan views on controversial matters that are irrelevant to their subjects and fields of expertise.
4) That professors will observe the distinction between education and indoctrination, between professional judgment and personal opinion and will not use their classroom authority to pressure students into adopting their personal opinions on controversial matters of the day.
5) That professors in the humanities and social sciences will not grade students on the basis of their political, social or religious opinions, or on their conclusions regarding matters of controversy and opinion, but strictly on their abilities to master the factual evidence, and marshal logical arguments in support of their conclusions based on that evidence.
6) That students will be informed of their rights under the university’s academic freedom guidelines; and that those students who feel they have been discriminated against politically or that their professors have used the classroom as a platform for non-academic agendas will have access to a grievance machinery that will review these matters and redress any injustices that may have been done.
This would be an Academic Bill of Rights. Otherwise what we are talking about is indoctrination, not education.
I thank the committee members for their patience and hope they will consider these issues.
Notes:
[1] http://courses.temple.edu/ih/ihtest/ih52/revolution/marx/marx_facpersp.htm
[2] http://courses.temple.edu/ih/ihtest/ih52/revolution/marx/marx_facpersp7.htm
[3] http://ih52.stier.net/notes/marx/failure.htm
[4] Gendered Voices: Selected Readings from the American Experience, Keith Gumery, ed.; Exploring Language, Gary Goshgarian, ed.; Great Divides: Readings in Social Inequality in the United States, Thomas M. Shapiro, ed.; and Writing Lives: Exploring Literacy and Community; Garnes, et al., eds.
[5] http://books.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,4233337-99819,00.html
[6] http://www.temple.edu/temple_times/9-18-03/loewen.html
[7] http://www.temple.edu/temple_times/8-26-04/caucasia.html
[8] http://www.temple.edu/temple_times/5-5-05/kabul.html
We have our media, we have our conservative government (Ok,but it's a start), Hollywood is imploding...now, if we could just liberate academia.
Absolutely. Every true conservative should make it a point to watchdog their own alma mater and hold it publicly accountable- especially when they are hounding you for donations. There should be a Students for Academic Freedom chapter at every university, particularly those which are part of our taxpayer funded state university system.
Donate a little to his cause! Halliburton and Scaife aren't as rich as Soros! Our side has to depend on a lot of small donors, anyway. The most interesting underreported story of the funding of the GOP vs. the DNC, left vs. right. The libs have their handful of Mandarins, we have millions of pajama wearers.
ping for tyranny of Liberal Academia list
Thanks Sisku:
"Tyranny of Liberal Academia" ping list:
Horowitz is a national treasure. Read his books. Learn from this former communist the real danger posed by his former comrades.
I think he's doing a valuable service with his criticisms of academia. Just how much traction he's getting, I just don't know, but it's nice to see someone out there making the case.
Well, you never know--I'm old enough to remember when all we had was Rush!
He defines one more item of the Communist Manafesto i.e. controlling hgiher education. It's scary.
I went to a Catholic university in PA (which shall remain nameless) and the extreme lib in the Sociology class that I was forced to take (stupid liberal arts requirement) made it clear that Roe v. Wade was to be taken as a proud achievement in the goal of social redress. I was ten seconds from writing to the Vatican of what was taking place there, not only from the professor's words but also in the textbook that had been written by a member of the faculty. I should have followed through with it.
"now, if we could just liberate academia."
And he's going for the jugular since the NEA was founded in PA and is entrenched in all levels of education!
Agree...His Books; Radical Son, Politic of Bad Faith, Left Illusions and the Art of Political War, were/are Fine Reads.
Please, add me. Thxs. :)
Great--thanks for posting. I have a daughter who will be going to college in September and I am doing my own indoctrination. As a matter of fact, I just spoke to her yesterday about signing up for FreeRepublic.
Please don't say it's Bard...
Bard makes the never ever applied to along with:
Oberlin
Brown
Bryn Mawr
and others too numerous to mention.
If she cares to go southern, email me.
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