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ACTA announces landmark legislation

An important press release from ACTA:

LEGISLATION REQUIRES COLLEGES TO FILE ANNUAL REPORTS ON INTELLECTUAL DIVERSITY

UNIVERSITIES MUST OUTLINE STEPS TAKEN TO ENSURE FREE EXCHANGE OF IDEAS

Washington, DC (Jan. 26, 2006)--A bill has been introduced in South Dakota which will require higher education institutions to report annually on concrete steps taken to ensure the free exchange of ideas on their campuses.

House Bill 1222 was filed by Rep. Phyllis M. Heineman, chairman of the South Dakota House Committee on Education, mandating that the South Dakota Board of Regents require institutions they govern to report on specific steps taken "to ensure and promote intellectual diversity and academic freedom." The bill suggests a variety of measures institutions can take, but leaves the contents of the report--which will be made public--up to each reporting institution.

More than thirty legislators have co-sponsored the bill, including both Democrats and Republicans.
The bill comes in the wake of a national initiative, launched by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, to ensure the free exchange of ideas on college and university campuses. In a report released last month, Intellectual Diversity: Time for Action, ACTA outlined steps universities could take to encourage a mix of ideas on campus and to respond to the growing public concern about the lack of intellectual diversity.

"As legislators we have many good reasons to request a report that assures taxpayers, parents, students and faculty that South Dakota's public campuses are committed to intellectual diversity and a free exchange of ideas," said Rep. Heineman (R-Dist. 13), who introduced the bill.  "$528,538,576 of them are our dollars invested (2007 budget request); 30,720 of them are our students enrolled; and over 5000 are faculty and staff employed."

"This has become a nationwide topic with some troublesome situations in some campuses across the country. Reacting to this growing concern, the American Council on Education, in which virtually all of our South Dakota higher ed institutions are members, issued a statement on Academic Rights & Responsibilities. It acknowledged the importance of intellectual diversity and noted that this statement could be a resource for policymakers," said Heineman. "Accordingly, we are asking for a report on measures taken on each campus to assure this environment. We suggest some contents, but leave it to the university to create its unique format making it a readable and useful public document."

Rep. Gerald Lange (D-Dist. 8), who co-sponsored the bill, believes that providing an open forum for diverse points of view is rooted in the Bill of Rights itself. "It's a no brainer," said the retired professor. "It's in the Constitution."

"Intellectual diversity and the opportunity to be exposed to a full range of ideas and philosophies is the heart and soul of a college education," said co-sponsor Senator Lee Schoenbeck (R-Dist. 5). "College is about learning and maturing and developing through exposure to all of the ideas that unite and divide us as a society. This legislation is about self-examination by the system to ensure that no part of the college experience is lost to our students."

Ryan Brunner, President, South Dakota State University Students' Association, welcomed the proposed legislation. "Intellectual diversity promotes critical thinking that is an integral part of a college education. A report on intellectual diversity at universities would help identify areas of improvement, as well as praise the steps the Board of Regents has already taken. South Dakota universities have taken steps to promote intellectual diversity and a report will give us a chance to highlight those steps."

"The legislators deserve our praise for emphasizing the importance of intellectual diversity and doing so in a way that is sensitive to the concerns of the academy," said ACTA president Anne D. Neal. "By giving a mandate to the board of trustees who already are legally responsible, the legislature has properly placed the burden on the institutions themselves, rather than inserting itself in an inappropriate way."

Calling on colleges and universities to demonstrate publicly how they are living up to a philosophical statement they have themselves endorsed, the bill brilliantly reconciles the twin imperatives of respecting higher education's autonomy and compelling those institutions to make themselves accountable to the public. That move was enabled by ACTA's December report on how colleges and universities across the country had not followed up on their initial endorsement of the ACE statement. Intellectual Diversity: Time for Action is available on the ACTA website.

Posted by acta online on January 30, 2006 at 12:54 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Another bad idea

The consensus seems to be that UCLAProfs.com is a misguided project that does no favors for those concerned about the teaching practices of politically doctrinaire professors--and rightly so. It is a misguided project, and it damages its own ostensible cause. But there seems to be far less consensus surrounding another damaging and self-destructive academic website that has made headlines lately: Rate Your Students. Rate Your Students is an anonymously-run blog devoted to publishing the complaints and gripes of anonymous college teachers everywhere. Designed to be a counterpart to the notoriously unreliable, unregulated, and often gratuitously cruel Rate My Professors, Rate My Students gives professors a chance to bite back with comparable hostility.

Some choice excerpts from professors around the country:

"If all of the kids who hated college would get out, it would empty the buildings pretty quick. But what a great life would remain for those who stayed. People would be interested. Students would talk. Teachers could teach. ... Instead, I presume that I'll get the same kind group in Spring semester. Dolts. Stupidheads. ... Disrespectful punks."

"He's never prepared for class, and he mostly shows up so he can run his mouth into the sweet ear of that sorority candy who sits next to him. ... I'd like to smack his smug face."

"You aren't my co-teacher! You don't have to nod your painfully huge head every time I say something, and then jump in with an inane aside every time someone in class dares to speak."

"Avoid this student if you can. She spends more on eyeliner than she does on textbooks. She wears more face powder than a 60-year-old stripper. She believes she's destined for greatness. She's destined to work at a laundromat."

Not every posting is like these, but many are. It's a damning indictment of academe on the part of a remarkably blinkered segment of the professoriate.

Taken as a group, college students are hardly paragons of interpersonal or educational etiquette, and their failures in this regard are real and, at times, egregious. But college professors are not likely to resolve the problem by sinking to the level of the petty insults they feel they have themselves received. Those professors who participate in the site are fooling themselves if they think they will all go undetected indefinitely--and they should be aware that professors who have griped online about their students have been fired for their trouble. So, too, have professors who have used the internet to engage in certain kinds of inappropriate praise.

The media has been having a ball with Rate My Students, but that's because even the most temperate journalists tend to have an unerring eye for scandal. And that is what Rate My Students is. What, precisely, is the scandal? Most basically, it is the spectacle of college professors giving substance to the gathering public impression that college professors have a striking tendency to behave in unprofessional and even appalling ways. That is the contention of Andrew Jones' UCLAProfs.com. That is also the contention of David Horowitz's Academic Bill of Rights, Students for Academic Freedom, and Luann Wright's NoIndoctrination.org. Each of these projects focusses specifically on the claim that college professors routinely abuse the privileges of academic freedom in order to behave in unacceptably ideological ways in the classroom--but what they are ultimately claiming is that college teachers cannot be trusted to behave professionally. If college teachers do not appreciate the arguments made by Jones, Horowitz, Wright, and others, then they ought to think twice before participating in a project that may look like a harmless opportunity to vent steam, but is in actuality helping to make the case that they and their colleagues may not deserve the sorts of pedagogical autonomy that academic freedom ostensibly grants them.

Debate rages at InsideHigherEd.com.

Posted by acta online on January 29, 2006 at 10:24 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Three strikes

There are some universities that distinguish themselves not by the quality of the education they offer, but by the consistency with which they manage to violate the rights of their students and faculty. As FIRE has noted in a recent report, the University of North Carolina tops the list of America's most unconstitutionally repressive universities, with its outrageous speech codes, disrespect for religious liberty, and wrong-headed attempts to confine student expression to unconstitutional "free speech zones."

But UNC is not alone. Ohio University deserves a place on the list of America's least rights-conscious universities, too. First there is its Junior Executive Business Program for Minorities, which almost certainly violates Ohio's obligation not to discriminate against students on the basis of race. Then there is the university's new sexual harassment policy, which, even in its newly revised form, is nightmarishly unconscious of the free speech rights of faculty and students. Now there is the university's little problem with age discrimination--the Ohio Civil Rights Commission has just ruled that in 2001, the university engaged in age discrimination when it denied tenure to an engineer who had more than met the requirements for tenure, but who was also considerably older than most candidates.

As a public university, Ohio University is legally bound to respect the constitutional rights of faculty and students. But the examples above not only show that the school is very far from meeting this legal obligation, but also suggest that the school is not particularly concerned with meeting it. Now would be a good moment for Ohio University trustees and alumni to take note and to take action. Ohio University ought to be better than this--but if recent events are any indication, it won't become better without some tactical pressure from these groups.

Posted by acta online on January 26, 2006 at 07:46 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Rethinking

Faced with nationwide criticism and the news that UCLA will consider any student who sells course materials to him to be in violation of university policy, UCLAProfs.com mastermind Andrew Jones has pulled the plug on the spy-for-hire plan he devised to encourage students to report their leftist professors' classroom behavior to him.

In a letter issued Sunday, Jones announced that he was suspending his offer to pay students fees ranging from $100 to $10 for course materials. But this does not mean that he has seen the tactical and ethical error of his ways--it just means he wants to establish himself on firmer legal ground before he moves ahead. Jones' letter also announces that the Bruin Alumni Association has obtained legal representation to help fight UCLA on this; he also makes it clear that students are still "encourage[d] ... to consult with the BAA (anonymously if necessary) for advice in reporting, documenting, and publicizing abusive professor behavior in past or current classes."

Alumni should be concerned about the quality and character of education offered at their former schools. But they should also be careful about how they gather their information, and about what sorts of actions they take to protest pedagogical practices that strike them as wrong. Jones' enterprise is a fine example of how not to do it. As the spate of recent resignations from the Bruin Alumni Association attests, the tactics he has adopted are more likely to damage his cause than to forward it.

Posted by acta online on January 24, 2006 at 08:03 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Civics, clinics, and activist education

Two important and complementary articles appear in the current issue of City Journal: Heather MacDonald's unrelenting analysis of the law school clinic, and Robert P. George's compelling argument for why colleges and universities owe it to their students to make civic education mandatory.

Some of MacDonald's best work in recent years has focussed on the ideological agendas of American schools. She is especially good at identifying how those agendas come to supplant legitimate educational content--her blistering critique of American ed schools, for example, demonstrates in painfully particular terms how an obsession with progressive gimmicks has utterly displaced the goal of ensuring that teachers actually know their subjects and that they are equipped to teach them. MacDonald's account of law school clinics is the latest chapter in her growing body of work on the failures and betrayals of an education establishment that is increasingly more concerned with promoting certain political positions than with preparing students of all political persuasions for life after school.

MacDonald shows how, in the wake of a sixties-era Ford Foundation-fueled funding infusion, law school clinics became activist training grounds, in-house public interest law firms that use student labor to pursue a range of almost always leftist causes. She shows, too, how ineffectual these clinics are as actual training grounds for future lawyers--who are far more likely to need training in business transactions, and who neither acquire actual skills nor add much to their resumes by participating in them. In short, MacDonald shows that most law clinics as they exist today are expensive institutional nuisances, useful only for the political agitation of activist professors and like-minded students.

Robert George's piece dovetails nicely with MacDonald's, showing how ignorant even the best educated college students are about the founding principles of this country. Though today's college students are alive to the political implications of civility--of being sensitive to and tolerant of demographic differences such as race, class, and gender--they are woefully illiterate when it comes to understanding basic civics. They don't know why the government is structured as it is, they don't know have a firm grasp of either the founding concept of limited government, nor do they comprehend the proper place of the courts within the government. Their lamentable lack of knowledge, George argues, makes them vulnerable to the dangerous but glossy concept of the "Living Constitution," with its tacit endorsement of judicial activism and its blatant disregard for conserving the fundamental founding ideas of this nation.

Together, MacDonald and George make a case for a massive curricular overhaul on America's campuses. Undergraduates should receive crucial training in civics, and law students should have the opportunity to acquire practical procedural skills without having to sign on to a leftist agenda along the way. The one would make for more citizens who can think their way beyond ideology; the other would help create more lawyers whose skills are actually suited to the needs of their real-world clients.

This ought to be a no brainer. But civic education would be expensive to implement, and it would also contradict much of the diversity programming and multiculturalist ideology that saturates undergraduate education in this country. Likewise, cleaning up the law clinics would be a costly and ideologically fraught endeavor, one that is caught up with funding issues on the one hand, and with professors' political prerogatives (often glossed as "academic freedom") on the other. The slow work of reorienting both undergraduate education and law school training will ultimately fall to trustees--if there are any out there willing to take on these twin concerns.

Posted by acta online on January 22, 2006 at 09:05 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Transparencies

There is transparency--and there is obfuscation dressed up to look like transparency. At the University of California, recent events provide an instructive opportunity to differentiate between the two.

The first is the UC Regents' decision to restructure the salary schedules of highly paid administrators so that there is both continuity across appointments and campuses, and greater accountability to the California taxpayers who pay those salaries. The second is the launching of UCLAProfs.com, a brainchild of the Bruin Alumni Association that purports to expose the extreme radicalism of UCLA faculty members.

Responding to intense public scrutiny and criticism, the UC Regents voted this week to approve a new pay structure that would divide jobs paying more than $168,000 per year into sixteen ranges. The pegging of individual jobs to set salary ranges is intended to clarify what kinds of raises are sensible as well as to enable the president of the UC system a greater degree of discretion over those raises. The new plan will stay in place until a systemwide audit of payment practices--including bonuses and perks--conducted by PricewaterhouseCoopers can be completed. The new plan is not perfect, but represents the best effort the UC system can make at the moment to ensure fairness, accountability, and transparency in practices that have by all accounts been wildly idiosyncratic and abusable.

Meanwhile, Andrew Jones' UCLAProfs.com has not had quite the impact Jones clearly hoped it would. Jones has made national news with his creation of a "Dirty Thirty" list of UCLA's most politically extreme professors and his offer to pay UCLA students for helping document "abusive, one-sided, or off-topic classroom behavior." He has also, along the way, come in for quite a drubbing.

The criticisms of UCLAProfs.com range widely--from the observation that paying students to spy on their professors is not only unethical but possibly illegal to the argument that Jones' site not only overstates the putative "radicalism" of UCLA professors, but also makes a damning mistake in its apparent assumption that liberal and leftist professors should be hounded for their politics alone. Most interesting of all, to those who follow the ongoing vicissitudes of the academic culture wars, is the manner in which David Horowitz has distanced himself from Jones' work and has even threatened to sue him for stealing his donor list.

Temperate critics of the academy's strong leftward tilt are careful to distinguish between professors' personal politics and their behavior in the classroom; the one is not the same as the other, and politically engaged professors who do not use their classrooms as personal ideological soapboxes should not be tarnished with the same brush as those who do. Jones' site makes no such distinction, providing profile after profile of professors whose politics he finds objectionable but doing little if anything to show that these professors are using their classrooms to try to indoctrinate rather than to educate. As such, it is a prime example of obfuscatory and distorting political tactics dressed up to look like a noble push for a necessary transparency.

Good for UC Regents--and good for those who saw UCLAProfs.com for what it is and said so before that site could get any ideological traction.

Posted by acta online on January 21, 2006 at 09:24 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Restructuring

Indiana University and the University of Richmond will both be losing their presidents soon--and in each case, this is understood to be to the good. U of R president William Cooper will leave his post in June 2007; IU president Adam Herbert will leave his in 2008, when his contract expires. According to news reports, few will be sorry to see either man go.

The issues that are sinking each presidency are at once identical and wholly opposite. Neither president has been able to satisfy the expectations of his administrative colleagues. But Cooper's problem was that he wanted U of R to become nationally recognized for educational excellence while Herbert's problem was, in the eyes of his critics, that he was not doing what needed to be done to secure IU's academic reputation.

Cooper offended his constituents when he delivered an ill-advised comment last fall regarding the quality of the Richmond student body. "The entering quality of our student body needs to be much higher if we are going to transform bright minds into great achievers instead of transforming mush into mush," he said, mortally offending students, parents, faculty, and alumni who did not appreciate the frank suggestion that neither Richmond students nor, apparently, their teachers, can think their way out a paper bag. The larger issue contained within that comment, however, was whether Richmond ought to be setting its sights on a national reputation of the sort Cooper envisioned. Critics insisted that the university would lose its distinctive southern identity if a push were made to make the school more nationally competitive. While the Richmond trustees stood by Cooper, a "Fire Cooper!" website was launched by alumni; Cooper announced last week that he would step down a year and a half from now.

Herbert, for his part, has run aground on an administrative dispute about how much independent authority the leader of the Bloomington campus ought to have. Concerned with his own ability to lead, Herbert is refusing to appoint a new chancellor to the Bloomington campus, arguing that the chancellor post confers too much autonomous power on the leader of that campus and that Bloomington ought to be managed instead by a provost who is more immediately answerable to the president. The Bloomington campus has been without a chancellor since 2003; this fall, Herbert scuppered a bid by Kumble R. Subbaswamy, dean of arts and sciences at Bloomington, for the job. Subbaswamy has since left IU to become provost at the University of Kentucky, and IU-Bloomington has remained, in the words of Rick Newkirk, who edits the Indiana Daily Student, "headless." Concern runs high that IU's administration is crumbling, and that the situation will not be helped by having a "lame duck" president presiding over the state university system for two more years.

Two university presidents have hogtied themselves into resigning by taking controversial stands--the one effectively compromising the management of a flagship campus by refusing to appoint someone to a job he felt should not exist, the other insisting that with better management and stronger leadership, his university could become an even finer place to work and study. Herbert hobbled the Bloomington campus because he did not like its administrative organization; Cooper hobbled himself when he chose offensive words to convey his conviction that Richmond could become even better than it is.

Indiana is better off without a president who can't honor either the structure of the university system or the mechanisms for altering it; Richmond is better off without a president whose vision of excellence is wasted on people who seem ultimately to be threatened by the prospect of improving their institution.

Posted by acta online on January 16, 2006 at 09:07 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

ACTA testimony at PA hearings

Media reports of Tuesday's meeting of the Pennsylvania Select Committee on Academic Freedom in Higher Education made much of David Horowitz's self-discrediting testimony. But while the spectacle of Horowitz's inability to provide documentation for some of his most damning tales of liberal bias in the academy was no doubt rivetting, focussing on one man's error has created a skewed picture of all that took place at Tuesday's session. Horowitz's substitution of hearsay for fact undermined his campaign for an Academic Bill of Rights, but the media and the public should not assume that this amounted to a dismantling of the argument that the academy is ideologically fraught zone that desperately needs to be overhauled.

ACTA president Anne D. Neal made that case eloquently and thoroughly on Tuesday. Her testimony is worth excerpting at length:

This committee's willingness to explore the issue and to determine what action, if any, is exemplary and I hope that it will serve as a model for legislatures across the country.

Let me begin by saying that lack of intellectual diversity is not a new problem, nor is it a matter of a few isolated incidents or abuses, as some of the witnesses would have you believe. As early as 1991, Yale President Benno Schmidt warned that "The most serious problems of freedom of expression in our society today exist on campuses. The assumption seems to be that the purpose of education is to induce correct opinion rather than to search for wisdom and liberate the mind." In his last report to the Board of Overseers, retiring Harvard President Derek Bok warned: "What universities can and must resist are deliberate, overt attempts to impose orthodoxy and suppress dissent… In recent years, the threat of orthodoxy has come primarily from within rather than outside the university."

A decade and more have passed since these comments were made and I wish that I could say to you that the situation had improved. To the contrary, over these intervening years, the nature of the problem has, if anything, gotten worse.

Rather than fostering intellectual diversity--the robust exchange of ideas traditionally viewed as the very essence of a college education--our colleges and universities are increasingly bastions of political correctness, hostile to the free exchange of ideas.

In recent months, members of the academy have themselves conceded challenges. The Association of American Colleges and Universities has issued a statement on Academic Freedom and Educational Responsibility that states: "Some departments fail to ensure that their curricula include the full diversity of legitimate intellectual perspectives appropriate to their disciplines. And individual faculty members sometimes express their personal views to students in ways that intimidate them. ... [T]here is room for improvement." Columbia president Lee Bollinger, after outside pressure, in early 2005 admitted students had legitimate complaints about intimidation in the classroom and issued new and revised grievance guidelines. David Ward, President of the American Council on Education, has admitted to the press that some institutions have no grievance procedures in place and should have.

Meanwhile, Surveys by Klein, Rothman, McGinnis and others documenting the politically monolithic character of the faculty have mounted, with no countervailing data of any kind. A study released in late December by Professor Dan Klein found that social science professors are overwhelmingly Democratic, that Democratic professors in those disciplines are more homogeneous in their thinking than Republicans, and that Republican scholars are more likely to work outside the academy than their Democratic counterparts. On the question of political affiliation, the survey showed an immense imbalance in the breakdown of Democrats to Republicans ranging from 21.1:1 among anthropologists; 9:1:1 among political and legal philosophers; 8.5:1 amongst historians; and 5.6 to 1 amongst political scientists. A 2005 study by Stanley Rothman, S. Robert Lichter and Neil Nevitte, Politics and Professional Advancement Among College Faculty, found that 72% of those teaching at American universities and colleges describe themselves as liberal and 15 percent conservative.

According to the study, the most one-sided departments are English literature, philosophy, political science, and religious studies, where at least 80 percent of the faculty say they are liberal and no more than five percent call themselves conservative.

"The American College Teacher," a major study by the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California at Los Angeles that has never been challenged, features some questions on politics. The last survey, in 2001, found that 5.3 percent of faculty members were far left, 42.3 percent were liberal, 34.3 percent were middle of the road, 17.7 percent were conservative, and 0.3 percent were far right. Those figures are only marginally different from the previous survey, in 1998.
According to a paper published last fall in The Georgetown Law Journal, politically active professors at top law schools overwhelmingly tend to be Democrats. The study by Northwestern Professor John McGinnis and two co-authors, which covers the faculties of the top 21 law schools listed in the 2002 U.S. News & World Report graduate-school rankings, finds that just under a third of the professors at those institutions contributed at least $200 to a federal political campaign in the past 11 years. Of that politically active group, 81 percent contributed "wholly or predominantly" to Democratic campaigns, while just 15 percent did the same for Republicans

This lack of diversity in political registration would, quite frankly, be irrelevant, were it not for the fact that some of the ideals that encourage intellectual openness command less allegiance in academe than they once did. Today, the notion of truth and objectivity is regarded by many professors as antiquated and an obstacle to social change. In this postmodern view, all ideas are political, the classroom is an appropriate place for advocacy, and students should be molded into "change agents" to promote a political agenda. The University of California recently abandoned the provision on academic freedom that cautioned against using the classroom as a "platform for propaganda." The president of the university argued in a letter to the Academic senate that the regulation was outdated.

Faculty imbalance, coupled with the idea that the politically correct point of view has a right to dominate classroom and campus discussions, has had fearful consequences for university life. While threats to the robust exchange of ideas come in many forms, they have typically manifested themselves in the following ways:

--Disinviting of politically incorrect speakers;
--Mounting of one-sided panels, teach ins and conferences, sanctions against speakers who fail to follow the politically correct line;
--Instruction that is politicized;
--Virtual elimination of broad-based survey courses in favor of trendy, and often politicized courses;
--Reprisal against or intimidation of students who seek to speak their mind;
--Political discrimination in college hiring and retention;
--Speech codes and campus newspaper theft and destruction.

I know that previous witnesses have highlighted many of these threats and various incidents are set forth more fully in the report referenced in your packets.

Many of our campuses have become, as one observer put it, islands of oppression in a sea of freedom. There is no way this kind of one-sided coercive atmosphere can be conducive to a solid education. Students -- the next generation of leaders -- are not empowered to think for themselves by being given only one side of the story. The lack of intellectual diversity is depriving an entire generation of the kind of education they deserve and every legislator, every parent, every taxpayer in Pennsylvania should be outraged since our system of government--our democratic republic--relies upon an educated and thoughtful citizenry.

Now, for decades, higher education leaders have denied that there is an intellectual diversity problem -- and you have heard from this contingent already. The head of the American Association of University Professors Roger Bowen called one study on the political affiliations of faculty wrong-headed, arguing that such affiliations are of little consequence in the classroom. Geoff Nunberg at the University of Pennsylvania, claimed that "these studies assume an inescapable connection between having a point of view and having a bias; ... That's a convenient assumption for people ... particularly if they want to take it as a justification for trumping up the evidence for their own side."

The American Council of Trustees and Alumni resolved to study the issue as objectively and systematically as possible. We went to those who really know what goes on in the classroom and are most affected by it -- the students. We commissioned the Center for Survey Research and Analysis at the University of Connecticut to undertake a scientific survey of undergraduates in the top 50 colleges and universities as listed by US News and World Report. These include Ivy League schools like the University of Pennsylvania, national research universities such as Carnegie Mellon and small liberal arts colleges like Swarthmore, Bryn Mawr and Haverford, as well as public institutions such as the University of California and Michigan.

We were interested in finding out whether in fact professors introduce politics in the classroom. It goes without saying that faculty members are hired for their expertise and are expected to instruct students on the subject of their expertise. If they are teaching biology, they should be talking about biology. If they are teaching Medieval English literature, we expect them to be lecturing on Chaucer, not Condoleezza Rice.

That indeed is a principle that has been adopted in the 1940 AAUP statement on academic freedom and that has been adopted by numerous institutions of higher education , at least on paper. The Temple University faculty Handbook, by way of example, provides that "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."

Notwithstanding these principles, our survey found that a shocking 49 percent of the students at the top 50 colleges and universities say that their professors frequently injected political comments into their courses, even if they had nothing to do with the subject.

The survey next turned to the atmosphere in the college classroom. Did students, many of whom were exposed to these subjects for the first time, feel free to raise concerns and question assumptions? Did they feel free to make up their own minds without feeling pressured to agree with their professors?

Once again, the answer was deeply disturbing. 29 percent of the respondents felt that they had to agree with the professor's political views to get a good grade.

The survey also explored whether students were being exposed to competing arguments on the central issues of the day. Were book lists balanced and comprehensive? Did students hear multiple perspectives, rather than just one side, of an argument?

Again, a disheartening response. 48 percent reported campus panels and lecture series on political issues that seemed "totally one-sided." 46 percent said professors "used the classroom to present their personal political views." And 42 percent faulted reading assignments for presenting only one side of a controversial issue.

Meanwhile, 83% of those surveyed said student evaluation forms of the faculty did not ask about a professor’s social, political or religious bias.

These findings are particularly noteworthy when we look at the characteristics of the respondents. First of all, the students voicing concerns are not a small minority. Nearly half of the students surveyed reported abuses. Second, although self-described conservative students complained in higher numbers, a majority of the respondents considered themselves liberals or radicals. Third, only 10 percent of the respondents were majoring in political science or government. The vast majority were studying subjects like biology, engineering, and psychology--fields far removed from politics.

Given the results of this scientific survey, one simply cannot claim any longer that faculty are not importing politics in the classroom in a way that affects students' ability to learn. Based on social scientific evidence as well as discussions with professors, administrators, trustees, and higher education experts, it is clear that:

(1) Today's college faculties are overwhelmingly one-sided in their political and ideological views, especially in the value-laden fields of the humanities and social sciences; and

(2) This lack of intellectual diversity is undermining the education of students as well as the free exchange of ideas central to the mission of the university; and

(3) It is urgent that universities effectively address the challenge of intellectual diversity.

Fortunately, there is considerable consensus on the principles at stake. As early as 1915, at its founding, the American Association of University Professors issued a "Declaration of Principles" that stressed the importance of impartiality in the classroom and the right of the student to learn as well as the faculty to teach:

The teacher ought also to be especially on his guard against taking unfair advantage of the student's immaturity by indoctrinating him with the teacher's own opinions before the student has had an opportunity fairly to examine other opinions upon the matters in question, and before he has sufficient knowledge and ripeness of judgment to be entitled to form any definitive opinion of his own. It is not the least service which a college or university may render to those under its instruction, to habituate them to looking not only patiently but methodically on both sides, before adopting any conclusion upon controverted issues.

In 2005, responding to concerns that have been raised about intellectual diversity, the American Council on Education released a major statement, endorsed by 30 higher education organizations, on "Academic Rights and Responsibilities." "Intellectual pluralism and academic freedom are central principles of American higher education," the statement declares. Among the "central, overarching principles" that are "widely shared within the academic community" are the following:

Colleges and universities should welcome intellectual pluralism and the free exchange of ideas. Such a commitment will inevitably encourage debate over complex and difficult issues about which individuals will disagree. Such discussions should be held in an environment characterized by openness, tolerance and civility.

The statement underscores the need for an intellectually open campus in which neither students nor faculty suffer reprisal based on their political views:

Academic decisions including grades should be based solely on considerations that are intellectually relevant to the subject matter under consideration. Neither students nor faculty should be disadvantaged or evaluated on the basis of their political opinions.

During the past two years, ACTA has reviewed a wide range of materials and had extensive discussions with professors, administrators, and trustees around the country. In these discussions, a number of principles governing both the definition of the problem and the search for solutions surfaced repeatedly. Put in one way or another, almost everyone agreed with the following nine points:

First, students are better educated if they are exposed to multiple perspectives.

Second, no professor should use the classroom to proselytize.

Third, professors should give a fair presentation to alternative points of view.

Fourth, professors should never intimidate or treat unfairly students with a "dissenting" point of view.

Fifth, campus panels and speakers series should give students more than one side of the great issues of the day.

Sixth, intolerant students should not be allowed to trash campus publications or impose a "heckler's veto" on invited speakers.

Seventh, political and ideological bias in hiring, promotion, and tenure is unacceptable.

Eighth, intellectual diversity among the faculty is desirable, but must be achieved only in ways that protect such values as academic freedom, shared governance, and academic standards.

Ninth, universities--faculty, administrators, and trustees--should take the initiative in meeting the challenge of intellectual diversity, in part to avoid "solutions" forced on them from the outside.

The fact that there is a high degree of consensus on principles argues well for success in meeting the challenge of intellectual diversity. Indeed, higher education has issued a statement underscoring that consensus. But has it done anything to implement it?

In the wake of the ACE statement, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni considered vigilance important and surveyed all 30 signatories, heads of major public universities in each state including Pennsylvania, as well as the presidents and chancellors of the top 25 national universities and the top 25 liberal arts colleges. ACTA asked them what they had done to implement their statement. The answer received? -- next to nothing. The closest they come to action is more talk. The University of Oregon's President, David Frohnmayer, reported a "work session" with his deans. The president of one of the signatories, the Association of American Colleges and Universities, reported that the association would be issuing a statement that will be "consistent" with the June statement and would discuss the issues further at its annual meeting.

Not one, not one, of the institutions covered by the pledge reported a single concrete step beyond meetings and statements. It was all words, and no deeds.

University administrators and faculty continue to insist that they, alone, are able to correct the situation in the classroom. But all reasonable people agree with ACTA that simply saying one believes in intellectual diversity and pointing to existing policy is not enough. We would not be here today if all existing practices and policies were sufficient or were being followed.

After Harvard president Larry Summers made the impolitic observation that researchers might explore whether biological factors affect the propensity of women to go into math and science, it took only a matter of weeks for Harvard to appoint diversity deans and to appropriate millions of dollars towards women and sciences.

Why, then, is it so hard for universities to take similar steps when it comes to intellectual diversity? Our colleges and universities are filled with offices and administrators whose entire job is to foster a diversity of backgrounds -- on the grounds that a diversity of backgrounds will provide a diversity of viewpoints essential to a strong liberal education. If diversity of views is the educational holy grail, then what is the academy afraid of?

You and I have heard or read the testimony of a number of speakers already in the course of these hearings and, quite frankly, they are simply in denial that there is a problem. They have said, in effect, that they are not going to do anything. Bob O’Neill said yesterday continue to trust us. You have to make it clear that this is not acceptable. It would not be acceptable if the problem were racism; it would not be acceptable if the problem were gender discrimination. It is not acceptable when the problem is political harassment and viewpoint discrimination.

We agree with the academy that the responsibility for correcting the current situation should fall first and foremost to colleges and universities themselves and that governing boards have the ultimate obligation to address those concerns. We agree that the law is a blunt instrument and state legislatures and the federal Congress are not well-positioned to prescribe specific remedies.

However, in the face of years and years and years of denial by many in the academy, legislators must not bury their heads in the sand, must not shrink from holding hearings to educate the public as you so boldly do today, and most importantly, must not shrink from making it crystal clear that universities ensure the free exchange of ideas and classrooms free of political abuse -- if they wish for government to stay out of their business.

That is why I am calling on you today to act.

Faced with growing legislative pressure on this issue, the higher education establishment issued the ACE statement, figured it would pretend to have a quick conversion, endorse intellectual diversity, get those "yahoo" legislators off their backs and go back to business as usual. DO NOT LET THEM GET AWAY WITH THIS CHARADE.

It is now incumbent on you to keep the pressure on, step in -- in a way that is sensitive to academic freedom and shared governance -- and demand action.

As legislators, responsible for public funding and oversight of Pennsylvania's institutions of higher learning, we submit it is up to you to ensure that those institutions are fostering an atmosphere in the classroom dedicated to valid educational ends.

And, to be sensitive to the concerns raised by the academy, we ask not that you impose curricular or other requirements but that, instead, you give a specific mandate to trustees -- public officials who have not only the right, but legal obligation, to ensure that their institutions are dedicated to valid educational ends -- to provide the legislature with a public annual report outlining steps taken to ensure a robust exchange of ideas and to implement the ACE statement.

A major obstacle to change has been a fear that any effort to encourage intellectual diversity would violate one or another academic norm -- a concern raised by many of the speakers who have addressed this committee and elsewhere.

ACTA has been sensitive to this concern and has discussed it with professors, administrators, and trustees. Based on these discussions, we have pulled together a set of practical suggestions that provide a starting point for concrete steps universities can take to address the problem.

These various approaches are set out in our report, Intellectual Diversity: Time to Act, located at our website, and they include such specific steps as:

--adoption by the board of trustees of the Statement on Academic Rights and Responsibilities issued by the American Council on Education and other higher education organizations on June 23, 2005;
--conduct of a self-study to assess the current state of intellectual diversity on campus;
--incorporation of intellectual diversity into institutional statements, grievance procedures, and activities on diversity;
--encouragement of balanced panels and speaker series;
--establishment of clear campus policies which ensure that hecklers or threats of violence do not prevent speakers from speaking;
--inclusion of intellectual diversity concerns in university guidelines on teaching;
--inclusion of intellectual diversity issues in student course evaluations;
--development of language in hiring, tenure and promotion guidelines to protect individuals against political viewpoint discrimination;
--establishment of clear campus policies to ensure student press freedom;
--establishment of clear campus policies to prohibit political bias in student-funded groups;
--elimination of any speech codes that restrict, or may have a chilling effect on, free speech rights; and
--creation of a university ombudsman on intellectual diversity.

Notably, Temple President David Adamany himself said yesterday that he saw areas where Temple could improve: directing students to grievance policies; taking steps to make sure students know their rights; perhaps modifying grievance procedures.

A reporting requirement will underscore the legislature's urgent interest in progress without the threat of any heavy-handed legislative intrusion. Indeed, by calling upon trustees to provide an accounting to the public they serve, the legislature will endorse the academy's insistence on institutional solutions rather than legislative intervention.

Any board that fails to guarantee the free exchange of ideas and the student's right to learn on its campus is not doing its job and deserves the criticism of taxpayers, students and parents who are paying for education, not indoctrination.

Intellectual diversity is not just something desirable in theory; it must be protected and promoted by actions -- and not just words -- if the academy is to provide a rich education for its students. In the face of years and years of inaction, I submit it is up to elected officials to make sure the academy puts up, or holds its peace.

Horowitz stole the show Tuesday, at least as far as some news outlets were concerned. But any responsible discussion of the Pennsylvania hearings should take into account the simple fact that David Horowitz is not the only person arguing that ideological bias pervades the academy, and that there are others--such as Neal--who are making cogent, responsible recommendations for how colleges and universities should address that bias.

Kudos to The Chronicle of Higher Education for keeping its coverage of Tuesday's events focussed on the issues and not the scandal.

Posted by acta online on January 12, 2006 at 12:02 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

ACTA president to testify in Pennsylvania hearing

This morning, ACTA president Anne D. Neal will testify before the Pennsylvania Select Committee on Academic Freedom in Higher Education. Neal's testimony comes in the wake of ACTA's bruising December report showing that while a number of American colleges and universities have begun paying lip service to the need to attend to issues of intellectual diversity and genuine ideological tolerance, their efforts amount to a hollow and cynical attempt to maintain the very status quo that they now admit is a problem.

Here is ACTA's press release announcing today's testimony:

Pennsylvania Select Committee on Academic Freedom in Higher Education to Discuss Intellectual Diversity

ACTA's President to Call for Legislation Directed to College and University Trustees

Tuesday, January 10, 2006
Temple University Student Center, Rooms B and C
13th Street and Montgomery Avenue, Philadelphia, PA
10 a.m.

PHILADELPHIA, PA, January 9, 2006 -- The Pennsylvania House Select Committee on Academic Freedom in Higher Education will hold a hearing tomorrow on intellectual diversity in higher education with American Council of Trustees and Alumni president Anne Neal as a lead witness. ACTA is a national network of trustees and alumni dedicated to academic freedom, excellence and accountability in higher education.

"We are pleased that the Committee is drawing attention to the issue of intellectual diversity on our college and university campuses," said Neal. "The lack of intellectual diversity is the most serious challenge facing higher education and should be of profound concern to all of us interested in the education of our next generation."

Neal's testimony will examine the severe political imbalance in college and university faculties, student survey data documenting politicization of the classroom and continuing denial by many in the academic community that a problem exists.  In spite of a statement by 30 higher education organizations recognizing the importance of intellectual diversity in June 2005, a recent survey by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni shows that not a single institution has taken concrete steps to further that goal.

The testimony will present recommendations for ways institutions can ensure intellectual diversity and call upon the legislature to demand a report annually from state boards of trustees outlining steps taken to promote and enhance intellectual diversity and the robust exchange of ideas on campus.

A copy of Neal's complete testimony is available upon request.

ACTA is a nonprofit educational organization of trustees and alumni dedicated to academic freedom and excellence. For further information, call 202-467-6787.

Neal's appearance at the hearings follows a lackluster Monday in which a professor who was supposed to testify about liberal bias at Temple failed to appear, a student witness admitted to never having filed a complaint about the liberal bias he had allegedly experienced, and the president of Temple claimed that during his five year tenure not a single complaint about political bias has been filed at the university, despite established procedures for doing just that.

Posted by acta online on January 10, 2006 at 08:30 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

The politics of American seniors

Hamilton College has completed its annual Hot Button Issues Poll, focussing this year on American high school seniors' attitudes toward homosexuality, gun control, and abortion. The results are interestingly mixed, and show a generation that is at once more liberal and more conservative than its parents. According to the poll, American seniors are more than twice as likely as their parents to support gay rights and gay marriage; they are also deceptively conservative on abortion--though more than 60% say they do not want to see Roe v. Wade overturned, the majority believes that abortion is morally wrong and opposes abortion under any circumstances except those in which the mother's life is in danger or the pregnancy resulted from rape.

In our politically binary public culture, it has become popular to oversimplify the outlook of today's college students--liberals tend to lament the growing conservatism of American youth, while conservatives tend to deplore the same generation's lack of core moral values. On campus, where liberal ideology rules supreme, speech codes, diversity movements, sensitivity training, and multiculturalism requirements attempt to liberalize students who are presumed to be locked in an intolerant conservative cultural stance. Elsewhere, novels such as Tom Wolfe's I am Charlotte Simmons, Philip Roth's The Human Stain, and Francine Prose's Blue Angel seek to document both the devastating moral nihilism of the hyper-permissive collegiate culture and the cynical hypocrisy of students who learn to manipulate the policies designed to protect their not-so-tender sensibilities.

Polls such as Hamilton's urge us to move beyond caricature and stereotype when it comes to understanding where young adults stand and why they stand where they do. They also make it possible for us to begin formulating a more rounded and precise portrait of a new generation. But they will only do so if people on both sides of the political fence are willing to relinquish their convenient adolescent straw men.

Posted by acta online on January 08, 2006 at 10:23 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Greenwood guilty

The University of California has determined that recently-resigned provost M.R.C. Greenwood did indeed violate university policy when she hired a friend and business contact. Though accused of also abusing her position to help her son secure a paid internship at the Merced campus, Greenwood was found innocent of that particular charge.

Greenwood resigned last fall as the San Francisco Chronicle broke the scandalous news of her questionable hiring practices and her acceptance of an illegitimate hiring bonus / housing allowance. Her punishment now seems to be, as far as the University of California is concerned, complete: She is on a highly paid sabbatical for the rest of the fiscal year, and will return to her professorial position at UC Davis in the fall with $100,000 in seed money to help her launch a new course of research. In other words, Greenwood's punishment for being guilty of misconduct is that she was found to be guilty of misconduct. The University will not be pursuing any formal sanctions against her, and when she retires will confer on her the title of "chancellor emerita."

With disincentives like this, the UC system isn't likely to clean up its troubled fiduciary act anytime soon.

Posted by acta online on January 03, 2006 at 01:22 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Yet another one for Margaret Spellings

Writing for the Washington Post, Miami University president James C. Garland argues that education secretary Margaret Spellings' Commission on the Future of Higher Education would do well to orient its study around a singular but largely overlooked fact: That public higher education as we know it is fast becoming a thing of the past.

According to Garland, rising costs and diminishing subsidies are squeezing public colleges and universities like never before. Tuition is consequently rising rapidly, and public schools are no longer the affordable answer to costly private ones. But, says Garland, this is only a bad thing when schools don't recognize what's happening and take proactive steps to make the most of it. Garland does not see the privatization of public education as the problem; in fact, he sees it as a welcome solution to the problems faced by an economically inefficient and often politically antagonistic higher education system that has in many respects worn out its welcome with legislators and the public.

Here is Garland's reasoning:

When states pay their universities to hold down tuition charges, they are indirectly subsidizing wealthy and poor students alike.

And as state subsidies dwindle, government regulation grows. My own state of Ohio typifies this pattern. This year Ohio will spend about $1.2 billion subsidizing instruction at its 13 public four-year universities, an amount that has declined over the past five years by 15.5 percent per student. Combine this decline with a file cabinet full of ever-expanding regulations, reporting requirements and tuition controls, and a bleak future seems certain for the state's beleaguered public colleges.

But states could break the cycle by investing their higher education dollars strategically.

First, turn all or part of each public four-year university into a private, nonprofit corporation, with legislation to protect research grants and centers and to honor personnel and pension obligations.

Second, phase out each school's subsidy over, say, six years, to enable campuses to grandfather in current students and adjust to the new environment.

Finally, reallocate the freed-up subsidy dollars to scholarships for new undergraduate and graduate students. The scholarships, valid at any accredited four-year college in the state, would go primarily to middle- and low-income students, with some reserved for engineering majors, math teachers and other groups that meet state needs.

Consider the consequences of this change:

Middle- and low-income students' degree costs would significantly decrease; others would pay a larger share of their college costs.

Universities and colleges would scramble to attract scholarship-holding students. Students would choose schools that offered them the highest-quality programs, the most value and a competitive tuition. Colleges that lost market share would either improve their offerings, lower their prices or risk going out of business.

Lacking an automatic pricing advantage, formerly public colleges would raise tuition to make up their revenue shortfall, but no more than the market would allow.

Competition would force campuses to become increasingly lean, efficient and strategic.

Garland's is a neatly libertarian model of how to use market forces both to liberate public institutions and to regulate them. By freeing themselves of dependency on subsidies that are at once grudgingly given and never enough, colleges and universities recover the freedom to use the funds they generate as they see fit. And, by competing openly with one another in the marketplace, colleges and universities will be forced to ensure that they spend their money well and that they offer a reasonably priced product. Meanwhile, privatization becomes, ironically, the means of restoring financial accessibility to a higher education system whose skyrocketing price tags have made it increasingly exclusive and anti-democratic.

According to Garland, the shift toward privatization is simply what must happen--and what is already happening--on campuses across the country. He is not proposing a shift, then, but describing one that is already in progress. As such, he sees Spellings' commission as having an obligation to spend some time thinking through how best to facilitate what amounts to a massive national change in the shape of higher education's economic structure. He's right.

Posted by acta online on January 02, 2006 at 01:03 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack