ACTA's Must-Reads
« More issues at Iowa | Main | ACTA's place in the accountability debate »
ACTA president speaks on academic freedom
ACTA president Anne Neal delivered a talk last week at a day-long symposium on academic freedom held at Montana State University. Neal's talk focussed on the importance of outside input to academic governance, debunking the misconception that such input violates academic freedom and offering a strong rationale for why academic leaders should make themselves more accountable to the broader public.
"When universities fail to abide by professional standards, when faculty members put personal, social, and political agendas ahead of a fundamental commitment to the objective search for truth, then outside input is salutary," Neal noted. "Outside input in such instances offers not interference but a means of protecting and defending the freedom to seek the truth." Neal compared the current culture of the American campus to the ideal outlined by the American Association of University Professors in 1915, noting that colleges and universities would do well to begin voluntarily working to ensure that intellectual diversity is alive and well on their campuses. Her talk included a series of guidelines for academic leaders interested in undertaking that process.
Neal's talk was a temperate analysis of a documented problem in higher education; citing studies showing that political bias has made its way into the classroom in ways that damage undergraduate education, Neal wasted no time on rhetoric and instead concentrated on pragmatics, essentially providing administrators and legislators with a blueprint for how to restore the robust exchange of ideas to campuses where the ideal of unfettered debate has been lost in the shuffle of political correctness.
But you wouldn't know this from the coverage in the Bozeman Daily Chronicle. The Chronicle's article on the symposium amounted to a one-sided and uninformed whitewash written by a journalist who appears to have forgotten that fair-minded neutrality is crucial to good reporting. Casting Neal as a lone--and implicitly mistaken--voice in the wilderness, the article briefly summarizes her argument but then devotes the bulk of its space to recording the comments of those who disagree with her. The effect was not to present a balanced view of either the issues raised at the symposium or the debate at the symposium itself, but, rather, to paint Neal as part of a political campaign to damage higher education--or, in the words of the article, as part of a "well-funded, highly coordinated effort by conservative groups" to blow a small problem out of proportion.
It's important for events such as the academic freedom symposium to be covered by the media. The state of intellectual diversity and academic freedom on campus is an issue that affects us all--whether or not we are academics or students ourselves. But it is equally important for journalists to inform themselves about the issues they are covering and to use their knowledge to maintain a steady objectivity when reporting on divisive and controversial issues. In this case, the reporter seems to have been taken in by the dismissive comments of Neal's opponents--so much so that their ungrounded assertions that there is no problem are given more weight in the article than Neal's documented statement of the case.
Posted by acta online at April 5, 2006 08:23 AM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.goactablog.org/blog/mt-tb.cgi/135