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ACTA a trendsetter
Bloomberg.com columnist Andrew Ferguson hazards the hypothesis that the push for intellectual diversity on campus is becoming a hot--and highly important--trend in higher education:
At journalism school I flunked my class in ``Trends: How to Identify Them, How to Invent Them.''So I'm not qualified to peg what follows as a genuine social or cultural trend. But it's happened in four state legislatures already. And we can always hope.
Most recently it's been percolating in Missouri, where Representative Jane Cunningham introduced a bill that will surely unnerve many of her state's higher education bureaucrats.
Cunningham's bill is aimed straight at the ideological orthodoxy that holds sway on U.S. college campuses. It would require that Missouri's state-funded colleges and universities announce each year what they have done institutionally ``to ensure and promote intellectual diversity and academic freedom.'' A bill similar to Cunningham's has also been introduced in Virginia.
In 2005, the state legislature in Pennsylvania established a special committee to investigate academic freedom and intellectual diversity on its campuses. The committee is requiring Pennsylvania's public colleges and universities to report by November 2008 on what concrete steps they've taken to ensure ``student rights'' with respect to intellectual diversity.
And the South Dakota Board of Regents, responding to a similar move by its state legislature, now requires that an a so- called Academic Freedom Statement be included in all course syllabuses, informing students that only academic performance, and not their political opinions, will serve as a basis for their grades.
Noting that ACTA is responsible for this trend--or, he jokes, "trendlette"--Ferguson goes on to explain the rationale behind the bills, citing studies showing the overwhelmingly left-of-center political affiliations of faculties, the fate of former Harvard president Lawrence Summers, and ACTA's recent study of undergraduates' experience of politicized classrooms.
He concludes with the astute observation that attempts to smear the reasonable measures recommended by ACTA only make defenders of the academic status quo look bad:
... faced with the vast uniformity in the ideological coloration of the faculty, the steps being called for in the state legislatures, and by ACTA, seem reasonable enough.Among them: letting students know during school orientation that they have means for filing grievances if they've been politically intimidated; including questions about ``academic freedom'' on student course evaluation forms; and keeping a central record of academic freedom complaints.
Mild measures like these fall rather short of ``McCarthyism.'' But predictably enough, it is ``McCarthyism'' -- the off-the-shelf, all-purpose debate-ender -- that ACTA and the legislators are accused of by the defenders of the academic status quo.
Really, these people need to find a new cliche to hurl at their critics. If they do, I'll be happy to declare it a trend.
Ferguson would most likely be the first to admit that he's not holding his breath for that one.
To find out more about ACTA's recommendations for how colleges and universities can work to improve and safeguard intellectual diversity, see Intellectual Diversity: Time for Change.
Posted by acta online at February 7, 2007 01:03 PM
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