ACTA's Must-Reads
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Common cause, contd.
The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that the Israel on Campus Coalition has published a report on academic freedom that lays out the procedural fundamentals for maintaining free inquiry and vibrant exchange on campus. The report is not going to be online until later today, but the Chronicle's summary makes it sound as though it dovetails in important ways with ACTA's own Intellectual Diversity: Time for Change report:
The goal of the 58-page report, "Academic Rights, Academic Responsibilities: A New Approach," is to "help ensure an academic climate that is conducive to studying charged, sensitive topics -- including the study of Israel -- free of bias and intimidation in the classroom," said David A. Harris, the coalition's executive director.The report, though, has relatively little to say about those topics. Instead it speaks broadly about the rights, rules, and responsibilities required for civil academic exchange -- a notion that, it freely admits, is "not a new idea" -- and quotes approvingly from several campus handbooks that espouse those principles. It also suggests that a vigorous adherence to the philosophy it lays out is academe's best defense against outside pressure groups.
In order to uphold those rights and responsibilities, and to "create a culture of proactive campus cooperation," the report offers a series of recommendations. Among other suggestions, it says that colleges should create academic-freedom task forces, reward faculty members who uphold those principles "in exemplary fashion," expose would-be professors to the ethical issues of the profession, set up clear grievance systems, and make use of employee handbooks or codes of conduct or both.
One page of the report even offers a handy table listing the rights and responsibilities expected of campus "stakeholders," as it refers to students, faculty members, and administrators. All of the table's provisions could readily be endorsed by people across the ideological spectrum.
It will be worth comparing this report to ACTA's once the former is available. The more organizations and individuals that are willing to endorse the idea that campuses must take strong procedural steps to ensure genuine academic freedom (which is essentially the same thing as ensuring intellectual diversity), and the more it is recognized that such steps are proactive means of protecting academe from outside interference, the better.
Posted by acta online at March 28, 2007 07:55 AM
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