ACTA's Must-Reads
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"Free Exchange," the AFT, and the facts
A group with the unfitting name "Free Exchange on Campus" recently published a remarkably inaccurate manifesto--"The American Council of Trustees and Alumni's 'Intellectual Diversity' Agenda"--on ACTA. This document, penned by a staff member of the American Federation of Teachers, amounts to a shameless use of the Internet to disseminate nonsense. It is riddled with factual errors, sloppy research, gross misrepresentations, and inaccurate characterizations. And most troublingly, underneath all the intellectually dishonest verbiage lies the group's deeply entrenched belief that academics should not have to answer to the people.
"Free Exchange" describes itself as a coalition "committed to advocating for the rights of students and faculty to hear and express a full range of ideas unencumbered by political or ideological interference." This coalition includes the AFT, as well as the American Association of University Professors, the National Education Association, the National Association of State PIRGS, the People for the American Way Foundation, and the United States Student Association.
ACTA believes that the academy has a "duty...to the wider public" (to use the words of the AAUP's 1915 "Declaration of Principles on Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure") that includes accuracy and fairness in the material it distributes. Higher education administrators, government officials, legislators, parents, students, teachers, and the general public should be on notice: "Free Exchange" is not for free or accurate exchange.
Here are just a few of the inaccuracies:
ACTA's Founding: ACTA was founded by a diverse group of prominent intellectuals and policy makers from across the political spectrum. They included former National Endowment for the Humanities chairman Lynne V. Cheney, former Colorado governor Richard D. Lamm, distinguished social scientist David Riesman, and Nobel Laureate Saul Bellow. Despite ACTA's notification some time ago that the information is false, a widely read "transparency" website inaccurately claims that the Intercollegiate Studies Institute was a founder. "Free Exchange" has repeated this inaccuracy without bothering to verify the facts.
ACTA's Leadership: Higher education reform is not a partisan issue. ACTA's supporters represent a range of perspectives. Members of our National Council include Martin Peretz, editor-in-chief of The New Republic; Hans Mark, secretary of the Air Force in the Carter administration and a former chancellor of the University of Texas; and Max M. Kampelman, who worked for Senator Hubert H. Humphrey and was appointed to an ambassadorship by President Carter. To suggest that ACTA is not bipartisan underscores how ideologically confused "Free Exchange" apparently is.
ACTA's Mission: "Free Exchange" claims that ACTA seeks to "restrict the free exchange of ideas at colleges and universities, ... launching an ideological attack on higher education, painting U.S. colleges and universities as biased institutions where naive students are indoctrinated by liberal professors who shun opposing views." In fact, ACTA's publicly stated mission is to "to support liberal arts education, uphold high academic standards, safeguard the free exchange of ideas on campus, and ensure that the next generation receives a philosophically-balanced, open-minded, high-quality education at an affordable price."
ACTA's Reports: "Free Exchange" tries to discredit two of ACTA's recent reports by citing a controversial January 2007 publication entitled "The 'Faculty Bias' Studies: Science or Propaganda?" Authored by John B. Lee, an education researcher and consultant, and sponsored by the AFT, this document argues that studies claiming a lack of intellectual diversity in higher education--including ACTA's Intellectual Diversity: Time for Action and How Many Ward Churchills?--are mere "propaganda." As ACTA pointed out to Inside Higher Ed, Lee's findings are "severely flawed." His report confuses and conflates two separate ACTA reports--Intellectual Diversity: Time for Action and Politics in the Classroom. It also faults both reports for not being scientific studies, though neither ever claimed to be such. The former was a collection of suggestions for trustees and other stakeholders; the latter summarized a review of course descriptions and other publicly available materials at colleges across the country.
Smith also claims another ACTA report--Defending Civilization, which catalogued statements made by faculty members in the wake of the September 11 attacks--"is tantamount to blacklisting anyone who questions mainstream thinking during any given historical period." This is patently untrue.
The report explicitly defends the academic freedom of professors in the academy. Indeed, ACTA's concluding plea was positively uncontroversial: "It is urgent that students and professors who support the war against terrorism, as well as those who are opposed, not be intimidated. If both sides are heard, students and all of us benefit." That such a basic endorsement of the free exchange of views could be so falsely characterized by "Free Exchange" raises disturbing questions about the group's genuine embrace of such exchange.
ACTA has never interfered with anyone's right to speak. It has never urged censure or punishment of academics for simply expressing their views. To the contrary, it has issued public statements defending the academic due process rights of University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill and others who have expressed controversial views, while emphasizing the correlative obligation in the classroom to abide by accepted scholarly standards. By equating criticism and censorship, "Free Exchange" underscores a real threat to academic freedom: academics' own effort to redefine academic freedom as synonymous with freedom from accountability.
Legislative Matters: For years, ACTA has been calling on colleges and universities to address voluntarily mounting public concerns about academic quality, academic freedom, and accountability. But time after time, the academy has denied that there is a problem. That's why--when approached by concerned legislators--ACTA helped draft model bills to address these issues responsibly. The intellectual diversity model bill under consideration in Missouri and other states requires institutions to report on what concrete steps they have taken to ensure academic freedom and the free exchange of ideas on campus. The legislation does not dictate what steps colleges and universities must take to do this, leaving them free to devise their own means of defining and addressing the issue. As such, the legislation is scrupulously respectful of institutional autonomy while still responding to institutions' continuing failure to guarantee academic freedom. If colleges and universities were voluntarily meeting their obligation on this front, legislation of the sort proposed in Missouri and elsewhere would not be necessary.
Posted by aneal on April 26, 2007 at April 26, 2007 06:19 PM
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