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April 16, 2007
Georgia Tech student responds
As Georgia considers implementing an intellectual diversity bill, students are speaking out about their experiences--good and bad--on the state's campuses. One of them is Ruth Malhotra, who received death threats after she and a fellow Georgia Tech student sued the university for violating their free speech rights.
Here is what Malhotra has to say about the Georgia bill:
On April 11, the Georgia House Higher Education Committee held a hearing regarding HB 154-the Intellectual Diversity in Higher Education Act. I, along with other students from universities around the state, testified in favor of this legislation, which would hold our institutions accountable for taking concrete steps to implement intellectual diversity on campus.
As a student for the past five years, I have witnessed the politicization of campus far too often and have been forced to fight for academic freedom time and again at a school usually known more for technological research than political controversy.
I came to Tech in 2002, excited about attending a school with a solid reputation for academic excellence, time-honored traditions and global impact. I looked forward to an intellectually honest environment where scholarly debate and open dialogue flourished both in the classroom and on campus. While I expected to have my abilities and beliefs challenged, I did not expect to be repeatedly censored, interrogated and condemned by those in authority for expressing a point of view that was not lockstep in line with their own political agenda.
That is not the education I am paying for-or what I came here for. In fact, it's not education at all. But, unfortunately, it is part of a toxic environment here in terms of the marketplace of ideas. Worse, this toxic environment is present from the top down and affects virtually every aspect of the Institute-from the senior administrators who refuse to admit (let alone address) any problems, to the unfortunate number of faculty who replace teaching their subjects with preaching their politics, to the students who have issued so many death threats against me that I now need police escorts to go to class.
The Intellectual Diversity in Higher Education Act will help address such campus abuses both within and beyond Tech. It would bring accountability to administrations and professors who operate with impunity now, ignoring both the Constitution and their own professional standards.
Fellow students, we deserve better for our money. And so do Georgia's taxpayers. That's why I support HB 154-a measure that would simply require our public universities to issue an annual report on what they're doing to make certain we can speak our minds.
Some are strongly opposed to legislation of the sort Georgia is considering. But there is a bottom line: As ACTA president Anne Neal said of a similar bill under consideration in Missouri, "If institutions adequately addressed these issues voluntarily, legislation of the sort proposed in Missouri and elsewhere would not be necessary."
Posted by acta online at April 16, 2007 08:09 AM
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