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Academic Freedom
ACTA President Anne Neal has posted the following in response to another article about donor intent:
Believers in academic excellence and academic freedom can count on Cary Nelson to underscore why donors have lost faith in higher education and why the AAUP has ceased to carry the banner for academic integrity. Rather than seriously analyzing whether the Kochs have unduly trampled professors' ability to follow truth wherever it may lead, Nelson has taken the opportunity instead to show his own ideological predilections on health care and welfare.
Nelson is, of course, entitled to his own beliefs about big government, the free market, Friedrich Hayek, and everything else, but they are an irrelevant distraction from a point he clearly doesn't want to acknowledge. The Kochs have tried to expand academic opportunity and have brought access to an important academic viewpoint. And no one has argued effectively that their generosity at Florida State has tampered with university or departmental prerogatives.
Any institution worth its salt should give students a broad exposure to key areas of knowledge as well as the range of perspectives in the field. But ACTA's research has found that schools across the country have abandoned their educational obligations. Our curricular study, www.whatwilltheylearn.com, documents that less than five percent of schools insist their students even study economics, let alone free markets. Failure to educate is not protected by academic freedom. And casting engaged donors' attempt to address that failure as an attack on academic freedom should be recognized for the bait-and-switch that it is.
Nelson's blind spot points to a systemic failure within academe: failure, in the words of the late Yale provost Frank Turner, to see that restricted funds "are in truth the lifelines that link colleges and universities to the marketplace of ideas within a democratic society."
Nelson and the AAUP are right to defend academic freedom--an essential principle of quality higher education. But it's time they acknowledged that the lack of intellectual diversity on campus, along with the repeated use of "academic freedom" to shield professors from accountability, forces donors to fill in the gaps.
Posted by Michael Pomeranz on June 28, 2011 at June 28, 2011 06:46 PM
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