THE NEW PC: CRYBABY CONSERVATIVES
Russell Jacoby, The Nation
Conservatives like David Horowitz complain relentlessly that
they do not get a fair shake in the university. What fuels
the persistent charges that professors are misleading the
young?
http://www.alternet.org/story/21715/<snip>
Virtually all "cases" reported to the Academic Freedom Abuse Center deal with leftist political comments or leftist assigned readings. To use the idiom of right-wing commentators, we see here the emergence of crybaby conservatives, who demand a judicial remedy, guaranteed safety and representation. Convinced that conservatives are mistreated on American campuses, Horowitz has championed a solution, a bill detailing "academic freedom" of students; the proposed law has already been introduced in several state legislatures. Until recently, if the notion of academic freedom for students had any currency, it referred to their right to profess and publish ideas on and off campus.
Horowitz takes the traditional academic freedom that insulated professors from political interference and extends it to students. As a former leftist, Horowitz has the gift of borrowing from the enemy. His "academic bill of rights" talks the language of diversity; it insists that students need to hear all sides and it refashions a "political correctness" for conservatives, who, it turns out, are at least as prickly as any other group when it comes to perceived slights. After years of decrying the "political correctness police," thin-skinned conservatives have joined in; they want their own ideological wardens to enforce intellectual conformity.
While some propositions of the academic bill of rights are unimpeachable (for example, students should not be graded "on the basis of their political or religious beliefs"), academic freedom extended to students easily turns it into the end of freedom for teachers. In a rights society students have the right to hear all sides of all subjects all the time. "Curricula and reading lists," says principle number four of Horowitz's academic bill of rights, "should reflect the uncertainty and unsettled character of all human knowledge" and provide "students with dissenting sources and viewpoints where appropriate."
"Where appropriate" is the kicker, but the consequences for teachers are clear enough from perusing the "abuses" that Students for Academic Freedom lists or that Horowitz plays up in his columns. For instance, Horowitz lambastes a course called Modern Industrial Societies, which uses as its sole text a 500-page leftist anthology, Modernity: An Introduction to Modern Societies. This is a benign book published by a mainstream press, yet under the academic bill of rights the professor could be hauled before authorities to explain such a flagrant violation. If not fired, he or she could be commanded to assign a 500-page anthology published by the Free Enterprise Institute. Another "abuse" occurred in an introductory class, Peace Studies and Conflict Resolution, where military approaches were derided. A student complained that "the only studying of conflict resolution that we did was to enforce the idea that non-violent means were the only legitimate sources of self-defense." This was "indoctrination," not education. Presumably the professor of "peace studies" should be ordered to give equal time to "war studies." By this principle, should the United States Army War College be required to teach pacifism?
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