Penna passes Usraeli Academia-control bill

[Moses]

Weekend Edition
July 23 / 24, 2005

Meet the New McCarthyites

Return of the Academic Witch Hunts

By DAVE LINDORFF

McCarthy-style witch hunts are coming back, and the first place we'll be seeing them is at Pennsylvania's public colleges and universities.

Under the innocent-sounding name "Academic Bill of Rights," a gaggle of right-wing "culture warriors" in the Republican-led Pennsylvania House recently passed HR 177, a resolution authorizing them to invade public colleges and universities armed with subpoenas to grill faculty on curricula, reading lists, exams, homework assignments, grading and teaching styles, and to take testimony from students, allegedly to determine whether their professors are fair or "biased."

The underlying assumption of the resolution--part of a nationwide campaign spearheaded by one-time SDS lefty and now rabid right-wing activist David Horowitz--is that America's colleges and universities have been overrun by leftist fanatics intent on banishing conservative ideas and punishing conservative or Christian students who dare to speak out.

The notion that leftists are in charge in academia, is as bogus as the notion that the media are dominated by liberals. The political mix on most campus faculties across the country is not much different from what you'd find in the broader community. Moreover, leftist teachers are no more likely to impose their ideas on students or to punish those who disagree than are rightists (maybe less), and in either casesuch behavior should and would likely be roundly condemned. (Any decent school has a mechanism for students to challenge political bias by a professor, and indeed Horowitz and his minions have been hard-pressed to show any hard evidence of such abuses.) Add to this the reality that at the higher you look in university administrations, through chairs to deans and provosts on up to presidents, the more conservative officials tend to be politically. At Pennsylvania's Temple University, for example, the University Senate voted resoundingly to oppose HR177 as a threat to academic freedom and free speech, yet the university president, David Adamany - technically an ex-officio member of the Senate--was quoted publicly as not seeing anything troubling about the legislative intrusion into academic affairs.

In my own limited experience in academia (which has included teaching at Alfred University, a small liberal arts institution, Ithaca College, a rather mainstream private institution with an emphasis on the arts, and Ivy League Cornell University), being overtly on the left was seen as a bit edgy, and perhaps even dangerous to one's tenure aspirations.

The Horowitzniks and Pennsylvania's HR177 backers also misunderstand, or deliberately misrepresent, the role of a university professor, particularly in the liberal arts fields like literature, political science, philosophy, sociology, etc., which is where their attention is focused.

University teaching, unlike elementary and high school instruction, should not be so much a "covering of the field" as an introduction to the idea of self-instruction and independent thinking. At its best, a college course should teach students how to pursue knowledge on their own, how to research and express their own ideas, and how to defend and, as needed, amend or even reject those ideas on the basis of free intellectual debate.

There is nothing wrong with having a teacher who presents a point of view, as long as that teacher is honest about it, and open to challenge. My favorite teachers when I was an undergraduate in the late '60s were precisely those professors who held strong views with which I disagreed vehemently, because they forced me to clarify my own thinking and to defend my own contrarian positions.

What Howoritz and the HR177 resolution backers seek is a bland, neutral academy where everyone keeps her or his ideas to her or himself. By bringing a legislative inquisition to campus, these people are really pursuing an agenda of intimidation and conformity, hoping to silence those in academe who may hold views out of synch with the national consensus. I taught once at a school that was like that: Fudan University in the People's Republic of China.

Pennsylvania is the first state where they've succeeded in passing a version of Howoritz's insidious redbaiting legislation. The anti-intellectual crew in Harrisburg was aided in its efforts by a state media that ignored their campaign until the measure had already passed. Pennsylvania's main newspaper, the Philadelphia Inquirer, ran no reports on House hearings on the resolution or even on the final vote. In fact, the Inquirer's first mention of the resolution-run after the measure had already passed--was an op-ed rant by a right-wing Penn State education professor who claimed, with no supporting evidence, that the state's public higher education institutions were under the tyrannical grip of minority and feminist professors.

In the 1950s, academics were attacked by Sen. Joe McCarthy and a gang of right-wing zealots who equated liberals and free thinkers with Communist fifth columnists and hounded many honorable teachers out of their jobs. Most Americans now recall that era in embarrassment. Horowitz and a bunch of right-wing legislative yahoos in Harrisburg, PA seem hell-bent on reviving that anti-intellectual witch-hunt.

---

Dave Lindorff is the author of Killing Time: an Investigation into the Death Row Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal. His new book of CounterPunch columns titled "This Can't be Happening!" is published by Common Courage Press. Information about both books and other work by Lindorff can be found at www.thiscantbehappening.net.

He can be reached at: [e-mail]

[Moses]

Don't read unless you can withstand cynical, insulting Usraeli Newspeak:

Victory in Pennsylvania for Academic Freedom Can Impact Public Universities Across the Nation
By David Horowitz, 7/6/2005 9:13:36 AM

July 5, 2005, the Pennsylvania House of Representatives by a vote of 111-87 passed a resolution on behalf of intellectual diversity and academic freedom for all the public universities and colleges in the state. The resolution was squarely based on the Academic Bill of Rights. [That is, it is his, Horowitz's legislation, and he is claiming credit]

This was a tremendous victory for academic freedom not only in Pennsylvania but for states that are watching these results across the nation. Opposition to the resolution, from the teacher unions – the American Association of University Professors, the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, and all their allies in local Pennslvania media – was fierce, and their defeat is that much more bitter as a result. But in the end, they had an indefensible position: opposition to the pluralism of ideas, the very heart and soul of the American social contract.

This victory would not have been possible without the political courage and steadfastness of Representative Gib Armstrong, a former Marine who was the principal sponsor and driving force behind the legislation, and Speaker of the Pennsylvania House John Perzel, an astute and savvy political leader who managed the bill’s passage through turbulent legislative seas. The students of the State of Pennsylvania owe both these men a debt of thanks for their efforts.

The Pennsylvania resolution accelerates a tide that has begun to flow in the direction of academic freedom across the nation. Less than a month before the resolution’s passage, the American Council on Education and 28 national groups involved in higher education, issued a statement endorsing core principles of the Academic Bill of Rights. These included the recognition that, “Intellectual diversity and academic freedom are central principles of American higher education;” and that, “Neither students nor faculty should be disadvantaged or evaluated on the basis of their political opinions.” This was a reversal for the educational establishment which until then had been denying that any problem of political discrimination or hostility to intellectual diversity even existed. The Pennsylvania bill will go a long way in making sure that these noble sentiments are given practical implementation by university administrations.

The vote on HR 177 was mainly along partisan lines, although a few Democrats and a few Republicans crossed over those lines. We hope that as time passes, and tempers cool, Democrats will understand that the Academic Bill of Rights protects all students, left and right, conservative and liberal, from abuse by professors with political rather than educational agendas; that it is about the intellectual integrity of our institutions of higher learning, and that it supports the core values of an American education. [state oversight of professor's classrooms?!]

The Pennsylvania resolution sets up a Select Committee to “examine, study and inform” the legislature about the condition of academic freedom in the state’s universities. [In his national model, this committee was to be comprised of CIA, FBI, Military, and Israel-first members] This is a huge first step towards prompting university administrations to do the right thing by seeing that academic standards are enforced and that faculty do not use their classrooms for political and other agendas that have no educational justification. As Stanley Fish, himself a liberal academic, has written: “Teachers should teach their subjects. They should not teach peace or war or freedom or diversity or uniformity or nationalism or anti-nationalism or any other agenda that might properly be taught by a political leader or a talk-show host. Of course they should teach about such subjects, something very different from urging them as commitments – when they are part of the history or philosophy or literature or sociology that is being studied. The only advocacy that should go on in the classroom is the advocacy of what James Murphy has identified as the intellectual virtues, ‘thoroughness, perseverance, intellectual honesty,’ all components of the cardinal academic virtue of being ‘conscientious in the pursuit of truth.” Amen.

The full text of the resolution passed by the Pennyslvania House, lacking one minor amendment which was made too late to be included in this report, can be found at www.frontpagemagazine.com

---

Ew. Need to take a shower now.