Seeing Shadows Over Universities

It's Groundhog Day, and regardless of whether Punxsutawney Phil sees his shadow, I see the signs of dark days—not to say Dark Ages—ahead.

I warned you to look out for talk of the "supressed majority." Forget the Inheritence Tax and Social Security, those are small beans when you can simply sieze control of "truth" and "facts."

Exhibit A. Last night, ABC World News Tonight reported, Conservatives Censored on College Campuses? And while the title of the story ends with a question mark, the overall tone was that college professors are liberal evangelizers. They even found a "non-partisan" "expert" who said, "The universities have been so captured by the left point of view, that you're going to get more political and intellectual diversity at your average suburban mega-church than you are at an elite university." And they presented a sympathetic and patriotically appalled image of an American student with a Arab-sounding name who "was told by his American government professor to get psychotherapy after refusing to write an essay criticizing the Constitution." [See Note 1 below.]

If you saw this story, your first reaction, like mine, was that some dimwitted administrators at community colleges had made some bad decisions. So what? What's the big deal?

The big deal is that this is another skirmish in the battle to control the truth and blur the boundaries between education, relgion, and politics. Don't get me wrong—these things, and money, are always intermingled. But there is intermingling and then there is confusion. The conservative right is siezing the language of "supression," "balance" (thank you Rupert Murdoch) and "freedom" to assert that political and religious ideology must be taught to students as competing sources of knowledge with those of the Arts and Sciences. [See Note 2 below.] So far there has been no strong move toward right-wing engineering, but give it time. Certainly the stem-cell debacle gives us something like right-wing medicine.

Exhibit B. Think I'm being alarmist, just worried about Bill O'Reilly storming my precious Ivory Tower? Consider Ohio Senate Bill 24, artfully titled the "Revised Code to establish the academic bill of rights for higher education." Sounds good, right? Isn't this just the protection I want? Who could argue with an academic bill of rights?

Don't be so silly. This is a bill to assure that (Clause A) "the fostering of a plurality of serious scholarly methodologies and perspectives shall be a significant institutional purpose… and reading lists in the humanities and social studies shall respect all human knowledge in these areas and provide students with dissenting sources and viewpoints." (I think this means that I have to stop teaching students that Descartes' arguments were bad, and that there are other—relgiously based—arguments for a substantial dualism about the mind.)

Also, no more political examples in class: (Clause B) "faculty and instructors shall not use their courses or their positions for the purpose of political, ideological, religious, or antireligious indoctrination" and (Clause C) "Faculty and instructors shall not infringe the academic freedom and quality of education of their students by persistently introducing controversial matter into the classroom or coursework that has no relation to their subject of study and that serves no legitimate pedagogical purpose." (I guess there can be no more Sponge Bob examples in logic class, either. Too controversial.)

And, of course, (Clause I) "The institution and its professional societies shall maintain a posture of organizational neutrality with respect to the substantive disagreements that divide researchers on questions within, or outside, their fields of inquiry recognizing that." So I think the legislature is trying to say that we can't, as a group, publicly say that intelligent design is tripe, that stem cell research is important, and that (see Clause A) religious ideology is not a competing "source of knowledge" about human origins.


Probably many of you are thinking about saving money for your child's college education. You might also start saving college textbooks, before they get rewritten.


----------


Note 1. The ABC story doesn't say, but I can only assume that he wasn't told to believe that the Constitution is wrong, just to criticize it. Of course there is much to criticize, e.g., its stance on slavery. But leaving that aside, I often expect my students to criticize their own views. Only by seeing the weaknesses in your view can you learn how to defend it. This is obvious. So this "case" presented by ABC seems desperate and poorly reported. How did ABC find this kid? Not by good reporting. Surely, someone fed them this lure and they bit.

Note 2. This despite the fact that for most of the last several thousands of years, the overwhelming majority of theologically minded people have thought that their beliefs complemente—not competed with—scientific and philosophical views. The Dark Ages are a notable exception.