Brow-beaten students sitting in classrooms ripe with counterculture can take heart. David Horowitz, the California Trotskyite who switched sides during the Reagan 1980s, has emerged as the avatar of the liberally oppressed. At his urging, U.S. Rep. Jack Kingston, R-Georgia, has proposed legislation to \project the principle of intellectual diversity"" and support Horowitz's academic Bill of Rights, a document designed to combat the classroom indoctrination perpetrated by liberals and other lefties. But getting the federal government involved in the classroom is certainly an odd way for conservatives to push increased tolerance.
A 2003 survey by the Independent Women's Forum, known for attacking Anita Hill's sexual harassment accusations against Clarence Thomas, and later defending Paula Jones' accusations against President Clinton, found nearly a third of surveyed students felt they had to discard ""intellectual and philosophical honesty"" in order to get good grades with politically erudite teachers. Horowitz calls this ""political pollution."" Conservative students, encouraged by groups ranging from Students for Academic Freedom to Daniel Pipes' Middle East Forum, rightly want change.
To ensure that students are not doped with the arcana suggested by UW-Madison courses like those with ""race and gender"" in their titles, the Academic Bill of Rights promises to protect students and their grades from ""orthodoxy of a political, religious or ideological nature.""
Presumably, enforcement mechanisms would be written into campus curriculum or state and federal law. For example, in the wake of Ward Churchill's 9/11 rants, the University of Colorado System adopted Horowitz's Bill of Rights. And in January the Ohio Senate introduced a bill that would apply similar ""protections"" to all post-secondary students in the state.
Yet, administrative or government enforcement of intellectual freedom seems a contradiction in terms. A mandate that professors include dissenting viewpoints in curricula would more likely threaten intellectual freedom. As State University of New York Professor William Scheuerman says, ""We don't want Big Brother here [in the classroom].""
And what if roles were reversed? ""What guarantee do [conservatives] have that government will not turn on them in the future?"" asked UW-Madison political science Professor Donald Downs. His point is that a government imposed academic Bill of Rights is, at best, a ""Mephistophelean pact.""
The assumptions underlying Horowitz's academic Bill of Rights and Kingston's resolution are also suspect. ""We do not go to . . . hospital operating rooms and expect to hear political lectures from our surgeons,"" Horowitz reasons. ""The same should be true for classrooms and professors."" Sure, a surgeon should cut and sew, but by their very nature, professors in fields ranging from history to economic theory talk about politics in class. Moreover, professors are intellectuals as well as educators. They must have the latitude to criticize the opinions, ideas and institutions of the majority.
While it is absolutely true that students should not be graded or hazed on the basis of their views, it is equally true that they have a right to an education. And is it possible to describe students who receive bachelor's degrees as ""educated"" if they manage four years on campus without ever having their political opinions challenged?
The Academic Bill of Rights, in a perverse or perhaps intended twist, might silence professors and otherwise prevent them from doing what they were hired to do. As Christine Link, executive director of the ACLU in Ohio puts it, ""[The Academic Bill of Rights campaign] has some feel of 1952 to it.""
Finally, it may be the case that not as many academics are raging liberals as we are led to believe. As Stanford Professor Graham Larkin has pointed out, Horowitz's famous tabulation of political affiliation (which counted a 10 to one Democrat to Republican advantage in a survey of 1,431 professors) is disingenuous. Horowitz did not include 1,891 professors who he assumed to be ""unaffiliated"" in the sample. And here at UW-Madison, more than a few prominent and well-published professors in the humanities are overt conservatives.
Horowitz's plan and Kingston's congressional resolution remain Mephistophelean remedies. Neither would grant such new-right conservatives what they seem to want-namely, more power in the marketplace of ideas. So, to quote a string of conservatives stretching back to Adam Smith, let ""the magic of the market"" do its work without the sort of ""government regulation"" that Horowitz and Kingston demand. As students (and professors), we should be suspicious of people who want to regulate us while simultaneously calling for the deregulation of their own affairs.
