It seems like too often the curricula and teaching methods of today's university professors are selectively critiqued by supervisors who have little insight into what constitutes the appropriate content and atmosphere of a college classroom. The raging debate over academic freedom has spawned an influx in public pressure to manipulate teachers' coursework for means of centrism. Cries of political bias in the classroom have caused many lecturers to become virtually paranoid in what they say and how they say it.
Reports surfaced last month that a right-wing alumni group at UCLA offered $100 rewards for tapes showing professors exhibiting a liberal bias in their teaching. Yet the Bruin Alumni Association is not the first organization to spearhead witch-hunts identifying and condemning "radicals" on America's campuses. Other organizations, such as the David Project's campaign against anti-Israel sentiment in Columbia University's Middle East Studies program, have long solicited volunteers to rat on their teachers. Such Draconian initiatives reveal the overzealous nature of whistleblowers who exaggerate the degree to which allegedly tainted material erodes the quality of their education and subjects them to disadvantaged conditions based on their personal ideologies.
But worse than the exaggeration of the claims are the proposed remedies. Conservative activist David Horowitz and his Students for Academic Freedom have sparked a national campaign pressuring state legislatures to pass laws correcting "liberal bias" among the faculty. Ironically, they want politics to be the solution in a case where politics is the problem. Masked by a façade of promoting "intellectual diversity," Mr. Horowitz and his allies seek laws imposing external political pressures on college curricula, faculty hiring policies and teaching methods. In a resurgence of classic McCarthyism, these excessive mandates would force universities to become subordinate to government micromanagement.
It's not that certain claims of the damaging effects of political partiality in the classroom are not without merit. Deliberately suppressing a particular ideological thought in academia is a vile breach of students' rights — action that should never be tolerated among university faculty. And if students' viewpoints are used against them or deliberately suppressed in an open forum — which has occurred — then it is undeniably an unconstitutional violation of free speech.
But the reality that complete objectivity in the classroom is a virtual impossibility demands that we separate out the more rare cases when lecturers' ideologies are used as conformist-promoting tools prohibiting dissent and disagreement. Exhibiting a preference towards one political side does not automatically presume a corresponding hostility towards the other, nor does it naturally undermine the information being presented. Free speech must be protected — but it is pure hypocrisy to use freedom of speech to condemn the acts of others practicing those same freedoms within contextualized boundaries. Besides, if students are secure about their ideological leanings, then they need not feel threatened by a professor occasionally exposing his particular viewpoints.
Case in point: my all-time favorite professor was a tried and true conservative, and I remember relishing in the controversy of his occasional provoking right-leaning comments. Indeed, the heated debates provoked by often questionable remarks that surround such classrooms — whether instigated by professors' political views are not — are the very acts which promote discourse necessary for academic enrichment and intellectual progress. Do we really want our classrooms to be free of such controversy and intensity? Have we become so insecure of what we believe in and what we stand for, so stubborn in our own viewpoints that we become terrified at the thought of having to listen or confer with individuals on the other side of the spectrum? Not only would legislation regulating the political nature of course curriculum make a mockery of free academic speech, it would effectively dull the dynamics of intellectual discourse in settings unequivocally meant to promote it.
At the center of the debate is the underlying assumption that America's campuses are perpetual beacons of radical liberalism and remain openly hostile to conservative thought. But since the acts of blazing liberalism that epitomized college campuses in the '60s and '70s, a unified and passionate conservative movement has become manifest, bolstered by the more than $35 million that conservative groups pour into campuses. The right's presence in universities is quite evident even at the University of Wisconsin, a school nationally renowned for its liberalism. Though colleges still lean to the left, individuals who claim that campus liberals lack strong conservative company are nonetheless blind to their surroundings.
The promotion of intellectual diversity should not be a task left solely in the hands of lecturers. The very idea of intellectualism is that one can see through the twists and turns of ideologically-tainted material and find the truth, shedding layers of partial fluff for discovery of the concrete. With the university resources available today, students should not be relying solely on professors to give them the full and complete truth.
Adam Lichtenheld ([email protected]) is a junior majoring in political science and African studies.
