see! they even make us wear blue!

Nearly every Professor, Associate or Teaching Assistant in the social sciences and humanities has experienced it. From spontaneous winging about stating opinions too openly, to planned campaigns of harassment, the well-financed campus Right has a new tactic in the effort to paint the world conservative. Just as Fox News ensconces their uniquely partisan hack-fest in the language of “balance” and “fairness”, a new form of student activism has targeted scientific inquiry and civil liberties in the name of “academic freedom”. The basic idea is this- there is a profound liberal or leftist bias in Academia, and so student activists should raise their voices and demand that “both sides” of issues be discussed in class, and where necessary, should turn to legislatures for laws requiring conservative viewpoints expressed whenever progressive ones are. Where legal remedies are not possible, students monitor instructors, post anonymous testimonials of bias on the web, and, in some cases, poster offices and even homes with attacks and slander. This is an organized movement with rightist foundations donors at its core. Its coming to a University near you.

The vanguard of this whiny new conservatism is Students for Academic Freedom, the brainchild of embittered former New Left hanger-on David Horowitz. SAF’s website contains a litany of complaints about so-called radical professors, as well as action kits and training manuals for students who are sick, sick, sick of hearing things they don’t like. It encourages students to demand equal time for conservative thought, to humiliate or shame professors for being forthright about their opinions, and to frame all of their demands as an honest appeal to fairness. This veil obscures the fact that this movement is nothing more than an attempt by conservatives, unsatisfied with dominance in government, church and the media to once again dominate higher education. If Fox is an indicator of what fair and balanced is in the cynical mind of a conservative revolutionary, imagine what our universities will look like.

This movement is an attack on scientific inquiry, an attack on personal freedom and a serious threat to academic integrity. It is part and parcel of a larger strategy of the right. Come out hard claiming bias and unfairness and it allows you to push your reactionary agenda.

The simplistic idea that there are “two sides”, one liberal and one conservative, to any given question or issue is patently ridiculous. In any given political question, there are a multitude of perspectives. In scientific or analytical questions there are generally many sets of hypotheses or schools of thought. Not all of these schools are created equal, some are based in better or worse methods, some are new and exploratory, while others are well-established and widely respected. The job of the instructor is to introduce these ideas to students, and to give them the tools to analyze and critically examine them. But science is not “Crossfire”- there are not liberal and conservative camps which should be given equal screen time.

For example, what is the “other” side on issues of racism or sexual discrimination? If equal time means giving conservatives, no matter how illiterate their views are, a presence in our curriculum, we would be forced to teach students that perhaps racism and sexism don’t exist. The overwhelming evidence in social science is that social inequality is real and palpable. Why should we give weight to the “other side” in this discussion when our discipline is nearly universal in it’s recognition of the existence of these social phenomena? Should rightist politicians and pundits be presented as the “other side”, equated with serious scholars simply because, for political reasons, they disagree with the state of the art? No. No more than geologists should be forced to teach that the earth might be flat or astrophysicists required to give credence to geocentrism. Science should be allowed to grow and change and should be led by scholarly debate and peer-review, not dictates from the state.

Of course, in the battles over elementary school curriculum exactly this argument is being made. The Kansas school board’s decision to give equal time to creationism in science class shows exactly where the commissars of “equal time” are headed.

Secondly, who should decide what views need to be included? The SAF logic would suggest that we present Holocaust deniers’ views when discussing the Second World War. Segregationists and slavery advocates also need their face time. Thought experiments like this are useful, given that these student activists attack the bejesus out of professors who would give Stalinism, or radical Islam their day in Academic court. Try to look at the world through Arab eyes and bam, you’re on a list. This is not about freedom.

Lastly, the idea that Professors should hide their political opinions is both bizarre and dangerous. I, for one, want to know exactly where a professor stands. I want her to be upfront and honest about it, so that I myself can piece together my own thoughts and beliefs. What these student activists want is to be spoon-fed information which will not challenge them, which will simply line up with what they already believe. The overall intellectual laziness of today’s student in today’s degree mill is a crucial factor here. Instead of learning enough to argue with professors with whom they disagree, they want to shut the professor up. And they say that the left is full of wimps.

From reading the internet posts and testimonials from distraught students, it is clear that the animating force here is a discomfort with the specific conclusions of academic scholarship. When economics departments present radical, free-market ideology as scientific fact, the SAFers are nowhere to be seen. However, when an English or Sociology professor makes the case that patriarchy or racism are responsible for white male accomplishment, people go apeshit. It’s not an accident that the SAF is a dominantly white and largely male club.

I’m working on a set of “talking points” for academics who are forced to confront these sorts of attacks. The upshot is that, if handled right, discussions of these issues can be important learning moments for students. It opens up issues of the role of the University and society, the nature of American political discourse (for example, the complete misuse of the term “liberal”) and the nature of scientific inquiry. Let’s have that discussion, but be careful not to encourage this whiny assault on intellectual honesty and liberty.