NEA’s Fearmongers Attack Academic Bill of Rights
Wednesday, December 17th, 2008This morning, I was alerted to the NEA’s attack on the Academic Bill of Rights as it pertains to DuPage Community College in Illinois. Here’s a portion of David Horowitz’s official statement:
As background I should remind you of our nationwide campaign to get universities around the country to adopt our Academic Bill of Rights. I wrote this document to end the political abuse of the university and to restore integrity to the academic mission as the objective and truthful pursuit of knowledge. The key provision was the one demanding that faculty not use their courses for political, ideological, religious or anti-religious indoctrination.
You can imagine the reaction of the faculty association at DuPage last month, therefore, when the school’s Board of Trustees proposed adopting the Academic Bill of Rights as part of the school’s basic philosophy and governance. “I and the other trustees thought it was important to provide for the academic freedom of students as well as faculty members,” Kory Atkinson, a trustee at DuPage and the principal author of the new policy manual which contains the Academic Bill of Rights, explained to the Freedom Center. “We’ve had some anecdotal evidence from students about faculty at DuPage providing lower scores [for ideological reasons] and even in some written reports for classes where professors made comments about sources being ‘right-wing’ rather than rejecting them for scholarly reasons, mainly in the social sciences where sources tend to be more subjective.”
Here’s the NEA’s reaction to the Board of Trustees’ saying that they might adopt this proposal: (more…)