Hot For Teacher

David Horowitz and Jesse Walker discuss the "Academic Bill of Rights"

Jesse Walker | September 18, 2003

(Page 2 of 2)

Walker: Hallelujah! I'm A Bum

David Horowitz spends a surprising amount of space reiterating that his Academic Bill of Rights will not lead to hiring quotas—surprising, because my article declared that, "if read properly—and if preserved in whatever law actually gets passed—[it] would preclude such policies." In other words, I already agree with him about this. When he gets to the argument that I did make—that his proposal would create new rights for students at the expense of the freedoms of the faculty—he seems to miss the point, commenting that it "does not extend any more rights to students than are implicit in the existing academic freedom tradition—a fact we draw attention to in the preamble to the document."

The preamble does include some quotations that might give that impression, one of which I cited in my article. I did not intend to suggest that there is no tradition of protecting students' rights on campus: The Joint Statement on Rights and Freedoms of Students, originally adopted by the American Association of University Professors in 1964 and revised periodically since then, includes protections against "prejudiced or capricious academic evaluation" and for the rights to "take reasoned exception to the data or views offered in any course of study" and "reserve judgment about matters of opinion"; it covers student speech, student association, and other important legal territories. Such rights are a longstanding element of academic freedom, and to the extent that Horowitz's document restates them it is unobjectionable, if somewhat superfluous. It's the new stuff that worries me.

The classic statement on academic freedom was adopted by the American Association of University Professors and the Association of American Colleges in 1940, and revised in 1970 and 1990. You'll find a kernel of Horowitz's revised definition there: an admonition that instructors "should be careful not to introduce into their teaching controversial matter which has no relation to their subject." A subsequent note explains that "The intent of this statement is not to discourage what is 'controversial.' Controversy is at the heart of the free academic inquiry which the entire statement is designed to foster. The passage serves to underscore the need for teachers to avoid persistently intruding material which has no relation to their subject." In other words, the measure exists to stop an engineering professor from spending his classes campaigning for Wesley Clark, proselytizing for the Bhagwan, or whining about his love life—a legitimate restriction, but not one that gets to the heart of Horowitz's complaints about modern universities. Furthermore, while it is part of a document on academic freedom, the clause does not describe a part of that freedom; it is a limitation on professorial liberty, an example of where it is permissible for the institution to intrude.

What Horowitz either doesn't realize or won't acknowledge is that he would introduce yet more intrusions, pushing far beyond restraints on obvious malpractice. I'm not at all reassured by his comment that the Creationism complaint would go nowhere because the Academic Bill of Rights merely demands "that students should be made aware of other viewpoints." Why require a professor of evolutionary biology to spend time discussing Creationism at all? That's admittedly an extreme example; I picked it because it lays out the trouble with Horowitz's rule so starkly, not because I expect it to be typical. Not every potential case involves fringe beliefs. Class time is limited, after all, and existing interpretations of the data are many. One of the best courses I took as a history student at Michigan examined the growth of the public sector. The prof made a deliberate decision to limit the colloquium's attention to two interpretive models, the pluralist and the Marxist, even though he acknowledged that there were many others that he was not describing, such as public choice. I respected his right to do so, even though I have more sympathy for the public choice approach than for either of the schools we examined; I certainly don't think I should have been able to file a grievance just because he didn't ask us to read some James Buchanan.

All this gets to the central problem with Horowitz's position: his belief that his proposal consists of negative liberties comparable to the American Bill of Rights. A lot of them look more like positive claims that students can advance against the faculty and the university. I'm actually sympathetic to the idea that students should have more power on campus, but not this sort of power; not the right to lodge official complaints against professors for the views they choose to explore in class. Even if we ignore the extraordinary cases— the Creationism example, say, or worse yet, a history professor forced to defend his decision not to engage the claims of Holocaust revisionists—we still have the remarkable notion that instructors could and should be required to defend ordinary editorial decisions to an official body, a la the Fairness Doctrine. If someone is treating a 600-page Marxist textbook as unchallengeable gospel, she may be a lousy teacher and a deluded ideologue, but the proper answer is not to drag her before a tribunal. As the cliché goes, the solution to bad speech is more speech. That is one course in one college in one enormous country. Leaflet the students. Tell them where they might hear other points of view. (Try the economics department.) If the class is required, then that's worthy of protest; the mere fact that it exists is not.

Finally: I'm glad to learn that Horowitz does not consider all the examples described in his site's "case studies" to be violations of academic freedom, and that he plans to clear up potential confusion by removing them from his Web page. I ask him to consider the fact that these are the sorts of events that prompted actual existing students to assert that their academic freedom was under attack, and that they are therefore the sorts of events that would likely prompt a student to lodge a complaint if Horowitz's bill of rights is ever put in place. Rules should be judged not just by the intentions of the people who draft them, but by the ways they can be used, and abused, in practice.