All students want their professors to respect them. Regardless of their race or sex, regardless of their sexual orientation or religious beliefs, all students expect their professors to give them a fair chance.
Some students, no doubt, feel they have been mistreated based on one of these traits. Some professors just don't respect diversity. Hopefully, those professors are a distinct minority, both at Ball State and across the nation.
But some students -- and legislators -- are concerned about a different kind of bias. They worry that liberal professors discriminate against conservative students, and they aim to do something about it.
David Horowitz, president of the Center for the Study of Popular Culture in California, is leading a national campaign to protect conservatives on college campuses.
Republicans in the Colorado legislature and the U.S. House of Representatives have introduced legislation based on Horowitz's "Academic Bill of Rights" into their respective chambers. Horowitz expects a half dozen more state legislatures and the U.S. Senate to follow suit sometime this spring.
The desire to protect students from professor's biases and prejudices is a noble one. However, this is not an appropriate place for the involvement of state legislatures.
Doing so would risk sliding down a slippery slope that leads to elected officials requiring universities to hire a certain number of "conservative" instructors, analyzing reading lists to make sure they're sufficiently "pro-American," and compromising the scholastic integrity of the classroom.
The only way to maintain the free and open exchange of ideas that makes America's higher education system so successful is to prevent excessive meddling by politicians. At the college level, education is about more than learning facts. It's about holding an intelligent conversation on a wide variety of topics, and doing that requires intellectual freedom. Once legislatures begin to interfere in higher education curricula and inject the political views into college courses, the academia will lose the ability to effectively analyze and critique our government and society. Such criticism is only possible when academics are independent of the political consequences of their ideas.
Universities must be free to set their own hiring policies. Professors must be free to share whatever ideas and theories they have.
Of course, it's wrong for professors to grade based on the views their students express, just as it's wrong to grade based on race, sex, sexual preference or religion. Universities must have policies in place so that students can appeal professors' decisions if they feel they've been treated unfairly, for whatever reason, and such policies should be well-known to students.
But it is monumentally important to the integrity of education that such appeals be decided within the university by fellow academics.
Otherwise, America risks losing the ability to look at itself carefully and honestly. We risk losing the ability to form our young people into true critical thinkers, and we risk damaging one of our most precious national resources.
Horowitz has good intentions, but if his ideas are based into law, he will do untold damage to education.
Write to Stephen at stevehj@mac.com
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