In a Jan. 26 article in the Ball State Daily News, Ball State University Provost Beverley Pitts claims that the bill introduced in the Indiana legislature and inspired by the Academic Bill of Rights would not mean "a change for Ball State," because "We already have a system where students have ample opportunity to express concerns they're having in the classroom and a due process for that."
Pitts' comments were echoed by Dean of Students Randy Hyman, who said, "I don't think the issue is worthy of addressing or necessary" because most faculty are already in agreement with the principles of the Academic Bill of Rights.
It is a shame that the Daily News did not contact us because we have already refuted these claims in a letter to President Jo Ann Gora. Pitts' and Hyman's comments amount to stonewalling by an administration that refuses to admit there is a problem.
If Ball State's academic freedom protections were adequate, student Brett Mock would not have had to appeal to sources outside the university to support his complaint, which President Gora and her administration have yet to address. If faculty at Ball State truly agreed with the principles of academic freedom, they would not have stood by while the university spent tens of thousands of dollars to indoctrinate incoming freshmen through a mandatory reading program that presented only one side of very controversial issues.
We have heard such empty claims from the Ball State administration before. In a Dec. 15 guest column in the Muncie Star Press, Ball State University President Jo Ann Gora asserted that the "fundamental concepts" of the Academic Bill of Rights are "already codified at Ball State and have been since at least the 1960s." She added, "Our experience shows the systems built into these policies work."
Students for Academic Freedom has researched Ball State's academic freedom policies, which are available on the University's Web site Anyone examining them will find they lack crucial and specific protections for intellectual diversity, particularly as they affect relations between faculty and students in the classroom. For example, the Ball State academic freedom policies do not address the responsibility of teachers to maintain a scholarly discourse in their classrooms as distinct from the partisan advocacy familiar in the political arena. It is this distinction which is at the heart of Brett Mock's complaint about the Peace Studies program at Ball State.
A copy of our report (which is detailed below and is available at http://www.studentsforacademicfreedom.org/archive/December2004/BSUreplytoGoraonABORUnnecessary122704.htm) was sent to Ball State's administrators soon after President Gora's column ran in the Star Press but has obviously been ignored by the Ball State Administration. That is why we have appealed to the legislature for redress. Pitts is 100 percent wrong in saying that the legislation will have no effect on Ball State procedures. That would only be the case if the Ball State administration were to stop its stonewalling and introduce these reforms itself.
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