Is professor bias a problem in our public colleges and universities?

No

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by Josh Hyman

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The debate over Academic Freedom has been ongoing since Universities have existed, but it has been boiling over for the past fifteen years. The Supreme Court has weighed in on this debate, and it's instructive to look at the issue from the Court's perspective, and also in the context of the ideological campaign that has fueled the fire.

The Supreme Court has declared the campus to be a "marketplace of ideas," and the speech that is funded, both by Student Activity Fees (a "self-tax" by the student body) and by the salaries of professors, is to be respected regardless of viewpoint (a principle called "viewpoint neutrality"). In other words, far from being "fair and balanced," speech should be respected and funded for meeting certain basic criteria of organization and competence, regardless of the slant which this respect engenders.

So, at Brigham Young University, the Mormon educational institution, or at Liberty University, the right-wing Christian college, you could reasonably expect to find more conservative professors and students, because they self-select to go there. Meanwhile, at UC Berkeley or at the New School, an alternative-model college, you could expect to find many more liberal students and faculty. The speech you will hear will be either decidedly liberal or decidedly conservative, and it is ALL CONSTITUTIONAL and fair, as long as basic principles are respected regarding in what context the speech is made. (For example, student club x inviting speakers to campus must raise a certain amount of money per year and keep accurate records of its membership and meetings, and professors universally are prohibited from discussing politics or ideology not germane to the subject of their course. And, of course, the rights of minority student clubs and professors to express their opinions must be equally respected.)

This is the marketplace of ideas. No one is without opinions, including educators and student organizations, and they are free to express them at will, within certain ethical constraints. However, the institutions regulating them must remain BLIND to the ideology expressed. In other words, a faculty member cannot be fired for being conservative, nor can a speaker be denied for being too liberal (unfortunately, both have happened; the latter was illustrated painfully by the number of administrators and professors who lost their jobs when a University of Colorado professor named Ward Churchill toured the country and spoke about the September 11th attacks in conspiracy-theory terms, and the now-fired professors and administrators refused to muzzle him).

A right-wing ideologue named David Horowitz has formed a group called Students for Academic Freedom, which purports to be a watchdog for violations of viewpoint neutrality, but which in fact distorts the issues involved. He creates a panic over "student indoctrination" reminiscent of the Red Scare, and in fact calls many of his targets "Communists" or "Socialists." His group shops around a document called the Academic Bill of Rights, which essentially calls for hiring practices and student activity fee allocations to be "fair and balanced;" in other words, minimum ideological quotas.

His ideas are intensely problematic. He calls for curricula, hiring, speech, and funding to reflect a balanced sample of research in a given field, but broken down by ideology and not by proportional scholarly support. In other words, think of Evolution and Creationism; think of a speaker who is a Holocaust survivor and one who is a Holocaust denier; think of the number of conservative professors at Liberty University and the number of liberals it would take to balance them out.

These would be the effects if the ABoR, as it's referred to in academic circles, actually took hold. It will never take hold as intended, thankfully, because it is too cumbersome; there's no way to balance out all speech and if an imbalance occurred (as it always would in somebody's perception) the educational institution responsible would get tied up in litigation referring to its improper enforcement of the ABoR.

The scarier, and more realistic, prospect is that the ABoR would stifle speech altogether, and we would wind up with an in locus parentis speech regulation system like we had in the Fifties. No possible formula could be devised for balancing out student-funded speakers; therefore, student groups could not invite speakers who were politically charged. Professors would live in constant fear of being fired for stepping over the political line, so they would never engage their students in political debate or challenge their social views, thus negating the benefits of education in a democracy. This is not an impossible reality, and could happen in five to ten years if a sinister bureaucratic ploy like the ABoR took hold.

It is vital to defend student and professor free speech, and allow any student to peruse, and participate in, the marketplace of ideas. There are very tough sanctions already in place to punish professors or student governments who punish students for their views, and they allow recourse from the department level all the way to the Supreme Court. The solution is not to muzzle "bias." It is to speak more.

The author served on the SUNY Board of Trustees as the elected president of the SUNY Student Assembly from 2005 - 2006, representing 413,000+ students in the debate over Academic Freedom, among other issues.

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