ACADEMIC FREEDOM CONFERENCE
Location: the Washington Court Hotel in Washington, DC
Date: April 7, 2006
LUNCH PANEL 1:00 PM Is Legislation Necessary or Advisable?
Scott Jaschik; Inside Higher Ed; Editor (Chair)
David Horowitz; Center for the Study of Popular Culture; President
Candace de Russy; SUNY Board of Trustees; Member
Terry Hartle; American Council on Education; SVP, Government Affairs
Bill Scheuerman; United University Professions; President
Tom Lucero; University of Colorado Board of Regents; Member
SCOTT JASCHIK: Good afternoon, everybody. While you’re finishing your lunch, we want to start the program because we have an excellent panel here and want to them time to talk and also time--spend a lot of the time engaged in discussion with the audience.
My name is Scott Jaschik, and I’m the Editor of Inside Higher Ed. And however you answer the question we are going to consider here today, about whether national--whether legislation is needed on this issue of politics in the classroom, I can tell you from a journalist’s perspective, it has been a very interesting issue to cover.
But we’re going to hear from a panel of people who come at this from different angles, and I’m going to briefly tell you a little bit about each of them right now. There are detailed biographies in your program materials.
Starting--and this is the order we are going to go in--we will hear from David Horowitz, who is President of the Center for the Study of Popular Culture. He is a prolific author, most recently of The Professors - The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America, and he is known as the father of the Academic Bill of Rights.
Then we’ll hear from Terry Hartle, who is Senior Vice President for Government Affairs at the American Council on Education. The American Council on Education represents just about all sectors of higher education, public and private, large and small, and so he can provide a broad perspective on the views of colleges.
Then we will hear from two New Yorkers, first from Candace de Russy, who is a member of the Board of Trustees of the State University of New York System and is also on the Board of Ave Maria University and is on the Trustee Council of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni.
Then we’ll hear from Bill Scheuerman, who is President of United University Professions, which represents faculty members and other professionals in the State University of New York System. He is also a professor of political science at SUNY’s Oswego campus, and is Vice President of the American Federation of Teachers.
And then we will hear from Thomas Lucero, who is a businessman and who is also an elected member of the University of Colorado Board of Regents.
Each of these people will speak for five to seven minutes, and I have warned them in advance that I’m going to be ruthless about cutting them off. And then we will have Q&A with the audience. So why don’t you hold your questions for now. I’d like to get through the panel first.
And so we’ll start with David Horowitz.
DAVID HOROWITZ: I’m going to try to be about two minutes because I’ve spoken a lot today. And it’s just--I wouldn’t even do this except that the Academic Bill of Rights and its legislative campaign have been so misrepresented and willfully misrepresented since I have testimony before several legislative committees that makes very clear what our agenda is.
I advised the Academic Bill of Rights for the SUNY system in New York. I did it for the Chairman of the Board of Regents, who told me he would put it through and endorsed it. He was paralyzed by his fear of the opposition of a radical minority on his faculty, the same kind of radical minority that toppled Larry Summers, a much more powerful university president than he was a chairman of regents. And that’s why I went to legislators, and that was mainly to get the attention of administrators and to put a weight into the balance so that an administrator could say, “The legislator is threatening legislation. Therefore, we need to restore the guidelines that have been established for nearly 100 years by the AAUP.” That’s the whole rationale for the campaign.
I have never sponsored - to this point, I have never - and I have never sponsored and don’t have any plans to sponsor legislative control of universities. All the legislation is resolutions and Sense of the Congress, and it has actually worked admirably. It has gotten the attention of everybody.
Terry Hartle, who is the Vice President of the American Council of Education, represents an organization that includes 1,800 or 2,000 higher education institutions, including all universities known to man, who--his organization was inspired by this to create a position that universities felt they could live with, which I have endorsed and which we have used as a compromised solution wherever universities have approached us, most particularly in the state of Ohio, where the inter-university council asked us if we would withdraw our legislation, if they would embrace the American Council’s resolution, and we said we would.
The one thing that I have reserved because I’ve found, thanks to Gib Armstrong, who sponsored this in Pennsylvania, is legislative hearings to see what the situation is, and basically, to bring information both about what’s happening on campuses, what’s actually happening in practice, and then what the university policies are, and then to ask university administrators hwy they aren’t enforcing them and what they could do, for example, to make students aware of their rights. Students have no idea what their rights are under the existing academic freedom policies.
I want to say one thing about the panel.
William Scheuerman is the Vice President of the AFT, has been publicly a very harsh critic of mine, but we met at Temple University and got along very well, and I’m happy to have him here.
And Scott Jaschik, who was kind enough to moderate this and runs an excellent Web magazine called InsideHigherEd.com on higher education issues has also published a lot of criticism of me. But, again, the fact that we get into a room and that we can discuss these issues is the only way, it seems to me, forward that’s not going to be highly destructive. And so I hope this panel is a portent of a future in which there is more discussion among people who reasonably disagree on these matters. Thank you.
SCOTT JASCHIK: Thank you. Terry?
TERRY HARTLE: Thank you very much. Let me begin by saying David’s--picking up on David’s comments that ACU is inspired as a result of his efforts to draft a proposal on academic rights and responsibility, I wouldn’t use the word inspired. We did it, but I wouldn’t use the word inspired.
The issue on the table, the politicalization of the university, particularly an assertion that it’s tilting to the left, is hardly new in our society. A common joke in Republican circles during the Depression was in a form of a question, “How do you get to Washington, D.C.?” Well, the answer, “It’s easy. You go to Harvard and turn left.”
In the 1950s, there was a great deal of concern about liberal tilting and communist tilting at American colleges and universities. At one point, Senator Joe McCarthy said that 28% of all top collaborators with the deceitful communist front movement have been college and university professors.
In the ‘60s, colleges and universities were the subject of controversy from a huge variety of issues. Looking back on it, today’s observer’s likely to be struck by the level of anger, the incendiary rhetoric, and the broad based nature of the charges. What’s interesting is that in the ‘60s, colleges and universities were opposed by both the left and the right. Indeed, at one point, opinion polls said that campus unrest was the nation’s second-most pressing problems, secondly only to the war in Vietnam.
But it was this idea that both the left and the right were very unhappy with colleges and universities. That’s so interesting today. As we were thinking about this talk, we found several articles that emphasized the extent to which both the right wing and the left wing wanted to attack colleges and universities.
In the 1980s, we heard this charge again. Joe Queenan, in his book, Imperial Caddy, The Life and Times of Dan Quayle, tackled this subject directly but in a somewhat humorous vein. He wrote, “The way society works is this. Leftist intellectuals with harebrained Marxist ideas get to control Stanford, MIT, Yale and the American Studies Department at the University of Vermont. In return, the right gets IBM, Honeywell, Disney World, and the New York Stock Exchange.
Leftist academics get to try out their stupid ideas on impressionable youth between 17 and 21, who don’t have any money or power. The right gets to try out its ideas on North America, South America, Europe, Asia, Australia, parts of Africa, most of which take MasterCard. The left gets Harvard, [Obil], and Twila Tharp’s dance company in Madison, Wisconsin. The right gets NASDAQ, Boeing, General Motors, Apple, McDonnell Douglas, Washington, D.C., Citicorp, Texas, Coca-Cola, General Electric, Japan, and outer space. This seems like a fair arrangement.
The question before us today, however, is a very specific one - is legislation needed? And I’ll confine my thoughts on this to talking about it from the perspective of federal legislation, though most of my points would also apply to state legislation as well.
First, I don’t think legislation is necessary or desirable for five reasons.
One, there is little evidence of a widespread national problem. There are assertions of a problem, and there are anecdotes, some of which may not be true. But there is very little data that one can point to. This is not to say that there are not professors or problems that need to be addressed. Rather, it is to say that there is no evidence to suggest a large widespread systematic problem.
Second, almost all colleges and universities have grievance policies to handle inappropriate academic behavior. Ironically, schools that have those procedures will tell you that they are rarely used. Where there is a problem, they should be used.
Third, government efforts to regulate speech on a general issue involving so many people in so many different ways will not succeed. Attempt to regulate speech may work if you’re dealing with a very specific issue and a very clearly defined problem. For example, you don’t joke about weapons when you go through security at the airport.
By contrast, efforts to impose speech codes at colleges and universities in the 1990s almost never worked because they were overly broad and poorly defined. Operationalizing such codes turned out to be nearly impossible, even when the unit under consideration, college or university campus, was fairly specific and defined.
Fourth, using government as an enforcement vehicle is always colored by the will of the majority at the time. The majority will change, and so will the discussion. We use government to establish boundaries of discussion on campus. Those boundaries will not be fixed and immutable.
Having said all of this, I must note that the House of Representatives recently passed HR-609 to reauthorize the Higher Education Act. The House Republicans wanted to include language in the bill to deal with this issue, and they did so. The higher education community, myself included, worked with the House Republicans and David Horowitz to find language that would address the concerns that had been raised while not generating unexpected side effects. What is in the legislation is put forward as a set of principles that address the idea of what a university should be. It is a good statement, and we can live with it.
One reason we could do this was because there was widespread agreement about the basic principles of what universities ought to be. Doesn’t mean there will always be agreement on the details. In fact, in the long history of higher education, it’s pretty clear that there will always be a vigorous debate about how to make those basic principles work in practice. That’s not a bad thing; it’s a good thing. And I suspect that the language in the House bill, which will eventually be included into a final bill, is likely to stimulate a lot of discussion on college and university campuses.
Please note that this is a Sense of the House resolution. Eventually, it will become a Sense of the Congress resolution. Congress is saying, “We think.” This is very different than Congress passing a law that says, “You must.” Sense of Congress resolutions are very useful for calling attention to an issue and establishing a viewpoint, and that is what this does.
Individual institutions will look at the language and decide how to address it on their campuses. In some cases, it will probably spark a campus-wide debate on the issue. But what Congress is doing is not self-executing. I think that what we’ll see is a lot of discussions about this on campuses, and I think that that is a good and healthy thing.
Thanks very much.
Candace De Russy: Good afternoon, colleagues and friends. As you here know well, higher education historically safeguarded the Socratic method of openly questioning all truths. But anyone who claims that this is still the case is either ignorant or dishonest. [Pache], Mr. Hartle, and back to the evidence question later.
Honest observers know that our campuses no longer protect intellectual pluralism and academic freedom for all. And indeed, they are a breeding ground for leftist curricular bias, repression, and a dangerous extremism. In short, today’s campuses have become modern incarnations of the Athenian jury, which executed Socrates for thought crimes. Yet, for the most part, our educational leaders, faculties and their representative organizations, administrators, governing boards, and political officials refuse adamantly to face up to this scandal.