[Peace-discuss] Neocons Lay Siege to the Ivory Towers

[David Green]

Neocons Lay Siege to the Ivory Towers
By Saree Makdisi

The Los Angeles Times
May 4, 2005

Saree Makdisi is a professor of English literature at
UCLA

In the months ahead, the state Senate Committee on
Education will
consider a bill that pretends to strike a blow for
intellectual
honesty, truth and freedom, but in reality poses a
profound threat
to academic freedom in the United States.

Peddled under the benign name "An Academic Bill of
Rights," SB 5 is
in fact part of a wide assault on universities,
professors and
teaching across the country. Similar bills are pending
in more than
a dozen state legislatures and at the federal level,
all calling for
government intrusion into pedagogical matters, such as
text
assignments and course syllabuses, that neither
legislators nor
bureaucrats are competent to address.

The language of the California bill -- which was
blocked in
committee last week but will be reconsidered later in
the
legislative session -- is extraordinarily
disingenuous, even
Orwellian. Declaring that "free inquiry and free
speech are
indispensable" in "the pursuit of truth," it argues
that
"intellectual independence means the protection of
students from the
imposition of any orthodoxy of a political, religious
or ideological
nature." Professors should "not take unfair advantage
of their
position of power over a student by indoctrinating him
or her with
the teacher's own opinions before a student has had an
opportunity
fairly to examine other opinions upon the matters in
question."

To protect students from what one might (mistakenly)
suppose to be
an epidemic of indoctrination, the bill mandates that
students be
graded on the basis of their "reasoned answers" rather
than their
political beliefs. Reading lists should "respect the
uncertainty and
unsettled character of all human knowledge." Speakers
brought to
campus should "promote intellectual pluralism," and
faculty should
eschew political, religious or "anti-religious" bias.

Notwithstanding its contorted syntax, the bill may
sound reasonable.
But, in fact, it has nothing to do with balance and
everything to do
with promoting a neoconservative agenda. For one
thing, the proposed
"safeguards" to "protect" students from faculty
intimidation are
already in place at all universities, which have
procedures to
encourage students' feedback and evaluate their
grievances. Despite
a lot of noise from the right about liberal bias on
campus, there
are simply no meaningful data to suggest that any of
these
procedures have failed.

The real purpose of the bill, then, is not to provide
students with
"rights" but to institute state monitoring of
universities, to
impose specific points of view on instructors -- in
many cases,
points of view that have been intellectually
discredited -- and
ultimately to silence dissenting voices by punishing
universities
that protect them.

"Why should we, as fairly moderate to conservative
legislators,
continue to support universities that turn out
students who rail
against the very policies their parents voted us in
for?" asks the
Republican sponsor of the Ohio version of the bill.

Backers of the Florida bill would like to empower
students to sue
professors with whom they disagree on the theory of
evolution.

The campaign for academic "rights" actually originated
with
organizations and individuals committed to defending
Israel from
criticism, and whose interest in curtailing academic
freedom
dovetails with those of conservatives.

At the federal level, for example, a confluence of
conservative and
pro-Israeli forces helped push HR 3077 through the
House of
Representatives in 2003. That bill, which foundered in
a Senate
committee (but has been resurrected in the current
Congress), called
for government monitoring of international studies
programs that
receive federal funding. The bill was drafted in
response to the
claim that the federal government was funding programs
that
criticize American foreign policy. If passed, it would
have created
a board (including two members from "federal agencies
that have
national security responsibilities") to ensure that
academic
programs "better reflect the national needs related to
homeland
security." Its supporters included the American Jewish
Congress, the
Anti-Defamation League, and the American Israel
Political Action
Committee, the bulwark of Israel's Washington lobby.

The bill was also backed by pro-Israel agitators
Daniel Pipes and
Martin Kramer, who, via allies such as neoconservative
firebrand
David Horowitz, are among the proponents of the "bill
of rights"
legislation at the state level. All the proposed bills
before state
legislatures are variants of a text written by
Horowitz and backed
by Students for Academic Freedom, which maintains a
website where
students can complain about their instructors'
supposed bias.

The problem with all this is that the university is
meant to be an
insular environment. Those within its walls are
supposed to be
protected from outside political pressures so that
learning can take
place.

But the lesson of the recent upheavals at Columbia
University --
where an individual professor became the object of a
concerted
campaign of intimidation because of his criticisms of
Israel -- is
that pressure groups targeting an individual professor
for his
public views are willing to inflict collateral damage
on an entire
university. What the new legislation offers such
groups is the
opportunity to inflict damage preemptively on our
entire educational
system.

Despite its narrow defeat in the California Senate
Education
Committee last week, SB 5's supporters clearly will
not disappear
quietly. If this and similar bills pass, who gets
hired and what
gets taught could be decided not according to academic
and
intellectual criteria but by pressure groups, many of
whose members
are failed academics driven by crassly political
motivations.
Society would pay the price.