OCE # 1 Education (spring 06)
Instructions:
Read “Witch Hunt at UCLA” and “Ideologues at the Lectern” (next pages) which were published in the Los Angeles Times on January 22, 2006

Write an essay responding to this question: Should the California legislature pass an academic bill of rights?

Refer to and quote both articles. Use them to back up your position as well as information to refute. No other sources are needed. Your first paragraph should include both article titles, authors, publication, and publication date.

Add your own thoughts, ideas, analogies, examples, etc.

Assume your reader is familiar with the articles, and minimal summary is needed.

Use more than one mode of development (such as comparison contrast, cause and effect, narrative, definition, etc) as needed to advance your thesis.

Participating in peer editing is part of your grade. Make sure your first draft is ready on the day we peer edit. Meeting with your instructor in conference with your second draft is also part of your grade. Make sure you meet that deadline as well.

You will edit your second draft for grammar using the checklist in your packet.

Your essay must be typed in 12-point font, double spaced.

You will turn in the 3rd draft, outline, 1st draft, peer edit sheets, 2nd draft, checklist (p. 14), and grade sheets (p. 15-16). Staple them together in the above order.

Length: 400 – 450 words

 

From Los Angeles Times
COMMENTARY
Ideologues at the lectern
By David Horowitz

January 22, 2006


STEPHEN ZELNICK is a political moderate who has taught in the English department at Temple University for 37 years. He has served as president of the faculty senate, as director of the university's writing programs and, more recently, was vice provost for undergraduate studies.

On Jan. 10, Zelnick and I testified as witnesses before a Pennsylvania House Committee on Academic Freedom, possibly the first such committee in the history of higher education in America.

Zelnick told the legislators that as director of two undergraduate programs, he had observed the classes of more than 100 teachers. He had "seen excellent, indifferent and miserable teaching," he said.

But in all those courses, he added, "I have rarely heard a kind word for the United States, for the riches of our marketplace, for the vast economic and creative opportunities made available for energetic and creative people (that is, for our students); for family life, for marriage, for love, or for religion."

I wasn't particularly surprised to hear that. The hearings in Pennsylvania are a direct outgrowth of the campaign I launched in September 2003 to persuade colleges and universities to adopt an "Academic Bill of Rights" to protect students from unprofessional political indoctrination by their professors. My bill said, for example, that students should be exposed to "the spectrum of significant scholarly viewpoints" and not force-fed an orthodoxy on matters that are controversial.

I began the campaign by trying to convince university trustees and administrators directly that a student's right to an intellectually honest, intellectually diverse education was in jeopardy because of professors — particularly from the left — who were determined to indoctrinate students with their own political opinions. But I turned to legislatures when I found the schools unwilling to listen.

Two years later, more than a dozen legislatures have considered "academic freedom" legislation, including Florida, Indiana, Maine, Missouri, Tennessee and other states. Universities in Colorado and Ohio have adopted new academic freedom rules (after we withdrew legislation that would have forced them to do so), and Pennsylvania has been holding academic freedom hearings as a result of our efforts.

In California, a bill to create an academic bill of rights didn't make it out of committee in the Legislature last year, but is to be reconsidered in the weeks ahead.

University administrators like to suggest that we are wasting our time trying to solve a non-problem. In the fall of 2003, I visited Elizabeth Hoffman, then president of the University of Colorado, who told me, "David, we have no problem here." A year and half later, one of the many extremist professors on her faculty, Ward Churchill, became a figure of national notoriety when the public learned that he had referred to the victims of 9/11 as "little Eichmanns," and had argued that Americans deserved even worse.

As a result of the public outcry, Hoffman was forced to resign. Churchill resigned as head of the ethnic studies department, but is still on the faculty.

The American public understands that a university should be a marketplace of ideas, and that people on both sides of the spectrum will go off the deep end at times. But they will not be so charitable if they believe that the universities are becoming partisan themselves.

Yet the one-sided nature of university faculties has now been the subject of several academic studies. A 2003 study by professor Daniel Klein of Santa Clara University, for instance, found that around the country Democrats outnumbered Republicans about 30 to 1 in the field of anthropology, about 28 to 1 in sociology, and about 7 to 1 in political science.

Another study, conducted by professors at Smith College, the University of Toronto and George Mason University, looked at data from a large national sample of professors and found that professors of English who identified themselves as leaning left outnumbered their conservative-leaning colleagues by 30 to 1; professors of political science by 40 to 1; and professors of history by 8 to 1.

The Churchill problem is not unique to Colorado but reflects a systemwide intellectual corruption in the academic world. Churchill could not have been hired, promoted, given tenure or been made chairman of his department without the support of his entire department, his dean, the university administration and about a dozen scholars in the field of ethnic studies, all of whom would have had to support him in each step of the process.

The Academic Bill of Rights is a modest attempt to improve a bad and deteriorating situation on our campuses. It would restore the idea of intellectual diversity as a central educational value. It would make students aware that they should be getting more than one side of controversial issues and that they should not be browbeaten (or graded) on the basis of their political opinions.

Opponents of the Academic Bill of Rights — including radicalized organizations that now represent the academic profession, such as the American Assn. of University Professors, American Historical Assn., Modern Language Assn. and American Federation of Teachers — have attempted to block its progress by waging a campaign of gross misrepresentation and falsehood, accusing me of seeking to put the government in control of university curricula, and of trying to have left-wing professors fired.

They say that our campaign would require universities to teach such minority positions as Holocaust denial and intelligent design. These claims are patently untrue. Anyone who wants can read the Academic Bill of Rights (which is posted at http://www.studentsforacademicfreedom.org .) There is not a single sentence in it that would substantiate their charges.

The creation of the Pennsylvania committee was the work of a former Marine, Republican state Rep. Gibson C. Armstrong. In the summer of 2004, Armstrong was approached by a constituent named Jennie Mae Brown, a student at the York campus of Penn State who complained to him about a physics professor who, she told the New York Times, regularly used class time to "belittle President Bush and the war in Iraq." According to the article, "as an Air Force veteran, Ms. Brown said she felt the teacher's comments were inappropriate for the classroom."

Although many professors put activism before scholarship, and are indeed guilty of such unprofessional abuses of their classrooms, I believe they represent a minority of faculty, part of an academic subculture that confuses political consciousness-raising with education.

I believe that the majority of university professors in this country are people of goodwill, and the campaign I have launched is designed to encourage them to take a stand in defense of educational values and academic freedom in the classroom.

David Horowitz is publisher of www.frontpagemag.com and author of "The Professors," to be published later this month by Regnery.

 

COMMENTARY
Witch hunt at UCLA
By Saree Makdisi

January 22, 2006

'UCLA STUDENTS: Do you have a professor who just can't stop talking about President Bush, about the war in Iraq, about the Republican Party, or any other ideological issue that has nothing to do with the class subject matter? It doesn't matter whether this is a past class, or your class from this coming winter quarter. If you help expose the professor, we'll pay you for your work."

This grotesque offer appeared last week on a new website taking aim at members of the UCLA faculty. The site, created by the Bruin Alumni Assn., a group founded by 2003 UCLA graduate Andrew Jones, offers differing bounties for class notes, handouts and illicit recordings of lectures ($100 for all three).

A glance at the profiles of the "targeted professors," however, reveals that they have been singled out, in most cases, not for what goes on in their courses, but for the positions they have taken outside the classroom — and outside the university.

I earned my own inaccurate and defamatory "profile," for example, not for what I have said in my classes on English poets such as Wordsworth and Blake — my academic specialty, which the website pointedly avoids mentioning — but rather for what I have written in newspapers about Middle Eastern politics.

My colleagues and I are being targeted for speaking out on the kinds of urgent social matters and universal principles that it has always — in every society and every age — been the task of intellectuals to address.

The website assumes that any professor who speaks out in a public forum must at the same time be indulging in ideological abuse of his or her students — proselytizing them, indoctrinating them. And it's actually not just any professor; it's only the supposedly "liberal" ones, since "conservative" faculty are not targeted on the website.

Naturally, a professor who speaks out in public expects to receive criticism in public. Criticism is one thing; a farrago of misquotations, misrepresentations and utter falsehoods, dragging in one's family and stretching back to one's high school days, is something else entirely. This is no way to assess someone's classroom conduct.

Ultimately, of course, this has nothing to do with me or my colleagues, or our teaching. A method for assessing how professors treat their students is already built into how universities work. Every course at UCLA gives students the opportunity to anonymously evaluate their professors, and those evaluations are used in hiring, promotion and tenure decisions; abusive professors don't get very far in their careers.

So the point of the website is not really to produce genuine "evaluations" of classroom dynamics — a cause that would hardly be well-served by a tiny group of politically motivated zealots accountable to no one and trying to use the cash nexus to break the sacrosanct bond between teacher and student. The point, rather, is to silence voices that go against the zealots' right-wing orthodoxy, and to subject the classroom to outside political surveillance, not simply by vigilante groups like this one, but ultimately by the state itself.

Jones, who created the website, is a former leader of UCLA's campus Republican organization. He explicitly aligns himself with the "student academic freedom movement" begun by conservative activist David Horowitz (although Horowitz last week criticized Jones, whom he said he'd once fired for pressuring students to file false reports about their professors).

The two distinguishing features of the academic freedom movement are the total absence of any significant student involvement and its use of Orwellian language — in which slogans such as "academic freedom" actually mean their opposite.

One member of the website's advisory board is state Sen. Bill Morrow (R-Oceanside), who has introduced a bill creating a "student bill of rights" — written not by students but by their paternalistic "friends" who assume they aren't up to the task of thinking critically for themselves.

Morrow's bill, which failed to pass last year but will be reconsidered this year, would wreak havoc. It could impose unprecedented state monitoring of classrooms and compel professors to teach discredited materials. It asserts, for example, that "curricula and reading lists in the humanities and social sciences shall respect the uncertainty and unsettled character of all human knowledge in these areas, and provide students with dissenting sources and viewpoints."

The intention is presumably to force "liberal" faculty to teach "conservative" materials, as though a university education functions according to the same degraded logic as the Bill O'Reilly show. But the bill could also force a professor teaching the Holocaust to teach the views of Holocaust deniers ("dissenting sources").

Such subtleties don't keep the conservative crusaders up at night. Irrespective of the damage their campaign inflicts, members of the hard right — who currently control all three branches of government and yet seem irrationally convinced of their own disempowerment — are seeking to impose their worldview on our university system through crude intimidation and "big government" intervention that reactionaries normally grumble about when it's taking care of the poor, the ill or the elderly.

Their success would almost certainly guarantee that what gets taught would be determined not according to scholarly criteria but according to political pressure. I'd hate to be mistaken for a "conservative," but the barbarians really are at the gates.

Saree Makdisi is a professor of English and comparative literature at UCLA.