Not long ago, a concerned alumnus of Baruch College, a campus of the City University of New York, contacted ACTA about his alma mater’s rather troubling freshman reading program. It’s already been panned in the New York Sun, but upon closer inspection, we found even more serious problems.

By way of explanation, every year Baruch requires its freshmen to read a certain text. This year, it is War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, whose author (Chris Hedges) believes the U.S. is “addicted” to war. Past texts have included Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America and Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation. And the books are not just read—they are the subject of the keynote address at Baruch’s mandatory convocation, and Baruch also exhorts faculty, on an official website, to “incorporate [them into] your freshman year course.” To help them do that, Baruch supplies questions. Questionable questions—the kind that give one reason to believe that the whole thing reeks of partisanship.

As ACTA put it in a press release today:

Many include politicized statements and then call on students to explain why they agree—without giving them any chance to differ.
One weighted question, for example, asks students to describe what “distortions in our democracy have already taken place” since 9/11, requiring students to accept as settled truth that such “distortions” have occurred.
Another notes Hedges’ discussion of humility and compassion. Students are then directed to list ways America has “moved away from these virtues in the past decade.”
“It is standard procedure for professors to present a thought-provoking view in a question and then ask students to agree or disagree,” [Anne] Neal said. “But these questions leave students no room to disagree. The picture they paint of Baruch’s freshman reading program is a troubling one indeed.”

Those are just a few samples. View the questions for yourself here and here.

ACTA wrote to Baruch’s president last month, asking her to give the freshmen there orientation, not indoctrination, but she has not replied. Apparently she doesn’t care that Baruch’s freshman reading program violates the AAUP’s 1915 “Declaration of Principles.” That document warns faculty against “taking unfair advantage of the student’s immaturity by indoctrinating him with the teacher’s own opinions before the student has had an opportunity fairly to examine other opinions upon the matters in question, and before he has sufficient knowledge and ripeness of judgment to be entitled to form any definitive opinion of his own.”

That smell fishy to anybody else?