John K. Wilson has declined my offer. In his earlier post, Wilson seemed to say that if conservatives criticized David Horowitz, he would favor the AAUP standing down from its absolutist claims about the freedom of faculty members to carry their political messages into every class, no matter the subject.

I suggested we turn this into a formal deal: I was prepared to criticize David Horowitz, but I wanted a guarantee that the AAUP would in turn support genuine academic freedom, including the freedom of students from having their classes hijacked by political-quip-of-the-day instructors and professors intent on using their classes to win converts to their ideologies.

No deal. Wilson says “there should be no bans against political indoctrination…no rules imposing balance in the classroom…And there should be no formal restrictions on ‘irrelevant’ political views.”

You can come out now David. We won’t have to hand you over, after all.

It is helpful to have Wilson’s firm set of anathemas. No bans, no balance, no bars to anything short of ignoring “the subject of their class entirely with irrelevant discussions.”

Is there some reasonable middle ground anywhere in sight? It would seem to me there is at least potential agreement on the idea that, ideally, faculty members adopt an ethic of self-discipline in these matters. I have no fondness for passing laws or imposing a regulatory regime that enforces “bans,” imposes balance, or restricts the discretion of instructors. Yet I think the public and the nation are attracted towards those steps when they see the combination of widespread malfeasance by college faculty members and a professional organization such as the AAUP declaring there is no malfeasance, or, if there is, it’s no big deal. The autonomy professors desire comes at the price of exercising thoughtfulness and self-restraint. The AAUP badly misjudges in attempting to bully everyone out of the way in favor of a distended all-rights-no-responsibilities doctrine of academic freedom. Cary Nelson’s declaration in the Chronicle of Higher Education that the report would encourage professors to say to critics, “Don’t mess with me!” is the kind of belligerence that will surely have the opposite effect.