As Candace has noted, several states have introduced bills designed to introduce an element of accountability into their public university systems. Andrew Ferguson has more on this trend in today’s New York Sun:
Ms. Cunningham’s bill is aimed straight at the ideological orthodoxy that holds sway on American college campuses. It would require that Missouri’s state-funded colleges and universities announce each year what they have done institutionally “to ensure and promote intellectual diversity and academic freedom.” A bill similar to Ms. Cunningham’s has also been introduced in Virginia.
In 2005, the state legislature in Pennsylvania established a special committee to investigate academic freedom and intellectual diversity on its campuses. The committee is requiring Pennsylvania’s public colleges and universities to report by November 2008 on what concrete steps they’ve taken to ensure “student rights” with respect to intellectual diversity.
And the South Dakota Board of Regents, responding to a similar move by its state legislature, now requires that a so-called Academic Freedom Statement be included in all course syllabuses, informing students that only academic performance, and not their political opinions, will serve as a basis for their grades.
The Missouri and Virginia bills are based on ACTA’s report Intellectual Diversity: Time for Action (PDF)—which trustees have praised for its sensitivity to academic freedom. And the news gets even better than what Ferguson knew when writing his piece: Similar legislation has also been proposed in Montana and Georgia.
Finally, it’s worth noting that Ferguson credits the legislative proposals for being both “mild” and “reasonable”:
ACTA commissioned the Center for Survey Research and Analysis at the University of Connecticut to survey undergraduates at the top 50 colleges and universities. Their majors ranged from the humanities to the hard sciences.
Almost one in three, 29%, said they felt pressure to agree with their professors’ political views to get a good grade.
Another 42% said that classroom assignments on controversial subjects were “one-sided.”
In light of these rumblings, and faced with the vast uniformity in the ideological coloration of the faculty, the steps being called for in the state legislatures, and by ACTA, seem reasonable enough.
Among them: letting students know during school orientation that they have means for filing grievances if they’ve been politically intimidated; including questions about “academic freedom” on student course evaluation forms, and keeping a central record of academic freedom complaints.
Mild measures like these fall rather short of “McCarthyism.” But predictably enough, it is “McCarthyism” — the off-the-shelf, all-purpose debate-ender — that ACTA and the legislators are accused of by the defenders of the academic status quo.
Really, these people need to find a new cliche to hurl at their critics. If they do, I’ll be happy to declare it a trend.