Pennsylvania

Pennsylvania’s Academic Freedom Reforms

May 23, 2020 by admin Leave a Comment

Pennsylvania’s Academic Freedom Reforms

By David Horowitz

Contents

Introduction: A Remarkable Achievement
Report on the State of Academic FreedomPennsylvania in in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania

1. A Remarkable Achievement for Academic Freedom

in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania

Now that the dust has settled on the academic freedom hearings that were held in Pennsylvania from September 2005 to June 2006, it is time to look at what was actually accomplished. According to the teacher unions, and their allies in the press, the effort was a “waste of time.” This was the editorial comment in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette for example. Others found the results modest, if worthy. The Associated Press began its report by noting that the legislative Committee on Academic Freedom had urged Pennsylvania universities “to review and make students aware of academic freedom policies.” This was a corrective to the existing state of affairs in which were generally unaware that such policies exist. If you don’t know your rights, you might as well not have them.

But this was only the tip of the iceberg of what the hearings in Pennsylvania The hearings were held over nine months at four locations – Harrisburg, Pittsburgh, Millersville and Philadelphia. What they revealed was startling: fact: All of Pennsylvania’s academic freedom provisions were written to protect professors; students in Pennsylvania did not have any academic freedom rights. Not a single public university in the Commonwealth had academic freedom provisions that applied to students. actually accomplished.

Administrators from five Pennsylvania universities appeared before the committee and claimed that students were already protected by the academic freedom regulations on their books. But when the regulations were actually examined by the Committee, it was evident that they applied only to professors. In other words, students not only did not know their rights, they didn’t have any. The Committee has recommended that this deficiency be corrected, and Pennsylvania universities have already step forward to do so.

As soon as the hearings were concluded in June, the trustees of Temple – one of the three large public universities in the state — undertook to write a new policy called “Faculty and Student Rights and Responsibilities.” The policy went into effect on August 1, 2006. For the first time in Pennsylvania history, Pennsylvania students have been provided with academic freedom rights. These rights are accompanied by a new grievance machinery specific to academic freedom matters, along with a system that reports abuses directly to the board of trustees.

Shortly after the new Temple policy was announced, the faculty senate at Penn State passed its own new Policy 20-00 which states, “Students having concerns about situations that arise within the classroom, or concerns with instructor behavior in a course that violates University standards of classroom conduct as defined in Policy HR64 ‘Academic Freedom,’ may seek resolution according to the recommended procedures established under Policy 20-00, Resolution of Classroom Problems.” As at Temple, Penn State academic freedom policy previously applied only to professors.

Penn State Policy HR 64 is one of the most powerful statements of the meaning of academic freedom on the books. It states: “The faculty member is entitled to freedom in the classroom in discussing his/her subject. The faculty member is, however, responsible for the maintenance of appropriate standards of scholarship and teaching ability. It is not the function of a faculty member in a democracy to indoctrinate his/her students with ready-made conclusions on controversial subjects. The faculty member is expected to train students to think for themselves, and to provide them access to those materials which they need if they are to think intelligently. Hence in giving instruction upon controversial matters the faculty member is expected to be of a fair and judicial mind, and to set forth justly, without supersession or innuendo, the divergent opinions of other investigators.” (emphasis added)

This would be powerful enough, but the policy also states: “No faculty member may claim as a right the privilege of discussing in the classroom controversial topics outside his/her own field of study. The faculty member is normally bound not to take advantage of his/her position by introducing into the classroom provocative discussions of irrelevant subjects not within the field of his/her study.”

In other words no speeches on the Iraq War in English classes where the course matter is not about Iraq or American foreign policy. No in class attempts to promote a political candidate during elections. No personal agendas that have nothing to do with the academic subject the students have signed up for.

The adoption of these new policies is a watershed event in the history of education not only in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, but nationally as well. Pennsylvania is the first state in the nation where universities have instituted academic freedom policies that protect students as well as professors. May the rest of Pennsylvania’s universities follow the examples of Temple and Penn State, and may the nation’s universities do so as well.

2. Report on the State of Academic Freedom in Pennsylvania

Editor’s note: The following is the original report drafted under the supervision of Representative Gibson Armstrong, sponsor of the authorizing legislation (HR 177) for the Pennsylvania Select Committee on Academic Freedom in Higher Education of the Pennsylvania House. The Committee held four sets of hearings between September 2005 and June 2006 at locations throughout the state. It differs from the final report in several crucial respects. The final report was the product of an eleventh hour coup by the Democratic minority on the committee and two Republicans beholden to the teacher unions and university administrators. In the final report, the entire Summary of Testimony – which is to say the actual report of what transpired – has been deleted. Also deleted is “Appendix A” which contains the new academic freedom policies adopted by Temple University and Penn StateUniversity in response to the hearings. The Committee recommendations in the final report have also been watered down. Thus every reference to “student-specific” rights has been removed. This was an attempt by the teacher unions and administrators to deny that problem existed in the higher education system before the committee was formed and to keep citizens and students from understanding the dramatic changes that have been achieved.

REPORT OF THE SELECT COMMITTEE ON ACADEMIC FREEDOM IN HIGHER EDUCATION

PURSUANT TO HOUSE RESOLUTION 177

NOVEMBER 14, 2006

TABLE OF CONTENTS

SECTION PAGE

Chairman’s Remarks 3

House Resolution 177 4

Members of the Select Committee 7

Purpose 8

Committee Structure 8

Method 9

Summary of Testimony 11

Findings 37

Recommendations 39

Appendix A: New Pennsylvania State University and Temple University Academic Freedom Policies

CHAIRMAN’S REMARKS

INTENTIONALLY BLANK

PRIOR PRINTER’S NOS. 1280, 2451 PRINTER’S NO. 2553

THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY OF PENNSYLVANIA

HOUSE RESOLUTION

No. 177 Session of 2005

INTRODUCED BY ARMSTRONG, BARRAR, BENNINGHOFF, BIRMELIN, BOYD,

CALTAGIRONE, CLYMER, CRAHALLA, CREIGHTON, FAIRCHILD, FICHTER,

FORCIER, GABIG, GILLESPIE, GINGRICH, HERSHEY, JAMES,

W. KELLER, KILLION, LEH, METCALFE, R. MILLER, MUSTIO,

PHILLIPS, READSHAW, ROBERTS, ROHRER, SCHRODER, STERN,

R. STEVENSON, E. Z. TAYLOR, TRUE, WILT, YOUNGBLOOD,

DENLINGER, CIVERA, RAPP, FLEAGLE, FLICK, BASTIAN, BROWNE,

HARPER AND PAYNE, MARCH 29, 2005

AS AMENDED, HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, JULY 5, 2005

A RESOLUTION

1 Establishing a select committee to examine the academic

2 atmosphere and the degree to which faculty have the

3 opportunity to instruct and students have the opportunity to

4 learn in an environment conducive to the pursuit of knowledge

5 and truth at State-related and State-owned colleges and

6 universities and community colleges in this Commonwealth.

7 WHEREAS, Academic freedom and intellectual diversity are

8 values indispensable to the American colleges and universities;

9 and

10 WHEREAS, From its first formulation in the General Report of

11 the Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure of the American

12 Association of University Professors, the concept of academic

13 freedom has been premised on the idea that human knowledge is a

14 never-ending pursuit of the truth, that there is no humanly

15 accessible truth that is not, in principle, open to challenge,

16 and that no party or intellectual faction has a monopoly on

17 wisdom; and

– 1 –

1 WHEREAS, Academic freedom is likely to thrive in an

2 environment of intellectual diversity that protects and fosters

3 independence of thought and speech; and

4 WHEREAS, Students and faculty should be protected from the

5 imposition of ideological orthodoxy, and faculty members have

6 the responsibility to not take advantage of their authority

7 position to introduce inappropriate or irrelevant subject matter

8 outside their field of study; therefore be it

9 RESOLVED, That a select committee composed of the

10 Subcommittee on Higher Education of the Education Committee,

11 plus one member appointed by the Speaker of the House of

12 Representatives and one member appointed by the Minority Leader

13 of the House of Representatives, examine, study and inform the

14 House of Representatives on matters relating to the academic

15 the expression of independent thought at State-related and

19 State-owned colleges, universities and community colleges,

20 including, but not limited to, whether:

21 (1) faculty are hired, fired, promoted and granted

22 tenure based on their professional competence and subject

23 matter knowledge and with a view of helping students explore

24 and understand various methodologies and perspectives;

25 (2) students have an academic environment, quality life

26 on campus and reasonable access to course materials that

27 create an environment conducive to learning, the development

28 of critical thinking and the exploration and expression of

29 independent thought and that the students are evaluated based

30 on their subject knowledge; and

– 2 –

1 (3) that students are graded based on academic merit,

2 without regard for ideological views, and that academic

3 freedom and the right to explore and express independent

4 thought is available to and practiced freely by faculty and

5 students;

6 and be it further

7 RESOLVED, That the chairman of the Subcommittee on Higher

8 Education of the Education Committee of the House of

9 Representatives shall be chairman of the select committee, that

10 committee vacancies not affect the power of the remaining

11 members to execute committee functions and that committee

12 vacancies be filled in the same manner as the original

13 appointment; and be it further

14 RESOLVED, That the committee may hold hearings, take

15 testimony and conduct investigations within this Commonwealth as

16 necessary; and be it further

17 RESOLVED, THAT IF AN INDIVIDUAL MAKES AN ALLEGATION AGAINST A

18 FACULTY MEMBER CLAIMING BIAS, THE FACULTY MEMBER MUST BE GIVEN

19 AT LEAST 48 HOURS’ NOTICE OF THE SPECIFICS OF THE ALLEGATION

20 PRIOR TO THE TESTIMONY BEING GIVEN AND BE GIVEN AN OPPORTUNITY

21 TO TESTIFY AT THE SAME HEARING AS THE INDIVIDUAL MAKING THE

22 ALLEGATION; AND BE IT FURTHER

23 RESOLVED, That the Chief Clerk, with the Speaker’s approval,

24 pay for the reasonable, appropriate and proper expenses incurred

25 by the committee; and be it further

26 RESOLVED, That the committee make a report of its findings

27 and any recommendations for remedial legislation and other

28 appropriate action by June 30, 2006, and that the committee may

29 extend the investigation for additional time, if necessary, but

30 no later than November 30, 2006.

Members of the Select Committee on Academic Freedom in Higher Education

Representative Thomas L. Stevenson, Chairman

Representative Lawrence H. Curry, Minority Chairman

Majority Members: Minority Members:

Rep. Gibson C. Armstrong Rep. Dan B. Frankel

Rep. Michael Diven Rep. Richard T. Grucela

Rep. Patrick E. Fleagle Rep. John E. Pallone

Rep. Lynn B. Herman Rep. Dan A. Surra

Rep. Beverly Mackereth Rep. John T. Yudichak

Rep. Bernard T. O’Neill

Rep. Thomas J. Quigley

Representative Jess M. Stairs, Chairman of the House Education Committee, and Representative James R. Roebuck Jr., Minority Chairman of the House Education Committee, are ex-officio members of the Select Committee.

PURPOSE

House Resolution 177 of 2006 created the Select Committee on Academic Freedom in Higher Education and required it to:

“…examine, study, and inform the House of Representatives on matters relating to the academic atmosphere and the degree to which faculty have the opportunity to instruct and students have the opportunity to learn in an environment conducive to the pursuit of knowledge and truth and the expression of independent thought at State-related and State-owned colleges, universities, and community colleges…” (Pg. 2, Lines 13-19)

This includes, but is not limited to whether:

Faculty are hired, fired, promoted and granted tenure based on their professional competence and subject matter knowledge and with a view of helping students explore and understand various methodologies and perspectives;

Students have an academic environment quality life on campus and reasonable access to course materials that create an environment conducive to learning, the development of critical thinking and the exploration and expression of independent thought and that the students are evaluated based on their subject knowledge;
That students are graded based on academic merit, without regard for ideological views, and that academic freedom and the right to explore and express independent thought is available to and practiced freely by faculty and students

COMMITTEE STRUCTURE

HR 177 specified that the Select Committee would be comprised of the Members of the Sub-Committee on Higher Education of the House Education Committee, with the Chairman and Minority Chairman of the Sub-Committee on Higher Education acting in the same capacity on the Select Committee. In addition, one member of the Select Committee was appointed by the Speaker of the House and one member was appointed by the Minority Leader. Finally, the Chairman and Minority Chairman of the House Education Committee were included as ex-officio members of the Select Committee since they have ex-officio status on the Sub-Committee on Higher Education.

METHOD

In order to learn more about the existing policies at State-owned and State-related colleges and universities as well as community colleges, the Select Committee requested that each institution provide its policies regarding academic freedom; lodging, verification, and resolution of student complaints; a list of academic freedom complaints during the previous five years; and any actions taken to correct policies based on handling of prior complaints.

After receiving the requested information from each institution, the Select Committee staff reviewed and compiled the information for the Select Committee’s future use. The staff determined that a significant number of institutions had adopted faculty academic freedom policies, but not student academic freedom policies. Based on this discovery, the staff recommended meeting with each sector of higher education and interested parties in order to determine whether current academic freedom policies are effective and applicable to students.

Because of the Select Committee’s concern that “students and faculty should be protected from the imposition of ideological orthodoxy,” it first heard testimony in Harrisburg from attorney David French, then-executive director of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, based in Philadelphia, and an expert on First Amendment rights as they affect academic freedom. French was asked to explain the concept of academic freedom and its relation to free speech.

Following the informational meeting, the Chairman and Minority Chairman of the Select Committee agreed to hold four public hearings at institutions throughout the Commonwealth. The meetings would focus on each sector of higher education as well as each region of the Commonwealth. For this reason, meetings were held in Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Millersville, and Harrisburg. Specifically, the Committee heard testimony from the University of Pittsburgh, Penn State University, TempleUniversity, Millersville University, The State System of Higher Education (SSHE), and the Pennsylvania Commission for Community Colleges (PACCC).

Throughout the four hearings, the Select Committee also heard testimony from interested faculty and research organizations, which included the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), the American Federation of Teachers of Pennsylvania (AFT-PA), the Pennsylvania State Education Association (PSEA), the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA), the Center for the Study of Popular Culture, United University Professionals (UUP), the National Association of Scholars (NAS), and the Intercollegiate Study Institute (ISI).

From September 19, 2005 through June 1, 2006, the Select Committee on Academic Freedom in Higher Education held hearings on the state of academic freedom in Pennsylvania’s public colleges and universities. An informational hearing was held at the State Capitol, and eight days of on-site public hearings were held at the University of Pittsburgh, Temple University, Millersville University and HarrisburgArea Community College.

Based on a review of previous actions taken, it appears that these were the first statewide public hearings on academic freedom in the nations’ history. However, this Select Committee is not the first Committee commissioned by the Pennsylvania House of Representatives for the purpose of studying academic freedom at a public institution of higher education. In fact, during the 1930’s the House created a five member Committee for the purpose of studying the status of academic freedom at the University of Pittsburgh (an excerpt from the article “University of Pittsburgh: Through One Hundred and Fifty Years” is attached in Appendix A).

Chairman Stevenson opened the first day of off-site hearings, at the University of Pittsburgh, by laying out clear and unambiguous guidelines describing the nature and limits of the Committee’s business. He stated that “[t]his Committee’s focus will be on the [academic] institutions and their policies, not on professors, not on students”

Over the course of eight months, which included nine full days of hearings, not a single professor was identified by name for complaint and not a single specific class was mentioned by any witness or committee member. The focus of the Select Committee remained “institutions and their policies.”

Chairman Stevenson further elaborated the Committee’s goals:

“We are here to really study and inform the full House on academic freedom issues and intellectual diversity issues at our universities and colleges across the Commonwealth. Academic freedom is likely to thrive in an atmosphere and an environment of intellectual diversity that fosters independent thought and speech.”

To further these goals, the Select Committee focused its attention on the following questions:

What are the academic freedom policies at Pennsylvania’s public colleges and universities?
Are they being enforced?
What problems concerning academic freedom issues exist at Pennsylvania’s public colleges and universities?
Are they being addressed?
Are students aware of their academic freedom rights?
Is there adequate grievance machinery in place to handle student complaints about academic freedom issues?
What are the policies of Pennsylvania’s public colleges and universities on intellectual diversity?
Are they being observed?
What reforms of present university policies and procedures are recommended for strengthening the principles of academic freedom and intellectual diversity at Pennsylvania’s public colleges and universities?

The committee heard testimony from several students and faculty members at each of the four hearings. Additionally, during the public comment period provided at the end of each hearing day, the committee heard from students and faculty who were not included in the official meeting agenda.

SUMMARY OF TESTIMONY

Attorney David French began his testimony by citing the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Sweezy v. New Hampshire as a model statement of the importance of first amendment rights to the academic community:

“The essentiality of freedom in the community of American universities is almost self-evident. No one should underestimate the vital role in a democracy that is played by those who guide and train our youth. To impose any straight jacket upon the intellectual leaders in our colleges and universities would imperil the future of our Nation…Teachers and students must always remain free to inquire, to study and to evaluate, to gain new maturity and understanding; otherwise our civilization will stagnate and die.”

French testified that many Pennsylvania universities were violating student First Amendment rights through the institution of “speech codes,” which he defined as “any policy or practice that prohibits speech that the First Amendment would otherwise protect” French observed that “speech codes have been struck down in every single court in the United states where they have been challenged, including a federal district court in this state…where a Shippensburg University speech code was struck down—or the enforcement of it was enjoined in late 2003.”

According to French, the reason for the court’s action was that “it is a constitutional rule that a policy or a code has to be clear enough that a person of average intelligence and understanding can know what’s prohibited and what isn’t. If you don’t know what’s prohibited, it begins to have a chilling effect on speech as you, to go on the safe side, say less than what you might think so as to not run afoul of the vague rule…Shippensburg University had a speech code which, among other things prohibited acts of intolerance on campus. The problem was, that’s a term that’s virtually impossible to define…And, in fact, at the oral argument when the judge on the case directly asked the attorney representing Shippensburg, ‘what is intolerance?’ there was no good answer forthcoming because, quite simply, there’s no good answer. Nobody knows really what it is.”

“And so [in the Shippensburg case] that phrase, “act of intolerance,” has been struck down; but it still lives in some speech codes in this state.” French estimated that as many as 15 public colleges in Pennsylvania had unconstitutional speech codes that infringed the First Amendment Rights of Pennsylvania students. He cited the speech code at Edinboro University as an example: “Edinboro University of Pennsylvania prohibits offensive or inappropriate sexual behavior. What is inappropriate sexual behavior? That’s an excellent question.”

According to French, who filed the suit against Shippensburg University, fifteen of the eighteen state-owned and state-related universities had speech codes similar to the one at Shippensburg.

French further explained that while free speech rights are broad, they do have limits established by law, which include categories of speech such as fighting words and obscenity, as that term has been constitutionally defined. An individual’s broad rights do not include a right not to be offended. His/Her rights do not include a right to have a teacher tell all sides of the story as they see all sides of the story.

On the other hand, student rights “do include the ability to criticize a teacher and to dissent even in class so long as dissenting or disagreeing is done in a way that’s not disruptive and doesn’t prevent the ability of the teacher from conducting the class.”

Teachers also have very broad First Amendment rights but these rights have classroom limits as well, which have been traditionally defined by the American Association of University Professors. The document represents the line separating rights as faculty from rights as citizens under the First Amendment.

The classic statement on academic freedom is the 1915 “Declaration of Principles on Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure,” issued by the American Association of University Professors. Virtually all university policies on academic freedom, including those of all public colleges and universities in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania derive from this statement. Academic freedom, as defined in this declaration, is not the same as First Amendment free speech rights, which are available to all citizens. It is freedom within a professional discipline. The 1915 Declaration expresses this restriction in the following way:

“[The] liberty of the scholar within the university to set forth his conclusions, be they what they may, is conditioned by their being conclusions gained by a scholar’s method and held in a scholar’s spirit; that is to say, they must be the fruits of competent and patient and sincere inquiry…”

Yale law professor Robert Post, one of the nation’s leading experts on academic freedom comments on this statement: “The ‘Declaration’ thus conceives of academic freedom not as an individual right to be free from constraints but instead as the freedom to pursue the ‘scholar’s profession’ according to the standards of that profession.”

Professor Stanley Fish, a well-known university scholar, law professor and former Dean of the University of Illinois Chicago campus, recently explained the same idea in a New York Times column: “academic freedom is the freedom of academics to study anything they like; the freedom, that is, to subject any body of material, however unpromising it might seem, to academic interrogation and analysis…Any idea can be brought into the classroom if the point is to inquire into its structure, history, influence and so forth. But no idea belongs in the classroom if the point of introducing it is to recruit your students for the political agenda it may be thought to imply.”

This distinction is also to be found in the Pennsylvania State University Policy Manual as Policy HR 64:

“The faculty member is entitled to freedom in the classroom in discussing his/her subject. The faculty member is, however, responsible for the maintenance of appropriate standards of scholarship and teaching ability. It is not the function of a faculty member in a democracy to indoctrinate his/her students with ready-made conclusions on controversial subjects. The faculty member is expected to train students to think for themselves, and to provide them access to those materials which they need if they are to think intelligently. Hence in giving instruction upon controversial matters the faculty member is expected to be of a fair and judicial mind, and to set forth justly, without supersession or innuendo, the divergent opinions of other investigators.

No faculty member may claim as a right the privilege of discussing in the classroom controversial topics outside his/her own field of study. The faculty member is normally bound not to take advantage of his/her position by introducing into the classroom provocative discussions of irrelevant subjects not within the field of his/her study. ”

With the exception of the University of Pittsburgh, all public colleges and universities in Pennsylvania including the schools in the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education have academic freedom provisions which either incorporate or are entirely based on the 1940 “Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure,” of the American Association of University Professors (The University of Pittsburgh’s “Policy on Academic Integrity” merely makes an off-page reference to the 1940 statement, without specifying what it is). At the time of the hearings, virtually all of these academic freedom policies were in student handbooks under faculty responsibilities, in faculty handbooks, or in faculty union contracts, but not listed under student rights. For this reason, students were unlikely to find academic freedom within the list of student rights provided in each public higher education institution’s policy handbook.

Temple University

At the time of the hearings, the Temple University policy, which was part of Temple’s Faculty Handbook, was as follows: “[a]ll members of the faculty, whether tenured or not, are entitled to academic freedom as set forth in the 1940 Statement On Principles of Academic Freedom and Tenure by the Association of American Colleges and the American Association of University Professors…”

The 1940 AAUP Statement is as follows:

Academic Freedom

<!–[if !supportLists]–>a. Teachers are entitled to full freedom in research and in the publication of the results, subject to the adequate performance of their other academic duties; but research for pecuniary return should be based upon an understanding with the authorities of the institution.<!–[endif]–>

<!–[if !supportLists]–>b. Teachers are entitled to freedom in the classroom in discussing their subject, but they should be careful not to introduce into their teaching controversial matter which has no relation to their subject. Limitations of academic freedom because of religious or other aims of the institution should be clearly stated in writing at the time of the appointment.<!–[endif]–>

<!–[if !supportLists]–>c. College and university teachers are citizens, members of a learned profession, and officers of an educational institution. When they speak or write as citizens, they should be free from institutional censorship or discipline, but their special position in the community imposes special obligations. As scholars and educational officers, they should remember that the public may judge their profession and their institution by their utterances. Hence they should at all times be accurate, should exercise appropriate restraint, should show respect for the opinions of others, and should make every effort to indicate that they are not speaking for the institution.<!–[endif]–>

In his testimony before the Select Committee in Harrisburg, David French explained this provision and its relation to First Amendment rights, along with the need to prevent classrooms from being exploited for personal or sectarian agendas:

“What does this [1940 statement] mean? What it means is that a teacher who is teaching, for example, sociology or political science or history has an enormous amount of latitude in determining the curriculum, the readings of the class, the precise topics covered within the subject of the class; they have an enormous amount of freedom in the classroom discussion so long as the classroom discussion remains germane to the topic of the class; and that they in truth should be free from state oversight into those kinds of decisions. Because that is the core academic freedom function of a professor.

What is a professor not free to do? A professor is not free to use a class, for example, let’s say a mathematics class…to advance a particular political agenda. That is something that a university, an institution, can properly restrict without interfering with that professor’s First Amendment rights.

Their First Amendment rights do not extend to the ability to use the state-provided platform to advocate for personal political goals if those personal political goals are not…germane to the topic of the class.”

At the time of these hearings, the Temple policy did not specify students or offer student protections. It was in faculty-related sections of the handbook and therefore not likely to be accessed by students. Additionally, it was not associated with any grievance policy specific to its provisions.

Pennsylvania State University

The Penn State policy HR 64 on academic freedom is especially admirable in making clear the distinction between First Amendment rights and the professional responsibilities of the classroom teacher to respect the academic freedom rights of students. No other policy of a Pennsylvania school approaches the Penn State policy for clarity and concreteness in defining the professional responsibilities of faculty in regard to students’ academic freedom.

As at most other Pennsylvania schools, however, the Penn State policy is expressed as a “faculty responsibility” not a student right. Consequently, while the policy specifies behavior that professors should avoid in the classroom, it offers no protections for students when confronted by such behavior and makes no provision for a student right to be free from political indoctrination by faculty. While describing inappropriate faculty behavior, it offers no basis for student complaints about such inappropriate behavior. However, according to the policy, “[i]f a faculty member feels that his or her academic freedom rights have been violated, the procedure listed in the policy entitled ‘Faculty Rights and Responsibilities,’ HR 76 may be used.”

University of Pittsburgh

The University of Pittsburgh Faculty Handbook contains a “Policy on Academic Integrity,” which states:

“It is the direct responsibility of faculty to encourage free inquiry and expression and to provide an academic environment in their classrooms and in their contact with students that reflects a high standard of integrity and is conducive to learning.”

Thus like the policy at Penn State, the Pitt “Policy on Academic Integrity” is addressed to faculty, not students, and is formulated as a faculty responsibility not a student right. Its placement under faculty responsibilities in the handbook is appropriate to this conception, but it is unlikely that a student looking for a list of his/her rights would be aware of this policy. Its formulation as a policy on academic integrity would not lead a student to connect it with issues of academic freedom. In testimony before the Committee, the university’s Provost, Dr. James Maher, conceded that “most of the academic integrity cases that come up involve accusation of cheating in exams and that is not really the focus of this Committee or today’s discussion.”

The Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education

The 14 schools of the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education (PASSHE), almost without exception proclaim their commitment to academic freedom on their official websites. But these websites, so far as the Committee has been able to discern, without exception, provide no definitions of “academic freedom,” nor do they specify any protections associated with academic freedom.

A system-wide provision for academic freedom does exist for PASSHE schools. This is the AAUP “Statement on the Principles of Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure.” But, this Statement and its provisions are part of the faculty-union contract, and thus do not specifically apply to students. Nor would they be accessible to students who did not have a reason to research the faculty union contract.

The President of Millersville University, Dr. Francine McNairy, testified on March 23, 2006 at the public hearing held on the Millersville campus. Comments from this testimony have been included below.

Dr. McNairy: As a capital university, meaning all 14 universities in the same system having the same collective bargaining agreement, Millersville has been diligent in developing policies to protect students’ academic freedom. And these are listed in the “Students’ Bill of Rights and Responsibilities” which is published on our website and in the Student Handbook and also our governance manual.

The Select Committee commends Dr. McNairy and her administration for specifying the rights that Millersville students have and informing them of their rights in a Student Handbook. The Committee notes however, that the policy leaves significant gaps where academic freedom issues are concerned. Thus, in its very first article defining “freedom” there is no mention of students’ rights not to be discriminated against because of their political affiliation or ideas.

Article I. Discrimination

FREEDOM: Every aspect of university life should be free from discrimination because of race religion, color, ancestry, national origin, sex or sexual preference. Student housing organizations, athletics, classes and community facilities should be open to all who desire to participate.

In her testimony Dr. McNairy drew attention to Article XI, which is the only article in the “Student’s Bill of Rights and Responsibilities” that specifically discusses student academic freedom rights in the classroom:

Dr. McNairy: In particular, Article XI of the “Student’s Bill of Rights and Responsibilities” in the section entitled “In the Classroom” addresses the issue of academic freedom as follows: “Students should be free to express their thoughts and positions on all issues pertaining to curricular material being presented in the classroom.”

This is an admirable policy, but the document does not contain the grievance process to be used if a student feels such rights have been violated. For this reason, it may be necessary to include a statement directing students to the location of a grievance process that can be used to file an academic freedom complaint if such rights are violated.

Does indoctrination occur? The following sentence appears in the course description of a Millersville University sociology course, available on the university website: “Given these premises, this course is dedicated not to whether or not these theorists and participants in social movements are right or wrong in some kind of objective sense, but instead is dedicated to understanding the importance of changing the American social structure to bring about new forms of social justice, and to understanding the relationship between social theory and social praxis.”

The instructor’s dismissal of objectivity, and the commitment of his course to a political agenda of radical social change is hardly in keeping with academic freedom principles, such as Penn State’s admonition that, “In giving instruction upon controversial matters the faculty member is expected to be of a fair and judicial mind, and to set forth justly, without supersession or innuendo, the divergent opinions of other investigators.”

Nor is it compatible with this classic statement of Robert Gordon Sproul, longtime president of the University of California: “The function of the university is to seek and to transmit knowledge and to train students in the process whereby truth is to be made known. To convert or to make converts is alien and hostile to this dispassionate duty. Where it becomes social, or sectarian movements, they are dissected and examined, not taught, and the conclusion left, with no tipping of the scales, to the logic of the facts…”

New Temple Policy on Academic Freedom

On July 19, 2006, following the conclusion of these hearings, the trustees of TempleUniversity adopted a new academic freedom policy (the text of the new policy is in Appendix B of this report). Responding to concerns voiced in the Committee sessions at Temple, the trustees adopted a policy called “Student and Faculty Academic rights and Responsibilities,” which specifies that academic freedom protections apply to students as well as professors, provides that all Temple students will be made aware of the policy and creates a grievance procedure and reporting system which the Committee finds admirable and which satisfies many of the concerns that these hearings have raised.

Accountability and Enforcement

Are professors in Pennsylvania being held accountable for unprofessional behavior in the classroom that violates existing academic freedom policies? Are existing academic freedom policies being enforced? These were among the central questions raised by the Committee. Minority members of the Committee who had opposed the authorizing legislation raised an additional question: Is there an academic freedom problem at all in Pennsylvania classrooms?

At the Millersville sessions, Representative Gibson Armstrong engaged in an instructive exchange with Dr. Kurt Smith, a professor of philosophy at BloomsburgUniversity:

Rep. Armstrong: These hearings are not about replacing liberal speech codes with conservative speeches. They are about helping to make sure that our universities are enforcing the policies that they have in place. That is something the Legislature has a fiduciary responsibility to oversee. We receive over $2 billion from taxpayers to distribute to our universities. And I think most of us would agree there is precious little accountability for how that money is spent…We had a university professor testify that one of the values of these hearings is helping students understand that they do have rights, and that, professors need to be accountable.

Dr. Smith: What, for telling students that they have rights? What do professors need to be accountable for?

Rep. Armstrong: Their conduct in the classroom.

Accountability was a key question raised by the Committee and was directed to administrators as well as faculty. Were faculty observing existing academic freedom policies as they affected students, and were university authorities enforcing them? Were individual professors able to violate without consequence the 1940 AAUP principles and their own academic freedom regulations by interjecting personal views on controversial matters into academic contexts where they were inappropriate? Were students subject to harassment in the classroom and in other academic settings for their political views?

In his testimony at the Temple session, David Horowitz, author of an “Academic Bill of Rights,” made the following claim to the Committee:

“Individual professors, individual courses, entire departments, and university-wide programs at Temple University violate standard academic freedom guidelines, including Temple University’s own academic freedom guidelines…[Temple’s academic freedom policy] is violated every day on every campus in this state, and at Temple University specifically. I can say this with confidence because I have interviewed at least a hundred students in this state and every one of them has been in a class or in several classes in which their professors have railed against George Bush, the war in Iraq, and the policies and attitudes of Republicans and conservatives.”

In confronting this and similar claims by other witnesses, members of the Committee were forced to confront an ancillary question which proved perhaps the most vexing issue of the hearings: Were these claims credible? Did a problem of political harassment or inappropriate political indoctrination in Pennsylvania classrooms exist?

Addressing this issue, Temple President David Adamany testified that in his five-and-a-half year tenure, he “had not had a single complaint about inappropriate political [discourse] or any political adversity in the classroom…We have reviewed our records and do not find any, and I want to emphasize that, any instances in which students have complained about inappropriate intrusion of political advocacy by teachers in their courses.”

University of Pittsburgh provost James Maher testified to a similar effect: “I have not yet been able to find a case of the many student complaints, in that we are not short of student complaints, I’ve not yet found one that claimed that a given student was being mistreated for political opinions.”

The Penn State University administration also supplied a reporter for the Centre Times with data showing that only 13 complaints about political abuses by faculty could be located in their files over a five-year period.

In the question period, following President Adamany’s testimony, committee member John Yudichak commented: “Now your comment, today, five-and-a-half years, zero complaints, to me, seriously disputes that claim [by David Horowitz]…that rights of students at Temple are widely abused…In Penn State, there were 13 complaints filed. That’s out of 80,000 students…Excuse me, that doesn’t seem to me like wide abuse.”

Committee member Armstrong responded to these remarks: “If those few complaints had to do with diversity of gender or diversity of race, I think a dozen complaints would be a big deal. I think a dozen legitimate complaints on a college campus, where diversity of ideas is supposed to be at the core of what we do,…deserves the full attention of the administration…Speaking of complaints, I’ve received over a dozen complaints from Temple students. And they say they have contacted me because of my association with this resolution. And for all of these I have names of professors and of students.”

Representative Armstrong read several of the complaints, including the following:

“My professor used English class as a vehicle to spread his/her view of Marxist/socialist ideology, often demonized President Bush, called capitalism evil, blamed the administration for the Katrina response, oftentimes gave one side of an argument in readings, often disrespected President Bush and everyone else in favor of conservative views or the Republican party, and frequently criticized the war in Afghanistan. The day after the [2004 Presidential] election said in class ‘I cannot believe it. I do not understand America, the American people. They vote that guy, President Bush, into office for four more years after they see what he has done. Why does the U.S. military study the language cultures of other people? So they can kill them easier,’ referring to the defense language program of Monterey.”

Committee member Lynn Herman wondered if Temple students were aware of their academic freedom rights since Temple’s academic freedom provision was located in the Faculty Handbook, and whether they could be made more aware of them:

Mr. Herman: What about the student handbook?

Dr. Adamany: We don’t have a Student Handbook, per se. We have a bulletin of courses which contains much material about the university. That would be a good place for us to give notice; by posting these policies for the students…We could make them more visible.

But the problem was not limited to placement visibility. As we have seen, the academic freedom policies of Pennsylvania colleges and universities generally referred only to faculty responsibilities, not to student rights. This was the case at each of the state-related universities, the state-owned universities, and the community colleges. This problem was reflected in the following excerpt from the question and answers session during following Dr. Adamany’s testimony.

Mr. Armstrong: Your academic freedom policy refers only to faculty? What about your students?

Dr. Adamany: I’m not sure I got the question.

Mr. Armstrong: In other words, would you consider amending your academic freedom policies to include protection to students…[and to] make students more aware of their rights?

Dr. Adamany: …I’m not sure that requires an amendment to the policy.

But, in fact, such a change would require a policy change, and the Temple Board of Trustees has accordingly amended the policy. In addition, they included provisions for a grievance procedure specific to academic freedom issues and separate from the existing procedures.

Even disregarding the factors that these hearings have disclosed—that most existing academic freedom provisions do not explicitly cover student rights; that even if they have such rights, students are not made aware of them; that there are no regulations defining their rights; and that there is no grievance machinery to specifically handle students’ academic freedom claims, the Penn State figure of 13 cases is not as small as it may at first seem. This figure needs to be put into historical context and assessed in relation to other notable periods when academic freedom was an issue of concern.

The McCarthy era, which was referenced by several witnesses, is the most obvious example of such a period. Temple professor Rachel DuPlessis read a paper written by Professor Ellen Schrecker, an expert on McCarthyism, which drew an explicit parallel with the present. Professor DuPlessis commented: “In retrospect, we can see how seriously McCarthyism violated academic freedom. It imposed an external political test on the nation’s academic faculties and punished law-abiding individuals for their refusal to cooperate with an academically irrelevant and politically repressive inquisition.”

The actual number of professors prosecuted during in the McCarthy era should therefore be instructive. The era is generally agreed by experts, including Professor Schrecker, to span the years from 1947 when President Harry S. Truman instituted a Loyalty Oath for government employees to 1954 when Senator McCarthy was censured by his Senate colleagues and his agendas fell into disrepute. Historian Lionel Lewis has written an academic study of the era, which focuses on its impact on university professors. It is titled Cold War on Campus.

During the nine-year period from 1947-1954, Lewis was able to identify only 126 cases at 58 institutions nationally, where a professor’s appointment was threatened because of his beliefs. These cases led to 69 terminations. Of these, 31 were at a single institution, the University of California, which had instituted its own loyalty oath. The California terminations took place in the years 1949 and 1950.

In other words, during the nine years of the McCarthy era, there were exactly 38 politically motivated terminations of professors in all 48 states and out of a total professoriate of several hundred thousand. This is far smaller than 13 cases at a single university. Yet, small as this number may appear, the author concludes, “the chilling effect on the expression of all ideas by both faculty and students was significant, although in fact there is no way to measure adequately their full impact.”

Simply put, if one looks at the number of complaints versus the number of institutions, complaints averaged 1 per institution during the McCarthy era. However, it is unlikely that any policy maker at any university would have considered one academic freedom violation insignificant at that time. For this reason, the Select Committee came to the conclusion that policies and procedures should be in place at all public colleges and universities in Pennsylvania to protect academic rights of professors and students.

Without policies and procedures in place, it is unlikely that a student would have an expectation to attend a college or university in an atmosphere where academic freedom and intellectual diversity are available to all participants. It is possible that the current lack of student specific policies has contributed to the relatively low number of complaints at institutions in Pennsylvania. On the other hand, having such policies in place may not cause additional complaints. Instead, it provides an avenue for prevention of academic rights violations similar to the policies that are still in effect for the professorate some 60 years after the national incident that most severely threatened academic freedom rights.

The importance of informing students of their academic freedom rights was raised by Stephen Balch, David French, and others throughout the hearings. In his testimony, attorney David French observed: “Students who are censored must (a) know that they can complain; and (b) know who they can complain to. At the foundation for Individual Rights in Education, we receive hundreds of complaints per year; but all the information that we’ve received indicates nationally that that’s a drop in the bucket.”

David Horowitz testified that:

“State universities in Pennsylvania (as elsewhere) spend tens of millions of dollars each year, and do so every year, to inform their students that sexual and racial diversity are fundamental university values and that harassment on the basis of gender and race will not be tolerated. They insert these values into orientation sessions; they put them into student handbooks and prepare literature to inform students about them. But these same universities do not spend a single penny on promoting the value of intellectual diversity—even though the American Council of Education has called this central to a higher education, and even though somewhere buried in faculty handbooks on most university websites lip service is paid to this core principle of academic freedom.”

This turned out to be one issue on which the Committee appeared to reach a consensus. Committee member Representative Daniel Frankel (D-Allegheny) endorsed the idea that university administrators should publicize the academic freedom rights of students. “I agree, maybe, that there ought to be more publicity given to your process for dealing with these situations and that may be a good outcome from this hearing.”

Other factors Affecting the Reporting of Possible Abuses

In addition to the lack of information for students about their academic freedom rights, testimony was given regarding other factors that might prevent students from coming forward with complaints about faculty behavior that violates existing academic freedom provisions.

Professor Tom Bradley, a faculty member at Shippensburg University for thirty years, testified that in his experience, students often felt intimidated by the prospect of coming forward with a complaint:

“What do students say when they come in and I suggest they go back and talk to the faculty member that needs to be addressed. They say, well, nah, you know all the faculty have networked. They are all friends. It is kind of the old brother network. The professor will support this guy or lady because when it is his turn to be challenged, that faculty member will support him…What can I do as a student? They are tenured. I have no power at all. Once the word gets out, I’ll be labeled as a troublemaker and I’ll be penalized later by another professor. That’s the thinking going on in the students’ minds as they reveal it to me.”

Professor Kurt Smith gave counter-testimony:

“Don’t be fooled for a second. Students, if they don’t like a professor…have a lot of authority. Students have a lot more authority than I think should be given them. And they are not dopes. If they see something is going on with a professor, they are not afraid to say that to anyone. It is amazing to me how it will be said over and over again that they are being intimidated, they are afraid about talking. They will talk to everyone here on television. It doesn’t seem to bother them. So, I don’t think that there is an intimidation problem.”

Testimony by Temple student Logan Fisher, offered a contrary view:

“My name is Logan Fisher and I am a senior majoring in business law at Temple University. I want to start off by saying that my testimony today will not only contain my personal experiences, but that of many students’ careers. As a vice-chairman of the Temple College Republicans and Vice-President of the Temple Chapter of Students for Academic Freedom, I experienced first hand the apprehension students had to testify today, as they expressed to me concerns of retaliation by professors and fear of being singled out in their classes in the future.”

Fisher also testified that he had asked members of his Students for Academic Freedom chapter to provide him with any complaints they had about recent classes. One complaint said of a professor “She came to class on a regular basis with buttons that were anti-Bush and anti-Iraq war. One whole class period was filled with discussion about how white male Republicans are heartless and how the war is unjust.”

Committee Chairman Stevenson asked if any of the complaints had been filed formally. Mr. Fisher said, no and explained that one of the students was a sophomore and the incident had taken place in a class required for her major. “The professor she had a complaint about she would most certainly have again in the future,” and therefore did not want to do so. Representative Armstrong then asked Mr. Fisher if he had ever filed a formal complaint on his own behalf. Mr. Fisher replied: “I have not lodged any formal complaints [because] I don’t think that they would be handled at all. I’ve talked to several professors outside of class when I have disagreed with the way they taught the class…and I’m usually dismissed by the professor. So I didn’t feel that lodging a formal complaint would do much good.”

An inadvertent but revealing response to the claims made by Dr. Smith and others skeptical of the motives of students who complained about their professors was provided in the testimony of Danielle Murphy, a junior at Millersville University, who is studying government, political affairs and business management. Murphy testified “Personally, I have never been penalized for my political views,” although it soon became apparent that she had been.

Murphy testified that she was President of the Millersville College Republicans and was involved with the American Conservative Union and conservative students on campus,” but she said she had no ill-feelings towards Millersville or her liberal and leftwing professors. The University had “an excellent staff,” she said, and she was receiving “an excellent education here at Millersville.”

Murphy also testified that one of her professors singled her out for her conservative views in class “on a regular basis” and discussed the 2004 presidential elections in class. “The class was in no way related to the American elections, but we talked about the elections and a few local elections.” The manner in which the discussion about the elections took place under this professor’s guidance was on which she and “many other conservative students” taking the class agreed was “nearly torturous.” On one occasion, the same professor “pointed at me and expressed the fact that I was conservative. He pointed at me and said, ‘You’re a conservative right?’ The question was in no way relevant to the course material or even to that day’s discussion.”

Yet, Murphy did not leave the course or complain about the professor or seek to punish him for her ordeal. In fact, as she testified, “I’m now taking another course with the same professor because I find him to be a brilliant professor.”

Without intending to, Murphy had highlighted the poignant dilemma of conservative students seeking to get an education in an academic environment in which there seem to be very few conservative professors.

Murphy also inadvertently highlighted a problem which the Committee was forced to consider. As Committee member Armstrong put it, “I’d be hard pressed to name a student who has told me they know what their rights were.” If students are not informed of their academic freedom rights and do not know what to expect in the way of professional behavior from their professors, they would be severely handicapped in determining what is abusive and what is normal.

Thus Danielle Murphy was able to tell the Committee “My experiences [in class] have not been detrimental to my education in any way,” yet in the same breath could describe those same experiences in these words:

“Although I’m a fairly confident and outspoken individual, I do constantly feel the need to censor the things that I say for fear of being branded the crazy conservative girl with right-wing views…To be conservative in a classroom is a difficult thing.”

Students do not have unions or large professional organizations to defend their rights or to hold administrators accountable if they do not enforce their regulations. If students are not made aware of their rights, or if these rights do not exist, they are, practically speaking, without recourse when abuses occur.

The Committee was presented with a scientific survey of college students by Anne Neal, President of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, which showed that in-class violations of existing academic freedom guidelines, and specifically the 1940 AAUP principles, were widespread. She stated:

“We commissioned the Center for Survey Research and Analysis at the University of Connecticut to undertake a scientific survey of undergraduates in the top 50 college and universities as listed by U.S. News & World Report. These include Ivy League schools like the University of Pennsylvania, national research universities such as Carnegie Mellon and small liberal arts colleges like Swarthmore, Bryn Mawr, and Haverford, as well as public institutions such as the University of California and Michigan.

We were interested in finding out whether, in fact, professors introduce politics in the classroom. It goes without saying that faculty members are hired for their expertise and are expected to instruct students on the subject of their expertise. If they are teaching biology, they should be talking about biology. If they are teaching medieval English literature, we expect them to be lecturing on Chaucer, not Condoleezza Rice…

That indeed is a principle that has been adopted in the 1940 AAUP statement on academic freedom and that has been adopted by numerous institutions of higher education, at least on paper. The Temple University Faculty Handbook, by way of example, provides that ‘Teachers are entitled to freedom in the classroom in discussing their subject, but they should be careful not to introduce into their teaching controversial matter which has no relation to their subject.’

Notwithstanding these principles, our survey found that a shocking 49 percent of the students at the top 50 colleges and universities say that their professors frequently injected political comments into their courses, even if they had nothing to do with the subject.

The survey next turned to the atmosphere in the college classroom. Did students, many of whom were exposed to these subjects for the first time, feel free to raise concerns and question assumptions? Did they feel free to make up their own minds without feeling pressured to agree with their professors?

Once again, the answer was deeply disturbing. Twenty-nine percent of the respondents felt that they had to agree with the professor’s political views to get a good grade.

The survey also explored whether students were being exposed to competing arguments on the central issues of the day. Were book lists balanced and comprehensive? Did students hear multiple perspectives, rather than just one side, of an argument?

Again, a disheartening response. Forty-eight percent reported campus panels and lecture series on political issues that seemed “totally one-sided.” Forty-six percent said professors “used the classroom to present their personal political views.” And forty-two percent faulted reading assignments for presenting only one side of a controversial issue.

Meanwhile, eighty-three percent of those surveyed said student evaluation forms of the faculty did not ask about a professor’s social, political, or religious bias.

Obviously, this controversy can only be resolved if university administrators take an interest in what goes on in university classrooms. Similar surveys can easily be conducted by university administrations on their campuses. Faculty evaluation forms can be amplified to include questions about intellectual diversity and political discrimination.”

Intellectual diversity was one of the central concerns the Committee chose to address, in accordance with its mandate, set out by Chairman Stevenson, the Committee followed the observation that “[a]cademic freedom is likely to thrive in an atmosphere and an environment of intellectual diversity that fosters independent thought and speech.”

In January 2006, the Association of American Colleges and Universities issued a statement on “Academic Freedom and Educational Responsibility,” which conceded that there were problems associated with intellectual diversity at American schools. “Some [university] departments fail to ensure that their curricula include the full diversity of legitimate intellectual perspectives appropriate to their disciplines. And individual faculty members sometimes express their personal views to students in ways that intimidate them…” The statement concluded that there was “room for improvement.”

In the first hearing session at Harrisburg, Committee counsel David French testified that the idea that the university should be a marketplace of ideas and that there should be “a broad range of ideas on campus” was not itself a controversial statement. It was an argument, in fact, that had been used by the American Association of University Professors and other collegiate parties in their appeal to the United States Supreme Court to preserve race-based affirmative action policies at the University of Michigan. The argument was that ethnic and gender diversity served to enhance the intellectual diversity that was crucial to a quality education. “So it’s really not controversial,” French commented, “to say that there should be a broader range of ideas in the university. What is controversial is the answer to this question: Does a broad range of ideas exist?”

Stephen Zelnick testified at the Temple session that it did not. A member of the Temple University faculty for thirty-six years, Zelnick had served as Professor of English, President of the Faculty Senate and vice-Provost for Undergraduate Studies. “As director of two undergraduate programs,” he testified:

“I have had many opportunities to sit in and watch instructors. I have sat in on more than a hundred different teachers’ classes and seen excellent, indifferent, and miserable teaching and done what I could to encourage the good and to repair the bad. On these visits, I rarely heard a kind word for the United States, for riches of our marketplace, for the vast economic and creative opportunities made available for energetic and creative people (that is, for our student); for family life, for marriage, for love, or for religion. I did hear a great deal about the importance of diversity and tolerance, about the evils of imperialism; about the need to be skeptical of all institutions and traditional values; and about the stupidity and mendacity of prominent politicians. There is much to applaud in this heterodoxy and rebelliousness. However, without the balance of the arguments for loyalty, tradition, and reverence, these appeals to radical thinking fail to serve education well.”

David Horowitz followed Professor Zelnick’s testimony with two statements his organization had received from two different students at Penn State:

“I’m taking a Women’s Studies class because I thought it’d be a good class to take. Yesterday, I was in class and people were giving presentations about women’s issues and one group decided to do abortion. The next thing I know, we’re spending the whole period learning about how abortion should be completely legal and that it’s a good thing for society to abort babies and that people need to learn how to say the word ‘abortion’ because women should be proud of the fact that they’ve had one. The professor made us start chanting “abortion, abortion,” and to be honest, I started to cry. There was no place in that class for my pro-life opinion.”

Following the hearings, this student was willing to put her name to this statement. Her name is Kelly Keelan.

The second statement read by Horowitz was also from a student who was reluctant to submit her name:

“I had a professor in a Biology Science class…go of on a 20-minute lecture about how Bush was a horrible president and had misled the people and that if I supported the war in Iraq, I was a bad, ignorant person…”

Horowitz continued: “Some Penn State instructors appear to think that there is no difference between education and indoctrination. Here is a statement from the official website of a sociology instructor at Penn State: ‘I’m open about bringing my ideology into this classroom because I see that all educational systems are ideological to the core.’”

Composition of Faculties

Answers to the diversity question in regard to the university curriculum were divided. Witnesses David French, Anne Neal, Stephen Balch and Marc Bauerlein argued that the current generation of liberal arts professors at American colleges and universities represented a narrow range of the ideological spectrum, while witnesses for the American Association of University Professors, the American Federation of Teachers, and the National Education Association argued that they did not.

In her remarks before the Committee, Anne Neal cited two university authorities who had warned that the university system was facing problems of intellectual conformity and ideological correctness:

“As early as 1991, Yale President Benno Schmidt warned that ‘The most serious problems of freedom of expression in our society today exist on campuses. The assumption seems to be that the purpose of education is to induce correct opinion rather than to search for wisdom and liberate the mind.’ In his last report to the Board of Overseers, retiring Harvard President Derek Bok warned: ‘What universities can and must resist are deliberate, overt attempts to impose orthodoxy and suppress dissent…In recent years, the threat of orthodoxy has come primarily from within rather than outside the university.”

In his prepared statement for the Committee, Stephen Balch, president of the National Association of Scholars summarized the present state of university faculties disclosed by a series of academic studies:

“There is now a small file cabinet of studies that document the intellectual one-sidedness of the professorate, some done by individual scholars, others sponsored by higher education organization like the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. They all show pretty much the same results. Whether professors are asked to self-describe themselves ideologically, whether their attitudes on cultural, economic and political issues are surveyed and scaled, or whether that general surrogate for opinion, party loyalty, is assessed, professorial opinion, as a whole, is considerably skewed to the left side of the spectrum. This skewing is even more pronounced when one looks at the fields whose subject matter have the most political and cultural relevance, the social sciences and the humanities. The ideological asymmetry in these areas ranges from very sizeable to overwhelming.”

A summary of the study results, which have not been contested by other data, were reported in the testimony of Anne Neal:

“A study released in late December by Professor Dan Klein found that social science professors are overwhelmingly Democratic, that Democratic professors in those disciplines are more homogeneous in their thinking than Republicans; and that Republican scholars are more likely to work outside the academy than their Democratic counterparts. On the question of political affiliation, the survey showed an immense imbalance in the breakdown of Democrats to Republicans ranging from 21.1:1 among anthropologists; 9.1:1 among political and legal philosophers; 8.5:1 amongst historians’ and 5.6:1 amongst political scientists. A 2005 study Professional Advancement Among College Faculty, found that 72 percent of those teaching at American universities and colleges describe themselves as liberal and 15 percent described themselves as conservative. According to the study, the most one-sided departments are English literature, philosophy, political science, and religious studies, where at least 80 percent of the faculty says they are liberal and no more than five percent call themselves conservative.”

The American College Teacher, a major study by the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California at Los Angeles, has never been challenged. It features some questions on politics. The last survey, in 2001, found that 5.3 percent of faculty members were far left, 42.3 percent were liberal, 34.3 percent were middle of the road, 17.7 percent were conservative and 0.3 percent were far right. Those figures are only marginally different from the previous survey, in 1998.

The interpretation of these findings was challenged by Princeton University professor Joan Wallach Scott, chair of the American Association of University Professors Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure. Scott suggested that the figures showing an overwhelming disparity in liberal and conservative faculty did not necessarily prove that there was “political discrimination in hiring” due to

“the possible role of preference for more economically lucrative work on the part of Republicans or the different policies each party has in regard to financial support for higher education, and so what might be called interest-based votes by university faculty…But even more important, political party affiliation has nothing to do with scholarly positions and with what counts as conservative or a non-traditional approach to literature or history or class.”

Advocacy in the Curriculum

The Committee did not address the issue of possible bias in the hiring process, but several witnesses argued in opposition to the above statement by Professor Scott. Some testifiers believed that there was indeed a correlation between the lack of intellectual diversity of faculties and emergence of an advocacy agenda in the curriculum, which has traditionally been devoted to dispassionate scholarly inquiries. Thus Emory professor Mark Bauerlein testified at the Millersville hearings:

“Because we have so strong a lean to the left on many parts of the campus, certain ideas have been embraced by almost everyone, even though those ideas remain controversial off-campus. With so much uniform backing, those ideas have settled into the professional habits of the professors. Instead of being opinions open for discussion, they are norms to be followed—that is, the regular operative premises of the discipline.”

One idea associated with sectarian advocacy agendas that had become embedded in the curriculum according to both Professor Bauerlein and Dr. Balch was “social justice.” They felt an obvious instance of a loaded political idea being recast as a disciplinary standard is the term “social justice.” Many schools, especially schools of education (e.g. the Social Justice Education program at University of Massachusetts), announce social justice as one of their curricular goals, and so it appears as an educational principle that participants must accept.

Bauerlein identified several public institutions in Pennsylvania, which incorporated advocacy of “social justice” into academic programs:

“In the state of Pennsylvania, among the general goals listed in the CollegeEducation at Penn State is this one: ‘Enhance the commitment of faculty, staff, and students to the centrality of diversity, social justice, and democratic citizenship.’ The mission statement of the Office of Diversity & Equal Opportunity at East Stroudsburg University begins, ‘The Office of Diversity & Equal Opportunity’s mission is to promote, plan and monitor social justice in the University community.’” of

In his testimony, Stephen Balch identified several others:

“The mission of the social work program at Bloomsburg also states that “an emphasis is placed on an appreciation for human standard diversity and a strong commitment to social and economic justice. Students are prepared through courses to engage in the social change process through interface with the regional community.” The mission statement of the School of Social Administration at Temple states that it is “dedicated to societal transformations to eliminate social, political, economic injustices for poor and oppressed populations…” The description of the social work program at Edinboro University characterizes it as preparing “individuals to actualize the concept of social concern, to internalize and actualize belief in the innate value of humankind, to service those in need, and to act with conviction in advancing the principle of social justice and human rights.”

Moreover, Balch argued, the accrediting agency for schools of social work—the Council on Social Work Education—itself establishes standards that are ideological rather than professional. “Among the purposes of the social work profession as given by these standards is the pursuit of ‘policies, services, and resources through advocacy and social or political actions that promote social and economic justice.’ Programs accredited by the CSWE are also supposed to prepare social workers to ‘understand the forms and mechanisms of oppression and discrimination and apply strategies of advocacy and social change that advance social and economic justice,’ Taken as a whole, social work education programs are also supposed to “prepare students to advocate for nondiscriminatory social and economic systems.”

Bauerlein testified that the concept of social justice was:

“Quite clearly an ideological demand, for ‘social justice’ is the idealized code word for various government-managed policies of income and resource distribution. To insert it into mission statements is to use it as a gateway into the profession. To pass it off as a profession is, precisely, to politicize the curriculum, and to compel students who want to join the program and professors who want to work there to accept it is a betrayal of academic freedom.”

The Committee heard contrary testimony from Dr. Robert Moore, a Professor of Sociology at St. Joseph’s University, which is a Jesuit school in Philadelphia. MoorePennsylvania division of the American Association of University Professors. Professor Moore agreed with Penn State Policy HR 64 that, “It is not the function of a faculty member in a democracy to indoctrinate his or her student with ready-made conclusions on controversial subjects.” Professor Moore reiterated, “Academic freedom for faculty does not include the right to indoctrinate students.” is also the vice-president elect of the

Professor Moore, however, was not sure that requiring students to subscribe to a social justice agenda was a form of indoctrination, or that requiring university hires to endorse the same agenda violated the professional neutrality to which educational institutions traditionally subscribed. “At St. Joseph’s University, in a private context, if you don’t come into a Jesuit school on the side of social justice, you are not going to get hired. You won’t be around very long.”

Committee member John Pallone was disturbed by this comment which seemed to him like a narrow directive, incompatible with the principle of academic freedom. On the other hand several members of the Committee, Representatives Frankel, Surra, and Curry thought that social justice was a neutral term that could encompass different remedies for social problems.

The problem raised by Dr. Balch and Mr. Bauerlein was crystallized in the testimony of Dr. Nadine Bean, a professor in the Social Work program at West Chester University—a program accredited by the Council on Social Work Education. Dr. Bean testified that

“‘Social justice” was one of the core values for social workers and thus an integral part of the social work program as it was taught at West Chester University. Social workers pursue social change particularly with and on behalf of the vulnerable and oppressed individuals and groups of people.”

This testimony reflected an activist view of the social work curriculum. Dr. Bean did not explain why unemployment or poverty were forms of injustice, rather than conditions reflecting individual failing or misfortune. Or, why “social change” rather than providing help to individuals should be the mission of social workers. This testimony appeared to validate the points made by Bauerlein and Balch that a one-sided faculty perspective leads to confusion between ideological agendas and professional standards.

The Committee members shared the view that education involves the consideration of a range of viewpoints, and that indoctrination in one perspective is incompatible with academic freedom and academic standards. It could not agree on whether particular cases brought before it constituted violations or not. The question that remained—and that the Committee members could not agree on—was whether university administrators had established clear academic standards and a definition of inappropriate academic behavior, and whether these standards were being enforced.

FINDINGS

Based on testimony provided at the four public hearings, the Select Committee came to a general consensus that legislation requiring the adoption of a uniform statewide academic freedom policy, which was referenced by several testifiers, was not necessary. Instead, the Committee chose to focus on whether academic freedom violations were widespread at public institutions of higher education in Pennsylvania; student awareness of academic freedom policies; the effectiveness of existing policies including each student’s ability to file a grievance and obtain resolution; the balance of political views represented on university campuses; and the ability of colleges and universities to adapt these policies.

The Committee received testimony from each sector of public higher education and determined that academic freedom violations are rare. However, questions arose regarding students’ ability to report academic freedom violations when no student specific academic freedom policy or process is in place.

The Committee heard testimony from several institutions confirming that student awareness of academic freedom policies may be a concern. In many cases, institutions cited faculty academic freedom policies as applicable to students. However, faculty policies are not readily available to students. Additionally, few schools that have student academic freedom policies make them readily available to students via student policy handbooks or the internet.

Concerns regarding the effectiveness of student academic freedom policies were raised during the four public hearings. However, at institutions with student academic freedom policies in place, it appears the policies are effective at resolving disputes.

On the other hand, concerns were raised regarding the willingness of students to confront the professor they felt was in violation of the academic freedom policy. This concern stemmed from the common requirement that students must first report concerns to the professor, then the department head, then the dean and finally the president of the university until resolution occurs. Some students might feel uncomfortable with this process if they perceive such proceedings as affecting performance in future courses with the same professor. While such concerns could not be validated or disproved, some testifiers suggested that an alternative reporting system could encourage students who fear retribution to come forward, but is not likely to affect the integrity of the reporting process.

Additionally, the Committee heard a significant amount of testimony regarding the political atmosphere on college campuses. The testimony was in regard to several studies of the political affiliation and leanings of the professoriate and each study pointed to a greater representation of Democrats than Republicans in most fields of study. The Committee did not receive testimony regarding any study that refuted these results. While differences in overall faculty leanings are certainly acceptable, it may be detrimental to university education if faculties as a whole lean extremely toward one political viewpoint, regardless of which view that might be. That being said, it is not this Committee’s intent or purpose to place political quotas on universities or their faculties. For this reason, the Committee believes that our universities should evaluate whether internal efforts are necessary to encourage diverse political views on campus and to ensure that students receive a balanced and effective education.

Finally, the Committee looked at the ability and willingness of institutions to modify policies if the processing of academic freedom complaints could be improved. During the hearings, the Committee learned that many institutions have made modifications to academic freedom policies in the past. In fact, the Committee learned that Temple University and the Pennsylvania State University began making improvements to academic freedom policies during the Select Committee hearing process. The Select Committee believes that the newly adopted academic freedom policies may be useful to other institutions that wish to improve such policies. For this reason, each institution’s new Academic Freedom policy has been included in Appendix C of this report. Additionally, the language of Pennsylvania StateUniversity’s HR 64, which is included on page 14 of this report, was recognized as a clear and concise faculty academic freedom policy that could be applied to students. The Committee believes that this language could be used as an example by other institutions if they should find it necessary to create a student-specific academic freedom policy.

RECOMMENDATIONS

<!–[if !supportLists]–>· Public institutions of higher education within the Commonwealth should review existing academic freedom policies and procedures to ensure that a student-specific academic freedom policy, which includes student rights and a detailed grievance procedure, is readily available.<!–[endif]–>

<!–[if !supportLists]–>· Public institutions of higher education should make students aware of the availability of academic freedom policies and grievance procedures. This should be accomplished by providing such information during student orientation when other student rights policies and/or discrimination policies are discussed. Additionally, this information should be available in the “student” section of the institution’s website. <!–[endif]–>

<!–[if !supportLists]–>· In order to provide students who do not wish to complain directly to a professor with an alternative option, public institutions of higher education should allow students to file complaints with a university official outside of the student’s major. This could be best accomplished by utilizing an existing office that handles student diversity issues for the purpose of receiving and processing such complaints.<!–[endif]–>

<!–[if !supportLists]–>· Public institutions of higher education should include questions on course evaluation forms that could provide additional information regarding the status of academic freedom at each institution and in each area of study. By placing questions relating to academic freedom on anonymous course evaluations, students may be more likely to share such concerns.<!–[endif]–>

<!–[if !supportLists]–>· All public institutions of higher education should maintain a record of complaints filed under the institution’s academic freedom policy. <!–[endif]–>

<!–[if !supportLists]–>· All public institutions of higher education shall make a report of actions taken regarding the recommendations of this Select Committee to the Chairman and Minority Chairman of the Subcommittee on Higher Education of the House Education Committee no later than November 1, 2008.<!–[endif]–>

APPENDIX A

New Pennsylvania State University and Temple University Academic Freedom Policies

Pennsylvania State University:

HR 64:

Faculty Senate Policy 20-00:

In every case, student concerns arising from questions about classroom situations or behavior shall be resolved in a manner that provides for equity and due process for students and for instructors. Students may attempt to resolve classroom problems with assurance that confidentiality will be maintained as appropriate.”

Temple University:

Title: Student and Faculty Academic Rights and Responsibilities

Policy Number: 03.70.02

Effective Date: August 1, 2006

Issuing Authority: Board of Trustees

Preamble

As an academic institution, Temple University exists for the transmission of knowledge, the pursuit of truth, the development of students, and the general well-being of society. Free inquiry and free expression are indispensable to the attainment of these goals. As members of the academic community, students should be encouraged to develop the capacity for critical judgment and to engage in a sustained and independent search for truth.

Freedom to teach and freedom to learn are inseparable facets of academic freedom. The freedom to learn depends upon appropriate opportunities and conditions in the classroom, on the campus, and in the larger community. The University and the faculty have a responsibility to provide students with opportunities and protections that promote the learning process in all its aspects. Students similarly should exercise their freedom with responsibility.

Temple University therefore reaffirms its commitment to academic freedom, and adopts the following statement of academic freedom principles applicable to faculty and students:

Statement of Principles

1 Faculty are entitled to freedom in the classroom in discussing their subjects, but they should be careful not to introduce into their teaching controversial (or other) matter which has no relation to their subject. The faculty member is responsible, however, for maintaining academic standards in the presentation of course materials. [It is not the function of a faculty member in a democracy to indoctrinate his/her students with ready-made conclusions on controversial subjects. The faculty member is expected to train students to think for themselves, and to provide them access to those materials, which they need if they are to think intelligently. Hence, in giving instruction upon controversial matters the faculty member is expected to be of a fair and judicial mind, and to set forth justly, without super-cession or innuendo, the divergent opinions of other investigators.]

2. As members of the academic community, students should be encouraged to develop the capacity for critical judgment and to engage in a sustained and independent search for the truth.

3. Faculty members in the classroom and in conference should encourage free discussion, inquiry and expression. Student performance should be evaluated solely on an academic basis, not on opinions or conduct in matters unrelated to academic standards.

4. Students should be free to take reasoned exception to the information or views offered in any course of study and to reserve judgment about matters of opinion, but students are responsible for learning the content of the course of study in which they are enrolled. The validity of academic ideas, theories, arguments and views should be measured against the relevant academic standards.

5. Students should have protection through orderly grievance procedures against prejudiced or capricious evaluations that are not intellectually relevant to the subject matter under consideration. At the same time, students are responsible for complying with the standards of academic performance established for each course in which they are enrolled.

Student Grievance Procedure

Except in cases in which a student challenges a grade received in connection with a course, the following procedures shall apply when a student believes that a faculty member has infringed upon the student’s academic rights as set forth in this policy. In cases in which the student is challenging a grade in connection with a course, the student shall follow the grade appeal procedure applicable to the school or college in which the course is offered.

1. If a student grievance for an alleged violation of academic rights cannot be resolved between the faculty member and the student, or if the student does not feel comfortable in discussing the matter directly with the faculty member, the student may bring an informal complaint to the Student Ombudsperson of the school or college to try to effect an informal resolution.

2. If a resolution satisfactory to the student is not obtained through an informal mediation process with the Student Ombudsperson, the student may submit a formal, written grievance to the Dean or the Dean’s designee.

3. The Dean or the Dean’s designee may attempt informal resolution through discussion with the student and faculty member. If a mutually agreeable resolution is not achieved through informal discussion, the Dean shall refer the matter for consideration in accordance with the procedures for resolution of student grievances as set forth in the Bylaws of the school or college.

4. The Dean will consider the recommendation of the school or college’s student grievance committee and issue a written decision and remedy. Appropriate precautions should be developed to safeguard the confidentiality of the grievance proceedings, including information about the outcome.

5. Either party to a grievance may appeal the decision of the Dean to the Provost, in writing, within ten (10) days following notice of the Dean’s decision. A written reply by the other party must be filed within ten (10) days after receipt of the appeal. The Dean’s decision shall be held in abeyance pending appeal. The Provost has discretion to determine the information and procedure that he/she will utilize in deciding each appeal. The decision of the Provost shall be in writing and shall be final.

Recordkeeping and Reporting

The officers should develop mechanisms and procedures for developing and maintaining records in a confidential manner of all grievances brought pursuant to this policy. In addition, the officers shall provide a report on all grievances pursuant to this policy each semester to the Chairs of the Student Affairs and the Academic Affairs Committees of the

Board of Trustees, and establish a mechanism for annual reviews of this policy and its effectiveness by appropriate University officials and the Board of Trustees.

Effective Date

This policy shall become effective on August 1, 2006.

Penn State Ad: Know Your Rights

Breaking the Law at Penn State

January 22, 2007 by admin Leave a Comment

FrontPageMagazine.comEditor’s Note: The following report identifies several academic departments at Pennsylvania State University which openly and regularly violate the academic freedom provisions of the university. These provisions were only recently made applicable to students at Penn State by a resolution of the faculty senate (20.00) in May. The new policy was a response to the Pennsylvania academic freedom hearings and the campaign for academic freedom waged by Students for Academic Freedom and the David Horowitz Freedom Center. The report examines official class syllabi, departmental web pages, and course descriptions and singles out the Penn State Women’s Studies Department for failing to meet academic standards and being a program designed to indoctrinate students in a sectarian ideology, which is expressly forbidden by Penn State’s academic freedom policy HR 64. For other studies in this series, click here:For more than fifty years, Penn State University has had one of the strongest and most clearly articulated policies on academic freedom of any institution of higher learning. Known as HR 64, the policy bars Penn State professors from indoctrinating students with “ready-made conclusions on controversial subjects.” It instructs professors, instead, “to train students to think for themselves, and provide them access to those materials which they need if they are to think intelligently.” It warns that “in giving instruction on controversial matters the faculty member is expected to be of a fair and judicial mind, and to set forth justly, without supersession or innuendo, the divergent opinions of other investigators” – in other words to present students with more than one perspective on the subject.Finally, the Penn State policy forbids faculty from using the classroom to discuss controversial subjects outside their field of study. “No faculty member may claim as a right the privilege of discussing in the classroom controversial topics outside his/her own field of study. The faculty member is normally bound not to take advantage of his/her position by introducing into the classroom provocative discussions of irrelevant subjects not within the field of his/her study.”There is nothing ambiguous in these policies. They define the standards of professionalism that Penn State University professors are expected to observe. But examination of a dozen courses in the Penn State curriculum reveals that these principles are often blatantly ignored, and the professional standards they set forth are widely – and in the case of select departments systematically — violated.The following analysis of course descriptions and syllabi in the Penn State catalogue shows that some professors feel free to teach the contentious issues of race, gender and justice in the social order through the frameworks of sectarian political ideologies, making no attempt to familiarize their students with the broad spectrum of scholarly views as required in Penn State’s academic freedom policies. Others presume to teach subjects for which they lack academic credentials. The introduction of such subjects into their courses appears to be motivated by political rather than academic agendas. In some instances, the curricula of entire departments, such as Women’s Studies, are organized to “indoctrinate … students in ready-made conclusions on controversial subjects,” a practice expressly forbidden by Penn State’s academic freedom policies.Legislative hearings held in Pennsylvania from September 2005 through June 2006 showed that the existing academic guidelines at Penn State and other public institutions did not apply to students. Hence formal student complaints about abuses of academic freedom were rare. Without such complaints, shared governance rules made it unlikely that university administrators would act against individual faculty members even in the face of clear curricular evidence that such abuses were taking place.This situation has now begun to change. In response to the hearings held by the Pennsylvania House Committee on Academic Freedom, both Penn State and Temple University have changed their academic freedom policies so that for the first time they now apply specifically to students. In the most encouraging sign of all, Penn State’s new policy – really an amendment to the existing policy – was passed by its Faculty Senate in May 2006. The new policy (20.00) states:Students having concerns about situations that arise within the classroom, or concerns with instructor behavior in a course that violates University standards of classroom conduct as defined in Policy HR64 “Academic Freedom,” may seek resolution according to the recommended procedures established under Policy 20.00, Resolution of Classroom Problems.

The following report on select courses in the Penn State catalogue is designed to encourage Penn State administrators, faculty and students to take a second look at the Penn State curriculum and particularly at the courses and academic programs herein analyzed, with any eye to addressing the problems it reveals. The Internet catalogue descriptions and syllabi (where not supplied by the professor) are available here.
[2] American Studies Program

This program is offered as a major at several Penn State campuses. On the main campus at University Park it is administered by the English Department, where its director is Deborah Clark, an Associate Professor of English and Women’s Studies – not by a historian or a political scientist.[1]

According to the Penn State catalogue, “American Studies 100,” which is the basic course in this program, is “a broad-ranging introduction to American culture. While specific topics may vary from class to class, the course examines what ‘America’ means and what it means to be ‘American:’ These issues will be examined from a variety of perspectives: literature, history, politics, film, race, gender, and geography.”

On campuses other than the main University Park location, the American Studies program is administered independently by different directors from different departments. Courses taken at one campus, however, may count towards fulfilling the American Studies major or minor at another.[2] The two individual course descriptions that follow (one from the University Park and one from the Berks campus) reveal agendas that are primarily political, and whose one-sided view of American history and culture reflects the political prejudices of its instructors.

Introduction to American Studies (University Park Campus)

American Studies 100. Instructor, Melinda P.Wilkins

The course is taught by several instructors, among them M.P. Wilkins, a Senior Lecturer in English at the University Park campus. Wilkins’ syllabus depicts American culture as the expression of a history of uninterrupted brutality and oppression, in which minority groups suffer while their white oppressors write the official story as a narrative of unfolding freedom. This is not atypical of the curricula offered in other American Studies 100 sections.

Wilkins is not formally trained in history and only holds an M.A. in English Literature from Virginia Tech, which she received in 1982. The sole historical text assigned for this course is Jame’s Loewen’s Lies My Teacher Told Me. This book is not a scholarly work, but — as the title suggests — a sectarian polemic against the traditional teaching of American history and against what the author views as the black record of the American past. Among other harangues to be found in his text, Loewen laments “[h]ow textbooks misrepresent the U.S. government and omit its participation in state-sponsored terrorism.”

According to Loewen, the lies teachers told him result from facts being “manipulated by elite white male capitalists who orchestrate how history is written.” This answers the course’s instruction to students to determine who is telling the story and who benefits. But it is an extreme and sectarian answer, and is not tempered by a required text with opposing views. Hence it violates Penn State’s academic freedom policy which defines an appropriate academic instruction as training students “to think for themselves” and providing them with “access to those materials which they need if they are to think intelligently.”

A typical chapter in Loewen’s required text is called “1493: The True Importance of Christopher Columbus.” Loewen summarizes the achievement of Columbus in these words: “Christopher Columbus introduced two phenomena that revolutionized race relations and transformed the modern world: the taking of land, wealth, and labor from indigenous peoples, leading to their near extermination, and the transatlantic slave trade, which created a racial underclass.”

As an extreme view, Loewen’s amateur text might be a useful subject of analysis and discussion. It is certainly not an accurate view of the historical record, since the taking of land, wealth and labor from indigenous people, leading to their near extermination, was a well-known practice of the Romans, long before Columbus arrived in the Americas. Moreover, the intercontinental slave trade (though not the translatlantic one) long pre-dated Columbus making his role hardly revolutionary as Loewen claims.

But Lowen’s tendentious text is not offered as a text to be examined critically and objectively as a reflection of extreme, uninformed, polemical views. Lies My Teachers Told Me is required as an official classroom guide for students. It is the only assigned historical text for Wilkins’ Introduction to American Studies course and its chapters are assigned in lessons throughout the semester to provide historical background to students as they study cultural artifacts throughout American history. In other words, it is the text designed by the instructor course to introduce students to the facts of American history which are said to underlie its culture.

For their other assigned texts, students are required to read novels that, taken together, are clearly intended to present the dark side of American history highlighted by Loewen — from the destruction of Native American tribes to the African slave trade to alleged massacres of civilians by American troops during the Vietnam War. (Among them the novels Middle Passage by Charles Johnson, The Way to Rainy Mountain by M. Scott Momaday and In The Lake of the Woods by Tim O’Brien.) Each novel is presented along with the relevant chapters in Loewen’s polemic to provide the background “facts.”

Here is the syllabus description of the lesson agendas in two weeks of Wilkins’ course:

9/20-29: Loewen, Chapters 2, 3, and 4
Momaday, THE WAY TO RAINY MOUNTAIN
Native Americans

10/4-20: Loewen, Chapters 5, 6, and 7
Johnson, MIDDLE PASSAGE
Civil War, Poverty and Race Relations

While there is nothing inherently wrong with examining cultural reflections on such chapters in American history – even when tendentiously presented – since there are no texts, fictional or otherwise, reflecting a perspective at odds with the course’s extreme viewpoint, the clear intent of the instructor is not to introduce students to the academic study of American culture, but to present them with a radical view of American culture, bearing the imprimatur of the American Studies program.

Since this is not presented as a course in radical culture (and since there are no critiques offered to students of its radical perspective) this is not a course designed to educate students about American radicalism but to present them with ready-made conclusions on controversial issues that reinforce the radical viewpoint. It is a course of indoctrination and it violates Penn States academic freedom policy.

Introduction to American Studies (Berks Campus
American Studies 100. Instructor, Dr. Ray Mazurek[3]

Another section of “Introduction to American Studies” is taught on the Berks campus by Dr. Ray Mazurek, an Associate Professor of English, and is titled “Work in America.” This course purports to examine “work in America in the 19th and 20th centuries, with an emphasis on the last 40 years.” But the course description and syllabus reveal it to be anything but a judicious survey of American labor history. What the course offers students instead is a relentless political attack on modern free-market capitalism that lacks any intellectual balance.

Of the assigned books, only one – Frederick Douglass’s account of his enslavement and freedom — might be said to be an exception. The others include Nickel and Dimed by journalist and political activist Barbara Ehrenreich. Ehrenreich is a socialist who excoriates the capitalist system in her book and likens the state of low and medium-wage workplaces in the United States to a “dictatorship.” Another text, No-Collar: The Hidden Cost of the Humane Workplace isby Professor Andrew Ross, a well-known academic radical and socialist, whose political activism focuses on anti-globalization and whose work is featured in The Nation and The Village Voice. Although Ross is not an academically credentialed economist, his book calls for an “alternative economic arrangement” to replace what he presents as the failures of free-market capitalism. Another text, Working Classics: Poems on Industrial Life, is an anthology of poems which collectively paint a negative portrait of working-class life in capitalist America. The remaining texts are A Short History of the U.S. Working Class by Marxist Paul Le Blanc and Working by leftist Studs Turkel.

This course is not presented as a review of the perspectives of radical socialists on work in America, but as an academic course about “Work in America,” which it is not. By presenting students with one-sided views of its subject, it fails to adhere to Penn State academic freedom policies that stipulate that “in giving instruction on controversial matters the faculty member is expected to be of a fair and judicial mind, and to set forth justly, without supersession or innuendo, the divergent opinions of other investigators.”

[3] Department of Women’s Studies

We have discussed two examples of politically influenced and therefore academically dubious courses in American Studies. With Women’s Studies, we encounter an entire program that is itself political rather than academic, and that contravenes Penn State University policy on classroom instruction.

The Penn State Women’s Studies Department features a curriculum designed to teach students to be radical feminists, rather than how to approach the study of women in an academic manner.

This is the description of the Women’s Studies program provided in the departmental template: “As a field of study, Women’s Studies analyzes the unequal distribution of power and resources by gender.”[4]In other words, the Women’s Studies program is organized around the narrowly conceived and clearly controversial opinion that in a democratic and free market society like ours resources and power are unequally distributed by gender. This is the unexamined premise of the curriculum, not a question for study.

Under the guidelines set forth in the Penn State academic freedom policy, as under those laid down by the American Association of University Professors which require instructors to follow the scientific method, Women’s Studies is not a proper academic program. To earn a major in Women’s Studies, students are required to focus on politically framed concepts such as “feminist analyses of women’s lives” and the “structure of sex/gender systems.” In other words, the department presumes that there are actual systems that can be described this way and that such assumptions do not themselves require examination. Because they require students to accept the controversial assumptions of the Women Studies Department and do not subject its viewpoint – radical feminism — to scrutiny or questioning, the Women’s Studies courses we anaylyzed are little more than for-credit forums for feminist politics.

Introduction to Women’s Studies
Women’s Studies 001.8.
Instructor, Michael Johnson

A catalogue description of Introduction to Women’s Studies, taught by emeritus professor Michael Johnson, begins: “Men are privileged relative to women. That’s not right. I’m going to do something about it, even if it’s only in my personal life.”

Professor Johnson explains that he will “spend most of the course on just a few of the ways that men are privileged relative to women. We’ll look at how and why women face more barriers to happiness and fulfillment than do men, and how we might go about helping our world to move in the direction of gender equity.” These contentious propositions are not raised as a potential object of disinterested academic inquiry, but as “truths” students are expected to embrace. The professor commends his course to those students who “want a really full feminist experience.” This is an appropriate invitation to join a political party, not an academic classroom.

While Professor Johnson retired in 2005, his courses (there are several — equally ideological) are still listed in the catalogue). No authority in the Women’s Studies Department or in the Penn State administration appears to have regarded them as problematic.

Introduction to Women’s Studies[5]
Section 4. Instructor, Yihuai Cai

This section of the Introduction to Women’s Studies course, taught by graduate student Yihuai Cai, focuses on recruiting students to radical feminist causes. To this end, students are asked to consider a number of politically spun “questions” clearly designed to impress on students the feminist claim that America’s democratic society is hierarchical and oppressive:

“How do various forms of oppression (e.g. sexism, racism, classism, ageism, heterosexism, and ablebodism) operate to divide oppressed peoples from one another and consequently facilitate the continued oppression of each group?”
“Examining your own previous values and knowledge, have you consciously or unconsciously participated in one or more of those oppressive ideologies and discourses?”
“What is feminist activism?”
“How shall we develop strategies that address issues of power differentials in our society?”

These questions – especially the last — reflect the mentality of a political operative not an academic teacher.

Consistent with the stated goal of the Women’s Studies department “to connect theory and scholarship with feminist activism,” students in the course are required to volunteer for organizations that are both feminist and activist. The activist programs include the “Penn State Center for Women Students,” which is not just a center for women students but an advocacy group that protests “institutionalized sexism, sex-based discrimination, violence against women and other conditions which impede women students’ personal and academic development.” “Peers Helping to Reaffirm, Educate and Empower,” another Penn State sponsored organization, conducts campus programs about “healthy body image;” Men Against Violence, a “peer education group” focuses on “gender violence;” the “Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Support Network;” and the pro-abortion group Planned Parenthood are all part of the Penn State educational experience as conceived by the Women’s Studies program and its affiliates. These programs are housed in the Paul Robeson Cultural Center, named after a famous American Communist and fervent supporter of Stalin, American Communist and fervent supporter of Stalin, who is described in the official announcement of the Center’s launch as a “human rights” activist, who became “an eloquent, often controversial spokesperson against racism and discrimination,”[6] and whose only university affiliation was with Rutgers University in New Jersey.

Among the organizations students are offered as options there are only two that appear either ambiguous or non-political. These are the HIV/AIDS Risk Reduction Advisory Council, a student organization that focuses on “health promotion and activism” and the Mid-State Literacy Council, which promotes adult literacy programs. No conservative activist groups with interests in women’s issues are included, nor is there any indication or awareness that encouraging political activism in an academic program might be at all problematic.

At the conclusion of their volunteer project, students are asked to write a paper that “summarizes the project and makes connections to the course readings and your own learning experience.” Since all of the course readings are written by radical feminists or “critical theorists” sympathetic to feminism, it is evident that the sole function of this course is to turn students into feminist activists. It is precisely this sort of classroom environment that is specifically prohibited by the Penn State rules under HR 64. This is not education; it is indoctrination.

Yihuai Cai is only a graduate student, but she teaches this course regularly, which means the course as she teaches it has the approval of the Department of Women’s Studies. The ideological, non-academic nature of the course she has devised itself calls into question the character of the graduate education she is receiving at Penn State.

Introduction to Women’s Studies
Women’s Studies 006. Instructor, Marla Jaksch

Another section of this course, taught by adjunct lecturer Marla Jaksch, is described as “an introductory feminist, survey course.” This merely spells out what the other course descriptions reflect. This is not an introductory course about women in which, in accordance with the school’s academic freedom policy, students can expect a balanced view of the relevant issues; it is, instead, a course in feminism – a sectarian ideology — with no option for students to take different or dissenting views. Jaksch explains that her motivation is to “examine (and challenge) the nature of power and privilege in our lives and institutions,” a mission appropriate to a political organization, not an academic class, let alone one funded by the taxpayers of Pennsylvania.

One of the principal texts assigned to Jaksch’s students is Feminism is for Everybody by radical author bell hooks. Hooks text is required in many courses in the Women’s Studies Department at Penn State.

A plodding ideologue, hooks explains to readers that her book is an exercise in “revolutionary feminist consciousness-raising.” More precisely, it is a manifesto devoted to hooks’ well-known extreme views, including the claim that black women are “never going to have equality within the existing white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.” White supremacist capitalist patriarchy is the way hooks habitually describes America’s democratic system. Hooks is credentialed as a Professor of English Literature at the City University of New York. What her academic expertise on capitalism, race or patriarchy is, is anybody’s guess. Penn State students in Jaksch’s Women’s Studies section are assigned no texts that present a different perspective from hooks’ extreme views.

It is not only radical views that Professor Jaksch intends to instill in her students. As she also explains, students are expected not only to learn about feminist politics but to practice them. To this end, the course is designed to “create possible strategies for change through appreciation and engagement with many creative strategies that women have employed historically and contemporarily.”

What such strategies entail is explained in her course assignments. One requires students to write a biographical paper on a “feminist” artist, activist, or writer. The purpose of the assignment is not to inspire students to think critically about their subject. Rather, it is to “familiarize you with feminist strategies for telling unique and possibly untold stories.” Students are also required to attend events that promote feminist activism, such as a “feminist film.” An entire section of the course is given over to the subject of feminist activism and presented under the title “Social Justice & Global Feminism,” which makes no secret of its underlying political agendas.

In common with other professors in the Women’s Studies program, Professor Jaksch states that she encourages “critical thinking” and “critically examines” the issues discussed in the course. But ample evidence shows that the term “critical thinking” is a common academic usage that refers to Marxist and post-Marxist critiques of capitalism. It is not a commitment to the kind of scientific skepticism and intellectual pluralism within an academic course that Penn State policy requires.

This section of Introduction to Women’s Studies is precisely a course in “ready-made conclusions in regard to controversial subjects” that HR64 is designed to prevent. The course violates the core principles of Penn State’s academic freedom policy and the academic standards that Penn State faculty are expected to follow. Indeed, the Women’s Studies Department itself describes its curriculum in terms which are political not academic and thus violate Penn State policy as well.

Global FeminismsWomen’s Studies 502. Instructor, Melissa Wright“

Global Feminisms” is a politically lopsided attack on international capitalism and the free-market system taught by Associate Professor Melissa Wright. A principal required text for the course is Feminism, Theory and the Politics of Difference by Chris Weedon, which examines the “political implications” of feminist theory. For Weedon, the implications are that capitalist societies are “both oppressive and hierarchical.” They are also racist and governed by racial stereotypes applied exclusively to Third World people: “Irrationality and violence are stereotypes regularly applied, for example, to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and Muslim fundamentalist regimes,” according to Weedon. Racial stereotypes of white Americans don’t count since white Americans don’t qualify as oppressed people.

A second required text for Professor Wright’s course is Chandra Mohanty’s Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity. This book is also required in several other courses in the Women’s Studies Department and also features a an unscholarly, polemical attack on capitalism. A radical feminist, Mohanty is frank about her political (and therefore non-academic) goals in writing the book. Proclaiming her “feminist commitments,” Mohanty proposes her text as a “transnational feminist anti-capitalist critique.” Her utopian vision is a world in which “ecological sustainability” and “the redistribution of wealth form the material basis of people’s well being.” Mohanty describes her target audience as the “progressive, left, feminist and anti-imperialist scholars and intellectuals” and further outlines her intention to influence pedagogy by “theorizing and practicing an anticapitalist and democratic critique in education and through collective struggle.”

A third required text for Wright’s course is The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy. Employing a vulgar Marxist analysis of free-market economies, the authors (who are not economists) assail “globalization” (the liberalization and integration of global trade) and “capitalist hegemony,” and make many extreme (and debatable) claims about capitalist “oppression.” They assert, for instance, that women are “allocated to subordinate functions of the capitalist system,” as though there were no women ceo’s of Fortune 500 companies, or as though two of the last three secretaries of state and the current Speaker of the House – third in line for the Presidency — were not female. Of the other texts used in this course all but one, Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran, advance a polemical feminist or anti-capitalist agenda.

The course’s non-scholarly agendas culminate in its final section, which is dedicated to promoting radical activism, specifically the cause of the anti-globalization movement. Titled “World Forums, Women’s Solidarity and the Human Rights discourse” this part of the syllabus is entirely devoted to an appreciation of the World Social Forum, its agendas and activities. The World Social Forum is an international conference of Marxists and other anti-capitalist radicals, terrorist organizations like the Columbian FARC and anti-American leaders like Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez. The World Forum’s Manifesto states: “We are building a large alliance from our struggles and resistance against a system based on sexism, racism and violence, which privileges the interests of capitalism and patriarchy over the needs and aspirations of the people.” The Manifesto further declares that, “an urgent task of our movement is to mobilize solidarity for the Palestinian people and their struggle for self-determination as they face brutal occupation by the Israeli state.”

This is not a course appropriate to an academic institution, let alone to a public university funded by the taxpayers of the state. It presses on students ready-made conclusions to controversial questions, exactly what Penn State policy is designed to prevent.

Feminist Theory
Women’s Studies 507. Instructor, Joan B. Landes

“Feminist Theory,” taught by Professor Joan Landes, adopts the language of intellectual pluralism while sharply limiting its scope to the idées fixes of the radical feminist Left. According to its catalogue description the course “aims to introduce students to the range of debate among feminist theorists on questions of patriarchy and male domination; gender, sexuality and desire; identity and subjectivity; experience and performance; maternity and citizenship; universalism and difference.” But by narrowly and exclusively focusing on leftwing perspectives, this approach falls decidedly short of an appropriate spectrum for an academic debate. Such disagreements as exist between the “feminist theorists” analyzed in the course pale in comparison to their shared beliefs, or to the views of those who do not share their assumptions.

To judge by the assigned readings, the feminist theory as presented in this course is inseparable from a political agenda that describes American society and free-market capitalism as racist and oppressive and urges radical resistance to both. This theme is stressed in a number of essays that students are required to read, including one titled “Theory as Liberatory Practice,” by bell hooks. In this essay, hooks explains her view that feminist theory is primarily a political tool that should be used to “challenge the status quo” and the “patriarchal norm” of American society – assuming without analysis that there is such a norm. The feminist writings of conservative and liberal academic thinkers who do not share these views – Professors Christina Hoff Sommers, Daphne Patai and Camille Paglia come immediately to mind — are simply ignored.

It should be noted that one section of Introduction to Women’s Studies (WMST 001) taught by Mary Faulkner does meet the test of providing an actual debate on these issues, at least for one lesson.

Friday, December 1st: Future of Women’s Studies?

Readings: Daphne Patai, “What’s Wrong with Women’s Studies”; Judith Stacey, “Is Academic Feminism an Oxymoron?”; Harry Brod, “Scholarly Studies of Men: The New Field is an Essential Complement to Women’s Studies”

Yet this assignment stands out as an exception among the Women’s Studies courses we looked at and merely highlights the failure of others to do the same.

It bears mentioning that the bell hooks essay, required for “Feminist Theory” makes no pretense to being a scholarly work. It urges readers to engage in “feminist struggle” against the injustices alleged by the author. Similarly, in the required text by Chris Weedon, Feminist Practice and Poststructuralist Theory, the authorwrites: “Feminism is a politics.” Echoing the theme of the course, Weedon suggests that feminist theory is largely the instrument of a political cause. Specifically, it “must always be answerable to the needs of women in our struggle to transform the patriarchy.” A theory that is answerable to the needs of the “women’s struggle” as defined by a group of sectarian ideologues, cannot by its nature be scholarly since it lacks the freedom to challenge the assumptions of those engaged in the “struggle” including the idea that the “women’s struggle” has definable “needs” that everyone can agree on.

The political agendas that make up the course in Feminist Theory find their most explicit expression in its concluding section. Titled “Transnational Feminism in the New Age of Globalization,” this is yet another leftwing critique of capitalism, a subject in which the course instructor has no academic credentials.

Typical of the readings in this section is a chapter from Feminism Without Borders, a book by the feminist and anti-globalization activist Chandra Talpade Mohanty, mentioned earlier in this report. In this essay, “Under Western Eyes’ Revisited: Feminist Solidarity Through Anti-capitalist Struggles,” Mohanty laments her disenchantment with what she calls the “increasing privatization and corporatization of public life” in the United States, calls for the revival of a more radical feminist movement, and boasts that her “site of access and struggle has increasingly come to be the U.S. academy.” The purpose of a university is not to be a focus of political struggle, nor were the faculty members in the Women’s Studies Department hired to be political activists in the classroom. Yet that is precisely what they are.

Women, the Humanities and the Arts
Women’s Studies 003. Instructor, Stephanie Springgay

On its face, a course on art might seem to have little in common with the feminist ideology and political activism promoted throughout the department. But Women’s Studies 003 shows that even a subject with no obvious connection to politics can become a canvas for the political agendas of activists posing as academics.

While Assistant Professor Springgay claims that her course does not propose a “right answer” for students to accept and encourages them to think “critically,” there is little evidence that she conducts the course in accordance with these appropriately academic standards. As the course description makes clear, students in this course will not simply learn about art. They will also be trained to “challenge the nature of power and privilege as it relates to gender, race, class and sexuality and in particular how it shapes the lives and experiences of women.” Additionally, they will be expected to “find spaces of resistance within these terms” and to “understand how women have, at times, been silenced by the constructions of gender, race, class, sexuality, and nationality, and how they have also reformulated those constructions through a variety of creative expressions.” The idea that gender may be innate rather than “socially constructed” – a view common, for example, among neuro-scientists — does not appear to have a place in Professor Springgay’s curriculum.

Not the least of the problems with this course it that is unclear what expertise the instructor, Stephanie Springgay, has to lecture about such complex topics as, for example, class, nationalism and globalization, which is the focus of an entire section of the course, based on three feminist instructional texts, two by professor bell hooks whose expertise is English literature. Professor Springgay is listed as an assistant Professor of Art Education and Women’s Studies and earned her doctorate in art education. How is Art Education an academic credential for teaching about class, race, nationality and globalization?

In violation of Penn State’s academic freedom provisions, Professor Springgay’s course is structured exclusively around the writings of feminist authors. In a typical reading assignment, author Linda Nochlin asks, “Why have there been no great women artists?” Her answer is that the problem lies with “social structure and [the] institutions” of the art world, specifically that they are dominated by white, middle-class, males: “As we all know, things as they are and as they have been, in the arts as in a hundred other areas, are stultifying, oppressive, and discouraging to all those, women among them, who did not have the good fortune to be born white, preferably middle class and, above all, male.”[7]

While ignoring great artists like Georgia O’Keefe and Mary Cassatt, this argument fails to explain why there have been so many great women writers throughout history, since they experienced the same social restrictions. Sappho, Jane Austen, Emily Dickinson and the Bronte sisters come to mind, not to mention the greatest writer in a famously patriarchal society, Murasaki Shikibu, the 10th Century author of the Tale of Genji, which is regarded as the Iliad of Japanese civilization.

The few reading assignments that cannot be classified as feminist in this course nonetheless are overtly political. In this category are essays like “The Other History of Intercultural Performance” by the visual artist and activist Coco Fusco. Fusco describes a performance art project in which she took part and explains that its intent was to “dramatize the colonial unconsciousness of American society.” According to Fusco, “our experiences…suggested that even though the idea of America as a colonial system is met with resistance — since it contradicts the dominant ideology’s presentation of our system as a democracy — the audience reactions indicated that colonialist roles have been internalized quite effectively.”

Not only do students learn about the convergence of art and political activism, but they are also required to create their own political art project. One section of the course asks students to participate in a “public art project as a form of student activism on the Penn State campus;” this form of activism counts for 15 percent of students’ final grade. Another section of the course is actually titled “activism.” Here students read essays that encourage them to participate in political — particularly feminist — activism. For instance, in her essay, “Bringing feminism a la casa,” feminist writer Daisy Hernandez asks students to consider the following query: “How do you go off to college, learn about feminism in English, and then bring it home to a working-class community where women call their children in from the street at night in every language — except ‘standard’ English?” Bringing feminism to a working-class community is a challenge for feminist activists, not for students who have signed up for an academic study of women at
a major university.

[4] Department of African and African American Studies Program

An examination of the African and African American Studies Program at Penn State reveals an underlying aim to encourage students in the view that American society and its institutions are racist and discriminatory against black Americans. Students earning a major in the program are given several related areas of study, known as “options” within the program. One such area is called the Law and Social Justice Option.

“Social Justice” is not an academic concept but a politically loaded term; there is in fact no societal consensus about how justice is best achieved and the term itself is historically associated with only one set of beliefs — those of the political Left.

Inequality in America
African and African American Studies 409. Instructor, David McBride

Professor McBride’s course requires only two texts, both of which reflect a one-sided view of the race issue. The dubious premise of Joe Feagin’s White Racism is that “few whites are aware of how important racism is to their own feelings, beliefs, thinking and actions,” and that in fact all whites harbor unconscious feelings of racism against blacks. On the other hand, blacks evidently have no such feelings against whites: “From the perspective of this book, black racism does not exist.” The required Feagin text also claims that the United States is governed by “white racism,” which the author defines as “a centuries-old system intentionally designed to exclude Americans of color from full participation in the economy, polity and society.” This would be news to the richest woman in America, Oprah Winfrey, to the Secretary of State, Condoleeza Rice, to the ceo of Time Warner (the largest media company in the world) Richard Parsons, and to the 49 percent of African Americans who are part of America’s middle class.

The second required text, Race, Ethnicity, Gender, and Class: The Sociology of Group Conflict and Change, by Dr. Joseph F. Healey, is an academic text, notwithstanding tendentious observations like the following: “Lynchings have not been relegated to the Civil War past.” According to Healey, the defining feature of minority groups in the United States is that they are discriminated against by the “dominant” white majority. “The United States faces enormous problems in dominant-minority relations,” the book claims, adding: “Four crucial concepts for analyzing dominant-minority relations are prejudice, discrimination, ideological racism, and institutional discrimination.” The idea that there is such a dominant group in a society as ethnically diverse as America’s, whose civil rights laws make such discrimination a crime, is not questioned.

Status of Blacks in the Twentieth Century: Interdisciplinary Perspectives[8]
African and African American Studies 100. Instructor, Darryl C. Thomas

The course description and curriculum for “Blacks in the 20th Century” make up an extended rant against the United States and free-market capitalism. This is the course description in the Penn State catalogue:

Through an examination of African American contestation and engaging of Globalization, Democratization and Empire from the contested Presidential election of 1876 to the recent disputed 2000 Presidential election and its’ [sic] aftermath in 2004, we can analyzed [sic] the divergent strategies employed by this non-state actor to changed [sic] the set of unequal power relations within the United States and to transformed [sic] the power relations that governs human rights practices, racial capitalism, and the global apartheid international regimes supported by the United States during divergent waves of globalization and racial capitalism.

This course description is not even written in coherent English, raising questions about the competence of the instructor, who will be grading student papers. The language employed — “racial capitalism,” “global apartheid international regimes supported by the United States” – is ideological rather than academic. The assignments for the course are exercises in learning the instructor’s ideological prejudices not in examining the subject in an academic and professional manner. Students are asked leading questions obviously intended to influence their answers. For instance, they are asked to write a paper explaining how “racial capitalism” has ill-served “underdeveloped African Americans in the past” and how it “continues to stifle African American financial and economic development today.”

Students are further asked to ponder whether the ideology of “Afrocentrism” provides “the essential instruments for combating the ‘new racism’ in the new era of colorblind America…” Afro-centrism, however, is itself a racialist ideology, which is based on tendentious claims that Egyptians were black and that the Greeks “stole” their contributions to civilization from them. In another assignment, students are asked to “develop a case why liberalism has failed African Americans?” No assignment asked them to assess whether radicalism has failed African Americans. The instructor, Darryl Thomas is an Associate Professor of African American Studies.

Minority Health
African and African American Studies 297C. Instructor, David McBride

“Minority Health” concentrates on “social and cultural factors, poverty, racial and ethnic discrimination, and health care barriers that are causing minority groups to have much higher rates of illness and disease.” Once again, a controversial conclusion is presented as the course assumption. An academic examination of healthcare might be expected to ask whether minority groups have higher rates of illness and disease due to genetic factors or cultural behaviors rather than racial discrimination.

The two required texts for the course are Social Injustice and Public Health and Mama Might Be Better Off Dead: The Failure of Health Care in Urban America. The first is edited by a team headed by well-known political activist Marian Wright Edleman who claimed that the Clinton Administration’s welfare reform would cause a million poor children to starve. The second is by Laurie Kaye Abraham, not an academic, but an investigative journalist with the Chicago Reporter, which is published by a community activist group. This course is not interested in educating students in the range of factors that affect minority health, which undoubtedly include inadequate care. It is interested in persuading students of the validity of a radical perspective, which blames racial discrimination and racially determined economic inequalities for minority health problems. It is indoctrination, not education and it violates Penn State policies.

Diversity and Health (proposed)
African and African American Studies 302.

This course is currently being proposed by four members of the Penn State faculty to study “the impact of diversity on health in America and across nations.” The course’s methodology focuses on the “interaction between concepts of diversity including but not limited to race, ethnicity, culture, gender, age, socioeconomic status, and sexual orientation…” In other words, this is a course in radical concepts and categories, a doctrinal schooling expressly forbidden by Penn State’s disregarded regulations.

[5] The Department of Science, Technology, and Society[9]Peace Seminar
Peace and Conflict Studies Program
Science, Technology and Society 490

This course is described as an “advanced study of major contemporary issues of peace and conflict.” In fact the course is primarily intended to promote the belief that violence is under no circumstance a legitimate “solution” to conflict and that “nonviolence” alone is the answer. Only two books are used in this course. One is Approaches to Peace: A Reader in Peace Studies, written by David Barash, an animal psychologist. Barash is a self-described “progressive”and an activist for non-violence who makes exceptions for “revolutionary violence” if it is used to good ends as in countries such as Cuba.[10]

Barash has no professional qualification for putting together an academic text on these complex issues. The other book, co-authored by a professor of peace studies, is titled An Anthology of Historic Alternatives to War, and reveals by its title its slanted perspective on the subject.Students in this course are not exposed to contrary perspectives but are presented with the ready-made conclusions favored by the instructor. Students are required to attend several lectures featuring anti-war radicals. Pennsylvania radical Barbara Ballenger, for instance, speaks to students about “personal peace activism after 9/11.” Peter Shaw, an anti-war radical, delivers his “reflections on a career of peace activism.”

The Politics of the Ecological Crisis (proposed)
Science, Technology, and Society 135.

The political agendas of this proposed course are evident from its title. Is there an ecological crisis in the first place? The very assumption of the course is a controversial viewpoint. There is, in fact, no consensus about whether this “crisis” actually exists. The course curriculum does not pose the question of whether there is a crisis, but proposes to focus on its politics. It presumes this contention as a fact. This directly contradicts the professional standards of academic discourse established by Penn State’s academic freedom policies.

The course description is rather candid about the fact that is agenda is polemical rather than academic: “Much of the reading assumes that our civilization faces the twin problems of increasingly serious shortages of resources and a growing ecological crisis that threatens the basis of life. Further, it argues that these ‘twin crises’ feed upon each other, and that together they pose serious short and long run challenges to survival. Some readings attribute these problems to the dominant values that characterize modern Western society. The course does consider some dissents from this perspective, arguments that things will be just fine. However, it concentrates on problems and predictions of trouble. Thus, the class does not claim to present an evenly balanced assessment. Rather, it recognizes that most of what we learn, read, and see supports the status quo and assumes our civilization and energy-dependent way of life will continue. Consequently it makes sense to emphasize the less frequently argued position that we may be headed for disaster. (emphasis added)

In other words, this course is designed as an attack on what it presumes to be the prevalent view of these matters. This is not an academic approach, but a political program. It specifically violates the Penn State guidelines. Whether or not the course is correct in its assumptions about the nascent ecological threat facing the Western world, or that the case for this threat is not adequately presented in the culture at large, it is not the function of an academic course to impose on students “ready-made conclusions on controversial subjects.”

[6] Conclusion

This is only a small sampling of the problematic courses offered by Penn State University – courses that violate Penn State’s academic standards and academic freedom policies. The fact that many of these courses are offered by departments whose mission statements are themselves problematic suggests the scope of the problem. There will be no remedy until the Penn State administration and faculty take seriously the standards they themselves have adopted, and find ways to enforce them at the classroom level. On the evidence, such enforcement would require the inclusion in reading lists of diverse perspectives; the reformulation of curricula so that they approach complex and controversial issues from an academic and analytical, not a sectarian viewpoint; the rephrasing of essay topics and the re-casting of class questions so they do not lead students to particular conclusions on controversial issues; the removal of all inducements and requirements designed to recruit students to political organizations and causes.

Appendix: Penn State Academic Freedom Policy HR 64

“No faculty member may claim as a right the privilege of discussing in the classroom controversial topics outside his/her own field of study. The faculty member is normally bound not to take advantage of his/her position by introducing into the classroom provocative discussions of irrelevant subjects not within the field of his/her study.”

Faculty Senate Policy 20-00:

“Students having concerns about situations that arise within the classroom, or concerns with instructor behavior in a course that violates University standards of classroom conduct as defined in Policy HR64 ‘Academic Freedom,’ may seek resolution according to the recommended procedures established under Policy 20-00, Resolution of Classroom Problems.“In every case, student concerns arising from questions about classroom situations or behavior shall be resolved in a manner that provides for equity and due process for students and for instructors. Students may attempt to resolve classroom problems with assurance that confidentiality will be maintained as appropriate.”

Tom Ryan helped with research in this report.

Notes:

[1] http://www.psu.edu:80/bulletins/bluebook/major/am_st.htm

[2] Because the American Studies major is being phased out at University Park itself, and no new students are being accepted, courses in American Studies taken at the secondary campuses only count for general education requirements at the main campus, and not for an American Studies major.

[3] https://cms.psu.edu/section/default.asp?format=course&id=200506SPBK+++RAM+ST100+050&title=AM+ST+100+%2C+Section+050%

3A+INTRO+TO+AM+ST++++

[4] www.womenstudies.psu.edu/

[5]http://soc.our.psu.edu/soc/fall/up/p-z/wmnst.html)

[6] http://www.libraries.psu.edu/news/releases/spring2002/YoungFirstFriday102.html

[7] http://www.miracosta.edu/home/gfloren/nochlin.htm

[8] https://cms.psu.edu/section/default.asp?format=course&id=200607FAUP+++RAAA+S100+002&title=AAA+S+100+%2C+Section+002%3A+BLKS+IN+20TH+CENT+

[9] www.discoverthenetworks.org/Articles/Penn_State_File[1].doc

[10] http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=15852

David Horowitz is a lifelong civil rights activist and founder of the Center for the Study of Popular Culture. Jacob Laksin is an assistant editor at FrontPageMag.com.