The AFT has always been a champion of academic freedom. In policy statements, legal battles and at the bargaining table, the union has defended this bedrock of the U. S. higher education system, which allows faculty to teach, research and provide services unencumbered by external influence.

In the past two years, the AFT has stepped up its defense as attacks on academic freedom have escalated and become more targeted. On the one hand, legislation known as the so-called Academic Bill of Rights has surfaced in 20 state legislatures and in Congress. On the other hand, a growing list of academics are being personally targeted and smeared in books like The Professors—The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America (2006 Regnery Press) and in the attack-dog conservative press.

Behind these attacks are a well-funded arsenal of individuals, like David Horowitz and his Center for the Study of Popular Culture—renamed this summer the David Horowitz Freedom Center—and organizations like the American Council of Trustees and Alumni and the National Association of Scholars. They make the case that a predominantly left-wing faculty is indoctrinating the students of America and stopping them requires government and trustee intervention in the classroom.

In February 2006, the AFT helped launch the Free Exchange On Campus coalition to mount a concerted and strategic response. Free Exchange (www.freeexchangeon
campus.org) is made up of student, faculty and civil liberties groups that monitor and respond to attacks from the right. Since forming, it has been busy
• releasing an analysis of the extensive errors and misrepresentations in The Professors;
• ensuring that students and faculty leaders were well represented at a series of legislative hearings held in Pennsylvania (see below); and
• responding rapidly on its blog to the daily mischief, accusations and right-wing detritus emanating from various propaganda machines.

This summer, delegates to the AFT convention passed a resolution opposing the so-called Academic Bill of Rights (ABOR) and authorizing the continued work of the Free Exchange coalition. AFT On Campus has been following these developments in our monthly news coverage. Those who have sought more frequent updates have found their way to the Free Exchange web site, where members of the coalition blog daily. With this issue of AFT On Campus, we inaugurate a new blog-like column, a “clog,” if you will—a compilation of items from the blog and other AFT news related to academic freedom.

Championing the free exchange of ideas

ABOR fire is out in Pennsylvania The Pennsylvania House Select Committee on Academic Freedom held its fourth and final hearing on H.R. 177, legislation seeking an investigation of the academic atmosphere in public institutions. At the May 31-June 1 hearing, students, faculty and academic freedom supporters testified that ideology is not a problem in the state university system. They cited procedures state colleges and universities have in place for students to register complaints if they feel they have been subjected to biased or unprofessional learning experiences in the classroom. Free Exchange presented the committee with a booklet called “Campus Voices: Students and Faculty Speak Out on the Free Exchange of Ideas in Pennsylvania Colleges and Universities,” a collection of the views and experiences of 70 students and 100 faculty from around the state. The select committee’s final report is due before the end of September.

Two weeks before the hearing, Rep. Gib Armstrong, the man who sponsored H.R. 177, lost his primary bid to retain his seat.

Less than meets the eye at Temple Temple University announced this summer that it was consolidating its 17 different student grievance procedures into one and it would be posted on the Web site. David Horowitz gleefully declared the policy “new” and spun Temple’s consolidated “Student and Faculty Academic Rights and Responsibilities” as a victory for the right wing.

Hardly, says Temple professor of history and educational policy studies William Cutler, who is also president of the Temple Association of University Professors/AFT. The clarification “is pretty much a straightforward call for faculty and students to respect well-argued views and the principles and standards of academic discourse,” he says. A Temple spokesperson had a similar take on the change when he told the online newspaper Inside Higher Ed that “the university made no changes of substance and found no problems. It just acted to simplify its system.”

You call this research? Conservative think tanks released several reports this summer that raise the question: Just how far do you have to go to make the case that liberals have overrun the academy? For starters there was the American Council of Trustees and Alumni study, “How Many Ward Churchills?” Using the Internet, it tried to prove that professors like Churchill, the controversial University of Colorado professor who made noxious comments after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, number in the thousands. The report examines some departmental Web sites, on-line course descriptions, electronic course syllabi, and faculty home pages in the liberal arts and finds that “the kinds of politically extreme opinions for which Ward Churchill has become justly infamous are not only quite common in academe, but enthusiastically embraced.”  As Swarthmore profressor Timothy Burke noted in his blog on the topic, “There is zero attention or even curiosity in the report about the issue of what faculty actually do in the classroom with these syllabi.”

Google this Shortly after that, the National Association of Scholars applied a similar research technique in its report, “Words to Live By: How Diversity Trumps Freedom on Academic Websites." It googled the Web sites of 99 universities to see how often the word "diversity" appears on each Web site compared with other words like "freedom" or "liberty" or "equality." NAS then compared those ratios to those of other "sectors" such as the media, blogs, religious organizations, business associations, political parties and unions. And they found that on university sites, the word diversity appears more often than the other words and that this is only true in higher education. Yet, as the Free Exchange blogger notes, his similar investigation of the General Dynamics site found more references to "diversity" than to all the other terms NAS searched combined!

Securing a free student press The California Legislature has become the first one in the country to protect freedom of speech and press for college and university newspapers this summer with the passage of a bill prohibiting censorship of the student press. The bill, A.B. 2531, which Gov. Arnold Schwarzenneger has not yet signed into law, is necessary, says its sponsor Speaker Pro Tempore Leland Y. Yee, because of the ruling in Hosty v. Carter. In that case, the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals said administrators at Governors State University (Illinois) were within their rights to require student newspaper editors to clear their stories with the administration before publishing.

Going after individuals It takes quite a bit of effort to disprove a negative: for example, to discredit a charge posted surreptitiously on a Web site, as University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth professor Dan Lomba had to do. Or to explain that a group that plasters your face on the cover of a publication called “Campus Support for Terrorism” is misrepresenting the facts, as Stanford professor Joe Beinin sued to prove. Or to show that what you say lawfully as a private person does not reflect on your classroom professionalism, as University of Wisconsin adjunct professor Kevin Barrett had to demonstrate.

Lomba was exonerated through a departmental grievance process, but the Web site information at Frontpagemag.com, sponsored by David Horowitz, is not updated to reflect that. Beinin’s lawsuit against David Horowitz for the unauthorized use of his copyrighted photo has not been settled, but Horowitz has removed the image from his Web publication, complaining to the San Francisco Chronicle that the lawsuit is “an abuse of the courts to chill my free speech.” (We don’t make this up.) To his employer’s credit, Barrett remains slated to teach his class, “Islam: Religion and Culture,” this fall since the university’s review of his 10-year experience teaching at the UW shows that he does not bring his personal opinions into the classroom.