Q. Legislative measures modeled after the Academic Bill of Rights sound reasonable. Why is the AFT so opposed to them?

A. This country is founded on the principle of limited government, on the idea that individuals    and institutions do not have to think or say what the government wants, or be subject to political oversight or intrusion.  It is especially critical to keep institutions like the press and higher education, which are vital to the free expression of ideas, free from government interference. This legislation gives public officials an extremely dangerous hunting license to impose a political litmus test on academic hiring and to second-guess the content of classroom teaching  and the curriculum. Stripped of the fancy language, the goal of the Academic Bill of Rights is to take control away from faculty and impose a political agenda in the classroom.

Q. Won't these measures help protect our students from biased professors in the classroom?

A. The picture of higher education painted by the people pushing for this legislation—one in which faculty members are all left-wingers who don't care about teaching their students, only in indoctrinating them—is as incorrect as it is insulting. America's colleges and universities are renowned as the world's best—the most diverse, challenging and successful by every reasonable measure. Higher education faculty members are trained professionals who bring a great variety of viewpoints based on their disciplinary knowledge to the classroom. Professors go through one of the most rigorous hiring and promotion processes anywhere. They are constantly evaluated by their peers on the basis of the quality of their scholarship and teaching. 

What is more, most institutions have a process for students to address instances of abuse, should they occur. This usually can be found in the institutions' student handbook.

Q. What's wrong with insisting that an academic institution have a "balance" of liberals and conservatives on its faculty?

A. Representing and respecting diverse viewpoints in a classroom is appropriate, but insisting that every professor in the humanities and social sciences represent all viewpoints on all issues, and give them equal time and weight in all classes, is neither possible nor desirable.  Students gain a diverse intellectual knowledge by selecting a variety of classes with a variety of faculty members who bring their specialized knowledge and particular perspective to the classroom material in a way that challenges students.

As Stanley Fish of the University of Illinois-Chicago has written, the pursuit of truth is not the same as the pursuit of intellectual diversity.  Bills of rights proponents say that since no humanly accessible truth is invulnerable to challenge, therefore challenges must always be provided. That confuses a theory of the truth with its pursuit and exchanges the goal of reaching it for a resolution to keep the question of it always open.

Q. What about those stories of students who say they have been disparaged or given poor grades because of their conservative viewpoints?

A. The idea that conservative students are cowed and mistreated is based largely on unsubstantiated stories posted on some Web sites without the faculty members in question being asked their view of the situation.  To treat these postings as fact shows that a political agenda, not the truth, is operating here.

Students already have mechanisms for addressing grievances at almost every institution in the country.  If such due process mechanisms do not exist, then they should be pursued at the institutional level.

Students should question ideas they do not understand or disagree with.  Healthy skepticism and debate are fundamental to the learning experience.  However, this legislation would have the opposite effect, undermining the faculty-student relationship and promoting unfounded complaints.