Last week, a committee of the Academic Senate at the University of California at Santa Barbara found that sociology professor William Robinson did not act improperly when he sent an e-mail expressing some controversial views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to students in his Sociology of Globalization course.

As we previously noted, the real question in this case had nothing to do with the content of the e-mail and everything to do with whether Professor Robinson had passed on that content in a manner consistent with his professional obligations.  We also noted that the people in the best position to evaluate his behavior were his UCSB peers.  

We should expect that when controversial opinions are expressed on hot-button issues, feathers will be ruffled.  Education is often an uncomfortable process.  But the university is a place where all of these opinions should have a chance to be aired and evaluated, and as such these institutions should err on the side of letting sometimes volatile exhcanges taking place.  Kudos to UCSB for making sure such controversial opinions can see the light of day.  

Noted without comment:

Liberty University has changed its policy on student groups, giving both its Democratic and Republican organizations a new status, "unofficial clubs," according to The News & Advance, in Lynchburg, Va.

Last month the conservative Christian college took away the Democratic group's official status. The policy shift allows its return.

Of the links that French provides as evidence, three of them go to claims that are - shockingly - presented by organizations or individuals that we detail in our report as leading the charge against professors based on less than persuasive "studies": David Horowitz's Discover the Networks site (which attempts to gain legitimacy by using a hackneyed version of social network analysis), ACTA, and the Alliance Defense Fund.  A fourth link, which French uses as evidence of the effects of indoctrination (more liberalized student views on social issues and a decline in traditional religiosity), actually refutes the thesis of faculty indoctrination in the Q&A with the researcher, Alexander Astin of UCLA, who conducted the cited study:

[I]t would appear that the political changes during college are influenced by the peer group and that this is the major source of influence on political leanings. The faculty doesn't appear to make much of a difference in this. We have looked at that in great depth, and it appears the main source of influence is the peer group.

French also ignores the fact that student attitudes mirror changes in the general population's (especially in the 18-29 year old cohort's) attitudes about religion and other social issues.  In other words, there's no causal relationship between attending college and changing attitudes.

According to the USA Today, ACTA is up to their old tricks, but this time with a new twist!  First, the old trick: create the impression that there's a lack of intellectual diversity on college campuses by completely misinterpreting data:

ACTA says, for example, that a 2007 campus survey of students at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill found that "at least 13% of undergraduates felt they had witnessed at least one classroom situation in which unpopular or provocative ideas seemed to have been unwelcome, either because of the instructor's viewpoint or viewpoints of most students."

We'll leave aside that a provocative college classroom where students confront ideas with which they are either unfamiliar or disagree is supposed to generate some level of discomfort.  But notice that the 13% of students at UNC felt that the discomfort was "either because of the instructor's viewpoint or viewpoints of most students [emphasis mine]."  Basically, ACTA is lumping peer pressure in with professorial pressure to make a case for further regulating what faculty do, despite reports from the State of Georgia and the Higher Education Research Center at UCLA that students are more likely to be made to experience intolerance about their personal beliefs from their peers.  Citing the 13% at UNC as evidence of the need to regulate the curriculum and on-campus programming for ideological content is, to quote Anne Neal, "simply disingenuous."

plenty more after the jump...

In the comments to this post, Christian DeJohn left us this note:

A key note here on my case and my academic performance at Temple University. As Mark Twain noted, "Facts are stubborn things." At Temple graduate school I maintained a 3.2 GPA- a strong "B-plus." My academic performance was reviewed and I was continued in the History program for years. Any shameless attempt to cast aspersions on my academic performance, such as this report's insane cliam [sic] that I was "dismissed" from Temple grad school for bad grades, is a flat-out lie. Fabrication. Falsehood, Lie.

Furthermore, incredible as it may seem, one's First Amendment rights are not contingent upon one's academic performance. One could be the worst student in the history of a school, but this does not negate their fundamental academic freedoms.

Here is the sum total of what was written about Mr. DeJohn (outside of two references to his court case) in Manufactured Controversy, first from p. 9:

One example was a lawsuit against Temple University in which a student claimed he was dismissed from his master's program for his political beliefs. Although this lawsuit did force Temple to do away with its campus speech code, the court dismissed the student's claim of discrimination in his dismissal, finding that he had been dismissed for academic reasons. 

Note that the claim is not that he was dismissed for "bad grades," but rather for "academic reasons."  As noted in the complaint that ADF filed on DeJohn's behalf (and referenced in our report), he was dismissed for reasons having to do with failing to make progress on his thesis, not poor grades.  This is actually fairly common - even A students are sometimes dismissed from graduate school once faced with the rigors of having to produce an original academic work like a thesis or dissertation.  Most of the them don't claim discrimination, however.  On top of that, our "insane claim" that he was dismissed for academic reasons is actually a finding of the court.

And from p. 19:

Conservative opponents of the free exchange of ideas also have used the courts both to attack higher education institutions and to promote their argument that something is amiss in higher education. The Alliance Defense Fund (ADF), a Christian legal organization, has been behind nearly all of the lawsuits in which students have claimed to be the victims of harassment and bias in the classroom-the two highest profile involving Missouri State University social work student Emily Brooker and Temple University graduate student Christian DeJohn.

[...]

At issue here is not whether there is a sufficient cause for student complaints. Missouri State University quickly settled its case (within two weeks of the suit being filed) and conducted an investigation of its social work program that recommended some important changes, while a court found in favor of one part of DeJohn's case involving Temple University's speech code (although the court did dismiss charges of retaliation against him). 

For those keeping score at home, we do note that Mr. DeJohn actually prevailed in the part of his lawsuit having to do with his First Amendment rights - hardly a vindication of his belief that we believe the university should keep him from speaking freely.

Mr. DeJohn's bizarre claims aren't very persuasive, but they do nicely underline the point that Manufacturing Controversy set out to make: that people are willing to distort facts (which indeed are stubborn things) in order to advance their ideological vendetta against higher education.