items tagged with Pennsylvania

As previously noted, right-wing shill David Horowitz debated philosophy professor Kurt Smith last night at Bloomsburg University on the topic of academic freedom although it sounds like perhaps DH is deciding that screaming at students in PA isn't the most persuasive approach.  The 75-minute debate, moderated by BU President Jessica Kozloff, focused primarily, although not exclusively, on Horowitz's so-called Academic Bill of Rights. 

Recently, Kurt Smith, Professor of Philosophy at Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania (and noted David Horowitz critic) was invited to talk about academic freedom at the University North Carolina's Parr Center for Ethics.  The full text is after the jump and is also available in PDF here.

Free Exchange readers have surely wondered what has happened to Academic Freedom Wednesday for the last couple of weeks.  Well, the truth is that we have been writing our AFW column each week, but then bands of right-wing thugs have conspired against us and replaced the real column with others!

This week we were determined to write on a different academic freedom issue than Horowitz and Company and their inability to create a problem that didn't exist in Pennsylvania, but it looks like we are going to get pulled back in again--but rest assured, this will be 10 minutes of academic freedom entertainment!

Yesterday, Henry Farrell from Crooked Timber and Daniel Drezner from, well, Daniel Drezner got together to discuss a variety of issues and they spent a few minutes talking about Horowitz and his "major setback" in Pennsylvania as they described it.  You should watch the whole thing, but here are some highlights.

Pennsylvania has of course been down this road before-attacks from Lancaster Co. legislators prompting a year-long investigation into academic freedom in higher education.  While the investigation yielded no evidence that legislation was warranted and in fact found that academic freedom violations are rare, it appears some legislators weren't satisfied.  Fortunately, for the time being it appears that the University is sticking to its guns and not canceling the speech.

It appears that holding a hearing where those testifying were overwhelming in opposition to your bill and then losing a bipartisan vote on the bill on the House floor is just not a clear enough message for Rep. Roger Koopman of Montana.  He has come back with a new version of his ACTA-inspired "intellectual diversity" bill-this time calling for an interim study of "to investigate the current state of intellectual diversity in the Montana University system."  Where have we seen this before?

Does anyone remember Pennsylvania's HR 177 that established a select committee "to examine 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 at State-related and State-owned colleges and universities and community colleges in this Commonwealth"?  Better yet, does anyone remember that after the Keystone state spent thousands of dollars, ate up weeks of legislator's valuable time, not to mention college administrators, faculty members and students, the Committee concluded there was not a problem in Pennsylvania and legislation was not needed?

Apparently Rep. Koopman doesn't.  Let's hope his colleagues do.

Update:  The legislation tracker has been updated to include Montana HJR 55.