items tagged with ABOR

We're pleased to offer you another interview with the contributors to Stephen Aby's forthcoming The Academic Bill of Rights Debate: A Handbook.  Previous installments have included interviews with Aby and with Lawrence Poston.  In this edition, we had the privilege of chatting with contributor Kevin Mattson about the role of the college professor, the on-going threats to academic freedom, and "postmodern conservatism."  We hope you'll enjoy the interview as much as we enjoyed conducting it!

Later this month a new collection of essays entitled The Academic Bill of Rights Debate: A Handbook (Praeger) will be released.  The book, edited by University of Akron professor, Stephen Aby, is a comprehensive look at the campaign by conservative activist David Horowitz to get legislation enacted to allegedly bring a "balance" of perspectives to college classrooms and campuses.  We got a chance to ask Stephen Aby a few questions about the genesis of the collection and some of his thoughts on the whole "academic bill of rights" (ABOR) movement. Below the jump, you can read the whole interview, but we can't help but whet your appetite with this comment from Aby about the book's contents:

I can't help but note that David Horowitz has five unedited pieces reproduced in this volume, for which he granted permission.  And there are many other pieces sympathetic to his views that are annotated in the bibliography.  Ironically, one would be hard pressed to find that diversity of views in his last two books.

We hope you enjoy the full interview.

This past spring, students at the University of Pittsburgh held a debate on the Academic Bill of Rights and posted the event at this website.  It's lengthy, but it's great to see a lively exchange by students of argumentation over this issue.  Hang around until the end to catch the remarks of Pitt Provost James V. Maher who makes the important points that a) Pitt has a process in place to deal with student complaints of being unfairly graded due to one's political, religious, or ideological beliefs and b) that process is rarely invoked.

Enjoy, and have a great weekend!

A couple of months ago, we noted that an investigation by the state of Georgia found that college students' peers had a bigger impact on their perception of the campus's political environment than their professors.  Today (via IHE) we discover that, according to the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA, college students' political opinions are more likely to be shaped by their peers than by their professors, putting yet another nail in the coffin of the ultra-conservative "liberal indoctrination" canard.

Buried at the very end of the article is this interesting point:

Looking at an earlier part of the study cohort, the researchers have found the percentage calling themselves "liberal" or "far left" rose from 24.0 percent to 29.9 percent six years after graduation, but the percentage choosing "conservative" or "far right" increased from 28.1 percent to 31.6 percent.

Essentially, fewer students called themselves middle-of-the-road, and they dispersed about equally in each direction after graduation. Still, the group identifying as "conservative" gained the most of any group.

While I don't think the math supports the final sentence of that quote, the overall premise is sound - students, in roughly equal numbers, become "more liberal" or "more conservative" through college.  If systemic liberal indoctrination - either from professors or peers - was occurring on college campuses, wouldn't the numbers be skewed further in favor of the left?

At any rate, the UCLA report further underscores that proponents of ABOR and "intellectual diversity" legislation are simply pushing a solution that's in search of a problem

The Free Exchange on Campus coalition is proud to release Manufactured Controversy (download the .pdf here), a report linking together the attacks on the free exchange of ideas, the proponents of these attacks, and the tactics and resources that have been used to push an agenda attacking higher education.  It's our hope that a record of our experiences over the last several years will be useful to professors, administrators, students, and community members who find themselves faced with outrageous attacks on academic freedom and free speech in the future.

The report has already generated a response from ABOR's numero uno honcho, David Horowitz, who bizarrely (yet somewhat predictably) compares our defense of the university to defending child abusers.  Horowitz accuses us of "misrepresenting the argument of its opponents, distorting the facts, and omitting the vast body of evidence demonstrating that abuses exist."  Readers who are familiar with our Facts Count and Facts Still Count fact checks of Horowitz's "vast body of evidence" (available on our publications page) will recognize his statement as a textbook case of projection.  Much like his allegations of indoctrination, there's nothing to back up his claims.