items tagged with American Council of Trustees and Alumni

ACTA issued a correction concerning their poll in Missouri although they did not indicate why--possibly this is the reason?  ACTA gets points for making the correction rather than screaming that checking the facts is an ad hominem attack--even better would be a response to the squishy percentages ACTA manufactures out of the poll.

While there is some difference of opinion out there (not in here) about whether or not the current charges of liberal bias against colleges and university faculty are warranted or not, it does seem that there is some pretty solid consensus that legislatures should not start passing laws to regulate higher education in this area.  Doubters only need to look at the record. Twenty-six states have had proposed legislation either under the guise of David Horowitz's so-called academic bill of rights or the American Council of Trustees and Alumni's "intellectual diversity" legislation, but no state has enacted such legislation.  This, of course begs the question: Why?  . . . assuming you don't have a conspiracy theory working.

Jeff Emanuel, a Special Operations military veteran who served in Iraq, and a Security Leadership fellow at the University of Georgia Center for International Trade and Security has an answer because he asks the right question.

The campaign for "intellectual diversity" legislation is a neoconservative ploy to secure the teaching of right-wing propaganda in the classroom, plain and simple. The authors of the campaign hide behind the mask of educational reformer, but what they seek is nothing short of educational control.

The 2005 ACTA report, Intellectual Diversity: Time For Action [.pdf], provides the movement's definition of intellectual diversity: "intellectual diversity means a multiplicity of ideas" (p. 1). And, as expected, ACTA launches into its concern over the "political imbalance" among faculty members (p. 2). Here, the complaint is that there are more self-labeled "liberals" than "conservatives," and as support for this confession from professors the fact that there are more registered Democrats than Republicans among faculty is given. Higher education is then cast as a biased environment, administrators and faculty failing to make higher education intellectually diverse.

Of course, the lack of diversity here is really just an imbalance in either self-characterization among faculty or party registration. When did self-description or political registration become the markers for intellectual viewpoints? How is it exactly that a balance in the numbers of Democrats and Republicans will secure intellectual diversity?

Installment II: The Undergraduate Classroom Is Not a Free Marketplace of Ideas

The classroom cast as a "marketplace of ideas" is an important component of the neoconservative argument for intellectual diversity. It has been employed by every political advocacy group, including Neal's American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA), Balch's National Association of Scholars (NAS), and Horowitz's the David Horowitz Freedom Center (DHFC).

As defined by ACTA, intellectual diversity is the multiplicity of ideas. Horowitz's mantra-"You can't get a good education if they're only telling you half of the story"-artificially quantifies every issue as having two sides. Be that as it may, the claim is that given that there are at least two sides to an issue, the professor must present both sides. Otherwise, he or she is violating their duty as educators to embrace intellectual diversity.

Final Installment: Putting it All Together

I would like to bring this part of the series on intellectual diversity to a close. As I noted in my last installment, one aim of the series was to bring to light the complexity of the issues involved. This was in turn contrasted to ACTA's overly simple definition of intellectual diversity as "a multiplicity of ideas"-though, as I also noted, this definition has been used to muck up quite a bit, something that Aaron Barlow clearly articulates in his recent post. In what follows, I will put together some of what was said in those earlier installments of the series, and make one final remark about the radical attempt by Anne Neal, David Horowitz, and others to control education by way of their deceitful political campaign.

more after the jump...