Thomas
Sowell
http://www.NewsAndOpinion.com | Governor Bill Owens of Colorado has cut
through the cant about "free speech" and come to the defense of a
16-year-old high school student who tape-recorded his geography teacher using
class time to rant against President Bush and compare him to Hitler.
The teacher's lawyer talks about
First Amendment rights to free speech but free speech has never meant speech
free of consequences. Even aside from laws against libel or extortion, you can
insult your boss or your spouse only at your own risk.
Unfortunately, there is much
confusion about both free speech and academic freedom. At too many schools and
colleges across the country, teachers feel free to use a captive audience to
vent their politics when they are supposed to be teaching geography or math or
other subjects.
While the public occasionally
hears about weird rantings by some teacher or
professor, what seldom gets any media attention is the far more pervasive
classroom brainwashing by people whose views may not be so extreme, but are no
less irrelevant to what they are being paid to teach. Some say teachers should
give "both sides" — but they should give neither side if it is off
the subject.
Academic freedom is the freedom to
do academic things — teach chemistry or accounting the way you think chemistry
or accounting should be taught. It is also freedom to engage in the political
activities of other citizens — on their own time, outside the classroom —
without being fired.
Nowhere else do people think that
it is OK to engage in politics instead of doing the job for which they are
being paid. When you hire a plumber to fix a leak, you
don't want to find your home being flooded while he whiles away the hours
talking about Congressional elections or foreign policy.
It doesn't matter whether his
political opinions are good, bad, or indifferent if he is being paid to do a
different job.
Only among "educators"
is there such confusion that merely exposing what they are doing behind the
backs of parents and taxpayers is regarded as a violation of their rights.
Tenure is apparently supposed to confer carte blanche.
The
All across the country, from the
elementary schools to the universities, students report being propagandized.
That the propaganda is almost invariably from the political left is secondary.
The fact that it is political propaganda instead of the subject matter of the
class is what is crucial.
The lopsided imbalance among
college professors in their political parties is a symptom of the problem,
rather than the fundamental problem itself.
If physicists taught physics and
economists taught economics, what they did on their own time politically would
be no more relevant than whether they go swimming or sky diving on their days
off. But politics is intruded, not only into the classroom, but into hiring
decisions as well.
Even top scholars who are
conservatives are unlikely to be hired by many colleges and universities. Similarly with people training to become public school teachers.
Some in schools of education have said that, to be qualified, you have to see
teaching as a means of social change — meaning change in a leftward direction.
Such attitudes lead to lopsided
politics among professors. At
Such ratios are not uncommon at
other universities — despite all the rhetoric about "diversity." Only
physical diversity seems to matter.
Inbred ideological narrowness
shows up, not only in hiring and teaching, but also in restrictive campus
speech codes for students, created by the very academics who complain loudly
when their own "free speech" is challenged.
So long as voters, taxpayers,
university trustees, and parents tolerate all this, so long it will continue.