Note from the Editor

For too long, public discussion about cultural issues has been treated as a war rather than a debate. As a result, all sides have tended to ignore violations of academic freedom when the victims are their ideological opponents. For that reason, Teachers for a Democratic Culture has issued this report an effort to address the real problems of academic freedom that affect all teachers and students, no matter what their views.

This report is opinionated. It makes judgments about what the most serious threats to academic freedom are. But it also takes notice of the threats posed by both the left and the right. We hope that it will provoke a debate about the meaning of academic freedom and how we can protect it.

This report on academic freedom is far from comprehensive. Many incidents of censorship are never reported to watchdog groups or publicized in the media. This is particularly--but not exclusively--true of progressive faculty and students, since there is no network of left-wing organizations and newspapers devoted to reporting examples of ideological intolerance, while many groups on the right (including Accuracy in Academia, Intercollegiate Studies Institute, National Association of Scholars, Individual Rights Foundation, Center for Individual Rights) are heavily funded to protect the rights of conservative faculty and students.

For that reason, this report on academic freedom does not attempt to list every possible example of intolerance like the People for the American Way's annual report on censorship in elementary and secondary education. TDC does not have the resources to investigate every case of censorship, and a mere list would do little to address the leading issues of academic freedom.

Other organizations, most notably the American Association of University Professors, are devoted to the protection of academic freedom, but we believe the issue is too important for only one group to focus on it. The AAUP provides a valuable service in carefully examining specific cases involving academic freedom and censuring institutions guilty of violating it. But the AAUP reports are inadequate for a comprehensive look at what is happening across the country. The AAUP only reports on a small number of incidents, and maintains confidentiality about the complaints it receives, preferring quiet and informal resolutions to public exposure of a widespread problem. Although this is often useful to the individual complainants, it tends to obscure threats to academic freedom.

It is necessary for all professional and advocacy organizations concerned about higher education to speak out in defense of academic freedom. We believe that every professional organization should have a committee on academic freedom to address charges of censorship involving members of their discipline. Public scrutiny is essential to pressure colleges and universities which are inclined to limit academic freedom.

We hope this report will be the beginning of an important debate on academic freedom, and the first of many annual reports tracking the state of academic freedom. We encourage your comments on this report, and we urge you to let us know about any controversies involving academic freedom.

--John K. Wilson

Introduction

Academic freedom is in a troubled state today, under attack on many fronts. The widely publicized critiques of "political correctness" have drawn considerable attention to the leftist threats to free expression. But the crusade against "PC" has obscured many other hazards to academic freedom in America today which come from right-wing sources. This "conservative correctness" poses a danger which is all too often overlooked.

While it is important to point out the intolerance on the left, a sense of perspective is in order about where the greatest threats to academic freedom come from. Nearly every mainstream newspaper and magazine in America has published an editorial or lead article condemning political correctness. But most of them have been silent about the conservative attack on higher education, or have even praised it as part of the war against PC. The fight in defense of academic freedom must be bipartisan, but unfortunately there have been few principled defenses of academic freedom

While the political correctness "debates" raged, almost no one realized how federal and state governments were drastically cutting student aid and university funding, reducing educational opportunities for disadvantaged Americans. The attack on "PC" has played at least a small role in the ease with which conservatives had pushed through the de-funding of higher education.

In recent years, the most powerful threat to academic freedom has come from a growing movement for greater government control over higher education. During a period of tight budgets, colleges and universities as well as government agencies such as the National Endowment for the Humanities are being targeted for ideologically-motivated cuts.

The recent attacks on tenure are a disturbing threat to academic freedom, since they would leave faculty vulnerable to dismissal based on their beliefs and deprive them of the security needed to make controversial arguments. But we should never think of academic freedom as something limited to tenured faculty. Academic freedom must also encompass assistant professors seeking tenure, instructors and graduate assistants who have no secure jobs, administrators, and even students. Otherwise, the idea of academic freedom will reduced to mere job security, and not a protection for the freest expression of diverse views in the university.

The core value of academic freedom is not procedural rights. Academic freedom is the protection of intellectual diversity. Academic freedom declares that dissent shall not be punished, whether in the form of public speeches or ideas expressed in a classroom. Neither firing nor reprimands nor bad grades should be imposed upon an individual simply because of their political views. Academic freedom is not something that is earned: one need not prove oneself a genius before being given the freedom to think and speak. Rather, academic freedom is the very foundation of intellectual life at a university.

Academic freedom is an ideal we must pursue constantly, and never quite fully achieve. It is a mistake to believe that academic freedom is fully protected anywhere. There are orthodoxies everywhere: A student who feels silenced in a classroom, a professor who is not hired because colleagues believe her research deals with an unimportant topic, a graduate student told to pursue a less controversial dissertation proposal.

The concept of academic freedom is a minefield of contradictions and dilemmas. The open expression of opposing views inevitably creates conflicts that cannot be fully resolved. A professor who discusses her views in a classroom and challenges what students say may find that some students try to simply parrot her beliefs. But the expression of ideas is an inevitable and essential part of higher education; to urge silence by a professor for the sake of preventing "advocacy" will not stop students from detecting an ideology, and instead will limit the open expression of these views. The best a teacher can do is to encourage dissent whenever possible, make sure that students are rewarded and not punished for disagreeing, and honestly try to achieve an ideal of academic freedom.

The assault on academic freedom comes at a time when many conservative intellectuals reject the very notion of academic freedom or restrict it so narrowly that it ceases to be a meaningful protection of free expression. Gertrude Himmelfarb writes in Commentary (9/95), "Originally intended to protect professors in their scholarly pursuit of truth within the university, while ensuring their political rights as citizens outside the university, the doctrine is now invoked to allow professors to express their political views in the classroom, without regard for either scholarship or truth." But how can professors pursue the truth if they know Himmelfarb and her allies are monitoring their political views? What one professor considers a truth informed by scholarship, Himmelfarb might dismiss because she disagrees politically with it.

What guardians of the academy are going to define what the truth is and how far a professor is allowed to stray from it? Can we trust anyone to define and enforce these proposed ideological limits on free speech in the classroom? It is always tempting to imagine that we are above bias and ideology, and to convince ourselves that we know the final truth. But we must resist the idea that it is possible to restrict the academic freedom of those we dislike without damaging the principle of academic freedom for everyone.

Yale Retaliates Against Striking Graduate Students

In 1995, Yale's Graduate Employees and Students Organization (GESO) held a grade strike, refusing to release grades unless Yale University agreed to negotiate with them about their demands for better benefits, improved teacher training, and smaller class sizes. Administrators accused graduate assistants of holding "the academic process hostage."

But a threat to academic freedom is coming from Yale's efforts to stop the strike. Yale administrators are threatening to withhold financial aid or even expel the graduate assistants involved in the strike, and three union leaders have been targeted for disciplinary hearings. A memo from Yale deans warned that strikers would be blacklisted from teaching appointments. Some faculty are punishing the strikers by writing negative recommendations.

Yale College Dean Richard Brodhead criticized one graduate student in a letter of recommendation for "poor judgment" in becoming a union leader. Another graduate student accused history professor Donald Kagan of withholding a recommendation; Kagan denied it, but said that he would take the student's strike into account if he wrote a letter of recommendation. The head of the teaching fellows program openly declared that such retaliation against strikers would be used because graduate students "can't hold undergraduates captive and expect that not to be taken into consideration in future academic appointments or careers."

The Yale Administration has not only refused to condemn these unprofessional acts of retaliation, but it is also actively encouraging such attacks: "in evaluating graduate students, faculty must be free to take account of actions that demonstrate a failure to meet responsibilities as a teacher, to the detriment of undergraduates in the class, or actions that violate law or academic regulations, such as withholding undergraduates' papers and grades."

Yale officials argue that graduate students are "developing scholars, not employees." However, Yale and colleges across the country exploit graduate students as cheap labor, and these students (like their teachers) are entitled to join together for the sake of better working conditions, especially since (unlike faculty) graduate students have no formal power within the university. If the graduate students are "developing scholars," then they should be treated as scholars, with the same rights of academic freedom and collective organization that other scholars have.

It should be clear that graduate students have a right to engage in union or political activity without having it affect recommendations, which should be based solely on their abilities as a teacher and a scholar. As Ellen Schrecker noted: "academic freedom is just as endangered by the insertion of a hostile description of a Ph.D. candidate's union activities into a letter of recommendation as it is by the politically motivated dismissal of a tenured faculty member."

1. The Defunding of Academia

The first steps toward the destruction of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts have been taken. The plans for a 40% budget cut this year, and elimination by the turn of the century, are already in place, and the NEH and NEA have begun laying off large numbers of employees and restructuring their agencies from the rubble that remains of what used to thriving cultural institutions.

For the first time in history, we have a national political movement which is successfully aiming to defund artists and scholars for explicitly ideological purposes. This threat to academic freedom is done in the name of curing political correctness, the bitter medicine that academia must take to purge its sick body of this evil.

The irony is that the right is plotting the death of fundamentally conservative institutions. The NEA, NEH, PBS, and similar government-funded agencies are not in any way controlled by the fringe left. Rather, they have deeply traditional goals, in some cases shaped by previous ideological threats by the right to their budgets. The NEA is devoted to supporting established artistic institutions and programs that bring culture to the masses. The NEH focuses on academic projects that offend no one, mostly preservation and publication of historical works. PBS offers nature programs, news shows and documentaries, and a large number of right-wing opinion shows.

The same politicians who condemn Hollywood and commercial television for its lack of values are eager to discard the government agencies that offer an antidote. The key value here is not a consistent commitment to education, but political opportunism of the lowest sort.

The NEA and the NEH are in the center of an ideological battleground. The endowments' defenders, who support it as a neutral way to increase public access to the arts and humanities, have been unable to compete with the critics who depict the NEA and NEH as handouts for porno queens, black gay men, and left-wing deconstructionists.

Sen. Spencer Abraham (R-Mich.) admitted that the cuts are ideologically motivated: "the activities of the NEA and the NEH run against the sensitivities of many American taxpayers who are opposed to seeing their dollars fund projects that they find objectionable."

Not only has the Republican-controlled Congress proposed a 40% cut in the NEH and the NEA, down to $99.5 million, but it acquiesced to the demands of Sen. Jesse Helms (R-NC) to impose censorship over the arts that the Justice Department says are blatantly unconstitutional. The NEA will be banned from supporting projects that "depict or describe, in a patently offensive way, sexual or excretory activities or organs" or that "denigrate the objects or beliefs of the adherents of a particular religion." Will any sexual imagery (such as Renaissance paintings) be banned? Will Satan worshippers (who form a "particular religion") be able to sue the NEA for any art that denigrates the devil? Content restrictions of any kind are an unacceptable limit on the freedom of artists, galleries, museums, and other institutions.

Sen. Slade Gorton (R-WA) attempted to make the bill constitutional by adding a provision that "Nothing in this section shall be construed to affect in any way the freedom of any artist or performer to create any material or performance using funds which have not been made available under this act to the National Endowment for the Arts." Not only does this dismiss the freedom of artists and institutions who receive NEA grants, but it is also an obvious lie. Almost all NEA money goes to support art that is funded primarily from other sources. Any artist, gallery, or museum that receives even a small amount of money from the NEA must censor all of their art. Gorton also inserted a clause asserting that the endowment funds are a "scarce resource" and thus subject to the same regulations as radio and television airwaves.(Chronicle of Higher Education, 11/17/95)

The attacks on the NEA are well-known and predictable. Art offends and shocks in a way that no scholarly treatise can equal. But the assault on the NEH is something new. The NEH was once the darling of the conservatives under William Bennett and Lynne Cheney. George Will, who only a few years ago was praising the NEH as the best part of government and Cheney's role as "secretary of domestic defense," facing enemies more "dangerous" than her husband did as Secretary of Defense, suddenly started condemning the NEH and new chairman Sheldon Hackney as the embodiment of evil in America. Cheney herself told Congress earlier this year that the NEH should be eliminated. Sen. Abraham noted that "the NEH's projects may well be more insidious than the NEA's, because they directly affect American education" -- citing as an example the National History Standards, which were "so horrendous and anti-American that 99 senators voted to denounce them." When a well-designed set of history standards produced by a broad consensus can be smeared as leftist indoctrination, no intellectual work is safe from attack. The fact that the entire Senate opposed a set of standards that none of them had ever read is a disturbing indication of the future direction of intellectual debate.

No one can seriously imagine that the plans to eliminate the NEA and the NEH are prompted merely by the budget cutting bonanza sweeping over Washington (or at least the parts of it dealing with education and human welfare). Instead, conservatives like Lynne Cheney, secure in their right-wing think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute, are now convinced that defunding universities and similar cultural institutions is the best way to attack the Left.

It scarcely matters to them that many excellent projects -- supporting artists and scholars from a wide range of perspectives -- will be lost by the destruction of the NEH and the NEA. To the critics of the Left, it doesn’t matter whether students would learn better history, whether people would be exposed to fine art and intellectual discussions, whether libraries and galleries would be improved, whether scholarship would flourish, or whether better television would be available to all Americans. So long as the Left is punished and marginalized, the harm done to the rest of America is an acceptable casualty in the culture wars. Cheney and her allies believe that their views can be adequately financed by the Olin Foundation and similar entities. In their view, the less intellectual competition the better.

The conservatives in Congress are adamantly opposed to debating ideas. Senator John Ashcroft (R-Mo.) declared, "When we get into the area of challenging some of the fundamental values of American culture, we get ourselves in real trouble. If the definition of art means that it has to challenge and be offensive, then I think we are in a situation where, regardless of how minimal the endowment might be in regard to the Federal budget, its position is in serious jeopardy."(New York Times, 1/27/95)

The Right views the abolition of the NEH and the NEA as a first step toward the suppressing of dissenting views in academia. At a Senate hearing, Walter Burns urged the elimination of the NEH: "It might be improper for the Senate of the United States to attempt to reform what's going on in the academy today. But you can do one thing: You can refuse to fund it."(Chronicle of Higher Education, 3/17/95) Once deprived of funding, the theory goes, the Left will wither on the vine.

The National Association of Scholars declared that the NEH deserved heavy cuts because "the benefits of government support for the humanities are severely limited by the current state of scholarship."(NAS Update, Spring 1995) This "cutting-edge" scholarship allegedly "denies that there is common intellectual ground, rejects the notion of excellence, and disparages the achievements of the past."

But it is the NAS, not cutting-edge scholarship, that rejects the idea of excellence, since the NAS wants to eliminate grants for excellent scholarship if it is critical of the past or dissents from the intellectual ground presupposed by the NAS. Scholarly editions, museum collections, libraries, archival cataloguing, and preservation are all important projects which have been heavily supported by the NEH, but to say that these should mark the limits of the humanities is false. It is the refusal to fund controversial or challenging ideas that reflects the true "anti-intellectual" bias.

No government agency should be immune from oversight or budget cuts. But the attacks on the NEA and NEH have never been about efficiency, waste, or serving the common good. Instead, these agencies are being destroyed for explicitly ideological reasons, because the entire artistic community and all of academia are perceived as too liberal. When budget cuts are aimed at increasing ideological sway over scholars and artists, it is nothing but an attempt at thought control.

The History Wars

In the past two years, perhaps no public issue regarding the humanities has been as contentious as the disputes over historical interpretation involving the Smithsonian Institution's Enola Gay exhibit and the National History Standards for schools. Together, these two events inspired some of the harshest attacks on academia by politicians and conservative groups in Washington, and the intimidation of dissenting views by condemnation and Congressional denunciation presents a serious threat to the public debate of ideas.  The Curtain Falls on "The Last Act"

The Smithsonian's exhibit on the dropping of the atomic bomb, "The Last Act: The Atomic Bomb and the End of World War II," was scheduled to open at the National Air and Space Museum in May, 1994. Almost immediately, veterans and more than 200 members of Congress objected to the content of the script drafted to accompany the show. The main objection centered around how many Americans would have died in an invasion of Japan.

The exact number of American soldiers who would have died had the bomb not been dropped is a matter of serious dispute and speculation. Legend had put the figure at a million casualties, but few historians take this as a realistic number. The American Legion felt betrayed when museum director Martin Harwit negotiated with them for an estimate of 225,000 casualties, but lowered the figure to 63,000 after speaking with a historian.

But the truth of history is not a matter for negotiation. The idea that a museum should ever negotiate with powerful interest groups in order to avoid criticism should be disturbing to all scholars. Moreover, the Smithsonian script also neglected the views of historians who argue that no Americans would have died because a Japanese surrender in the faced of Soviet and American troops was likely without an invasion or the dropping of the atomic bomb.

Although it is easy to challenge the 63,000 estimate, and to criticize the exhibit for failing to offer alternative estimates, the attacks on the Smithsonian went far beyond mere dissent. Instead, they were a political drive to manipulate the depiction of history.

Members of Congress threatened to cut the Smithsonian's $480 million budget, 77% of which comes from the federal government. A bipartisan letter from 81 representatives demanded museum director Martin Harwit's firing. In January, 1994, when members of Congress began calling for hearings on the exhibit, the Smithsonian board decided to get rid of the controversial aspects: the revised exhibit showed only the Enola Gay fuselage; a videotape of the crew describing the dropping of the bomb, and a plaque describing the Enola Gay, with no mention of the controversy over the number of casualties, and nothing about the devastating effects of the bomb.

MIT historian John W. Dower noted, "The chill is on. You can't touch anything controversial. That's self-censorship, and that's scary. That's not what a democracy does....instead of museum exhibits with pluses and minuses you have a celebration--a kind of Fourth-of-July historiography. And anyone who's critical is called an America-hater."(Boston Globe, 7/25/95)

Smithsonian head Michael Heyman noted that they made "a basic error" in trying to give a historical analysis of the dropping of the bomb while commemorating the end of the war, since "veterans and their families were expecting -- and rightly so -- that the nation would honor and commemorate their valor and sacrifice."

Edward T. Linenthal, author of "Preserving Memory: The Struggle to Create America's Holocaust Museum," observed: "When we move from legitimate, articulate intellectual debate about an exhibit to ugly, slanderous attacks upon curators who are described in the newspapers as pro-Japanese, when we move to that kind of neo-McCarthyite discourse....I think we are moving into a very, very dangerous period, not just for museums, but for the doing of public history in America."

The Enola Gay episode was shocking for its political intrusion into an academic discussion, and the fact that there was so little criticism of the efforts to intimidate the Smithsonian; on the contrary, many commentators praised the censorship of the museum exhibit. Intellectual debate is not decided by democratic rule. When the majority (or a powerful interest group influencing Congress) gets to determine what will be shown in museums, it will inevitably harm the open discussion of controversial issues.

The National History Standards

The endless attacks on the National History Standards continue long after they have been denounced by Congress. What could -- and should -- have been an intellectual debate about the teaching of history instead served as mere fodder in a particularly lowly form of politics.

For too many politicians, it was easier to take a stand against "anti-Americanism" than to consider the National History Standards seriously. Every single member of the U.S. Senate denounced them, and they even became fodder for political campaigns. In September 1995, nearly a year after Lynne Cheney's first attack on them, Bob Dole condemned the National History Standards for their un-Americanism. Even Education Secretary Richard Riley told the National Press Club, "the history standards... were not our standards. " Riley claimed, "they portray American history in a bad light, and that is a mistake... this is the greatest country on the face of the earth, that ever has been. "

Whenever the legislature intrudes into an academic debate about which members of Congress know nothing, there is reason for serious concern. The National Standards are purely voluntary: there was no reason for Congress to make its opinions known in a resolution, except demagoguery.

The belief that a history of America must be positive and patriotic has overwhelmed those who have always put truth above sanitized history. The work of improving history teaching was discarded by conservatives who preferred to make an attack on historians rather than help children learn about the true history of their country.

The Istook Gag Rules

Congressional attempts at censorship are not limited to the NEA and the NEH. Rep. Istook (R-NY) has been seeking to ban federal grants to any nonprofit group (but not any corporations) which uses more than 5% of their own funds for "political advocacy." According to Istook, it doesn't matter if the grants are used for completely legitimate purposes: "each federal dollar received by a grantee frees up more private dollars for political advocacy, thereby leading to a growing amount of indirect government support for political advocacy." Political advocacy includes not only lobbying, but any stands taken on a public issue as well as public interest litigation against government agencies. (However, Istook does not spend all of his time trying to silence liberal opponents. An Istook amendment used $5 million of the NEH cuts to increase funding for the Department of Energy oil technology research and development program).

Earlier in 1995, Istook lost in his attempt to impose a Campus Gag Rule which would cut off all federal funds to any college that allowed money from student fees to support "any organization or group that is engaged in lobbying or seeking to influence public policy or political activity." The fact that an imposition on academic freedom of this degree was contemplated by Congress shows how extreme the attacks on academia are. To blackmail all colleges into banning funding for any group involved in discussing a "political" issue is an extraordinary level of censorship in higher education.

Istook's reasoning behind his Nonprofit Gag Rule mirrors the attacks on the NEA and NEH. Since these agencies are hopelessly politicized by an academic and artistic elite, any money used to support their activities (even if legitimate) amounts to a subsidy for their left-wing political agenda.

The Threat of State Legislatures

Efforts by state legislators to intimidate public universities with the threat of budget cuts are a particularly effective form of censorship. These attempts to limit academic freedom are almost always directed at silencing leftist faculty, and even if not immediately successful, administrators often become wary of controversial ideas for fear of retaliation. In 1995, Cuban-American state legislators in Florida threatened to cut off funding to the University of Florida after two professors from the University of Havana were invited to a symposium on Caribbean economics. (St. Petersburg Times, 7/2/95) In December 1995, the University of Oklahoma Regents provided matching funds for a $500,000 endowed law chair in honor of Anita Hill for the study of sexual harassment and other women's issues. In response, conservative state legislators threatened retaliation, comparing the chair to a "Jeffrey Dahmer Chair in the School of Cooking" and an "Adolph Hitler Chair for Creative Population Control." Political activist E.Z. Million declared, "We're going to do everything we can to punish the University of Oklahoma for this heinous act. We want the law school shut down." Dean David Swank was forced out in 1993 for supporting Hill, and Oklahoma president Richard Van Horn resigned in 1993, reportedly because his defense of the fund drive for the professorship offended important donors. (USA Today, 12/8/95)  California Legislators Demand Dismissal of Angela Davis

In July 1995, California state senator Don Rogers, joined by several other politicians, demanded the firing of University of California at Santa Cruz chancellor Karl Pister because he appointed Angela Davis to a presidential chair: "The appointment of such a person to this position -- of the highest honor that the university can bestow -- clearly shows a lack of judgment and sensitivity that calls into question Pister's continuing as head of the Santa Cruz campus." Rogers declared, "I am appalled that Davis is a tenured professor at Santa Cruz." The conservative California Republican Assembly Board passed a resolution to fire Pister and any others responsible for "this seditious act against the law-abiding taxpayers of California."

In fact, the presidential chair is not the highest honor bestowed by the University of California. Indeed, it is not really an honor, but a competition held to develop new programs, and Davis' application was deemed best out of eight applicants at Santa Cruz. State senator Bill Leonard (author of the Leonard Law used to strike down Stanford's never-enforced "speech code") condemned Davis as an "extremist" with a "reputation for racism, violence and communism" and demanded her removal from the presidential chair on the grounds that she is "the leftist equivalent of "a grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan." Leonard also attacked "the insensitivity of the administration of UC." Another state senator told the university to let "decency" prevail by rescinding the award to a "counter culture castoff."

University of California chancellor Jack Peltason was interrogated by legislators who hinted that the university might suffer for its decision, as one representative noted: "We're going to be appropriating money to you and [this] does raise questions about where you decide to put that money." Peltason expressed disagreement with Davis' views, but noted that the $75,000 grant over three years would be used to develop new ethnic studies courses for students, not to personally enrich Davis. As Peltason put it, "a university cannot avoid making academic judgments because they are controversial."

Davis, who was fired by the University of California regents in 1969 for being a member of the Communist Party, said the new attacks are part of a "concerted assault against multicultural education." One Republican state representative acknowledged, "If we get into fooling around with academic freedom, we put the whole system in jeopardy because we turn into dictators ourselves." (Los Angeles Times, 2/20/95, 3/29/95, 7/21/95; Sacramento Bee, 3/8/95; San Francisco Examiner, 2/26/95)  Intellectual Freedom Up In Smoke

When the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Center for Health Promotion and Disease Prevention held a federally-funded two-week summer institute in 1995, bringing together health workers to discuss education about tobacco, several state legislators were offended at the affront to corporate "good citizens" like the tobacco companies. State Rep. Leo Daughtry, House majority leader and tobacco farm owner, explicitly threatened the university's funding if it permitted this federal grant to be accepted: "This will affect the budget process." Democrat Charlie Rose called the university's president, asking him to rescind an invitation to FDA director David Kessler. Although the university stood up strongly for academic freedom and the controversy died down after Kessler could not attend the summer institute, the chilling effect on those who would challenge powerful corporations is clear. (Greensboro News & Record, 6/20/95; Durham Herald-Sun, 6/25/95)

This was not the only case of tobacco's political power over academic studies. In August 1995, the House of Representatives Appropriations Committee eliminated funds for a National Cancer Institute study of how campaign contributions from the tobacco industry influence public policy. Tobacco lobbyists objected to the study, and influenced Republican lawmakers to halt it. (Chronicle of Higher Education, 8/4/95)

2. Censorship in Cyberspace

During the early years of the internet, it was virtually unregulated and largely unknown outside of its aficionados. Not so anymore. With the recent surge in popularity has come headlines about pornography on the internet and calls for the government regulation in the name of protecting minors.

Some of the issues of internet censorship are far from clear-cut. One example is University of Michigan student Jake Baker, who posted sexual fantasies on alt.sex.stories describing how he would abduct a female student from one of classes (whom he named), take her to a secluded area off Route 23 in Ann Arbor, use tools from his toolbox to rape and mutilate her, and then kill her. Baker wrote, "I plan it well. It will be my first kidnapping; my first real rape of a pretty young girl. My first experimentation with all the devices of pain I had thought up before. I am obsessed about my target more than any other girl on campus." Baker also e-mailed a friend: "Sometimes, I'll see a pretty one alone in the quad and think "Go on Jake, it'd be easy.' But the fear of getting caught always stays my hand."

Baker was immediately expelled from campus under a bylaw that allows the president to take necessary actions to maintain order. James Smiley of Michigan's Department of Public Safety said, "We think it's a very serious matter. When he named a student, that put a different light on it -- he's just not fantasizing any more."

To call Jake Baker a victim of censorship is difficult considering that it was never his fiction writing, but his use of a specific woman's name, that caused the controversy. However, there was some over-reaction. Denying him bail, one federal judge called him "too dangerous for society" and another said he was "a ticking bomb waiting to go off." The case was eventually dismissed for lack of evidence, but the government promises to appeal the decision. Yet it is disturbing that the FBI investigated the charges not as possible threat, but as "distribution of obscene material."

It is quite clear that the university is within its powers to forbid specific threats against an individual, even if they are posted on the internet rather than sent directly at that individual. If Baker's words are protected speech, then the same principle could allow anyone to publish death threats in the newspaper or on the internet and claim that it was only "fiction." (Ann Arbor News, 2/4/95; Michigan Daily, 2/13/95; Time, 2/20/95)

The true danger of censorship comes not from the Michigan officials who wanted to discipline Baker for his explicit threat against a woman, but from members of Congress and administrators who want to ban sexual fantasies (including anything that is "obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, or indecent") altogether.

A House-Senate conference committee voted in December 1995 to impose harsh restrictions on the internet. The proposed measure would outlaw making any indecent "comment, request, suggestion, proposal, image or other communication" available on any system where minors can gain access to it. Violators would be subject to fines up to $100,000 and as much as five years in prison. The revised Exon bill is so extreme that even commercial internet services, notorious for their censorship, opposed the language, offering instead a compromise restricting only material deemed "harmful to minors." (New York Times, 12/7/95) In essence, the federal government will compel academic institutions to impose the censorship controls now used by several commercial internet providers. (The extent of this censorship was revealed recently when America Online put "breast" on its list of forbidden words, only to back down when breast cancer survivors protested.)

Self-censorship by internet providers is strongly encouraged by the bill, which protects "good Samaritan" efforts to censor messages "whether or not such material is constitutionally protected." But organizations that have no reason to "protect" minors -- such as universities -- will have no legal defense unless they impose severe censorship standards.

Since every college admits some "minors" (e.g. any 17-year-olds) to its first-year class, ever college can be found in violation of the law for providing internet access without sharp limits on what all students can look at or say. Every newsgroup, and every web page, could be subject to the same censorship that radio and television face.

"Indecency" is a word that covers a broad sweep, from four-letter words to nudity and any sexual material considered "patently offensive" according to community standards. Because of the international nature of the internet, a lawsuit could be filed anywhere, particularly places where community standards are notably harsh toward "offensive" sexual material.

The drive for the internet censorship bill is being led by Rep. Henry Hyde (R-IL), who ironically is the sponsor of a bill compelling private colleges and universities to adhere to the First Amendment, a proposed law aimed at striking down speech codes. While Hyde pretends to defend freedom of speech with one bill, he shows no qualms at restraining it with another (as he is done before with the abortion gag rule against doctors.)

The internet censorship bill is a boon to smut-hunting search engines, which will become the monitors of the thoughts of the entire world (since there is no way to isolate and censor only American messages). Because it is technically possible for programs to examine every word of every message on the internet, the much-ridiculed broadcasting rules banning the seven dirty words could be the law of every publicly-expressed message. And since much more than these seven words have been found indecent (depending upon the context), there will be a long supplementary list of words (and virtually every picture) that will trigger surveillance. If actually enforced, the internet censorship bill would impose thought control on an enormous scale. Quite literally, millions of people will be forced to watch what they say -- and have it watched for them.

Even if some new limits were needed for the internet, this bill goes far beyond protection of children. The internet is analogous to a vast, international library. Naturally, some people don't like to have their children wandering around it reading potentially offensive material. But the answer is not to pull the books off the shelves and prosecute the librarians.

Perhaps the greatest irony is that the new law will benefit most of all the commercial bulletin boards which specialize in providing pornography -- the same bulletin board misleadingly used by Martin Rimm in his study (publicized by Time) to promote the notion that pornography dominates the internet. If they can keep out minors, these provides will be virtually immune from the law, and will become vastly more popular because they can offer the only uncensored areas of the internet.

The internet anti-smut movement is driven by a desire to protect children from indecent material. But due to the interconnected nature of the internet, every regulation of computer networks is a threat to academic freedom. The Exon bill in Congress will not only "protect children from these materials, but adults as well. Since there is no absolute way to prevent children from gaining access to news groups and web sites, a law requiring the protection of children will inevitably compel censorship of everything on the internet. A ban on having "indecent" material made available to children is synonymous with a ban on all such material. It is as if a magazine like Playboy (and its printer, distributors, and sellers) could be found guilty of violating the law because of the possibility that a minor might read a copy of it. Such a law would amount to nothing less than an absolute ban because the threat of legal action is so great. The irony is that Playboy's web site may now be prohibited on the internet, even though a similar law banning Playboy in print would be plainly unconstitutional.

The threat of internet censorship also comes from universities themselves. In 1994, Carnegie Mellon University eliminated three computer bulletin boards devoted to sexually explicit pictures, fearing that they violate state obscenity laws. Many institutions, especially religious colleges, already ban sexually-related bulletin boards by refusing to carry them. Some are concerned about the space that sexually-explicit images take up on their computers, while others worry about obscenity laws or sexual harassment regulations. Carnegie Mellon had originally planned to eliminated three additional bulletin boards including alt.sex and its subgroups, but relented after criticism from students and the ACLU, which warned that their policy "sweeps far too broadly." (Chronicle of Higher Education, 11/16/94)

One need not believe in absolute freedom of expression to see the dangers of such regulations. Because universities in charge of computing distribution systems could be held liable for anything publicly posted, many of them might impose particularly harsh regulations on free speech. All sexually oriented material could be banned, and the imposed censorship will go far beyond the existing standards. Not only universities, but everyone connected to the internet, will suffer the consequences of this drive to regulate offensive ideas.

3. Harassment Codes and Free Speech

Of all the threats to academic freedom, perhaps none is so burdened with dilemmas as sexual harassment codes. For far too long, higher education in America was complicit in policies of discrimination against women, and until recently sexual harassment was not a problem colleges and universities considered to be of any importance. Even today, far too many women faculty and student are subjected to sexual harassment.

However, it is also becoming clear that many harassment codes has been misused to punish faculty and students for speech that, although often distasteful and offensive, nevertheless must be protected for the sake of free speech and academic freedom. Several professors have been punished for relatively innocuous classroom statements that, although not directed at any particular students, were deemed offensive. All too often, harassment codes are being used to silence students and professors rather than prevent harassment. Although in many cases courts have overturned punishments that restrict free speech, the chilling effect of misused harassment codes cannot be ignored.

Currently, the law on harassment is based on prohibition of discrimination, which the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has interpreted to include forms of harassments which alter the conditions of employment. EEOC guidelines define two forms of harassment: 1) quid pro quo harassment, which is the use of rewards or threat of punishments in exchange for sexual favors; 2) hostile environment harassment, which covers forms of harassment that discriminate without fitting the quid pro quo category.

A Model Harassment Code

[Note on definitions: the word "harassment" is used throughout this policy to mean any conduct regulated by the university's disciplinary code (except for academic dishonesty and similar cases), so that a uniform conduct code can be created. This code supersedes all other university disciplinary codes that may have a broader standard for punishment.]

Harassment is a serious violation of university standards of conduct, and all students, faculty, and staff are subject to discipline for violating university rules. Any kind of harassment may be regulated, but harassment based on race, sex, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, and disability is regarded by this university as particularly serious and destructive to the free exchange of ideas in our community, and may result in enhanced penalties. But assaults, threats, intimidation, and other forms of harassment for any reason are considered completely unacceptable.

Harassment consists of speech or behavior that creates an intimidating, hostile, or offensive learning environment. In order to constitute harassment, courts have found that actions must be sufficient serious as to constitute discrimination. It must result in an alteration of the conditions of employment or education. In general, harassment must also be directed at a specific individual or group. Harassment is usually repeated and unwanted behavior, although sufficiently serious isolated incidents may alone constitute harassment.

In a university, the free expression of ideas is one of the highest priorities; this is precisely why harassment is regulated, since it tends to silence open discussion by those who are harassed. But protected speech should not be regulated by charges of harassment, and disciplinary boards should be careful not to punish protected speech. Merely offensive ideas, by themselves, are not harassment. Material relevant to a classroom discussion that is presented by a professor should not be the basis for an accusation of harassment.

In order to protect free speech, a high-level administrator such as the president, chancellor, or provost should review charges of harassment immediately after they filed. This initial review, in consultation with the official in charge of disciplinary hearings, should not attempt to verify the accuracy of claims, but merely determine whether the charge of harassment -- if everything alleged is true -- is a charge solely based on the accused's protected free speech or an obvious attempt to silence protected speech by frivolous accusations. If the accusations have possible merit, university officials still have the discretion about whether or not to convene a hearing based on their analysis of the evidence.

Disciplinary hearings:

Anonymous accusations should not be permitted in disciplinary hearings. However, accusers may remain anonymous in informal attempts to deal with disputes, and officials should encourage and facilitate dispute resolution unless the accused is involved in a pattern of harassment or presents a danger to others. Intimidation or further harassment of witnesses or accusers is prohibited.

In general, the rules of evidence and due process used in U.S. civil suits should be followed. However, disciplinary boards are not composed of lawyers, and evidence codes need not be followed in every detail. But the accused should be informed of the evidence and witnesses against them in advance of the hearing, and should be able to question these witnesses and call their own witnesses. Lawyers or advisers for the accused or accuser should be permitted, but no lawyer may speak as an advocate on their behalf. A university official who investigates the case and presents it to the disciplinary board should not serve as a member of the disciplinary board or the appeals board.

Disciplinary boards for faculty should be primarily or entirely composed of faculty, and some students should be involved in disciplinary boards for students, but all disciplinary boards should follow the same standards for what constitutes harassment: a student should not be punished for behavior if university officials are unwilling to punish a faculty member for the same actions, and vice versa.

Disciplinary panels, whether at public or private universities, should conduct disciplinary hearings in secret and maintain the privacy of accusers, accused, and witnesses. However, the results of disciplinary hearings should be made public and not concealed. In the case where a student, staff, or faculty member is found guilty, the offender should be named and the punishment (and reasons for it) should be described in detail to the university community. Other schools and potential employers should be informed of the punishment in detail.

Disciplinary cases should be held as quickly as reasonably possible. Officials may instruct an accused not to have any contact with an accuser, or temporarily move an accused in the university housing system.

Appeals: A special university-wide appeals board, headed by a top university official, should exist to consider appeals from either the accused or accusers who feel that procedures have been violated or a gross injustice has been done. The appeals board may decide not revisit the case if it is satisfied with what happened after a cursory review. In general, the appeals board should defer to the judgment of the disciplinary board, but it may increase or reduce the penalties, or change the verdict, in cases where it is necessary. Further appeal to the president may also be possible.

Special Note on Sexual Harassment: Quid pro quo harassment of any kind is considered particularly unacceptable. Threats or rewards in exchange for sexual favors are a serious violation of academic standards, particularly when made by an individual in a position of authority.

Statement on Consensual Relationships: Consensual sexual relationships are not prohibited by the University. However, no individual should hold a position of authority over a person they have a sexual relationship with, and they should excuse themselves from any decisions involving a past or present partner. No individual should make sexual overtures to someone they hold authority over (such as a professor to his or her student), since such actions contain an implicit threat of punishment or reward. Also, the fact that a consensual relationship has existed in the past does not insulate an individual from a charge of sexual harassment or sexual assault.

The Poster Police

In 1993, Chris Robison, a graduate student in clinical psychology at the University of Nebraska, was ordered by administrators to remove a 5x7 inch photo of his wife in a chainmail bikini. Two female graduate students who shared the office with him objected to the photo and asked to have it remove, saying that it created a hostile work environment. Robison claims that it limits his free speech rights to express the message "that my wife is a sexy person." Normally, an administrative decision to resolve a dispute between officemates in the workplace would not attract much attention, but the bikini incident soon became infamous throughout the entire country. In fact, there was no formal charge or finding of sexual harassment, only an administrative decision about the appropriateness of displaying the photograph.

But this is hardly the first case where administrators have censored controversial photographs. In 1992, a department chair asked assistant instructor Pedro Bustos-Aguilar to move a sexually explicit AIDS-awareness poster after receiving complaints from students and parents. (Chronicle of Higher Education, 4/8/92)

Brigham Young University not only bans alcohol, tobacco, caffeine, beards, shorts, and braless women, but sexually-oriented posters as well. It requires all students to live in approved housing, where one non-student tenant was threatened with eviction for having a sexually provocative poster in his own room. In September 1994, Brigham Young ordered the staff of the campus newspaper, the Daily Universe, to remove the "beyond the wall" advertising insert from 4,000 papers because it included posters showing a condom and scantily clad women, which administrators considered offensive. (Chronicle of Higher Education, 9/21/94)

But the most absurd case of poster censorship came during the Persian Gulf War, when Ohio State English professor and Vietnam veteran Phoebe Spinrad complained to the U.S. Department of Labor that she was being harassed by "anti-military" material on some faculty members' office doors. The Department of Labor ordered Ohio State to create affirmative-action programs for Vietnam vets and keep the working environment free of harassment against veterans. No one spoke up to criticize this clear-cut violation of academic freedom; instead, Spinrad was cheered in conservative journals like Heterodoxy.

Don't Talk About Sex

Jane Gallop (Academe, 9/94) warns that sexual harassment policies may interfere with close relationships between teachers and students, and affect classroom discussions of sexuality. Gallop also makes an important point about the tendency to ignore "common nonsexual forms of sexual harassment -- like the engineering professor who regularly tells his class that women can't be engineers, working toward that self-fulfilling prophecy by encouraging his male students while making sure that his female students feel stupid whenever they ask a question or don't understand." It is essential to understand that sexual harassment is all about gender discrimination, not sex.

In some cases, sexual harassment charges have been used to silence classroom discussions of sexuality. In 1995, Craig Rogers filed a $2.5 million lawsuit against California State University at Sacramento because he was offended by professor Joanne Marrow's guest presentation for a class on "Contemporary Issues in Psychology" in December 1994.

Marrow joked about women's masturbation, held up a catalog of sex toys, and showed slides of female genitalia. Rogers says he felt "completely trapped, held captive, this crap forced on me." Rogers says he "felt" raped because the pictures involuntarily aroused him. Rogers also accused her of having a "political agenda" because she made it clear that she was a lesbian and intimidated men in the classroom by talking about how women could be freed from men through self-stimulation. (Chronicle of Higher Education, 3/17/95)

Racial Harassment and the OCR

In a 1991 presentation to the Fairbanks Chamber of Commerce, University of Alaska professor Judith Kleinfeld declared that professors in the teacher education program were pressured to pass Native American students who deserved to fail. After the statement was made public, a complaint was filed with the Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights. An OCR investigation determined that Kleinfeld's remarks were not prohibited under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.

Steven Wulf (Academic Questions, Spring 1995) uses the Kleinfeld example to attack the OCR's revised guidelines for investigating incidents and harassment, which can make an institution liable if there are any forms of "harassing conduct" which "subject and individual to different treatment on the basis of race if [an institution] has effectively caused, encouraged, accepted, tolerated, or failed to correct a racially hostile environment." According to Wulf, this provision is "alarmingly insensitive to academic freedom." But quite to the contrary, the provision follows the standard EEOC "hostile environment" definition of harassment, and includes a footnote protecting free speech: "investigatory guidance is directed at conduct that constitutes race discrimination and not the content of speech. In cases in which verbal statements or other forms of expression are involved, consideration will be given to any implications of the First Amendment."

It's impossible to see the kind of danger in these guidelines that Wulf imagines: "Could the assignment of 'offensive' literary texts (say, Huck Finn) trigger an OCR investigation for a possible violation of Title VI?" The answer is an easy and obvious no. Teaching Huck Finn has never been and never will be harassment.

4. Heterosexual Correctness

Perhaps no group is more persecuted on college campuses than gay, lesbian, and bisexual faculty and students. Deprived of protection under the law, and banned by many colleges, gays and lesbians are still fighting for the right to equality. Many of the same people who condemn "political correctness" are silent about attacks on the rights of gays and lesbians, or are leading the campaign for homophobia.

While fewer gays and lesbians are closeted than in the past and discrimination is less severe than it once was, coming out is still a risk to a teacher's career. Formal discrimination against gay and lesbian faculty has not been eliminated. The worst offenders are religious institutions, and several incidents are described on page 31 of this report. But homophobia also persists at many secular colleges.

In July 1994, openly lesbian poet Nuala Archer was removed as director of the Cleveland State University Poetry Center after she sponsored a national poetry contest for "all lesbian poets of color" that was funded by a $5,635 grant from the Women's Community Foundation. Her critics claim the firing was due to her poor administration of the Poetry Center. But David Evert of the Poetry Center committee noted, "My only concern was that the last thing we wanted was to have something coming out of CSU that was potentially controversial without some sort of warning." Even if Archer's administrative skills were questionable, the fear of something "controversial" was clearly the major factor in her dismissal. (Cleveland Plain-Dealer, 8/9/94)

At the Montana College of Mineral Science and Technology, English professor Henry Gonshak proposed a summer course on "gay and lesbian studies." A fundamentalist pastor in a local church wrote a letter to the newspaper protesting the class title. Gonshak reports, "the alumni soon began besieging Tech administrators with letters and telephone calls. They threatened to withdraw thousands of dollars in contributions unless the class was dropped." (Democratic Culture, Spring 1995)

Students supporting gay and lesbian rights are also heavily regulated. Administrators at many colleges encourage homophobia by banning gay and lesbian student groups and in some cases by making homosexuality grounds for expulsion. In 1993, Gonzaga University trustees refused to recognize a gay and lesbian group because of the university's Catholic affiliation. Gonzaga president Bernard Coughlin declared, "such a movement clearly is a betrayal of the university's tradition and mission." In 1993, the student government at St. John's University banned the Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Alliance for being inconsistent with the institution's religious values, a day after the student group returned from a national march on Washington for gay rights. The administration refused to overturn the decision. (New York Times, 5/13/93) Gay and lesbian student groups have also been banned at Notre Dame, Boston College, and several other campuses.

In 1993, the student senate at Ohio Northern University voted to deny recognition to the Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Alliance because the student body president claimed that "a club based solely on sexual orientation is not needed on this campus." In 1994, administrators at Stephen F. Austin State University overturned a student government's decision to ban a gay and lesbian student group from campus and revoke its funding because "a group that advocates breaking the law shouldn't be getting student fees." (Dallas Morning Star, 11/10/94)

In 1991, Auburn's student government refused to charter the Auburn Gay and Lesbian Alliance. After administrators approved the group under threat of an ACLU lawsuit, Alabama passed a law unanimous against using public funds or facilities to support a group that "promotes a lifestyle or actions" prohibited by state sodomy laws. Auburn University requested all student groups to sign a promise not to encourage violations of the state's sodomy law. (Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 10/21/92, 8/16/94)

When gay and lesbian activities are supported at public universities, state legislators often intervene and threaten funding. In 1994, the University of Texas at Austin changed the funding for gay and lesbian counseling workshops under threats from state legislators, who warned declared: "the funding arrangement could have jeopardized their credibility with the Legislature." (Houston Chronicle, 9/16/94)

At Indiana University, plans to spend $50,000 on an Office of Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Student Support Services were scrapped after a state legislator threatened to cut $500,000 from the university's budget and a wealthy alumnus threatened to withhold a million dollar donation. Instead, the support center will be renamed the Office of Student Ethics and Anti-Harassment Office, and will be funded by private donations. (Campus Report, November 1994)

At Kent State University, the College Republicans protested allowing a class on the sociology of gays and lesbians to be taught, arguing that offering to students was tantamount to University sanctioning of the gay lifestyle. In 1993, before the course was ever taught, an Ohio state senator wrote to Kent State president Carol Cartwright, threatening to cut state funding if it was permitted. (Campus Report, November 1994) The interference of state legislators in university affairs poses a dramatic threat to academic freedom, particularly when their goal is to silence gays and lesbians.

More Censorship at the University of Iowa

In October 1993, the Iowa Board of Regents imposed a policy on the University of Iowa requiring professors to warn students before any materials, "graphic, still photo, motion film form, or otherwise" are presented which include "explicit representation of human sexual acts that could reasonably be expected to be offensive to some students." These students, the Board ruled, must be allowed to skip class without penalty and complete an alternative assignment, or drop the course without penalty.

The policy was prompted by an option film, "Taxi zum Klo" shown as part of the German Film and Video Series for German conversation classes in 1991 at the University of Iowa. The flier promoting the film included the disclaimer, "Don't come near this film if the world of homosexuality upsets you in any way." Although students in German conversation classes were told attendance was optional, Iowa President Hunter Rawlings quickly condemned the showing of the movie: "I find it difficult to believe that it was appropriate to use this film in the course, and I have conveyed this concern to the College of Liberal Arts." In response to the film, then-Board of Regents President Marvin Pomerantz said, "We hope that we don't see this kind of thing again, and we're going to make sure everyone involved hears that from the regents." Pomerantz did not believe the instructors would be fired, but only because "it would be difficult to make the dismissals stick." But he declared, "There is some appropriate action that should be taken that is clear and decisive so that the faculty understands that, while we protect their rights and we stand for their rights, we don't tolerate bad judgment."

The University of Iowa tried to stop further showings of "Taxi zum Klo." The administration continued to refuse to allow permission for the movie to be shown, until a few hours before its screening on November 21, 1991, when the Iowa Attorney General informed the university that they had no legal authority to prevent it. After the controversy over "Taxi zum Klo," the Board of Regents ordered a policy developed for sexually explicit materials at all Iowa public universities. While faculty debated proposals for regulating the use of sexually explicit materials, two additional incidents led to reprimands of instructors at the University of Iowa.

In February 1993, teaching assistant Megan O'Connell was reprimanded and ordered to apologize to students for showing offensive material in a class and failing to inform the students of their right to leave. An eight-minute video by Iowa City artist Franklin Evans which depicted two men engaged in oral sex was shown to her art colloquium of 150 students at the University of Iowa. The video consisted of a collage of images altered by various technical tricks, including three short segments totaling 15 seconds that contained the offensive material. A first-year student who objected to the video called her mother, who attacked the video as "pornographic" and declared, "For a man to be having oral sex with another man is objectionable." The student said, "To me, it wasn't art at all because this guy was trying to push his way of life on other people. I don't think that's right, showing a sexual act in class and condoning it." Former Board of Regents President Marvin Pomerantz warned in a board meeting: "Somebody is going to get fired around this university if they don't follow the rules."

In April 1994, a teaching assistant for an "American Cultures" class was reprimanded for showing "Paris is Burning" to a class, even though the film about transvestites had no graphic sex scenes at all, and despite the fact that the TA had warned the class beforehand about its content. Nevertheless, three students complained to university officials about being shown a film on drag queens. Only when the TA fought back and protested the decision was a letter rescinding the reprimand put in his file. However, the original letter was not removed, and the retraction occurred only because the policies "were not readily available or widely known."

After the University of Iowa (unlike other Iowa universities) failed to pass a sexually explicit materials policy that satisfied the Board of Regents, a policy was unilaterally imposed on it which required instructors to warn students of potentially offensive sexual materials and to consult with the offended students to offer alternative assignments or the option of dropping the course.

In 1994, the University of Iowa president imposed a "compromise" version of the rule requiring teachers "to give students adequate indication of any unusual or unexpected class presentations or materials." While the new rule eliminated the specific attack on issues of sexuality, it broadened the policy to cover any material which any student might feel is "unusual or unexpected." There is little doubt that a chilling effect on discussions of sexuality, especially homosexuality, has been the result. (Democratic Culture, Spring 1994)

In December 1995, the Iowa Board of Regents voted 7 to 2 to eliminated the "unusual or unexpected" clause. However, faculty are now required "to present to appropriate context for course content" and strictly prohibited from using materials that have "no pedagogical relationship to the subject matter of the course." The old language was dropped because it was "too hard to define," but the new language is no better. Now instead of being required to warn students about offensive material, teachers are banned from using anything the Regents deem "pedagogically unrelated" to the course topic. Like the old ban, the new ban is an unnecessary restriction on academic freedom which will have a chilling effect on what is discussed in the classroom. The Iowa Board of Regents should stop protecting students from learning, and start protecting faculty from vague and arbitrary bans on classroom speech.

5. Judge Upholds Punishment of Jeffries' Speech

In 1995, a federal court of appeals ruled that City College of New York professor Leonard Jeffries could be deprived of the chairmanship of the black studies department solely because of the protests against a 1991 speech he made. Professors from all ideological backgrounds should be concerned that punishment for their public speeches has been found constitutional by a federal court. However offensive and ignorant Jeffries' ideas are, this is a dangerous precedent that allows controversy to be an excuse for disposing of unpopular views.

In his July 20, 1991 speech at the Empire State Black Arts and Cultural Festival in Albany, Jeffries contended that Jews were major figures in the slave trade, said historian Arthur Schlesinger was "a weakling" and "slick and devilish," and called professor Bernard Somer "the head Jew at City College." Jeffries said that the denigration of blacks in movies was "a conspiracy, planned and plotted and programmed out of Hollywood, where people called Greenberg and Weisberg and Trigliani and whatnot... Russian Jewry had a particular control over the movies, and their financial partners, the Media, put together a system of destruction of black people." (New York Times, 4/5/95)

After this speech became publicized, there was a loud public outcry, with several politicians calling for Jeffries' dismissal. In response to these complaints, City College decided to punish Jeffries by stripping him of his chairmanship in the black studies department, a position that is normally not taken away without evidence of incompetence at the job. A jury determined that City College had violated Jeffries' First Amendment rights. As a juror in cases noted, "Much as I would like to have ruled otherwise, because he was sort of an odious individual, they definitely violated his rights as far as I could see." (Congress Monthly, 7/93) However, the jury's verdict of $360,000 was overturned on appeal.

The U.S. Court of Appeals Second Circuit found that City College did not violate Mr. Jeffries' free-speech rights because it was reasonable to believe that his speech would "likely be disruptive." This is a dangerous standard; under it, Michael Levin in a similar case surely could not have won his lawsuit, since his remarks (and the response to them) could be considered destructive. Anyone who wants to censor an opponent need only be "disruptive" to provide an excuse for administrators to remove the controversial professor.

The New York Times concluded that being a department chair was "a special credential" and "a leadership position" whose holders "represent the university's values to the public," and therefore is not entitled to protection by academic freedom. (11/17/94) However, the key issue here is not the nature of a department chair, but the plain reasons why Jeffries was removed from it. His political views, not his administrative competence (which is very much in doubt), was the only reason for City College's retaliation.

The decision overturning Jeffries' victory sets a dangerous precedent that even opponents of Jeffries' bigotry must understand. A federal court has established that faculty may be punished (and perhaps, by the same principle, even fired) for expressing unpopular views of any kind in public.

If free speech is to be defended and bigotry condemned -- and both ought to be our goals -- then there should be no more double standards, no more demands that ever black intellectual and political leader stand up to condemn every racist who happens to have a black face, no more accusations of political correctness when white bigotry is challenged, and no more attacks on those who defend the free speech of black bigots. If academic freedom means anything, it is the right to speak of those we hate and condemn.

6. Censoring the Student Press

All too common today are efforts to intimidate student newspapers which print articles deemed "offensive" by the self-appointed media critics on campus who express their opposition by throwing out newspapers, filing charges of harassment, or even occupying offices.

The most egregious violation of free press rights occurred in 1995 at DePaul University. The controversy began after the Feb. 17 DePaulia reported on a fight that broke out at a Feb. 10 dance sponsored by House Call, a primarily African-American student group. Black students complained that the article relied solely on police sources, and quoted security reports which identified disruptive individuals as "M/Bs" -- shorthand for black males. Protesters took copies of the free newspaper from the racks and ripped them up.

On April 5, the black students began a sit-in at the student newspaper office, shutting down production. President Rev. John Minogue did not take action against the sit-in, but ordered the suspension of the. Minogue met several demands, including retaining an African-American consultant to provide sensitivity training; requiring the newspaper to devote one issue annually to concerns of students of color; including minority faculty and staff; establishing a student mentorship program; increasing internship opportunities; improving retention and recruitment of minority students; allocating $70,000 to multicultural programs; and not taking disciplinary action against protesters because they were peaceful. (Chicago Tribune, 4/9/95; Chicago Sun-Times, 4/15/95)

It's one thing to hold a sit-in on an administrative building to protest university policies; it's quite a different story to occupy a newspaper office in order to shut it down. The students' behavior was appalling enough, but DePaul University's official response was even worse. The Student Press Law Center reported that it was the first time in the 1990s that a campus newspaper was not printed due to a student protest.

For the administration, censoring the DePaulia not only appeased the African-American students on campus, but it also ensured that the newspaper would be compliant in the future and unlikely to cause controversy. Newspaper editors at DePaul know all too well the danger they face if they dare to publish anything potentially offensive to anyone -- especially if it's an article critical of the administration which now holds absolute power over the student newspaper.

A similar assault on the rights of a newspaper occurred at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1992, where 200 protesters twice vandalized the offices of the student newspaper, the Collegian, damaging equipment and threatening staffers. The protesters demanded more minority control of the newspaper, and the editors ended up taking their newspaper underground to avoid attacks.

Cases like this are rare, but the failure of administrators to half such attempts at intimidation raises serious concerns about the freedom of the press. A more widespread problem, however, is the thrashing of student newspapers and direct censorship of these papers in an effort to suppress controversial views.

One way to suppress views is to file a harassment charge. Although this rarely leads to a guilty verdict, it can have a powerful silencing effect on the student press.

At Marietta College, a student writing in the school newspaper who called lesbians "deviant" was accused of sexual harassment; the Marietta Board of Trustees intervened tonsure that the student was not sanctioned. The student editor of a conservative newspaper at Oberlin College was accused of harassment and abuse for an article in the paper, and was exonerated after a hearing before the school's judicial board. (USA Today, 3/95)

These are cases where conservative views have been censored, and they should be condemned. One case is the UCLA Daily Bruin, which ran a cartoon where a rooster was asked how he got admitted on campus and the rooster replied, "Affirmative action." For this cartoon, the editor and art director were suspended for violating the policy against using derogatory stereotypes. At California State University at Northridge, the editor of the campus paper wrote an editorial criticizing the decision, and also reproduced the offensive rooster cartoon -- as a result, the paper's faculty advisor gave a two-week suspension to Taranto for printing "controversial" material without permission. After ACLU intervened, a settlement was reached.

These examples of censorship must be strongly opposed, as should be the theft of newspapers. Many of these newspaper trashings have been widely publicized. On April 15, 1993, a group of black students at the University of Pennsylvania threw away the 14,200 press run of the Daily Pennsylvanian because it included a column written by conservative student Gregory Pavlik, who had criticized affirmative action and Martin Luther King, Jr.

But in most cases, newspaper thefts have nothing to do with "political correctness." Newspapers are usually trashed when they report crimes or criticize student government. On April 21, 1994, the California State University at Fullerton's Daily Titan had half of its 6,000 papers trashed because of a lead article on a student election. On April 26, 1994, 7,000 out of the 9,000 copies of the California State University at Northridge's Daily Sundial were stolen by a student body presidential candidate's supporters because the newspaper endorsed another candidate. (Los Angeles Times, 4/28/94)

Most papers are not taken for ideological reasons, and there is no sign that conservative papers are specially targeted for censorship. At Brandeis University, for example, a Holocaust revision ad (although printed with a disclaimer and with the revenues donated to the Holocaust Memorial Museum) led to 2,000 copies of the Justice being stolen. After the Georgetown University's Voice ran a similar ad in October 1993, the staff was forced to publish a retraction and a letter of apology, donate the money from the ad to the Holocaust museum, and visit the museum. In April 1994, the University of Miami's student newspaper, the Miami Hurricane, sparked campus protests after it published an ad denying the Holocaust: 4000 students condemned the ad in a rally, and a wealthy donor withheld a $2 million donation to the university. In response, the board of trustees ordered the newspaper to prohibit all ads that are "hateful or misleading." (Newsletter on Intellectual Freedom, July 1994)

But it is not true, as Lynne Cheney claims, that "campus newspapers have been removed or destroyed at over 70 colleges... and we didn't find a single case where a student who has stolen a newspaper has been punished." (Washington Times, 3/22/95)

At the University of Maryland, bundles of the November 1, 1993, issue of the campus newspaper were taken because of charges that the newspaper was racists. However, black leaders on campus, including two black editors of the paper, quickly denounced the theft, as did the university president. The students responsible were put on probation, forced to perform 16 hours of community service, and required to write a paper on student press censorship.

At Penn State University in April 1993, some feminist students stole 4,000 copies of the right-wing student newspaper, the Lionhearted. That same night, protesters burned hundreds of copies of the newspaper in front of the law office of a trustee who had supported the newspaper. The protesters were angered by the Lionhearted's attacks on feminism, including a full-page picture of a female columnist from the student newspaper, with her head pasted on top a bikini-clad body. In July 1993, university police charged two recent graduates with theft, receiving stolen property, and criminal conspiracy for taking the newspapers.

At Duke University in 1993, a member of the Black Student Alliance took 100 copies of the conservative Duke Review. He was strongly condemned by Duke President Nan Keohane, and was placed on probation after being convicted of theft by the Undergraduate Judicial Board. However, the conviction was overturned on appeal because the student was denied due process when a new definition of theft was applied retroactively.

Nor do Cheney and other conservatives mention the fact that progressive newspapers are frequently the victims of official censorship. The Newsletter on Intellectual Freedom (11/94) has reported that many progressive weekly papers have been targeted by right-wing groups, with threats, newspaper trashings, and attempts to cut off advertising with boycotts.

While conservative columns are more likely to spark trashings than liberal ones, administrative censorship is more common among liberal papers. In 1989, the editors of the Marquette University Tribune were suspended and the business manager was fired because the newspaper had published an ad for an abortion rally, even though it ran a disclaimer nothing that Marquette was not supporting the rally. Under intense media scrutiny, the university finally reinstated the student journalists. In March 1993, the university refused to allow the paper to publish an unsigned editorial on abortion pill RU-486 which contradicted the university's position, claiming that it might be misinterpreted as Marquette's views.

Faculty adviser Bill Blanton has since resigned, saying that it was "not a good atmosphere to teach or practice journalism." Rev. John Patrick Donnelly, the new director, declares: "Freedom of the press belongs to those who own it. This being a Catholic institution, we don't expect the paper to run editorials that contradict church positions." The Tribune is under orders to inform administrators about any stories with "controversial material" before publication.

At Viterbo College in 1992, President William Medland fired the faculty advisor, the editor, and the entire staff of the student paper after it published an article on condoms.

In 1991, the editor and managing director of the student newspaper at Palm Beach Atlantic College were fired for insubordination and lost their scholarships after attempting to publish an anonymous letter and an editorial questioning the school's ban on homosexual activity. The issue, despite being heavily censored, was criticized by several students who threw away about half of its 1,500 copies.

At Wheaton College in 1992, the committee on student publications at the conservative Christian college forced the editors of the literary magazine Kodon to remove two nude sketches of a man and a woman before it could be published. Elgin Community College school officials tried to censor the Observer and threatened to close it down because the student magazine ran stories about gay organizations on campus.

At Millsaps College, the campus Purple and White newspaper was shut down for 10 weeks by administrators after an opinions columnist jokingly suggested group sex as a way for people to transcend their differences. When alumni and trustees threatened to withdraw money from the school, the administration condemned the column as "poorly written, tasteless, offensive, and unworthy of publication anywhere." The Purple and White was allowed to resume publication only after adopting standards for taste and decency and requiring a five-person editorial board to unanimously approve each story before publication.

Although the repression of progressive papers continued unabated, there has been some recent success in stopping trashings. In recent months, the number of newspaper trashings has sharply declined, with only a half-dozen incidents reported in fall 1995. According to Mike Hiestand, staff attorney for the Student Press Law Center, one reason may be that "schools are actually doing something about it." At the University of Texas, the district attorney is investigating charges related to a newspaper trashing in the fall of 1995. In 1995, Corrado Giovanella dumped 5,800 copies of the University of Texas Daily Texan in a recycling bin when it reported his attempt to forge an application as a transfer student.(Chronicle of Higher Education, 9/15/95) At the University of Virginia, 4,000 copies of the Cavalier Daily were hidden after an article criticized the food-service contractor, ARAmark, as "a hearty band of taste-bud impaired Visigoths." John Darmstadt, an ARAmark manager, admitted taking the papers because he thought the review was unfair.(Chronicle of Higher Education, 9/15/95) ARAmark apologized and donated $1,000 to a charity of the paper's choice.

Administrators at some schools also have the courage to refuse to punish newspapers for their views. The University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee recently resisted student demands to shut down a student paper, the Times, after it printed a column calling O.J. Simpson a "nigger" and another column full of obscenities and insults such as "fag" and "bitch." Chancellor John Schroeder was hanged in effigy by protesters after he refused to disband the newspaper, although he criticized the editors. For administrators, it is often easier to silence an unpopular and offensive newspaper than to recognize the extreme danger that such interference poses to an independent press on campus.(Chronicle of Higher Education, 11/24/95)

When newspaper censorship is taken seriously, it creates a climate where students use the free exchange of ideas, and not trashings and occupations, to express their disagreement with the views that appear in student papers. Defending freedom of the press requires administrators to take action against newspaper thefts, and not to ignore such attempts at suppression or make efforts to silence the student press. Unfortunately, all too many colleges and universities prefer to have writers and editors who are fearful of suppression rather than a free press that may criticize the administration.  Recent thefts reported in the Winter 1994-95 Student Press Law Center Report

The Laguardia Community College Bridge was shut down by school officials while they investigated allegations that an anti-Semitic opinion piece was printed in October 1993. The College Association, which allocates student activity funds, ordered changes in the paper's governing document and demanded prior review of every issue.

At Western Nebraska Community College, administrators temporarily confiscated all copies of the student newspaper because a controversial column compared the academic performance of black and white athletes on campus. The papers were returned to bins the next day, but college officials maintain they have a "right" to "protect the best interests of all students involved."

At Monmouth College in New Jersey, vice president for student affairs Mary Anne Nagy temporarily removed 2,500 copies of The Outlook during parents weekend because it reported an assault on campus.

Reginald Butler admitted to stealing 800 copies of the Troy State University Tropolitan because it included an article about his arrest for credit card theft. Editors agreed not to press charges against in exchange for Butler paying $75 for the trashed papers, helping distribute 4,000 copies across campus, and writing for the newspaper about the track team for three quarters.

Unknown thieves took 5,500 copies of the University of Alabama at Birmingham's Kaleidoscope because of an article about a former professor charged with sexual harassment and sexual misconduct. In response, the administration added a policy to university regulations that punishes students who steal newspapers.

At the University of Northern Colorado at Greeley, members of MEChA stole the print run of 7,500 newspapers and returned the copies to the newspapers's office in garbage bags. They were protesting two columns about the student elections. Police and administration refused to press any charges.

6,000 copies of the University of Buffalo's student magazine Generation were stolen for unknown reasons.

At Boise State University, 800 copies of the Arbiter were taken, possibly to protest a prior issue which included an editorial opposing a state anti-gay initiative and an interview with a gay professor.

At the University of Detroit Mercy, 1,400 copies of the Varsity News were stolen because a lead article blamed a campus political group for several acts of vandalism. In February 1994, 200 copies were stolen because of a story about a chemical spill on campus.

San Jose City College's City College Times had 1,000 copies taken because of an article about the campus radio station.

Clark University's student newspaper, The Scarlet, regularly is removed from bins during the biannual visits of the Board of Trustees.

A cartoon in the student newspaper of Salem-Teikyo College in West Virginia caused controversy in April 1995 because it showed a man with his middle finger pointing up. School officials demanded a public apology, and the editors were removed by student government leaders when they refused. (Ironically enough, the cartoon was titled, "Censorship.")

7. Power of the Purse: Alumni Demands Vs. Academic Freedom

As institutions like the NEA and NEH are eliminated, and universities find themselves subject to severe budget cuts, conservatives hope that financial pressures will lead colleges to give in to the ideological demands of alumni donors, foundations, and corporations. Lynne Cheney herself led the formation in 1995 of the National Alumni Forum (NAF), along with former Colorado Gov. Dick Lamm, Sen. Joseph Lieberman (D-Conn.), Sen. Hank Brown (R-Col), Jerry Martin, Irving Kristol, Martin Peretz, and Judge Laurence Silberman. The Washington Times reported that NAF's goal is "to organize the alumni for the purpose of exerting pressure on the colleges to curtail Political Correctness." As Cheney put it, "It comes down to a question of who owns the university." According to newt Gingrich in To Renew America, "What is amazing in the overwhelming meekness of the alumni in accepting this hijacking of their alma mater," where their money is "used to subsidize bizarre and destructive visions of reality." Believing that alumni and trustees (with their more conservative values) should control universities, Cheney and friends want to use their economic and political power over universities to enforce a new dogmatism in the name of "preserving academic values." Senators Hank Brown and Joseph Lieberman, while claiming that the NAF is "dedicated to academic freedom and excellence," complain that "the rules protecting academic freedom insulate the academy from outside pressures." These outside pressures, from alumni, trustees, and legislators, are precisely what conservatives want to create.

NAF president Jerry Martin (Chronicle of Higher Education, 10/13/95) claims that "professors reign as absolute sovereigns over academic issues," and he urges alumni to help de-throne them. But alumni are hardly powerless, and in fact pose a major threat to academic freedom when they are organized to force colleges to follow a particular ideology.

In 1993 at Converse College in South Carolina, conservative alumnae and trustees helped force out President Ellen Wood Hall who was deemed to be too liberal. The Intercollegiate Studies Institute newspaper, Campus reported, "Hall's radical feminist agenda has included a watering down of the curriculum, the formation of a lesbian support group, and inviting Molly Yard to campus." Homophobia was behind much of the criticism, as alumnae complained of a "lesbian problem" because two years earlier some students had met with counselors to talk about lesbianism; Hall's dean of students was dismissed for being "intemperate" when arguing with an alumna who wanted to ban lesbians from the schools.

According to Hall, "I was attacked for no reason other than being female. I was criticized about my clothes and lack of personal beauty." However, her opponents maintain that they pushed to have her fired because of her liberalism, not just her personal appearance. Hall recognized Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday as a holiday, supported efforts to add Latin American and African studies to the curriculum, and allowed men on campus four days a week instead of three. Alumnae cited a student trip to New York City to work in Harlem soup kitchens, and worried that Hall and her husband, who teachers at a college 35 miles away, only spent weekends together. If this is how the National Alumni Forum wants to influence colleges, by having "liberal" presidents fired under alumni pressure, it shows a serious threat to academic freedom.

Political pressure of this kind is exactly what the National Alumni Forum wants. As Lynne Cheney observes, "It comes down to the question of who owns the university. (Memphis Commercial-Appeal, 3/18/95) Believing that the soul of a university is something that wealthy alumni can purchase by their donations, the National Alumni Forum and similar alumni pressure groups formed by conservative organizations (in 1993, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute started its "Winds of Freedom" movement to oppose speech codes, multiculturalism, and gay student groups) directly threaten academic freedom even while they claim to be protecting it.

It is not hard to reach the conclusion that the National Alumni Forum wants greater alumni control over higher education primarily because Cheney and her allies believe that wealthy alumni will have more conservative goals than most faculty. But should a few rich alumni (or a political organization purporting to represent alumni interests) be allowed to impose their vision of education on American colleges and universities without criticism?

In fact, many alumni object to the lack of diversity among students, faculty, and administrators, want to see more multiculturalism in the curriculum, and deplore the failure of many colleges to confront harassment and discrimination on campus. Most alumni want to see academic values improved and academic freedom protected without approving of the National Alumni Forum's conservative agenda.

Certainly, alumni have a role to play in critiquing their colleges and in shaping academic programs by their donations. But they should not try to be puppeteers who manipulate college policies with demands for ideological control while they dangle donations in front of administrators too timid to resist them. The ideas of alumni should be welcomed and taken seriously. But when these ideas are imposed by financial threats, they represent a danger to academic freedom rather than a defense of it.

What Really Happened to the $20 Million Bass Gift at Yale

The formation of NAF coincided with a national controversy at Yale University. The story, as Newt Gingrich tells it, is this: "Yale University recently had to return $20 million to oil tycoon Lee Bass because after several years the university could not get the faculty to agree to teach Western Civilization." In fact, nothing like this PC fantasy ever happened.

According to the National Alumni Forum, Lee Bass withdrew his $20 million gift to Yale University "after it became clear that his wishes would not be followed." In fact, the gift was returned only after Bass demanded a right to veto faculty appointed to the program whose views he opposed. Rather than criticizing this appalling abuse of the donation process, the National Alumni Forum presents Bass a victim of political correctness, quoting Camille Paglia's claim that "they were dragging their feet because of the content" and New York Post columnist Hilton Kramer's declaration that "tenured left-wing advocates of a multiculturalist anti-Western political agenda" were in "open warfare against the creation of the course>" (National Alumni Forum newsletter, Fall 1995)

However, this was not a case of "Political Correctness 1, Education 0," as the national Alumni Forum claimed, nor did Camille Paglia or Hilton Kramer known what they were talking about. As David Karp noted in the Washington Post (6/4/95), the delays in implementing the Western Culture course had nothing to do with leftist faculty opposing the proposal.

Yale's efforts to start a Western Civilization course were delayed by the administrators' efforts to use the money to offset faculty cuts in the budget. But Light and Truth, a conservative student publication funded by the right-wing Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI), ran a story by Pat Collins accusing left-wing professors of sabotaging the project. According to Collins, "President Levin obviously made the determination that it was better to be loved by the left wing of his faculty than by his alumni donors."

T. Kenneth Cribb, Jr., president of ISI, flew to Texas in an effort to convince Bass to withdraw his donation in order to punish Yale. Although Yale promised to implement the program as Bass originally conceived it, Cribb convinced Bass to demand the right to veto any professors hired for the program. Faced with a donor insisting on ideological control over the Western Civilization program, Yale chose to return the money rather than allow academic freedom to be jeopardized. Other alumni donors were inspired to withdraw their gifts, according to Cribb, "The cost of Yale's behavior is now estimated to be several times the original Bass gift of $20 million." (National Review, 9/25/95) Yale and other universities now know that they will be punished, and harmed financially, if they fail to implement a conservative agenda.

Lynne Cheney declared about the Bass donation, "It is sad to see politics play any role in deciding what educational opportunities will be available to students." It is indeed sad to see politics playing a major role in the attempts to intimidate and malign Yale University. It is sad to see that conservatives would kill a Western Culture program -- blaming its death on the left -- and deprive students of the chance to study the West for the sake of gaining more fodder in a propaganda culture war.

8. Authoritarian Administrators

The punishment of faculty by administrators for expressing unpopular ideas has a long history in academia, and academic freedom is still not fully protected from authoritarian presidents, whether they are squelching liberal or conservative ideas.

At Dallas Baptist University, a professor and a dean were fired in 1992 for indefensible reasons. David Ayers, assistant professor of sociology, had criticized feminism, and another professor attacked his positions at a faculty lunch. Ayers then distributed copies of both papers to students, calling his critic's paper the "razor-sharp sword of the assassin." The dean, John Jeffrey, refused to investigate Ayers, saying his actions were protected by academic freedom; Jeffrey was then fired for failing to follow orders. While Ayers certainly deserves criticism for advocating "the universality of patriarchy," neither he nor Jeffrey should have been fired or punished in any way.

It is important to recognize, however, that Ayers was fired from a small Christian college, not a leading secular university. None of this excuses Dallas Baptist University, but it shows that academic freedom is more strongly supported at the elite universities which are said to be the centers of "political correctness." While PC was part of the problem in the firings at Dallas Baptist University, the main reason was simply the administration's desire to control the faculty and get rid of embarrassing "troublemakers," combined with its failure to respect basic principles of academic freedom.

Unfortunately, some on the left try to censor views they dislike instead of refuting them by argument. During the 1980s, conservative speakers were occasionally shouted down by small groups of leftists. While the shouting down of speakers rarely occurs anymore (although the cries against "political correctness" have grown more and more strident), there is still not full openness by some leftists to hear opposing voices. In one deplorable and highly publicized example, former Pennsylvania Governor Robert Casey (who is opposed to abortion) was prevented from speaking at Cooper Union in 1992 by disruptive protestors who chanted, "Racist, sexist, antigay, Governor Casey go away." But sometimes conservatives are intolerant of views they dislike. James Brady, the Reagan Administration press secretary disabled by an assassin's bullet, was booed off stage along with his wife, gun control activist Sarah Brady, when they appeared in 1992 at the University of Nevada. She was heckled and booed throughout her speech, and finally had to cut the lecture short. (New York Times, 2/10/92)

David Brion Davis, a Jewish professor from Yale, was scheduled to give a lecture at Howard University, but administrators there convinced him it would be best for him not to speak after the turmoil on campus following two lectures by the racist and anti-Semitic Khalid Abdul Muhammad. Howard banned an application for a third speech in September 1994, citing safety concerns because of an attempted assassination in California. Howard has also imposed central administration control and stricter guidelines over outside speakers in an effort to prevent further controversies and speakers in an effort to prevent further controversies and improve the university's image. (New York Times, 12/14/94)

Recently, the University of Delaware refused to allow two researchers to accept grants from the Pioneer Fund, those 1937 charter declared that consideration for grants "shall be especially given to children who are deemed to be descended predominantly from white persons who settled in the original 13 states prior to the adoption of the Constitution of the United States." In 1985, the reference to "whites" was deleted. The Pioneer Fund provided $174,000 to education professors Linda Gottfredson and Jan Bilts for research on racial differences in intelligence.

The University of Delaware declared that faculty may not accept funding from organizations that are "incompatible with the University's mission." By banning this funding, the University of Delaware was clearly restricting scholars' ability to do research freely, distasteful and intellectually dubious as that research may be. The idea that research funds are a privilege subject to university approval and not a right, merely because they are channeled through the university, is ridiculous. The University should not restrict professors' sources of funding, so long as that source does not impose impermissible limits on its funding (such as racially discriminatory allocation of grants -- as the Pioneer Fund required until 1985).

Still, in the end free speech was protected. When the two scholars threatened to sue, the University of Delaware agreed to an out-of-court settlement which allowed them to receive grants from the Pioneer Fund, provided a year's paid leave of absence for both professors and assured that a monitor will ensure fairness for one professor's promotion decision. (Science, 5/15/92)

But authoritarian control over colleges and universities is more often exerted by conservative presidents. In 1991, four former Hillsdale College professors, all members of the conservative National Association of Scholars, criticized the small college and its president, George Roche. They wrote: "For years the Hillsdale administration has neglected its academic program to pay for 'outreach' activities designed to promote Dr. Roche, maintained a curriculum that requires no appreciable knowledge of Western culture, and used every possible means including dismissals and threats of lawsuits, to silence dissent of any kind among faculty and students." (Academic Questions, Fall 1991) They noted that in 1986, "the administration began to attack the student newspaper, the Collegian, for its disagreements with college policies, threatening lawsuits and other reprisals against the student staff and any faculty who defended it." The editor of the Collegian was forced by the administration to resign, and the rest of the student staff resigned in protest.

Roche also urged a student, Mike Nehls, not to publish an independent newspaper, the Hillsdale Spectator. When Nehls went ahead with his plans and began criticizing Roche in editorials, Roche banned distribution of the paper on campus and then expelled Nehls. As one editorial in the banned Hillsdale Spectator noted, "Hillsdale is a cult of personality and not of principle. Roche is the divine monarch."

Faculty at Hillsdale have also been victims of Roche's "conservative correctness." When a dean sued a faculty member, accusing him of committing slander in a private conversation with another administrator, assistant history professor Warren Treadgold was one of the 16 faculty who signed a letter to the student newspaper protesting the use of lawsuits. Three months later, Treadgold was dismissed. Hillsdale officials reportedly said that Treadgold did not "fit in" at Hillsdale and called his letter "unwise, unbecoming, and unprofessional." Hillsdale, which has no appeals or grievance procedures, refused to give any reasons for Treadgold's dismissal. Treadgold said: "I am a conservative, and my disagreements weren't with their politics. Basically Hillsdale is a feudal manor run by George Roche."

An AAUP investigation found that Treadgold was one of the top scholars at Hillsdale, with a Ph.D. from Harvard and a book being published by Stanford University Press. A 1987 evaluation of Treadgold at Hillsdale declared that "his scholarship is of the highest quality as well of a superior quantity" and called his teaching "clearly above the average." The AAUP concluded that the letter he signed "was the determining factor in the administration's decision to issue notice of nonreappointment when it did." This is a far cry from the National Review College Guide's description of utopia at Hillsdale where "top-notch" faculty "express a sense of joyful release at their departure from the stifling atmosphere of the official ideologies of their old schools." Yet all of the conservatives who condemn the PC thought police fail to mention Hillsdale, except as a model college in the fight against political correctness.

Another idol of conservatives is Boston University president John Silber, who for two decades has led efforts to remove faculty he dislikes from Boston University. For this, Silber is celebrated by conservatives as a model president and rewarded by his Board of Trustees. In 1980, Silber overruled unanimous decisions by a faculty committee and the English department, and rejected tenure for Julia Prewitt Brown. Silber was eventually voted guilty of sex discrimination, based in part upon his comment that the English department (which was 70% male) was a "damn matriarchy." (Brown v. Trustees of Boston University, 891 F.2d 337, 1st Cir. 1989)

Silber has sought to remove leftist faculty and trouble-makers like Brown, who had openly picketed in front of Silber's office during a 1979 faculty strike. Three women active in union work were also denied tenure in the early 1980s -- Elizabeth Rapaport, Roslyn Feldbert, and Seyla Benhabib -- despite receiving overwhelming support from their departments and from faculty committees. Education theorist Henry Giroux was denied tenure in 1983 because Silber objected to his research.

Silber has a long record of obstructing academic freedom and civil liberties. In 1976, the National Labor Relations Board found that Boston University had "unlawfully discharged" four women at the BU Health Clinic for having a meeting to complain about working conditions; they were rehired and then fired again. In 1978, his administration delayed the publication of the student yearbook and had some objectionable political material removed. In 1979, the Massachusetts chapter of the ACLU reported that it had "never, in memory, received such a large and sustained volume of complaints" about one institution, and concluded that "B.U. has violated fundamental principles of civil liberties and academic freedom." A student newspaper critical of Silber had its student funding vetoed by the Boston University administration, and eventually won an out-of-court settlement. The director of the campus radio station was fired for refusing to delete a joke about Silber from a tape. In 1985, an honors student being interviewed for a university brochure was told she could not refer to Howard Zinn, a Silber critic, one of the school's best professors. In 1986, the Silber Administration threatened to evict a student from a dormitory because he put a sign with the word "Divest" in his window; a judge ruled in the student's favor, criticizing "B.U.'s desire to prevent the exercise of free speech rights." (Ironically, one common PC story is that of Brigit Kerrigan, a student at Harvard who was criticized for putting up a Confederate flag. Although Kerrigan was permitted to keep the flag in her window, this case is often cited by conservatives as censorship while Silber’s actions are ignored.)

9. The Heresy Hunters: Academic Freedom at Religious Schools

Many religious colleges have been intolerant of dissenting voices. In 1994, the Southwestern Theological Seminary trustees rescinded an invitation to Rev. R. Keith Parks because he had left the Southern Baptist's Foreign Mission Board after clashing with conservatives. Daniel Maguire, a leader of Catholics for a Free Choice, found that invitations to speak at Catholic colleges were cancelled because of his unorthodox views, even when abortion was not the subject of his speeches. At St. Martin's College, the president wrote to Maguire: "The Board [of Trustees] determined that the Saint Martin's religious studies program should avoid the hiring of personnel who advocate teachings that may be contrary to the tenets of the Roman Catholic Church," which included hiring Maguire to deliver a speech. Maguire's lecture at the College of St. Scholastica was cancelled by the president because of Maguire's "association with Catholics for a Free Choice." Similar cancellations occurred at Villanova University and Boston College.

At Catholic University of America, abortion rights supporter Bill Baird was scheduled to participate in a debate with Sandra Faucher, director of the National Right to Life Political Action Committee. But the Program Board cancelled the debate, claiming that Baird is "overemotional." The move was protested by the Catholic University Students for Choice, a group which is not officially recognized by the university because of its political views, and which is prohibited from holding functions on university property.

Nor has the suppression of unorthodox views ended. Many of the examples of academic freedom violations in this report took place at religious colleges, and some cases are directly tied to free speech. Sister Carmel McElroy was fired in April 1995 by the St. Meinrad School of Theology because she was one of 1,000 people who signed an open letter to the Pope in the National Catholic Reporter calling for dialogue on the issue of ordaining women. Although a tenured professor, McElroy notes, "my signature was used as 'proof' of public dissent from the official teaching of the church." The dismissal occurred after a team from the National Conference of Catholic Bishops visited campus and demanded McElroy's firing. The team also criticized the seminary's use of unapproved liturgical texts with "inclusive" language, opposed the singing of morning prayers, and required the expulsion of any seminarian admitting a homosexual orientation.(National Catholic Reporter, 3/31/95) Barbara Crawford, St. Meinrad's director of communications, defended McEnroy's termination for "public dissent" as appropriate: "We feel that for the sake of the students, they ought to have faculty members who can in good conscience uphold the teaching of the church both in the classroom and publicly."(Indianapolis Star, 7/7/95) McElroy's due process rights were also violated because there was no judgment by a faculty committee or right of appeal as required by her contract. Another faculty member, Bridget Clare McKeever, resigned her position in protest. As Notre Dame theologian Richard McCormick asks, "Is this going to be a first-class education or is it going to be high-grade catechism?" The National Catholic Reporter editorialized, "The faculty apparently did not properly gauge how small the circle of orthodoxy has become within the Catholic church."(5/12/95)

In 1993, English professor Cecilia Farr was dismissed by Brigham Young University because a year early she had spoken at a pro-choice rally. Farr had been notified that her public dissent from Mormon doctrine violated "her university citizenship obligations" and would be considered during a status review. Although Farr had better teaching and research records than others who passed the review, her "citizenship" -- speaking in opposition to a government ban on abortion -- was enough to have her fired.

Even professors at secular colleges must be careful about what they write and say on the topic of religion. Former nun Jane Schaberg, a professor of religion at the University of Detroit at Mercy had her car set on fire, received hate mail, and was condemned by the Archbishop of Detroit because her book, The Illegitimacy of Jesus, argued that Mary was not a virgin. University officials neither condemned nor defended her.(Campus Report, 11/93)

Should religious colleges receive an exemption from academic freedom? In 1940, the AAUP declared so, but it amended the statement in 1970. Robert Poch, in a 1993 report (Academic Freedom in American Higher Education, ASHE-ERIC), argues that the AAUP's 1970 Interpretive Comments were "highly presumptuous and overly simplistic" in suggesting that religious institutions should protect academic freedom. According to Poch, "core values and beliefs" at some institutions will be "consider truth through faith or divine revelation and not open to question." The AAUP ideal of academic freedom would "remove the distinct identity of a church-related institution as it welcomes calling into question the fundamental tenets of the church." Poch argues that these institutions should be respected in the name of institutional academic freedom: "the freedom to chart an institutional course and identity without external interference."

But the notion of "institutional academic freedom" -- though important as a legal doctrine -- is dangerous when taken as a moral ideal. Of course, courts should not be allowed to dictate every policy of a private institution, or intervene in every case where academic freedom is abridged. Such a policy would allow judges (who are often ignorant of academic ideas) to have the final say in academic decisionmaking, to the detriment of higher education.

However, academic organizations like the AAUP, Teachers for a Democratic Culture, and others have no legally binding authority. These groups -- and all academics -- have a moral duty to stand up against intolerance, no matter where it is happening or who is doing it. Every college and university could use "institutional mission" as an excuse for censorship. Expecting professors at religious institutions to have less freedom to think is the presumptuous and simplistic view.

The insult to religious beliefs does not come from defending academic freedom, but from the suggestion that religious views are so intellectually inferior that dissent must be suppressed rather than addressed. Some might argue that religious colleges are under no obligation to protect academic freedom, since they are created to promote a certain point of view. But faith is not reinforced by suppressing dissent. All colleges and universities have a moral obligation to promote free expression of ideas because this is an essential component of any form of higher education. And all faculty bear a responsibility to condemn violations of academic freedom, no matter where they occur or what excuses are offered for silencing dissenting views.

Homophobia at Religious Colleges

At some religious institutions, simply talking about homosexuality with less than complete condemnation can be grounds for dismissal.

Kenneth Gowdy was fired by Bethel College in Minnesota in May 1992 after expressing his belief in the need for commitment in all sexual relationships, including homosexual ones, to a student in an informal conversation held in a hallway lounge. Gowdy noted, "I've never advocated homosexuality in any of my classes. I've never counseled any student to explore or continue a homosexual lifestyle." After some students told Rev. John Piper, a former Bethel instructor, about the conversation. Piper cosponsored a resolution at the Baptist General Conference declaring that "those who believe that homosexual behavior is a Biblically acceptable lifestyle are not qualified to serve in the leadership of the conference or to teach in its educational institutions." Piper talked with Gowdy and then took his concerns to provost David Brandt, who fired Gowdy. Gowdy reports, "I was told that the school wouldn't have someone with my point of view on the staff. I was asked if I would change my point of view. I said that I wouldn't just to save my job."(Minneapolis Star-Tribune, 9/1/92)

At Nyack College, English professor June Hagen was fired in 1993 after a student complained that she was "tolerating" homosexuality because of a button attached to her briefcase which declared "Support Gay Rights." A local pastor wrote to the college, "a professor who advocates 'gay/homosexual rights' has no place at Nyack College." Edna Bivens, chair of the Christian Coalition's Orange County branch, threatened to withdraw her daughter from Nyack if Hagen was not fired: "We don't pay this kind of money so that our daughter can sit and listen to this kind of liberal garbage." Administrators reminded Hagen of the school's policy on sexuality, which says that the college promotes a Biblical life-style that "precludes premarital and extramarital intercourse, homosexual practice, and other forms of sexual behavior incompatible with the conservative Christian life-style. Any student violating these principles will be subject to dismissal." Hagen declared that she was a "wholehearted supporter" of this statement and removed the button, explaining that it represented only her concern about violence against homosexuals,