Are Virginia Commonwealth officials insane? They knowingly violate their own policies to sign a secret contract where academics must give away their academic freedom to Philip Morris? Every administrator associated with this deal should resign in disgrace and never work in academia again. Since they're already doing Philip Morris' bidding, maybe the tobacco company will be willing to hire them.

The University of Delaware trustees, to their credit, decided yesterday
not to ban educational programs in the residence halls. Anne Neal of ACTA was "disappointed" by the failure of the trustees to ban "the controversial ‘educational'" activities. Candace de Russy, who is on the advisory board of FIRE, had a much stronger reaction to the trustees, "It is time to consider measures by which to penalize them for their derelection of duty." Astonishingly, de Russy wants to see trustees removed from their positions for refusing to ban voluntary activities. Neal and de Russy object that the program "asks students to post answers to highly personal questions on public bulletin boards—such as for whom they are voting and how they define love" or "to bring their ‘favorite material possessions' to a floor meeting." But there's a key word here: "asks." There's absolutely nothing mandatory about this participation, and if students want to post their views about love, why do ACTA and de Russy want to stop them?

Unfortunately, the Delaware program has already been dumbed down by this political pressure, and I fear that the monitoring of the program, rather than protecting students from violations of their rights, will be used to try to prohibit staff and students from adding additional educational activities. Certainly, the University of Delaware situation needs to be watched to ensure that no one infringes upon intellectual freedom, no matter what side they're on.

Today, David Horowitz's Frontpagemag.com runs an article proclaiming that the Council on Islamic-American Relations (CAIR) has articles on its website supporting Barack Obama: "statements showing favoritism towards a particular candidate, including one denouncing that candidate's opponent, flies in the face of the 501(c)(3) rules." It's very interesting, though, that this article appears on Horowitz's site, which is part of a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that routinely runs articles attacking Barack Obama and opposing Democrats of all kinds. Instead of urging politicized investigations of advocacy groups other than itself, perhaps Horowitz's group should support a system based on freedom, where organizations liberal or conservative are not persecuted for expressing views about politics.