Academic freedom is under attack at Duke University. Don't worry though, one campus group aims to defend it.
Students for Academic Freedom, led by junior Stephen Miller, is working on a pledge that will be presented to Trinity College professors to sign. As Miller told The Chronicle, the pledge's aim is to "affirm [the professors'] commitment to students' intellectual rights and guarantee that their classrooms will not be used as a place for promoting a partisan agenda and advancing their own political ideas."
Miller has vocally decried the disproportionately large number of liberal and Democratic professors in Trinity. He bemoans the fact that most of the people who have devoted their careers to liberal arts disciplines are- well, liberal. Perhaps he's onto something. I'm thinking that we should get a pledge going to make sure that teachers in the computer science department don't discriminate against students who like sports.
Over the summer, Miller sent an e-mail to SAF members that linked to an article he wrote for FrontPageMag.com (a conservative bastion) and included a picture of him grinning next to Karl Rove (not exactly known for embracing free discourse). The tacit goal of the pledge appears to be the protection of conservative ideology on campus. Claims of seeking the elimination of political agendas thus carry a tinge of irony.
More importantly, there is an issue of fairness at stake. If students have access to a list of professors who choose to sign the pledge, then shouldn't professors be able to know, for instance, which students in their classes signed the Duke Community Standard during freshman year Convocation?
Of course, the latter is merely a symbolic act that affirms a minimal expectation-students are bound to the Standard either way. Knowing which students participated in the public signing provides relatively little insight into their moral compass.
But the Academic Freedom Pledge contributes nothing to our understanding of the pedagogical philosophies of professors at Duke. Miller himself predicts that very few professors will sign it. What's worse, its black-and-white, sign-or-don't-sign framework doesn't allow professors the opportunity to explain their decisions or express nuanced opinions on the complicated issue.
If SAF's goal is to brand ideologues and zealots by their refusal to sign, it's fishing with dynamite.
If I were a professor, I'd reject the pledge as a matter of principle. The suggestion by the right-wing president of a student group that I need to defend my commitment to academic freedom would be insulting.
Miller and SAF are paranoid that liberal Duke professors fail to separate political ideology from their educational practices and treatment of students. Yet the pledge is irrelevant to this separation, which, like loyalty to the Community Standard, we should expect no matter what.
I find it hard to believe that a teacher at this university would be vindictive enough to grade a student punitively for any well-supported, intelligently argued but contrary viewpoint. And scattered anecdotal accounts by students claiming ideological discrimination in the grading of their papers simply don't establish that there is a crisis facing academic freedom.
If there is a large amount of concern that this type of downgrading does occur, perhaps legislative measures are in order. But one politically charged student group's attempt to remedy the situation by "outing" certain professors as anti-freedom is inappropriate.
Even the more subtle concerns about the openness of dialogue in classrooms are relatively unfounded. Teachers may have their biases, but a central part of the educational experience is to learn to defend one's own position in the face of opposition-even against an authority figure. Professors who challenge students' politically charged in-class comments do them a service.
Of course, a teaching position is not a soapbox. We don't expect instructors to advocate political agendas instead of teaching the relevant material. We can also probably agree that when multiple reasonable viewpoints on a subject exist, professors should at least acknowledge the range of opinion.
However, students should be hesitant to draw conclusions based on professors' abstention from a pledge that seeks conformity to one group's interpretation of freedom.
David Kleban is a Trinity junior. His column appears every other Thursday. He's really not as serious as he looks in that picture.
Get The Chronicle straight to your inbox
Signup for our weekly newsletter. Cancel at any time.