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Bills Challenge Faculty Control over Curriculum
By Gwendolyn Bradley
Bills challenging the premise that faculty and colleges should determine curriculum and select teachers have been introduced in fifteen states and the U.S. Congress, but none has advanced to become law. The bills, which are based on the so-called Academic Bill of Rights advanced by neoconservative David Horowitz, would involve the government in oversight of curricula and teaching, and in faculty hiring and promotion in both public and private institutions of higher education. In many states, the legislation was prompted by students working with materials disseminated by Students for Academic Freedom. That group maintains that students often experience discrimination at the hands of politically biased, propagandizing professors and curricula.
However, many of the student complainants seem not to have availed themselves of procedures already in place. "Our experience in Colorado showed that not one student who showed up to testify in favor of the Academic Bill of Rights had appealed through the institution's grievance procedure," says Dana Waller, vice president of the Colorado AAUP conference and a member of the AAUP's national Committee on Government Relations. The Colorado bill was set aside last year in favor of a "memorandum of understanding" among the presidents of the state's major public colleges and universities. This year, bills have been introduced in California, Florida, Indiana, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Tennessee, and Washington.
David Hollinger, chair of the Association's Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure and a history professor at the University of California, Berkeley, notes that the bills often overlook procedures already in place for making sure that classroom instruction and research programs reflect sound professional judgments. In testimony submitted to the California legislature, Hollinger pointed out that the proposed legislation, if enacted, would damage higher education "by inviting nonprofessional criteria for evaluation, by encouraging the false idea that the content of teaching and research can be helpfully classified in popular political categories, and by inviting costly litigation." Scholars who really know the subject matter are those best qualified to decide what presentation is biased or in any other way unprofessional, he concluded.
In the U.S. Congress, language based on the Academic Bill of Rights has been inserted by members of the House of Representatives in the College Access and Opportunity Act to reauthorize the Higher Education Act. Reauthorization of the act, originally scheduled for 2004, is now anticipated in fall 2005 or in 2006. Before reauthorization is complete, the House and Senate will have to agree on a final version of the act.
The Association in December 2003 issued a formal statement opposing Academic Bills of Rights, and AAUP leaders and staff have been at the forefront of the fight to keep higher education free of government interference. AAUP general secretary Roger Bowen and Association leaders have made campus presentations about the issue and discussed it on radio and television programs, the Association has lobbied strenuously against the bills, and it has created an extensive Web site providing resources for faculty to resist these intrusions.
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