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Academic Freedom Debate
By Gwendolyn Bradley
AAUP president Cary Nelson debated right-wing activist David Horowitz March 4 as part of a conference organized by Students for Academic Freedom, a group affiliated with Horowitz. Horowitz has been the impetus behind bills, introduced in many state legislatures, that call for legislative oversight of colleges and universities because of a presumed liberal bias in higher education.
Nelson observed that American higher education remains the best in the world and that efforts to impose legislative and bureaucratic oversight of college classrooms are misguided. Higher education is more than job training, he insisted, and should “remain a field of debate and a field of passionate inquiry.” He continued:
American society needs higher education to be a place of contestation and debate. American society needs students to hear disciplined, thoughtful advocacy; advocacy that’s based on research; advocacy that’s based on reasoning. . . . They need to hear faculty members take passionately held positions and argue them in detail. That’s part of the preparation for being a thoroughly informed member of a society that needs to debate its own goals, its own problems, and its own solutions.
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