Bill would kill academic freedoms

This week ' s announcement of the Diversity Forum on the Academic Rights Bill coincided with an article from New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, " An Academic Question, " that discusses the very same issue. In Krugman ' s column, he warns of a future in which biology professors who don ' t give enough credence to creationism and geology professors who maintain that the earth is in fact billions of years old could face the possibility of getting sued.

For those of you not familiar with the Academic Rights Bill, it is a bill passed in Georgia last year that aims to " secure the intellectual independence of faculty and students and to protect the principles of academic freedom " at all public colleges and universities around the state. The bill is designed to stop, or at least curb, discrimination that is based on political or ideological beliefs, a kind of discrimination that some conservatives around the nation say is rampant within this nation ' s academic institutions.

At first the passing of this bill seems to be a victory for students everywhere who feel downtrodden by oppressive professors. However, when considering the implications of such legislation, it seems that there would be an overall negative effect on the classroom environment and on learning.

Though only a resolution, and therefore not lawfully binding, the bill sets the tone of the state administration ' s attitudes towards " academic freedom. " To many contenders of the bill, this Academic Rights Bill could very well squelch the academic freedom that it claims to promote.

The main reason that this issue is so controversial right now is that the divide between supporters and contenders is largely drawn on political lines. Conservatives who feel oppressed by their mostly liberal teachers naturally support the bill, while the mostly liberal professors are largely against it.

However, I ' d like to take the discussion away from politics and towards the bigger picture by raising this question: if teachers do not feel free to express themselves, opinions and all, can they still be effective teachers?

According to the American Association of University Professors, that answer is no. They feel that controversy is important (obviously more so in the liberal arts) to promote learning. If a teacher is not free to express his or her opinions on controversial issues, their potency as teachers will be diminished.

As an avid social science student in high school, I remember learning the most from class discussions. It is during those discussions that I formed the basis for my personal politics and beliefs. It is also through those discussions that I learned to critically analyze an argument and to form solid ones of my own, especially when my positions differed from those of others. Those discussions often became heated, and to a biased observer, those discussions could have very well been construed as an argument and, perhaps, a violation of my " academic rights. " However, without those discussions, my social science classes would have been boring and unenlightening.

On the flip side, being forced to express all views can detract from learning, such as in the scenarios brought up by Krugman ' s article, in which science teachers would be forced to introduce a plurality of theories for a topic, even if only one theory is accepted by the scientific community. Some biology teachers here at Tech already give pseudo-disclaimers before lecturing on evolution, just in case someone feels offended. How would people react if physics teachers gave disclaimers before lecturing on the Newtonian laws? Can students really understand a subject if they don ' t believe in its central principles? And if a teacher gives a student low marks, and then the student complains that the question was subjective, who is to make the subjective decision on what is subjective?

That is where the danger lies in this legislation. I agree that teachers should, in the words of proponent David Horowitz, teach students how to think, not what to think. However I do not feel that it is possible for a teacher to withhold his or her political or ideological bias when teaching a liberal arts course. In fact, liberal arts courses are expected to promote free thought and can be extremely subjective.

I do not think it right to have a legislator or a lawyer judges what is or is not appropriate political or ideological expression within the classroom.

Lastly, I ' d like to add that one can censor a mean-spirited teacher who discriminates against certain students, but that teacher will remain mean-spirited and discriminatory, perhaps even more so because he or she has been censored. However, if one censors an inspiring teacher it can only diminish their message and lessen their effectiveness.