INDOCTRINATION U.

ENCOUNTER BOOKS

Contents

Preface.................................................................xiOne Academic Freedom...................................................1Two A Revealing Debate.................................................19Three Facing the Opposition............................................35Four Indoctrination U..................................................49Five Dangerous Professors..............................................81Six Battle Lines.......................................................97Coda Academic Progress.................................................115Appendix I The Academic Bill of Rights.................................129Appendix II Academic Freedom Code for K-12 Schools.....................133Acknowledgments.........................................................137Notes...................................................................139Index...................................................................153

Chapter One

In the winter of 2002, I drew up an Academic Bill of Rights whose purpose was to promote intellectual diversity on college campuses and restore academic values to university classrooms. Although this bill has since been the object of fervid attacks, it is actually a quintessentially liberal document reflecting values embraced by all American institutions of higher learning throughout the modern era. Its text is based on a famous document called the "Declaration of Principles on Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure," published in 1915 by the American Association of University Professors. These principles have long since been incorporated into the academic policies of most American research universities.

The 1915 Declaration of Principles proposed two basic rights-one for faculty and the other for students. Professors were guaranteed freedom in their professional research, but they were also warned not to use their classroom authority to indoctrinate their students. In the words of the declaration, a teacher should avoid "taking unfair advantage of the student's immaturity by indoctrinating him with the teacher's own opinions before the student has had an opportunity fairly to examine other opinions upon the matters in question, and before he has sufficient knowledge and ripeness of judgment to be entitled to form any definitive opinion of his own."

While this doctrine has been the foundation of the educational governance of universities for nearly a hundred years, in the last several decades it has been increasingly disregarded by faculty and rarely enforced by administrators. My awareness of this fact led me to believe that a new statement of these principles was required. It also convinced me that a national campaign would be needed to inspire renewed commitment by university administrators to enforce the rules that were meant to ensure the fairness and objectivity of the college classroom.

In 1940 and 1970, the American Association of University Professors issued two subsequent statements amplifying the original Declaration of Principles. Both featured clauses cautioning professors to "be careful not to introduce into their teaching controversial matter which has no relation to their subject." Like the original declaration, these statements were published at a time when the nation was torn by controversies over war and peace. Their goal was to insulate the university from the turbulent passions inspired by the First and Second World Wars and the Vietnam War, whose repercussions could damage the academic enterprise. In designing the Academic Bill of Rights, I was conscious of the fact that I was doing so in the shadow of the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and a new war against radical Islam, and that we were entering these ominous times with the academic freedom protections in a tenuous state.

The hundreds of interviews I conducted with students had made me aware that professors routinely used their classrooms to voice their nonprofessional, and often passionately expressed, opinions on the war in Iraq and other matters that were irrelevant to the subjects they taught and outside their areas of expertise. In the course of these interviews, I rarely encountered a student who had not been subjected to such in-class abuse.

Because student claims to this effect have been regularly-and peremptorily-challenged by faculty opponents of the Academic Bill of Rights, I offer the following two statements by university professors as an indication of how prevalent the use of classrooms for political agendas actually is. These statements appeared on a list-serve managed by the National Endowment for the Humanities for academics whose field is American studies. A question posed to the list by one of the academics was itself revealing of the political, rather than scholarly, mindset of those participating: "How are we in American Studies responding to the war in Iraq (and Afghanistan) as a 'teachable moment'?"

Evelyn Azeeza Alsultany, a professor of Arab-American studies at the University of Michigan, was one of those answering the question. In her communication, Professor Alsultany not only declared it her intention to pursue political agendas in the classroom but also made a veiled (and typically inverted) reference to the academic freedom campaign, which she complained was causing the pursuit of nonacademic agendas to be "more difficult":

Date: 8/16/2006 3:47 PM From: Evelyn Alsultany Hi Jay, I personally think it is very important to address current politics and wars in our classes. Unfortunately, given the many attacks on academic freedom over the last few years, this has become more important and more difficult. I will not be teaching this Fall, but in the Winter semester I will be team teaching a course with Nadine Naber, "Why Do They Hate Us?: Perspectives on 9/11 ..." The other course I will be teaching in the Winter is called, "From Harems to Terrorists: Representing the Middle East in Hollywood Cinema." While the focus is on U.S. media and particularly Hollywood films, the course more broadly examines the ideologies that justify anti-Arab racism and U.S.-led wars in the Middle East.

Another answer to the question was provided by Kyla Tompkins, assistant professor of English literature and women's studies at Pomona College, one of the premier liberal arts colleges in America.

Date: 8/16/2006 2:16 PM From: Kyla Tompkins In my feminist theory class, we spend the last two weeks on Feminism after 9/11 and students have responded really well to that. More pertinent to this list, I teach a Cultures of U.S. Imperialism class, mostly a 19th-century course, and the war is present in everything we talk about. One text that was particularly eerie was the Susannah Rowson text Slaves of Algiers, a text that uncannily echoed Bush's early "Save the Women in the Service of Democracy and Freedom" rhetoric during the beginning of the Afghanistan War. However we also paid a lot of attention to the proto (or is it para-?) Zionist rhetoric of many 19th-century texts and rhetoric.

(Note that Professor Tompkins has no academic credential or background that would qualify her to teach about imperialism, slavery, or Zionism. According to her faculty website, her "expertise...