Academic Freedom's New Direction
by Kevin Smith // February 12, 2005
The success of the Ward Churchill saga to make it into the mainstream media has not only brought the problem of bias and indoctrination in the academy to the attention of "middle-America", but it has also highlighted one of the academic freedom movement's greatest shortcomings. This sad episode in the history of American academia has proven that the lack of intellectual diversity on campus extends beyond the nation's Ivy-Leagues and into the common walls of the rest of America's institutions of higher learning. Unfortunately, it has also proven that the academic freedom movement has failed, where the mainstream media has succeeded, in showing "middle-Americans" this truth.
Since I started going to college, I have been frustrated by the public's ignorance, or sheer complacency, over the fact that the state of the American university has become nothing short of what Dr. Jim Black, in Freefall of the American University, terms a "socialist conspiracy." My personal experiences, grouped with stories of students I knew that came from colleges around the country, provided proof that the anti-intellectual left had taken over the academy and were currently churning out graduates lacking in everything but a political indoctrination in the ideology that matched their professors.
Several years ago, I remember sharing my college experiences with friends and family. I was almost always surprised that everyone was willing to recognize that some of my arguments concerning the decline of the modern academy were true, but it seemed that no one believed the pandemic of indoctrination had infected anything but the most prestigious universities (who have been widely recognized as the most "liberal"). Outside of my own personal experiences, the only accounts of bias in academia that I could reference were from the growing amounts of published works highlighting bias and indoctrination in schools like Stanford, Harvard, Princeton, Dartmouth, and even some notable state schools like the University of Michigan. Sure these schools provided ample proof that bias in the academy existed, but my focusing on them only prevented the connection necessary for most of my friends and family to take notice and be concerned.
During this time, I had a lengthy eye-opening conversation with my mother about this issue. I was attending my final semester at Glendale Community College where I had spent much of my outside-of-class time fighting for intellectual diversity on campus. At one point, I even enlisted the help of local talk radio host Bruce Jacobs in exposing some of the most grotesque examples of the professorial left preaching to students on our campus during the lead-up to the Iraq War. When Jacobs discussed the outright indoctrination of one of the professors at GCC on the radio, he received several phone calls from students around the Phoenix area who had similar experiences at other small community colleges. Having seen me go through this experience, I was surprised by my mother's reaction when I mentioned to her that I wasn't looking forward to attending Arizona State University West after I completed my A.A. degree, considering there I would confront tenured Ph.D.'s, more activist student/professorial organizations, and classes more committed to the ideology of the left. She fervently disagreed with my prediction that ASUW would be a Marxist youth camp, because it had the (false) reputation - unlike the larger Main campus - of being a business school catering to older students. She was convinced that even though I had experienced "a few" leftist professors at my community college, state schools like ASUW attract older, more mature, and typically more conservative students who cannot afford to go to Ivy-League schools. In her eyes, this meant that activism by professors wouldn't be accepted, because the more mature crowd was beyond that idealistic stage where they were so susceptible to leftwing ideology. This made her confident that my experience at ASUW would be relatively benign and enjoyable.
The conversation with my mother helped to ingrain in me an understanding that "middle-America" has difficulty believing there is a problem with higher learning, or at least a difficulty in confronting it, because they don't feel it effects them. If the majority of Americans think that bias and indoctrination in the academy are limited to Ivy-League institutions and the most prominent universities, where the majority of the 15 million college students in this country do not attend school, then why should they feel the need to combat the problem? If "middle-America" can make themselves believe (such as my mother did years ago, although she has rightly adjusted her opinion since) that the problems of the American university exist only at schools like Harvard, Stanford, and UC Berkeley, then why should they spend their precious time to combat a problem that plagues only the most elite, and usually the most wealthy, young Americans?
This is where the academic freedom movement has fallen short, and it is where we must begin to develop new evidence in order to show that the problem is more universal. We must show that the fundamental collapse of academic freedom in the academy has not been relegated to just the most prestigious universities, but rather to the majority of them. Americans will begin to care when they begin to see that not just "America's future elites" are being brainwashed, but rather "America's future everything-else" are being brainwashed as well. If we want "middle-American" moms and dads to care that the local, state university they are sending their kids to is going to churn out individuals in four years that they no longer recognize, then it's time we start showing them evidence that schools like the University of North Dakota, the Blue River Community College in Missouri, and the University of Memphis (Tennessee) are being brainwashed by the same corrupting influences of nihilism, moral relativism, and anti-Americanism as their more "elite" counterparts.
Fortunately, some elements of the academic freedom movement are beginning to understand this. At studentsforacademicfreedom.org , concerned citizens can read news stories from all corners of the country relating to bias in the academy, and frequently these stories discuss schools that most of us may not have heard of before. They can see that there are now more than 150 university chapters of SAF at schools ranging from Canisius College to the University of Rochester. At each of these institutions, students have become so concerned about the bias they experience that they have appropriately taken the next step to combat it by joining a nationwide coalition with that exact aim. It would make sense to utilize these schools not just as evidence of the complete left-wing takeover of the American academy, but also as evidence that there is a widespread call by concerned students to combat it as well.
As Ward Churchill falls back into the shadows of academia, we must take from him the most important lesson his story was able to show us. We must realize that this professor from the University of Colorado provoked more outrage from the public then the comments made by a certain Columbia University professor, regarding "a million Mogadishus", a few years ago. We must understand that this isn't because Americans didn't previously care that there was a problem with the academy, but rather because we have failed to prove to them why they should. So now that we know that we must continue to connect with "middle-America" since we finally have their attention, it is time to prove that professors like Ward Churchill are just symptoms of a disease more vast, more dangerous, and more close to home then Americans ever realized before.