Stuart Taylor's brilliant rant in this week's National Journal ("Academia's Pervasive PC Rot") says "the cancerous spread of ideologically eccentric, intellectually shoddy, phony-diversity-obsessed fanaticism among university faculties and administrators is far, far worse and more inexorable than most alumni, parents, and trustees suspect."

There's an obvious explanation of why so many university watchers don't seem to know what's going on: the news media are extremely reluctant to report on what the increasingly coercive diversity lobby is doing to the campuses.

The brainwashing and indoctrination at the University of Delaware (and anyone who has read the voluminous documents in the case knows that use of these words is surely fair) has been pervasively reported on conservative blogs and right-wing radio. But the left has been silent and the mainstream media have almost universally avoided telling alumni, parents and trustees what is going on. Only a few news outlets covered the story. The Wilmington News Journal ran a piece headlined "Some Made Uneasy by UD Diversity Training", thus reducing indoctrination to discomfort. The Philadelphia Inquirer ran a similarly soft report that used the headline word "unsettled" instead of "uneasy." The story's lead: "When University of Delaware freshmen showed up at their dorms this semester, their orientation included an exercise aimed at bridging cultural

Sharad Karkhanis, professor emeritus at Kingsborough Community College, is a vitriolic critic of the faculty union at the City University of New York. He's accused Susan O'Malley, another professor at Kingsborough, of seeking to "recruit terrorists" to teach at CUNY. O'Malley has responded with a two million dollar libel suit, reports the New York Post:

In papers filed in Manhattan Supreme Court, Susan O'Malley charges that professor emeritus Sharad Karkhanis defamed her by accusing her of having an "obsession with finding jobs for terrorists" in recent issues of a newsletter he's been e-mailing to CUNY faculty members for 15 years.

Citing O'Malley's efforts to land jobs for convicted activist lawyer Lynne Stewart's co-defendant Mohammed Yousry and former Weather Underground member Susan Rosenberg, Karkhanis wrote:

"Has Queen O'Malley ever made a 'Job Wanted' announcement like this for a nonconvicted, nonviolent, peace-loving American educator for a job in CUNY? . . . Why does she prefer convicted terrorists bent on harming our people and our nation over peace-loving Americans?"

Karkhanis considers his writing to be satire. It's not particularly civil language; but then again, as KC Johnson has pointed out, two of O'Malley's prospective hires were terrorists, or quite near to being ones - Susan Rosenberg "was a member of a terrorist organization" and Mohammed Yousry "was accused and convicted of aiding a convicted terrorist." Not all, predictably, agree on the substance of the comments: John K. Wilson, for one, has called them "idiotic" but he does dub the idea of a two million dollar libel suit in response as "frivolous and absurd." Fortunately, others agree; a new blog, "Free Speech At CUNY" has ably taken up Karkhanis' case.

"Free Speech At CUNY" offers some delightful background on Karkhanis' assailant. O'Malley, former university faculty senate chair, former faculty representative on the CUNY board of trustees, and an all-around perennial in CUNY union posts, was the arranger of a 2004 CUNY conference on "Defining and Defending Academic Freedom"; the site provides the text of numerous faculty union statements on "dissent" and "academic freedom" in which O'Malley, as part of the union leadership, seems to have had a hand. The current case is useful in clarifying what she actually meant; freedom for her, libel suits for her opponent.

William and Mary's new and anonymous bias reporting system is so wrong-headed that it's hard to know where to begin protesting it. Some anonymous reports are legitimate, as Eugene Volokh argues at the Volokh Conspiracy, but calling for a college's entire student body to watch out for bias, and then turn in their fellow students or professors, is not a good idea. This is particularly so in an era when campuses are busy fostering victimology and minority-group identities based on the allegedly permanent hostililty of majority groups. Under these circumstances, it makes much more sense to avoid placing full-time bias awareness front and center in the minds of students. Hearsay and marginal or ambiguous incidents are bound to be reported, probably with sensitivities, suspicions and resentments increased. Legitimate protests will increasingly be reported as intolerable provocations. And the anonymity is bound to rankle. A web site opposing the new bias reporting opens with the comment "Let's disband William and Mary's new schoolyard tattletale system before the lawsuits commence and William and Mary again becomes the subject of national jokes." Surely there is a better way to encourage civility and respect than setting up a formal program for snitches.

Many universities try to indoctrinate students, but the all-time champion in this category is surely the University of Delaware. With no guile at all the university has laid out a brutally specific program for "treatment" of incorrect attitudes of the 7,000 students in its residence halls. The program is close enough to North Korean brainwashing that students and professors have been making "made in North Korea" jokes about the plan. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) has called for the program to be dismantled.

Residential assistants charged with imposing the "treatments" have undergone intensive training from the university. The training makes clear that white people are to be considered racists - at least those who have not yet undergone training and confessed their racism. The RAs have been taught that a "racist is one who is both privileged and socialized on the basis of race by a white supremacist (racist) system. The term applies to all white people (i.e., people of European descent) living in the United States, regardless of class, gender, religion, culture, or sexuality."

The University of St. Thomas has now, predictably, re-invited Desmond Tutu to speak, after revoking his invitation over earlier concerns about his thoughts on Israel.

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports:

Rev. Dennis J. Dease, president of the university, sent a letter to students and members of the faculty and staff on Wednesday, saying he had changed his mind about the archbishop's appearance and would now like to formally invite him to visit the university, in St. Paul.

In the contemporary academy, no speaking invitation is ever secure, nor, it seems, is one ever really canceled. Yet another proof of the gossamer public stances of university administrations.

Bored of reading? Want something to hear?

See John Leo and Peter Berkowitz discuss the afflictions of the modern academy in our new podcast.

You can read a passel of editorials on Ahmadinejad above, and if you're enterprising, you can easily find another, oh, thirty of so op-eds on the topic of his appearance. None of these, except for one, address any substantive findings from Ahmadinejad's speech, because there weren't any.

That one exception, The Columbia Spectator now urges that "students, professors and administrators must think critically about what we have learned from him - particularly his provocative thoughts on the plight of the Palestinians, Iran's nuclear program, and how Western imperialism has helped shape the Middle East." Provocative thoughts? Is there a single person who wasn't aware of his precise views on these topics?

Bollinger's bromides against Ahmadinejad made clear that there was no real exchange or debate, or honesty expected, from the start, and that was exactly the case. Did we learn anything from him that we didn't know already - aside from the fact that Iran doesn't have homosexuals like this country? Bollinger's new rhetoric of boundless free speech clouded another important scale; that of academic worth. Columbia provided a spectacle to the public, and a jolt to op-ed pages, but it's still not clear what academic benefit it provided its students.

President Bollinger is displaying a new-found talent for confounding expectations. After barring Ahmadinejad from Columbia last year, he suddenly invited him back on Wednesday, to widespread criticism, for offering a platform to a despot. Then, Bollinger further surprised with a caustic introduction and a roundup of pointed questions about Iranian nuclear ambitions, persecution of women and homosexuals, Holocaust denial, the jailing of scholars, aid to insurgents in Iraq, and the execution of minors. At this point, Bollinger did not simply wait to hear Ahmadinejad, but summed up a blistering (that seems to be everyone's word for it) statement:

Today I feel all the weight of the modern civilized world yearning to express the revulsion at what you stand for. I only wish I could do better.

Bollinger, continues his shock-the-world week in displaying a heretofore unknown capacity for indictment. Suffice it to say that Ahmadinejad was not much of a sparring partner. Bollinger is now basking in a well-deserved tide of compliments for his comments. His worthy broadsides haven't swept aside any of the larger questions concerning Ahmadinejad's apperance, though. The event took a form that was far from everyone's expectations - to Bollinger's considerable credit. Ahmadinejad was not accorded the place of respect that many feared he would enjoy, but instead roundly condemned. That's good.

There's still something very odd about Bollinger's attitude towards the event, though. If he viewed it as a conditional occasion to barb Ahmadinejad, then good for him - but he seemed to think that hosting the Iranian President was now a duty.

This is the right thing to do and indeed, it is required by the existing norms of free speech, of Columbia University and of academic institutions.

This is not the Bollinger of last year, who canceled Ahmadinejad's speaking appearance - and was well within his rights in doing that. But now Columbia must host him? There's no doubt that universities tend to be far more censorious and inattentive to free speech than they should, but Bollinger's free speech epiphany doesn't shed a single bit of light on the topic of campus free speech. What exactly is "required?" To receive Ahmadinejad now? To receive world leaders? To receive vulpine Iranians? Bollinger displayed admirable clarity in condemning Ahmadinejad today, but that shouldn't cloud the fact that otherwise he has continued on his usual path, as the most confusing "first amendment scholar" of our day.

The New York Times City Room is blogging on Ahmadinejad's Columbia speech. Read this passage from President Bollinger and see if it makes any sense:

"To those who believe that this event should never have happened, that it is inappropriate for the university to conduct such an event, I want to say that I understand your perspective and respect it as resaonable." He said, "It is an experiment, as all life is an experiment." He added, "This is the right thing to do and indeed, it is required by the existing norms of free speech, of Columbia University" and of academic institutions. He added that he regretted if people were hurt by the speech, and he called the "intellectual and emotional courage" to "confront the mind of evil." "We cannot make war or peace, we can only make minds," he said.

Huh?

Was Bollinger calling Ahmadinejad the mind of evil?

I don't think Bollinger will clarify.

Erwin Chemerinsky, a noted constitutional scholar and law professor at Duke for 21 years, has just been hired and then fired as the first dean of the University of California, Irvine, Law School, which opens in 2009. Irvine's chancellor, Michael Drake, explained the firing by saying "he had not been aware of how Chemerinsky's political views would make him a target for criticism from conservatives," according to Brian Leiter's Law School Reports, a blog on legal academia.

If the blog report is accurate, the treatment of Chemerinsky is a test case for conservatives who support free speech and argue vehemently against political tests for faculty and administration appointments. Do these principles apply only to conservatives, or do they protect liberals as well?

Chemerinsky is indeed very liberal and very outspoken. He particularly irritated many religious conservatives by lumping Christian fundamentalists with Islamic fundamentalists as threats to democratic principles. So argue with him, but don't try to get him fired.

For one thing, the chancellor had plenty of time to think about the impact of hiring Chermerinsky, and to reject him if he chose. But it's disgraceful to hire the man, fire him immediately and then explain that you are doing so to cave into political pressure. The chancellor, the school and Chemerinsky all suffer from this sort of amateurish behavior. And if the chancellor does not reverse course and accept Chemerinsky, he puts the next choice for dean in an untenable position - he will inevitably be seen as a safe nominee, so harmless that no political pressure group will try to oust him. The reputation of the law school would decline two years before opening.

"I've been a liberal law professor for 28 years," Chemerinsky said. I write lots of op-eds and articles, I argue high-profile cases and I expected there would be some concern about me. My hope was that I'd address it by making the law school open to all viewpoints. He said he has begun to assemble a board of advisors that would have included conservatives such as Viet Dinh, a law professor at Georgetown, and Deanell Reece Tacha, a judge on the 10th Circuit Court.

Writing anonymously on the Wall Street Journal site, different Duke law students offered both praise and criticism for Chemerinsky. A pro-Chemerinsky opinion said: "To respond to allegations of anti-conservative bias - these cannot be further from the truth. Equal air time was always given to both sides during class, and with regard to his Con Law final, I wrote a final exam that could only be described as 'Scalia-esque' and received a 4.0."

Do the right thing, chancellor, and re-hire Chemerinsky.

The Supreme Court's Morse v. Frederick decision was questionable on several grounds. In upholding a high school's right to regulate student speech "reasonably regarded as encouraging illegal drug use," the justices took the student banner "Bong Hits for Jesus" much too seriously. Was it an argument for student access to drugs or a jokey stunt that never should have gotten to the court? Besides the student was displaying the banner off campus, across the street from his school during a school-sponsored welcome for an Olympic procession.

Then there is the issue of general damage to free speech rights. Several free-speech advocates, including David French, then president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education and now director of the Alliance Defense Fund Center for Academic Freedom, warned that censorship-minded universities would cite the Frederick decision as justification for campus speech codes. That has now happened. Temple University points to Morse v. Frederick as backing for its egregious speech code that prohibits "generalized sexist remarks and behavior." The goal is to erode the wall between high school youngsters and adults at college, who traditionally enjoy greater free speech rights.

Attorneys for the Alliance Defense Fund filed the case against Temple, now before the court of appeals for the third circuit. FIRE's amicus brief has been joined by an array of allies, including the ACLU of Pennsylvania, the Christian Legal Society, collegefreedom.org, Feminists for Free Expression, Students for Academic Freedom and the Student Press Law Center. It's an unusually broad coalition for a college free-speech case.

Jay Bergman has a fine new piece up at the NAS Forum, puncturing the sanctimony that surrounds the ever-expanding sphere of "academic freedom" in the minds of many professors (see "Ward Churchill, sober research scholar, victim")

In response to the increasing contention that "academic freedom protects professorial speech in any circumstance Bergman cites the 1940 AAUP Statement of Principles, and its statement that "teachers are entitled to freedom in the classroom in discussing their subject, but should be careful not to introduce into their teaching controversial matter which has no relation to their subject."

At Central Connecticut State University where I am a professor, this distinction is sometimes ignored. Last fall, a professor sent the students in one of her courses more than 100 e-mails containing articles advocating the professor's opinions on matters entirely extraneous to the course -- for example, that Israel committed war crimes while fighting Hamas in Gaza last summer, and that comparisons between the Bush administration and Nazi Germany are reasonable. She also invited students to join her in attending seminars, such as Workshops on Peace, that were designed to advance the professor's political agenda.

What is even worse, during one class, as a way of demonstrating how the American colonists stole Indian land, the same professor took a student's backpack without permission and in front of all the students emptied its contents onto the floor, naming each item one by one. It is hard to imagine a more egregious violation of a student's privacy, or a more flagrant abuse of the power professors have over students by virtue of their grading them and writing recommendations for them for jobs after they graduate.

Unfortunately, this is not uncommon. In my 17 years at CCSU, about half of my students have told me, on their own initiative or in response to my asking them, that one or more of their professors not only interjected their political opinions in class on a regular basis, but did so in an effort to convert their students to their point of view.

Read on.

Stop the presses. The president of a well-known college has actually come out for diversity of ideas, rather than just the narrow form of diversity prized on campus (skin color, gender, sexual orientation). In a baccalaureate address at Middlebury College's graduation, President Ronald D. Liebowitz talked about the "value of discomfort" in listening to and grappling with new ideas. Liebowitz said, "If the wariness about discomfort is stronger than the desire to hear different viewpoints because engaging difference is uncomfortable, then the quest for diversity is hollow, no matter what the demographic statistics on a campus reflect." If the pursuit of diversity is to be intellectually defensible, he said, Middlebury can't just exchange one orthodoxy for another.

At colleges, "discomfort" is a familiar buzzword justifying censorship or punishment for offending the sensibilities of students designated as "underrepresented." That's why coming out in favor of discomfort is a near-heresy in the campus monoculture.

Some students objected to Bill Clinton as this year's commencement speaker, while a larger and more irritated group objected to Middlebury's endowed professorship in American history and culture honoring William Rehnquist. Liebowitz noted that some members of minority groups on campus felt "invisible and disrespected" by the decision to honor Rehnquist and considered it an offense against diversity. Indignant objections to conservative supreme court judges are an old story on campus, including attempts to boycott Antonin Scalia at Amherst and Clarence Thomas at the University of North Carolina Law School.

Some objectors to the Rehnquist professorship claimed that the goal of a liberal education should be to advance social change, and since Rehnquist failed this test, he should not be honored. "I do not share in that narrow definition of a liberal education," Liebowitz said. "Rather, liberal education must be first and foremost about ensuring a broad range of views and opinion in the classrooms and across campus..." Good idea. Will it apply to the hiring of professors as well?

The Boston Globe reports:

A judicial panel at Tufts University on Thursday ruled that a conservative campus journal "harassed" blacks by publishing a Christmas carol parody called "O Come All Ye Black Folk" that many found racist.

The Primary Source, which published the carol, removed the lyrics from their site months ago, and replaced them with a rather sincere apology. The note makes clear that the carol was intended as an affirmative action parody. Does that make sense? Not to this panel. They issued a requirement that an editor sign all pieces, and "recommended that Tufts' student government 'consider the behavior' of the magazine when allocating money."

Bruce Reitman, the dean of students, found this financial threat, well.. rather elegant.

I'm proud of the committee," he said. "I was pleased to see them balance both values of freedom of speech and freedom from harassment, without letting one dominate the other.

Aren't we glad there's someone like Bruce Reitman fighting against the domination of free speech? Thank heavens.

[Indoctrinate U, a documentary by Evan Coyne Maloney on the state of intellectual freedom at American universities, premiered at the Kennedy Center in September 2007 and has screened in multiple locations since. Peter Berkowitz, writing in The Wall Street Journal, called Indoctrinate U a "riveting documentary about the war on free speech and individual rights waged by university faculty and administrators..." John K. Wilson, founder of The Institute for College Freedom, doesn't think the film's quite fair. He provided us a critique of Indoctrinate U and invited us to solicit Maloney's response. You can read Wilson's original review, and Maloney's response here. Below is their second round of comments. Indoctrinate U is screening at select campuses and theaters in the near future; check the film's website for more information (and read our original review here.)]

No.
By John K. Wilson

Maloney objects to my claim that liberty on campus is far better protected today than it's ever been. To disprove this, he writes that FIRE "receives hundreds upon hundreds of reports each year in which those rights have been trampled." But that doesn't prove anything. For example, the ACLU didn't exist until after World War I. The fact that the ACLU publicized violations of civil liberties after 1918 does not show that civil liberties were better protected during World War I, it only shows that we lacked organizations to publicize these violations. For example, virtually all of the speech codes FIRE objects to (and usually with good reason) today were typically far worse in the past, when administrators usually had arbitrary power to punish students without due process, without rules, and without appeal.

As for Ward Churchill, Maloney says that he defended his free speech. He did, but none of that is mentioned in the movie, nor is the fact that Churchill was banned from speaking at some campuses (which is separate from the controversy over his firing). That's a key point considering how Maloney tries to show in the movie that only conservative views are silenced in academia.

Citing the fact that Ignatiev hasn't been censored is a rather odd analysis by Maloney, considering that he ignores the counterexample of Churchill. Maloney, after all, doesn't put on film all of the conservatives who haven't been censored, nor any of the liberals who have. At some point, if you only discuss liberals who haven't been censored and conservatives who have been censored, and ignore the counterevidence, you're twisting the data.

On the Clemens case, Maloney claims that "professors were required to inject into their courses political topics." Clemens called it an "ideological loyalty oath." The Chronicle of Higher Education reported that faculty on campus said it wasn't a requirement to inject political topics in class; it was a requirement that faculty proposing a new class had to answer a dumb question on the form about the role of race, class, and gender in the proposed class. After Clemens objected, he was allowed to leave the question blank and had his course approved. He never had his job threatened in any way, so I dismissed this as rather unimportant compared to the far worse penalties suffered by liberals and conservatives in many colleges. (Contrast that with a case this year where a pacifist Quaker professor was fired under a real loyalty oath.)

[Indoctrinate U, a documentary by Evan Coyne Maloney on the state of intellectual freedom at American universities, premiered at the Kennedy Center in September 2007 and has screened in multiple locations since. Peter Berkowitz, writing in The Wall Street Journal, called Indoctrinate U a "riveting documentary about the war on free speech and individual rights waged by university faculty and administrators..." John K. Wilson, founder of The Institute for College Freedom, doesn't think the film's quite fair. He provided us a critique of Indoctrinate U and invited us to solicit Maloney's response. Here is Wilson's review, followed by Maloney's thoughts. Indoctrinate U is screening at select campuses and theaters in the near future; check the film's website for more information (and read our original review here.)]

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No
By John K. Wilson

Evan Coyne Maloney's new movie, Indoctrinate U, is probably the best documentary ever made about higher education. That fact makes the numerous biases, distortions, and omissions of his work all the more disappointing. But these errors aren't all Maloney's fault; instead, his documentary reflects the mistakes of right-wing critics who often promote false stories or provide one-sided analysis.

What makes Maloney's movie so good is the application of Michael Moore's techniques to the realm of free speech and colleges. Certainly, nobody has ever made such an entertaining documentary about higher education, as Maloney makes effective use of his sarcastic voiceover, fast pacing, and putting himself in front of the camera as he demands answers, in person, from wary administrators who, over and over again, refuse to speak with him.

Maloney even echoes Moore's autobiographical tilt about Flint, Michigan in Roger and Me with his own story about being the son of activists who protested for campus liberty as part of the Free Speech Movement. Maloney concludes: "Somewhere along the way, the Campus Free Speech Movement got killed by university regulations." Actually, the Free Speech Movement got started because of university repression, and the fight continues to this day, although many of the battles have been won. Maloney claims, "Academia today isn't a marketplace at all. It's a monopoly. But it wasn't always like this." All of Maloney's nostalgia to the contrary (and it's amusing to see conservatives embrace the campus liberatory movements of the 1960s), liberty on campus is far better protected today than it's ever been.

Maloney is also guilty of some of Michael Moore's flaws, such as using selective editing to mock those he disagrees with. He takes Noel Ignatiev's theories about whiteness and reduces him to a series of two-second edited clips mangled together, trying to make him look foolish. It only makes Maloney look bad, since he seems unwilling to engage intellectually with a theory he doesn't like and even appears to suggest that thinkers like Ignatiev should be banished from academia since Maloney is annoyed that such ideas are considered "completely legit."

By Stephen Balch

Trustees face a quandary in trying to figure out their role in academic governance. As a matter of law, institutional responsibility is squarely in their hands. On the other hand, while few challenge their oversight in matters managerial and financial, they are routinely warned that when it comes to intellectual content, the heart of university life, they should keep their distance.

Trustees should generally avoid getting involved in judgments about intellectual specifics such as individual personnel decisions, the content of courses, and the structure of particular programs, etc. Usually they will be out of their depth here. But they should be actively engaged in matters pertaining to overall intellectual climate, especially the degree to which such core principles of rational discourse as objectivity, disengagement, meritocracy, civility, and pluralism are honored and institutionalized. Here trustee fair-mindedness, ideological coolness, and intellectual distance, can help keep the ideological passions of academics from running discourse off reason's rails.

Like judges, trustees should see themselves as having a responsibility to ensure that the rules of sound intellectual discourse are recognized, that the academic cultures of the institutions they supervise are "lawful" in a manner that preserves the free and effective exercise of reason. This, of course, is a matter of faculty responsibility too, but since the nature of these rules, in many essentials, simply follow the operating principles of a liberal social order, citizens of that order should be able to understand them well enough to backstop compliance. Trustees need not be scholarly experts to participate meaningfully in the university's intellectual governance. They need only be intelligent and watchful products of a free society.

What types of rules are we speaking of and why should members of a liberal society be able to recognize and help enforce them?

By Donald Downs

In my last essay for Minding the Campus, I discussed how faculty indifference may have contributed indirectly to the establishment of the University of Delaware's now notorious residence hall re-education program. If so, we should consider this a crime of omission rather than a crime of commission. This perspective on the problem either differs from or supplements the claims of many critics of higher education, who blame ideological agendas among faculty as the major cause of campus politicization.

A panel discussion/debate in October between Stephen Balch and Harry Lewis at the Pope Center in North Carolina highlighted this disagreement. The panel dealt with the problems besetting liberal education, focusing on education's aimlessness and failure to instill knowledge and respect for free institutions. Balch and Lewis agreed on several things, but offered two different slants on the ills of higher education. Comparing the views of Balch and Lewis can help us to clarify and refine the problem of politics in higher education today.

Balch, the distinguished president of the National Association of Scholars who recently was awarded the National Humanities Medal in the Oval Office, blamed the ills of liberal education on politicized faculty. According to Jay Schalin's report of the panel, Balch argued that higher education is failing "because it has adopted a left-wing ideology that is at odds with our traditions. The university system, with its population of impressionable young people, is naturally attractive to people with 'an inclination toward visionary and utopian thinking,' and these utopians feel that the purpose of education is to 'move people toward their visions."

By Donald Downs

A lot has been written about the details of the residential life program at the University of Delaware, and the ways in which it has bullied students and residential assistants to accept regnant orthodoxy. The nation's collective hat should go off to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education for exposing this program, and for compelling the university to back down - at least temporarily. The episode brings to mind last spring's heated debate in the Chronicle of Higher Education over whether FIRE was too extreme in its attacks on higher education, and whether FIRE had outlived its usefulness. One case is not statistical proof, but the fact remains that without FIRE, this remarkably repressive program would still be in effect.

I want to address a broader issue in the Delaware case that has not attracted enough attention thus far: the role of non-faculty members in promoting the politicization of higher education. Kathleen Kerr, a mastermind of the Delaware program, is director of residential life for the University of Delaware. Interestingly, as John Leo has recently pointed out, she is also the chairperson of the American College Personnel Association's Commission for Housing and Residential Life - a group with connections to universities across the country.

By Erin O'Connor

Last summer, AAUP president Cary Nelson announced that the AAUP would be issuing a back to school statement on academic freedom in the classroom. Now that statement has gone public - and it makes for very interesting and informative reading.

Written by a subcommittee of the AAUP's Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure, "Freedom in the Classroom" acknowledges that professors have been accused in recent years of indoctrinating rather than educating, of failing to provide balanced perspectives on controversial issues, of creating a hostile learning environment for conservative or religious students, and of injecting irrelevant political asides into class discussion. And as such the statement is ostensibly meant to address the very real issues surrounding faculty classroom conduct that have arisen of late. As anyone who follows higher ed news knows, concerns about whether professors are abusing their pedagogical prerogatives have been repeatedly voiced; and, as the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) and other groups have repeatedly noted, those concerns should be addressed in a manner that is simultaneously respectful of students' rights to learn and professors' academic freedom to teach as they see fit. The AAUP is right to take up the issue of classroom speech, and it is right to seek to parse exactly where faculty academic freedom begins and ends.

The trouble, though, is that the AAUP's statement does not take seriously the questions and complaints to which it purports to respond. A small but telling indicator of the larger problem: When interviewed about the statement by The Chronicle of Higher Education, Nelson said that it is ultimately designed to encourage professors to say to outside critics, "Don't mess with me." In other words - by Nelson's own admission- it's less a rigorously reasoned policy statement than it is a confrontational ultimatum disguised as a policy statement. This maneuver was not at all lost on The Chronicle's Robin Wilson, who wrote that while the statement "is billed as a tool to help professors decide what they can and cannot safely say in the classroom - particularly when it comes to hot-button cultural and political issues," it comes across "more like a defense of the professoriate in the face of heavy criticism" coming from outside the academy.

By Anthony Paletta

Tom Monaghan, founder of Domino's Pizza, Ave Maria University, and the town of Ave Maria, Florida (in that order) obviously isn't attracting media acclaim in his effort to establish a conjoined orthodox Catholic University and Catholic town on a former tomato farm in Southwest Florida. No, he comes off as something as something of an Inquisitor, putting a farm of happily secular Florida tomatoes to the sword to make room for a bishopric of right-wing Catholics. The caviling about Monaghan, for the most part, is easily explained; Monaghan has explicitly proclaimed his intention of creating an orthodox Catholic University, and his critics despise the thought.

Monaghan's truly revolutionary step here isn't imagining a university - it's that he hasn't simply handed his dream over to the standard mush of college administration, but has remained deeply involved with the project - so far as to literally uproot the college over several states. The college's move from the Midwest to Southwest Florida is a rather dramatic example of a founder's influence, but American higher education seems to have altogether forgotten the experience of a living founder in this day of universal rule by amorphous faculty-trustee-administrator confederation (aka "our costs will always go up but no one knows who's responsible"). Faculties are accustomed to Presidents who can be curbed when overly outspoken (Laurence Summers) and administrations are accustomed to routinely ignoring the wishes of donors and trustees (the Bass donation at Yale, the Robertson donation at Princeton). Monaghan is a very different quantity in this mix, an individual who hasn't been content to see his wishes run aground in the morass of standard academic decision-making. He's continued to exert a very active role in his University - a step that professors would see in almost any case as a clear intrusion into their purlieus.

By Anthony Paletta

It's difficult to be anything but pleased by the failure of Norman Finkelstein's DePaul tenure bid. He's a figure of repulsive opinions, given to frequent invective and doubtful scholarship. Yet all should look more carefully at DePaul University's explanation of the step before celebrating. The logical foregrounding for their tenure decision would have been problems with his published scholarship; instead, DePaul justified their decision chiefly with talk of "respect for colleagues." There's little doubt that Finkelstein is a jerk, but DePaul's grounding of its refusal in that fact - instead of holes in his academic work - leaves it open to justified criticism. "Collegiality" is a potentially insidious concept - just ask Walter Kehowski, a professor at Glendale Community College, who was just released from a forced administrative leave for the crime of emailing George Washington's Thanksgiving address to fellow professors. The crime? Creating a "hostile environment." Finkelstein's faults are clearly of a higher order than this, but all should be wary of arguments premised upon a professor's sociability, instead of his scholarship.