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Mr. SOUDER. I thank my distinguished friend from Washington State.
A little bit of irony here. I had an amendment that we fully debated in committee on students' free speech, and I wanted to offer it today. But isn't it ironic that while I was trying to argue for a student bill of rights and free speech, that we're not allowed to have free speech and a bill of rights in the United States Congress. How in the world, when we're having 27 amendments, and this amendment was overwhelmingly supported by our party, we only have, out of 27, four from Republicans, and two of those are Republican opposed. If we have time for 27 amendments, why can't we have an amendment for free speech? I just don't understand.
I never understood the opposition to the amendment, but what an insult to the American people that when we want to debate whether there should be a student bill of rights on campuses, which is being adopted and introduced in many places around the country, that the United States Congress can't even debate on the House floor a free speech amendment and protection for speech in colleges. This is an outrage, an embarrassment, and a humiliation to the Rules Committee. Why 27 amendments, but not one on a student bill of rights? Could it be that it's a difficult vote?
David Horowitz, and I will insert into the Record an article, ``In Defense of Intellectual Diversity,'' has been a champion of this problem. Now, we had a very interesting debate in committee. The chairman of the committee said that some of these students who have been complaining should grow up, and cited a case of where he struggled. And certainly when I was a college student in the late sixties and early seventies and wore a button ``I'm proud to be a square'' when most of America wasn't proud to be a square, I certainly had my share of debates, my share of harassment, my share of being yelled down, trying to offer a differing view than the view that was popular in the late sixties. And some of that goes with being on a college campus, but there are examples all over this country where intellectual diversity, intellectual alternatives are being stymied in academia. This amendment would try to protect those rights.
Some of it's from the far left; a lot of it is on the conservative side right now. In fact, next Tuesday Ben Stein has a movie coming out, ``Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed,'' that will debut about one of those debates in science. Where there is an effort to stamp it out, particularly when you get into government, economics, sociology, philosophy, and so on, increasingly there is a rigidity; and if you disagree you are harassed, your grades can be altered, your papers can be given back to you, speeches and alternative speakers are shouted down. And, yes, there are nominal processes to do it, but if there are nominal processes to do it, what is wrong? This amendment says, for example, ``Individual colleges and universities have different missions and each institution should design its academic program in accordance. Within the context of institutional mission, the college should promote intellectual pluralism and facilitate free and open exchange of ideas.'' Well, that's not very controversial.
``D, Students should not be intimidated, harassed, discouraged from speaking out, discriminated against, or subject to official sanctions because of their personal, political, ideological or religious beliefs.'' Isn't that a terrible, risky, difficult vote?
``Students should be treated equally and fairly, including evaluation and grading, without regard to or consideration of their personal political views or ideological beliefs.'' That's just awful. How could we vote on that in the United States Congress to say there would be no persecution? There is no ``whereas'' clauses here. There's nothing in here that says campuses are liberal, campuses are conservative. We don't have any ``whereas'' clauses that are insulting in here. There is nothing in here that's partisan; I just read you the guts of the bill.
Why can't we vote on this? Why is this opposed? Why is it opposed so much that we're not even allowed to debate it on the floor of Congress? How can we say, in a higher education bill, that we believe in inquiry, that we believe in searching for knowledge, but when we had an amendment to protect students who might have a difference of opinion that we wouldn't even allow a vote?
[From the Chronicle Review, Feb. 13, 2004]
In Defense of Intellectual Diversity
(By David Horowitz)
I am the author of the Academic Bill of Rights, which many student governments, colleges and universities, education commissions, and legislatures are considering adopting. Already, the U.S. House of Representatives has introduced a version as legislation, and the Senate should soon follow suit.
State governments are also starting to rally around efforts to protect student rights and intellectual diversity on campuses: In Colorado, the State Senate president, John K. Andrews Jr., has been very concerned about the issue, and State Rep. Shawn Mitchell has just introduced legislation requiring public institutions to create and publicize processes for protecting students against political bias. Lawmakers in four other states have also expressed a strong interest in legislation of their own, based on some version of the Academic Bill of Rights. Students for Academic Freedom is working to secure the measure's adoption by student governments and university administrations on 105 member campuses across the country (http://www.studentsforacademicfreedomÐ.org).
The Academic Bill of Rights is based squarely on the almost 100-year-old tradition of academic freedom that the American Association of University Professors has established. The bill's purposes are to codify that tradition; to emphasize the value of ``intellectual diversity,'' already implicit in the concept of academic freedom; and, most important, to enumerate the rights of students to not be indoctrinated or otherwise assaulted by political propagandists in the classroom or any educational setting.
Although the AAUP has recognized student rights since its inception, however, most campuses have rarely given them the attention or support they deserve. In fact, it is safe to say that no college or university now adequately defends them. Especially recently, with the growing partisan activities of some faculty members and the consequent politicization of some aspects of the curriculum, that lack of support has become one of the most pressing issues in the academy.
Moreover, because I am a well-known conservative and have published studies of political bias in the hiring of college and university professors, critics have suggested that the Academic Bill of Rights is really a ``right-wing plot'' to stack faculties with political conservatives by imposing hiring quotas. Indeed, opponents of legislation in Colorado have exploited that fear, writing numerous op-ed pieces about alleged right-wing plans to create affirmative-action programs for conservative professors.
Nothing could be further from the truth. The actual intent of the Academic Bill of Rights is to remove partisan politics from the classroom. The bill that I'm proposing explicitly forbids political hiring or firing: ``No faculty shall be hired or fired or denied promotion or tenure on the basis of his or her political or religious beliefs.'' The bill thus protects all faculty members--left-leaning critics of the war in Iraq as well as right-leaning proponents of it, for example--from being penalized for their political beliefs. Academic liberals should be as eager to support that principle as conservatives.
Some liberal faculty members have expressed concern about a phrase in the bill of rights that singles out the social sciences and humanities and says hiring in those areas should be based on competence and expertise and with a view toward ``fostering a plurality of methodologies and perspectives.'' In fact, the view that there should be a diversity of methodologies is already accepted practice. Considering that truth is unsettled in these discipline areas, why should there not be an attempt to nurture a diversity of perspectives as well?
Perhaps the concern is that ``fostering'' would be equivalent to ``mandating.'' The Academic Bill of Rights contains no intention, implicit or otherwise, to mandate or produce an artificial ``balance'' of intellectual perspectives. That would be impossible to achieve and would create more mischief than it would remedy. On the other hand. a lack of diversity is not all that difficult to detect or correct.
By adopting the Academic Bill of Rights, an institution would recognize scholarship rather than ideology as an appropriate academic enterprise. It would strengthen educational values that have been eroded by the unwarranted intrusion of faculty members' political views into the classroom. That corrosive trend has caused some academics to focus merely on their own partisan agendas and to abandon their responsibilities as professional educators with obligations to students of all political persuasions. Such professors have lost sight of the vital distinction between education and indoctrination, which--as the AAUP recognized in its first report on academic freedom, in 1915--is not a legitimate educational function.
Because the intent of the Academic Bill of Rights is to restore academic values, I deliberately submitted it in draft form to potential critics who did not share my political views. They included Stanley Fish, dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago; Michael Bérubé, a professor of English at Pennsylvania State University at University Park; Todd Gitlin, a professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia University; and Philip Klinkner, a professor of government at Hamilton College. While their responses differed, I tried to accommodate the criticisms I got, for example deleting a clause in the original that would have required the deliberations of all committees in charge of hiring and promotion to be recorded and made available to a ``duly constituted authority.''
I even lifted wholesale one of the bill's chief tenets--that colleges and professional academic associations should remain institutionally neutral on controversial political issues--from an article that Dean Fish wrote for The Chronicle (``Save the World on Your Own Time,'' January 23, 2003). He has also written an admirable book, Professional Correctness (Clarendon Press, 1995), which explores the inherent conflict between ideological thinking and scholarship.
Since the Academic Bill of Rights is designed to clarify and extend existing principles of academic freedom, its opponents have generally been unable to identify specific provisions that they find objectionable. Instead, they have tried to distort the plain meaning of the text. The AAUP itself has been part of that effort, suggesting in a formal statement that the bill's intent is to introduce political criteria for judging intellectual diversity and, thus, to subvert scholarly standards. It contends that the bill of rights ``proclaims that all opinions are equally valid,'' which ``negates an essential function of university education.'' The AAUP singles out for attack a phrase that refers to ``the uncertainty and unsettled character of all human knowledge'' as the rationale for respecting diverse viewpoints in curricula and reading lists in the humanities and social sciences. The AAUP claims that ``this premise ..... is anti-thetical to the basic scholarly enterprise of the university, which is to establish and transmit knowledge.''
The association's statements are incomprehensible. After all, major schools of thought in the contemporary academy--pragmatism, postmodernism, and deconstructionism, to name three--operate on the premise that knowledge is uncertain and, at times, relative. Even the hard sciences, which do not share such relativistic assumptions, are inspired to continue their research efforts by the incomplete state of received knowledge. The university's mission is not only to transmit knowledge but to pursue it--and from all vantage points. What could be controversial about acknowledging that? Further, the AAUP's contention that the Academic Bill of Rights threatens true academic standards by suggesting that all opinions are equally valid is a red herring, as the bill's statement on intellectual diversity makes clear: ``Exposing students to the spectrum of significant scholarly viewpoints on the subjects examined in their courses is a major responsibility of faculty.'' (Emphasis added.)
As the Academic Bill of Rights states, ``Academic disciplines should welcome a diversity of approaches to unsettled questions.'' That is common sense. Why not make it university policy?
The only serious opposition to the Academic Bill of Rights is raised by those who claim that, although its principles are valid, it duplicates academic-freedom guidelines that already exist. Elizabeth Hoffman, president of the University of Colorado System, for example, has personally told me that she takes that position.
But with all due respect, such critics are also mistaken. Most universities' academic-freedom policies generally fail to make explicit, let alone codify, the institutions' commitment to intellectual diversity or the academic rights of students. The institutions also do not make their policies readily available to students--who, therefore, are generally not even aware that such policies exist.
For example, when I met with Elizabeth Hoffman, she directed me to the University of Colorado's Web site, where its academic-freedom guidelines are posted. Even if those guidelines were adequate, posting them on an Internet site does not provide sufficient protection for students, who are unlikely to visit it. Contrast the way that institutions aggressively promote other types of diversity guidelines--often establishing special offices to organize and enforce all sorts of special diversity-related programs--to such a passive approach to intellectual diversity.
At Colorado's Web site, for example, one can read the following: ``Sections of the AAUP's 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure have been adopted as a statement of policy by the Board of Regents.'' Few people reading that article or visiting the site would suspect that the following protection for students is contained in the AAUP's 1940 statement: ``Teachers are entitled to freedom in the classroom in discussing their subject, but they should be careful not to introduce into their teaching controversial matter which has no relation to their subject.''
Is there a college or university in America--including the University of Colorado--where at least one professor has not introduced controversial matter on the war in Iraq or the Bush White House in a class whose subject matter is not the war in Iraq, or international relations, or presidential administrations? Yet intrusion of such subject matter, in which the professor has no academic expertise, is a breach of professional responsibility and a violation of a student's academic rights.
We do not go to our doctors' offices and expect to see partisan propaganda posted on the doors, or go to hospital operating rooms and expect to hear political lectures from our surgeons. The same should be true of our classrooms and professors, yet it is not. When I visited the political-science department at the University of Colorado at Denver this year, the office doors and bulletin boards were plastered with cartoons and statements ridiculing Republicans, and only Republicans. When I asked President Hoffman about that, she assured me that she would request that such partisan materials be removed and an appropriate educational environment restored. To the best of my knowledge, that has yet to happen.
Not everyone would agree about the need for such restraint, and it should be said that the Academic Bill of Rights makes no mention of postings and cartoons--although that does not mean that they are appropriate. I refer to them only to illustrate the problem that exists in the academic culture when it comes to fulfilling professional obligations that professors owe to all students. I would ask liberal professors who are comfortable with such partisan expressions how they would have felt as students seeking guidance from their own professors if they had to walk a gantlet of cartoons portraying Bill Clinton as a lecher, or attacking antiwar protesters as traitors.
The politicized culture of the university is the heart of the problem. At Duke University this year, a history professor welcomed his class with the warning that he had strong ``liberal'' opinions, and that Republican students should probably drop his course. One student did. Aided by Duke Students for Academic Freedom, the young man then complained. To his credit, the professor apologized. Although some people on the campus said the professor had been joking, the student clearly felt he faced a hostile environment. Why should the professor have thought that partisanship in the classroom was professionally acceptable in the first place?
At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a required summer-reading program for entering freshmen stirred a controversy in the state legislature last fall. The required text was Barbara Ehrenreich's socialist tract on poverty in America, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America (Metropolitan Books, 2001). Other universities have required the identical text in similar programs, and several have invited Ehrenreich to campus to present her views under the imprimatur of the institution and without rebuttal.
That reflects an academic culture unhinged. When a university requires a single partisan text of all its students, it is a form of indoctrination, entirely inappropriate for an academic institution. If many universities had required Dinesh D'Souza's Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus (Vintage Books, 1992) or Ann Coulter's Treason: Liberal Treachery From the Cold War to the War on Terrorism (Crown Forum, 2003) as their lone freshman-reading text, there would have been a collective howl from liberal faculties, who would have immediately recognized the inappropriateness of such institutional endorsement of controversial views. Why not require two texts, or four? (My stepson, who is a high-school senior, was required to read seven texts during his summer vacation.)
The remedy is so simple. Requiring readings on more than one side of a political controversy would be appropriate educational policy and would strengthen, not weaken, the democracy that supports our educational system. Why is that not obvious to the administrators at Chapel Hill and the other universities that have instituted such required-reading programs? It's the academic culture, stupid.
Ms. SUTTON. Mr. Speaker, I'd like to take this opportunity to refresh the memory of my colleagues on the other side of the aisle on past rules.
The last time the higher education reauthorization bill was considered in the House was just 2 years ago, in the 109th Congress. It, too, was done under a structured amendment process using two rules. Those two structured rules allowed a total of 22 amendments out of the 113 submitted, fewer than the rule we are offering today.
This is a very fair rule, and I urge my colleagues to support it and the bill. The rule makes in order 27 amendments on a wide variety of important issues relating to the higher education of our Nation's youth and others seeking a post-secondary education. Members on both sides of the aisle will be able to offer amendments that they believe will further improve this already very bipartisan bill.
This bill is one of the most bipartisan products of the 110th Congress, reported from the Education and Labor Committee by a vote of 45-0. There is no arguing with those facts.
And, Mr. Speaker, the benefits of higher education are undeniable for students, their families, and for our country and society at large. As a nation, we recognize this, having always been a global standard bearer and our high regard for the merits of higher education. Reaching the American Dream of leading a secure and fulfilling life is a goal that we can make achievable when we open the doors of college to all.
The fact that this bill passed 45-0 out of the Education Committee is a testament to the great work that the committee has done on this bill and to the fact that we care tremendously about the future of our children.
Listening to parents from my district, Mr. Speaker, and across the country, I hear about how the ability to send their children to college weighs on their minds. And talking to professors, counselors, and administrators at the University of Akron, Loraine County Community College, and other schools across Ohio, I also know that student debt is a tremendous factor in determining which professions our students are choosing to enter.
Nearly two-thirds of all students at 4-year colleges nationwide graduate with loan debt these days, with the average amount of debt surpassing $15,000. This bill we're passing goes a long way to changing that distressing fact.
By increasing aid and encouraging colleges to rein in tuition, this legislation will enable more students to pursue their passions and give back in service to their communities and our country.
I am proud that this bill continues the work of this New Direction Congress in making necessary improvements for the workforce of tomorrow. We have seen the necessity of investing in stem education, and this legislation continues the effort we began last year in passing the innovation agenda by improving teacher training and development programs and focusing on recruiting teachers into high-demand science and technology fields.
In today's global economy, it's essential that America's workforce remain competitive at an international level.
Mr. Speaker, the Higher Education Act has not been reauthorized in a decade. The Senate has already passed a reauthorization, so we must act expediently to pass this vital bill so the President may sign it into law.
I hope that my colleagues on both sides of the aisle will join me in voting for this bill and supporting a brighter future for our students, our families, and our communities.
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