Wes Vernon
Monday September 15, 2003

Students for Academic Freedom (SAF) is making a concerted challenge to academia to allow the "free and open discussion" in "the marketplace of ideas" to which it has long given lip service while conducting a reign of terror against conservative professors and students.

As NewsMax.com predicted last week, this movement is beginning to make headlines. And this is only the beginning.

Already, an uproar over this issue in Colorado has made the front page of the Washington Times. Look for movement in many other states and very possibly in Congress here in Washington.

"Free inquiry and free speech within the academic community are indispensable," says the SAF proclamation reviewed by NewsMax.

Intellectual diversity is the SAF concept. "No party or intellectual faction has a monopoly on wisdom," it argues.

Therefore, "academic freedom is most likely to thrive in an environment of intellectual diversity that protects independence of thought and speech."

Here are the main goals laid out by these students who are fed up with "speech codes," professors who flunk students because of their conservative views and block the hiring or tenure of independent thinking professors:

1 — No political, ideological, or religious orthodoxy will be imposed on professors and researchers "through the hiring or tenure or termination process, or through any other administrative means by the academic institution." Rather all faculty "shall be hired, fired, promoted and granted tenure on he basis of their competence and appropriate knowledge in the field of their expertise."

2 — Tenure, search and hiring committee deliberations "will be recorded and made available to appropriately constituted authorities empowered to inquire into the integrity of the process."

3 — Students "will be graded solely on the basis of their reasoned answers and appropriate knowledge" of the disciplines, "not on the basis of their political or religious beliefs."

4 — Academic disciplines should welcome a diversity of approaches to unsettled questions. The document cites a 1910 report on academic freedom which admonished faculty to avoid "taking unfair advantage of the student’s immaturity by indoctrinating him with the teacher’s own opinions" before the student has been able to consider all opinions. Professors may express their own views, but must make students aware of other viewpoints.

5 – Selection of speakers shall "promote intellectual pluralism." Further, "the obstruction of invited campus speakers, destruction of campus literature or other efforts to obstruct [the free] exchange [of ideas] will not be tolerated."

6 - Academic institutions "should maintain a posture of organizational neutrality with respect to the substantive disagreements that divide researchers on questions within or outside their fields of inquiry."

That is a program that encourages free and open debate and intellectual inquiry.

And yet, true to the left’s habit of condemning conservatives for what they themselves are doing, liberal politicians and editorialists in Colorado accuse the lawmakers at the state capitol, who are urging intellectual diversity, of trying to promote a political agenda and are calling for an investigation.

The faculty senate has cried "McCarthyism" and charged the program to allow a diversity of views on campus is a threat to academic freedom.

This is a preview of battles to come. The enemies of free speech cannot tolerate anyone who challenges their near monopoly in "the marketplace of ideas."

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