Although at least one of her political science professors told her that individuals do not make a difference, Ruth Malhotra (pictured), a soft-spoken, petite, rising senior at Georgia Tech, proved that lecturer wrong.
Ruth took her tale of classroom bias off campus, to the Education Committee of the Georgia State Assembly. And what a story it was!
When she told her political science professor [not the tacitly anti-individual one] that she would miss a class in order to attend the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington, D. C., the prof said, “Then I’ll have to fail you for the course.” “I didn’t think that she was serious,” Ruth told me in our September 2nd radio interview. Ruth found out how serious the professor was when she got her first test back. The professor gave Ruth, who has made the Dean’s list every single semester that she has been at Georgia Tech, an “F.”
We should point out that Ruth rarely skips class and on that rare one that she missed, no test was at stake. That she even brought up this absence well in advance of the date is further proof of her diligence.
The Education Committee, after hearing Ruth’s testimony, favorably reported the Academic Bill of Rights to the state assembly’s upper chamber, which passed it. Though the bill still sits there, the exposure of the school’s practices led to some tangible changes at Georgia Tech.
For one thing, the Academic Bill of Rights became required reading in Ruth’s political philosophy class. And, Ruth was permitted to retake the CPAC-deferred course, with another professor. This time she got an “A.”
Such changes are not inconsiderable on that campus. “I don’t remember ever having an openly conservative professor,” Ruth said on Campus Report’s early September broadcast on www.rightalk.com.
And how far from the other side of the plate do they swing? “I have had professors passionately defend communism,” Ruth said. “I had an atheist professor who said that Jesus was a communist. I must have missed that lesson in Sunday school.”
Georgia Tech was originally a military school. Even today, the school offers an ROTC program, which is rare in higher education. On the technical side—in the agriculture and engineering departments particularly—the school leans conservative. Nonetheless, the liberal arts departments at Georgia Tech live up to the worst connotation of that phrase. For example, Ruth has even heard one political science professor make fun of some students’ Georgia accents right in their own home state.
What’s next for Miss Malhotra? Her campus College Republicans are planning the first September 11, 2001 memorial that the school has held since 2002. That was the last year in which Georgia Tech honored the victims of the terrorist attacks on Washington, D. C. and New York City.
Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.
