The movement for academic freedom has been spurred on by students who have seen bias in the classroom or experienced political discrimination, stood up against it and become activists for their cause.
A handful of these students were in Washington, D.C. to publicly share their stories at the recent Academic Freedom Conference held by Students for Academic Freedom on April 6-7.
Student Mason Harrison, of University of California-Davis, encountered a political rant on the first day of a women’s studies class he’d enrolled in on a wager.
“My professor began the class, not by introducing herself, but by chanting: ‘No on Arnold! No on recall!’” said Harrison, who decided to withdraw from the class, losing the $50 bet.
Harrison also enrolled in a counterterrorism class in which he expected to find balance and insight on world affairs; instead, he was taught that the number one terrorist of all time was Jesus Christ. I guess that means Jesus beat out bin Laden, Hussein, Castro, Hitler, Mao and Stalin. Harrison dropped that class too.
“So I joined College Republicans and did crazy stuff. We registered students to vote, ran petition drives for the recall, held a sit-in to deliver a list of grievances [to the administration] including not having conservative speakers,” Harrison said. “They said, ‘Yes, we have. We had Gerald Ford.’ That was in 1982, but as of 2003 they still did not have one speak,” said Harrison.
He also helped organize the largest Republican youth rally in Sacramento since the 1930s.
Fellow Californian Stephen Miller became an activist while he was still in Santa Monica high school right after 9/11 because the principal decided to deliver a lecture against invading Afghanistan over the public address system and a history teacher dragged an American flag on the floor.
Though he was only a junior, Miller sent the story to Larry Elder, a talk-radio show host who invited him on air. This began Miller’s media campaign against his school which included other media appearances and press coverage. He prevailed against Santa Monica High because he was effectively damaging its public image at a time when they wanted a ballot measure to pass that would increase school funding. He agreed to publicly improve their image if they would adopt a policy of political neutrality for their classrooms, which they did.
Miller also tried to bring David Horowitz to his high school and they fought for three quarters of a year before allowing him to speak. When he finally appeared, a school official told him how happy they were to have him there, the author and activist replied, “No, you’re not. You tried for nine months to keep me out.” Miller now attends Duke University in North Carolina where he founded the Duke Students for Academic Freedom and he was able to bring David Horowitz to speak. At Duke a teacher tried to get people to protest by stripping naked during the speech. This did not happen, but there were people trying to disrupt the speech in other ways.
On the East Coast, senior Marlene Kowal of Temple University said that this semester in her Contemporary China class, the professor proclaimed herself as a Maoist and said her intention in teaching the course was to demonstrate Mao’s greatness. Too bad the teacher didn’t believe her purpose was to educate her students on contemporary Chinese history. According to Kowal, the same teacher proclaimed on March 21st that “During the Maoist period, China was the most equal country in the world. After the post-socialist turn, China is among the most unequal. The rural farmers are now worse off despite the World Bank figures…those figures are untrue.”
Kowal also knows of other student complaints at Temple because she is the chair of the Temple chapter of Students for Academic Freedom and has 20 complaints for this year alone.
Ruth Malhotra encountered something even worse than absurdities offered as facts; punishment for her political views. On the first day of one public policy class at Georgia Tech, Malhotra approached her teacher to ask what must be done to miss one day of class for a trip to Washington, D.C. The teacher asked Malhotra why she was going to D.C., to which she responded—for the Conservative Political Action Conference.
“Then you will probably fail my class,” was the response Malhotra received, although she did not take it seriously until her first test came back with an F.
Up to this point Malhotra had been an A student and the class was a required public policy course [her own major] so dropping the course was not an option; but when the teacher continued to fail her she had to withdraw. With the help of Students for Academic Freedom, Malhotra confronted Georgia Tech and got results including the professor being banned from teaching that course. She said that the school also held a forum on Academic Freedom showing signs of progress after the Georgia state legislature began working on legislation.
Julia A. Seymour is a staff writer at Accuracy in Academia.
