I've heard a lot of talk lately about the proposed Academic Bill of Rights that has been introduced in the Ohio Senate, and most of it has been negative. It seems like everyone's argument centers around two key points. One being that there isn't a problem with bias in the classroom, and if there is, we already have the First Amendment to protect students' speech, and this bill might infringe on professors' rights. The second point is that all of us conservative students are just close-minded idealists that don't want to hear a differing opinion. I've got big problems with both of these points.
To deny there is extreme bias in the lectures that are given everyday is just absurd. Just one example: In my marketing class just before the election, we were lectured for an hour on the evils of Issue I and then dismissed. And the bias isn't always liberal -only about 99 percent of the time, I've had a professor that would make derogatory comments about John Kerry, and that was a business law class. Tell me how either of those are relevant to marketing or business law. This is a gross misuse of their position and a waste of the money I'm paying to learn about my relative subjects. Professors have a right to say whatever they want on their own time, but when they waste the time that I have paid for by lecturing about irrelevant subject matter, I feel I should have some meaningful recourse (and don't tell me the evaluations mean anything). This is exactly what Senate Bill 24 is trying to provide students.
I wonder who it is that is really opposed to hearing new, challenging ideas. Some say that conservatives just don't want to hear liberal views. That's not true at all. It is the liberals that don't want to hear our side of the story. I know lots of students with conservative views that don't speak out in class anymore because either professors don't want to hear their opinions or because their grades have been threatened because they expressed differing opinions in the past. In my book this is discrimination, and it needs to be stopped. Instead of stifling debates in class, this bill will foster them because now there can be real two-sided debates and not just one-sided rants by those in the majority opinion.
And just a little note to those that say we don't need anything beyond the First Amendment to guarantee our rights. I believe it was the 15th Amendment that guaranteed the right of all citizens to vote, but we still needed the civil rights bills of the 1960s and '70s to ensure that all minorities could vote. Legislation protecting minority freedoms -sounds kind of familiar, doesn't it?
-Jordan Carr is a sophomore accounting/pre-law major. Send him an e-mail at jordan.carr@ohiou.edu.
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