Wednesday (March 9), an advertisement sponsored by Students for Academic Freedom ran in The Post. Among other things, the ad encouraged students to contact the organization if they had tales of professors abusing their teaching privileges. Presumably, SAF will use the stories as ammunition to support Senate Bill 24, a proposed bill to curtail professors' indoctrinating or harmful speech. Like any number of college students, I suppose I'm prone to get worked up about the latest political controversies, from Rathergate to Ward Churchill. Most of the time, I'll form an opinion, froth about, and eventually get put off by all the arguing and go back to Mario Kart. But seeing Wednesday's ad, I, for the first time, became truly afraid for democracy in our country.
A paragraph in the ad states, If you are not taking a course whose subject is the war in Iraq
your professor should not be making statements about the war in class or about George Bush if the class is not on contemporary American presidents
presidential administrations or some similar subjects. Can we even make sense of this kind of rhetoric? Since when is there a class specifically about the war in Iraq, or contemporary American presidents? POLS 415 covers the Presidency as an institution, so are we confined to all talk about the president in that class? And what sense do we make of the phrase or some similar subjects? It looks like those who wish to eliminate these abuses don't even know how to concretely implement their plan. Where do we draw the line between what is a similar subject and what isn't? Sure, slamming Bush in calculus class seems off-topic, but isn't it possible that so much criticism of our president could be a sign that his policies just aren't wanted by a large percentage of the population? I know that 49 percent is not the mandate that 51 percent is, but since when did having a (slight) minority opinion become illegal?
And about avoiding discussion about the war in Iraq in class: Are we supposed to ignore one of the most controversial issues in our country, just because the indoctrinating professors offend the masses? It looks as though the bill's critics are justified in their fears; ambiguous enough to feign neutrality, the bill's real targets will be the opinions that criticize the president and his policies. Government control over criticizing leadership? Hmm.
In short, I have a hard time understanding how our current political climate justifies turning unpopular opinions into illegal ones. Is there a clear and present danger in criticizing a president's decisions on controversial subjects? Isn't criticism inherent in anything that is controversial? Why can't students fight back? If professors are maligning student assessment because of their political opinions, then students should resist that. But mechanisms are already in place here to do that.
If we can't discuss controversy here at the university, where can we? What does that say about this freedom we're so determined to spread everywhere else?
-Ben Scragg is a senior education major. Send him an e-mail at benjamin.scragg@ohiou.edu.
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