Academic Freedom

Now that the dust has settled on the academic-freedom hearings that were held in Pennsylvania from September 2005 to June 2006, it is time to look at what was actually accomplished. According to the teachers unions and their allies in the press, the effort was a "waste of time. " Others found the results modest, if worthy. The Associated Press noted that the legislative Committee on Academic Freedom had urged Pennsylvania universities "to review, and make students aware of, academic-freedom policies.

Pennsylvania, birthplace of our political liberties, is currently the setting for legislative hearings to advance the cause of intellectual freedom. To date, the Pennsylvania Subcommittee on Academic Freedom has held two sets of hearings - one at the University of Pittsburgh and another at Temple University. The hearings were authorized by Pennsylvania House Resolution 177, which established a committee "to examine the academic atmosphere and the degree to which faculty have the opportunity to instruct and students have the opportunity to learn in an environment conducive to the pursuit of knowledge and truth" at public colleges and universities in the state.

Academic freedom is the golden rule at American colleges, a long-cherished principle that protects the right of professors and students to conduct controversial research and classroom discussion without fear of reprisal, all in the cause of knowledge and understanding. But as two local cases show, colleges with a religious affiliation often must struggle to balance academic freedom with the potentially conflicting values of religion. A part-time religion professor recently resigned from Chestnut Hill College after she said the Catholic school's president told her that, when speaking publicly, the professor could not identify herself as both a lesbian and a college employee.

Academic fights don't always get publicity, especially ones that roil along shores on the other side of the Atlantic. But a recent row in Britain deserves attention from the higher education community and all who prize academic freedom. The Association of University Teachers is the dominant higher education union in Britain. On April 22, the AUT as it's known, decided to boycott Haifa and Bar-Ilan universities in Israel and block cultural or academic cooperation, joint projects, funding and conference participation.

Tributes to Justice William J. Brennan since his death have stressed his deep concern with the effect of law on individuals. So does this one. When four colleagues and I at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo decided in 1963 to challenge the Feinberg Law - a 1949 Red Scare statute requiring that teachers and other government employees sign loyalty oaths - we felt fairly sure we would win. True, the Feinberg Law had been upheld several times in court, and a special faculty committee convened by SUNY's law school had concluded that it could not be overturned.

So it turns out that Erwin Chemerinsky is going west, after all. Last week, citing the Duke professor's "controversial" public positions, the University of California, Irvine, withdrew an offer to make him dean of its new law school. But it reinstated the offer after a firestorm of protest, including a letter signed by hundreds of faculty members. That's exactly as it should be. As the letter noted, "unacceptable ideological considerations" clearly caused the university to break its initial deal with the left-leaning Chemerinsky.

Congress whooped through its reversal of the Supreme Court's 1984 Grove City College decision and its override of President Reagan's veto with an unwarranted air of self-congratulation. And the President in his veto message missed a chance to make a useful point about academic freedom, a sizable bit of which has been lost. You might assume, if you didn't know otherwise, that the Grove City decision denied someone his civil rights. In fact, what the court said was merely that the Department of Education might sanction the small Pennsylvania college that chooses, for reasons not now fashionable, to separate boys and girls in its intramural sports program; but the sanctions, said the court, must be limited to the offending department.

Commonwealth Court taught a bunch of college professors a lesson yesterday: You do the teaching, let your bosses do the counting. It's like this. Back in 1989, some Bloomsburg University faculty members objected to a decision by university officials to increase the number of students in their classes. The university had accepted 650 more students in certain courses than it had seats in which to put them. Rather than cut students or hire more teachers, the university required faculty members to teach more students.

On Wednesday, the Pennsylvania House of Representatives passed a resolution of epic proportions - an initiative to ensure academic freedom in the Commonwealth's colleges and universities. Our representatives have established a select committee to examine the state of academic freedom and, though the legislation doesn't specifically say so, to discover whether the political left has indeed overwhelmed the great towers of academia and flooded the minds of its captive students with liberal pabulum and propaganda.

School board members and teachers in the Octorara Area School District returned to the bargaining table for the first time in six months Wednesday, with both sides reporting little progress. The main stumbling blocks remain salaries and academic freedom, although salaries were never discussed during a 4 1/2-hour meeting attended by seven of the nine board members and 20 teachers. Instead, the talks centered on the union's position that contractual language is needed to ensure academic freedom in the classroom and protect teachers from reprisals by the administration through a just grievance clause.

Two free-speech groups have called on Villanova University to reconsider its decision to cancel a workshop by a controversial gay performance artist. The National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC) and the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education sent a letter to Villanova's president, the Rev. Peter H. Donohue, saying they were concerned about the "threat posed to academic freedom" by the abrupt cancellation of Tim Miller's workshop, which was scheduled for mid-April. Donohue said he called off the residency because of the "explicit, graphic, and sexual content" of Miller's work and not because of his sexual orientation.

WILMINGTON - A tenured professor fighting to keep his job at Widener University School of Law after allegedly making classroom comments about a dean has sued the official for defamatory remarks she is accused of making about him. As part of classroom exercises, Lawrence J. Connell used what he called hypothetical examples in which he "decided to shoot" the dean. The school, which is investigating the matter, has placed him on paid administrative leave. In his suit, Connell, an associate professor, has accused the dean, Linda L. Ammons, of intentionally making false statements, in proceedings to oust him, that characterize him as a racist and sexist.

S WILMINGTON - A tenured professor fighting to keep his job at Widener University School of Law in Wilmington has sued the dean for allegedly making defamatory statements in an effort to fire the instructor. Lawrence J. Connell, an associate professor at the school, has accused dean Linda L. Ammons of intentionally making false statements that characterize Connell as a racist and sexist in administrative proceedings to oust the professor. Attorneys for Connell said the suit was filed Friday in Delaware Superior Court.

After receiving a chorus of criticism against a professor who has called for the destruction of Israel and denied the Holocaust occurred, Lincoln University yesterday issued a statement assailing the educator's remarks. Lincoln President Ivory Nelson said Kaukab Siddique's remarks at a recent rally and his earlier writings and statements "are an insult to all decent people. " A firestorm arose after CBN News, the Christian Broadcasting Network, aired a video of a Sept. 3 Washington rally in which Siddique said, "We must stand united to defeat, to destroy, to dismantle Israel, if possible by peaceful means.

A Lincoln University professor who drew criticism this week for anti-Israel statements he made at a recent rally said Thursday that he stood by those words and would not back down from detractors out to "threaten academic freedom. " Kaukab Siddique, 67, an associate professor of English and literature, said that he had the support of his faculty and students and that he would continue to speak his mind, despite pressure from those who have referred to him as an "anti-Semite. " "I got a little fired and said a few things that were pretty strong," said Siddique, a tenured professor who has taught at the university since 1985.

I'm a tenured professor. But I'd get rid of tenure. Tenure was created to protect academic freedom after a series of 19th-century cases when university donors or legislators tried to remove professors whose views they disliked. One famous instance in the late 1800s involved progressive movement leader Richard Ely, whose critics accused him of socialism and tried to remove him as an economics professor at the University of Wisconsin. The rationale for tenure is still valid.

Millersville University has been in hot water lately over William Ayers, the Weatherman-turned-Fox News preoccupation. Ayers was back in the news because Millersville, a public university in Lancaster County, invited him to speak there last week. The university was inundated with outrage from the local community, including a letter from peeved state legislators. Millersville wasn't alone in having a speaker-related brouhaha on its hands. Indiana University of Pennsylvania, in the opposite corner of the state, got heat for booking former University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill last month.

Directed by Nathan Frankowski. With Ben Stein, Richard Dawkins, Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler. Distributed by Rocky Mountain Pictures. 1 hour, 30 mins. PG (adult themes, disturbing images and brief smoking). Playing at: area theaters. Droning funnyman Ben Stein monkeys around with evolution with the documentary Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, a cynical attempt to sucker Christian conservatives into thinking they're losing the "intelligent design" debate because of academic "prejudice.

So it turns out that Erwin Chemerinsky is going west, after all. Last week, citing the Duke professor's "controversial" public positions, the University of California, Irvine, withdrew an offer to make him dean of its new law school. But it reinstated the offer after a firestorm of protest, including a letter signed by hundreds of faculty members. That's exactly as it should be. As the letter noted, "unacceptable ideological considerations" clearly caused the university to break its initial deal with the left-leaning Chemerinsky.

Now that the dust has settled on the academic-freedom hearings that were held in Pennsylvania from September 2005 to June 2006, it is time to look at what was actually accomplished. According to the teachers unions and their allies in the press, the effort was a "waste of time. " Others found the results modest, if worthy. The Associated Press noted that the legislative Committee on Academic Freedom had urged Pennsylvania universities "to review, and make students aware of, academic-freedom policies.