Uncommon Sense

The Newsletter of the United Faculty of Florida, USF Chapter

(an FEA [AFT & NEA] affiliate)

Volume 13, Number 1 Summer, 2005

The Voice of the University Professional

Academic Freedom

Last summer, the faculty union led a successful fight against a bill that would have undercut academic freedom in Florida. This was a victory against a campaign to seize control of higher education in America.

And it is not over.

It started with David Horowitz, founder of a Center for the Study of Popular Culture and author of many books which Mr. Horowitz feels are being underutilized as college texts. Mr. Horowitz claims to be more offended by the indifference than the lack of royalties. Whatever his motives, he launched the Students for Academic Freedom, which hawked an Academic Bill of Rights to state legislatures, ostensibly to end bias in academia. The Bill would accomplish this with a very long preamble, consisting of misleading citations, and then some broad and vague clauses which would generate lots of litigation.

Florida Representative Dennis Baxley (R-Ocala) introduced it as House Bill 837, saying that when he was a college student, his anthropology professor arrogantly dismissed his creationist convictions. For a while, the equal-time-for-intelligent-design association clung to the bill, even after Baxley announced that the bill would not be used for creationism after all (probably because, no matter what Baxley said, a biology teacher who covered natural selection but not intelligent design was indeed liable under the bill).

Since one of the bill’s clauses encouraged students to challenge grades in court, the Department of Education’s analyst

warned that $ 4.2 million per year would be needed just to hire more lawyers. But the university administrations that would have had to find the money were largely quiet, abandoning the fight to the United Faculty of Florida and its friends and affiliates.

Baxley’s Education Council heard from many witnesses in April, mostly from Horowitz and allies. About five minutes were given for faculty union president Tom Auxter to make a statement warning, among other things, that the bill would complicate university efforts to hire and retain good faculty. Then our chapter president Roy Weatherford, speaking on behalf of the AFT, the NEA, and the AAUP, debated Baxley on Democracy Now.

Later in April, Baxley met with State University System presidents, who told the press that they did not see any need for the bill (this was the most public action of the university administrations). Meanwhile, although the bill was sold as a protection for students, student witnesses and student newspapers were critical of the bill, and Baxley exhibited a student editorial cartoon of the evolution of Baxley as evidence of liberal bias at Gainesville.

By the end of April, obituaries were being written for the bill, although Baxley promised to keep the issue alive, perhaps by pressuring the administrations, perhaps with new legislation in the next (election year 2006) session.

Baxley is not unique. Pennsylvania’s House of Representatives has formed a Panel on Political Bias to conduct legislative investigations into liberal professors who give conservative students low grades. And in Washington, D.C., the current version of the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act contains a Sense of Congress provision condemning (left-wing) political discrimination against (right-wing) students, although the Education and Workforce Committee did remove a provision that would cut funding to international studies programs that support “un-American activities.” And Congressman Joe Barton, R-Texas, is formally requesting documents from climatologists as a preliminary into a Congressional investigation of liberal bias in global warming research.

Getting Proactive

We seem to be kicked around a lot these days.

When politicians say that higher education is in serious need of reform, they mean that higher education is a soft target. We haven’t been as outspoken the pundits and politicians who throw darts at us, and a lot of our speech has been defensive. That makes us appear to be fair game.

It is time we got organized politically, not just to stop the erosion of academic freedom and the invasion of business fads, but also to contain the proliferation of non-tenure-track lines and non-permanent positions – while improving the compensa-tion and employment conditions of faculty holding those positions. We need to improve our health and pension benefits. We need to strengthen the legal status of collective bargaining and binding arbitra-tion. And we need more funding for higher education. A lot of this goes beyond collective bargaining to...lobbying.

The legislature has its hands in many issues important to us. And many other issues are handled by the statewide Board of Governors and the USF Board of Trustees. If we are to get out of a reactive, confronta-tional mode where we devote all our energy to defeating bad initiatives, and get into a proactive, collegial mode where we advance positive initiatives, we need to lobby and we need to organize.

As Lucy explained to Linus in Peanuts, “Take five fingers. Individually they are nothing, but when I curl them together like this into a single unit, they form a weapon that is terrible to behold.” It is time for us to organize our fingers.

And so we are conducting a membership campaign this year. Anyone interested in helping is invited to contact our membership chair, Sherman Dorn, at dorn@mail.usf.edu.