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A guest commentary

Dangerous development in the world of academia

Sunday, October 31, 2004

Historically, the presidential election provides higher education with its most bountiful semester.

Money, morals, inflation, religion, war, dirty tricks, voting psychology, advertising, ethnic divisions, rhetoric and stem cell research: it's all there, featured on the menus of courses from sociology to economics to medical science.

There's a smorgasbord of academic meat in the newspaper every day, served as fresh, authentic texts of excitement and education in the fall term.

So when a professor at College of DuPage in Glen Ellyn had the good fortune to bag a regional political candidate as a guest speaker for his class, he may have thought he was dishing out an opportunity for his students to develop acumen in critical thinking, to hone their writing skills, beef up their brain power, and tune up their propaganda detectors.

Instead, he may get busted.

The charge? Violating COD's ethical code by engaging in "political activity."

COD is the largest single-campus community college in the country, with an enrollment of nearly 40,000 students. And last week, the school administration was asked by the college district's board of trustees to conduct an investigation of two of its professors as a result of separate complaints received against them for engaging in political activity during class time.

The first was the aforementioned teacher who invited a political candidate to speak; the second professor was accused of criticizing one of the presidential candidates in class, and of showing a film that supported that singular view.

I lived through the Cold War when "investigating a professor for political activity" was a phrase you saw in stories with a Moscow dateline. So I figured this whole thing at my own school in the good old USA must be a mistake.

Or a misunderstanding, at best. After all, it's a professor's job — if it is important and relevant for course objectives and the learning community — to expose his students to strong views, political and otherwise, no matter how slanted or even flawed some of them might be.

You can't teach students to analyze, discriminate and think critically if you're limited to neutral texts.

Yet strange things can happen in an election year, and the story about the investigation turned out to be true.

I blinked my eyes. Was the Constitution still in effect? Did not our guarantee of free speech allow any college professor or student in the United States of America to express an opinion, even if it's to criticize a presidential candidate?

What would they say at Berkeley, where professorial political criticism was practically invented?

However famous Berkeley may have been for free expression in the academy in the 1960s, things are different in 2004.

In the post 9-11, Patriot Act era of John Ashcroft and FCC censor Michael Powell, there is a different sentiment about free speech in the university that's been gaining momentum.

It's best typified by conservative columnist and "Front Page" editor David Horowitz, who has issued a call in his so-called Academic Bill of Rights to seize back the schools from the "intellectual Left" by exercising more control over what can and cannot be taught inside the college classroom.

COD — center of the largely affluent, largely conservative and historically Republican DuPage County west of Chicago — last May adopted its own version of Horowitz in a new code of ethics. It includes the prohibition against political activity by a professor in his classroom, defined as "… any activity in support of, or in connection with, any campaign for elective office or any political organization …"

Now I was in trouble, I thought. In my own composition and literature classes, over time, I have taught from texts by Rush Limbaugh, John F. Kennedy, Mike Royko, Gloria Steinem, Al Gore, Kathleen Parker, George Will, Jimmy Breslin, Leonard Pitts, Bruce Springsteen, Molly Ivins, Sherman Alexie and William F. Buckley, among others.

Many of these were biased but powerful texts, some conceivably in support of various campaigns or political parties, but which inspired my students to question, probe, rebut and extrapolate — the same thinking skills we want them to learn when prompted by a candidate's spiel, a professor's subjective lecture or a propagandistic film.

It would have been impossible to have consistently concealed my own leanings throughout all those sessions. Nor did I think I needed to try, according to the First Amendment.

There is additional speculation on campus that politics is to blame for this month's crackdown, since no such investigations were launched when the college hosted events for Ronald Reagan in 1984, for George H.W. Bush in 1989, and more recently G. W. Bush in 2000.

Eventual disclosure of the identities of the candidates invited and criticized by the two professors, which have not been made public, will either debunk or lend credence to that theory.

In the meantime, however, I believe COD's administration is well-intentioned in its objectives to ensure fair presentation of course material and to spare students from partisan impositions.

But neither objective comes even close to justifying the implantation of fear in America's classrooms, and the violation of our sacred freedom of speech.

David McGrath, professor of English at College of DuPage, has published many articles on education, some of them in The Star. He lives in Oak Forest.