5/16/2005

KUFM / KGPR

T. M. Power

Ideologues’ Efforts to Dumb-Down Our Universities

Neo-conservatives are urging Congress and various state legislatures to pass what they have labeled “Academic Bills of Rights.” Posing as efforts to promote intellectual honesty, protect the truth, and defend academic freedom, these are barely disguised efforts to authorize ideological politicians to dictate what is taught in the classroom.

Some of the supporters of these efforts are straight forward in admitting what they are after. As one Ohio legislator put it: “Why should we conservatives continue to support universities that turn out students who rail against the very policies their parents voted us in for?” Clearly, it is the sponsors of these Academic Bills of Rights who are the ones that want our campuses to be used for indoctrination: The passing on to students of the political view and religious values of the politicians.

The original idea behind the academy was a relatively sheltered and protected institution where new ideas could be developed even if they conflicted with existing orthodoxy. That, protection, of course often failed and academics suffered the consequences. Over 2000 years ago, Socrates was forced to poison himself with hemlock for teaching subversive ideas to his students. In Stalin’s Soviet Union, scientists were forbidden to study or teach modern genetics even though it was a Slav who laid the foundation for genetics. Stalin’s objection was that genetics suggested some human behavior might have genetic roots that social institutions would not change. Stalin wanted everyone to believe that humans were blank slates that Soviet institutions could mold into perfect socialist citizens. Hitler, of course, insisted on a different approach to genetics, demanding that academics confirm that certain nationalities and races were superior to others.

Now we have religious conservatives in the United States wanting to limit the teaching of evolutionary biology in our schools and colleges. To “protect” students’ “rights” not to be taught something that their parents fear might conflict with their religious beliefs, teachers will be required to be “unbiased,” meaning that they will not be allowed to convey their professional scientific judgment on what the current scientific literature has concluded. Instead scientists and other scholars and teachers will have to ignore the professional literature and teach every conceivable point of view, whether scientifically supportable or not. They will also have to entertain any challenge that might come from a student, regardless of the student’s logic or lack of it.

This is exactly the tactics used in other totalitarian societies, Mao’s China, Hitler’s Germany, and Stalin’s Soviet Union, to eliminate politically non-conforming scientists and scholars. It was the approach taken by the Medieval Catholic Church to discipline Galileo for teaching that the sun and stars did not rotate around the Earth. The difference is that the Catholic Church has since apologized for seeking to silence scientists and made clear that scientific enquiry need not conflict with religious belief. Our contemporary American religious conservatives, however, are inspired not deterred by the destructive history of the religious attack on science and intellectual enquiry.

These “academic bills of rights” have nothing to do with protecting the freedom of intellectual pursuits. They seek to do the opposite: Put politicians in charge of dictating what is studied and taught in our schools. The sponsors are people who are afraid of the power of ideas and challenging open debate. They want to impose a comfortable orthodoxy on our schools and colleges, an orthodoxy they will dictate.

This can only “dumb down” our school systems. Given the fields of scientific enquiry to which these neoconservatives object, if they succeed we would cease teaching contemporary biology, physics, astronomy, economics, anthropology, and sociology, to name just a few fields that periodically come under attack by religious and political conservatives.

These efforts by powerful political interests to control the research and teaching on campuses is not new. Back in 1919, under pressure from the mining industry, the Chancellor of University of Montana suspended economist Louis Levine because of his research into tax inequities in Montana. A half-century later, a conservative Montana governor was again trying to get economists fired because they were “Keynesians,” which he just “knew” meant they must be socialists.

Our nation has been through its own share of academic witch hunts, several just in the 20^th century. Around the world and across the centuries, there has been one uniform outcome of religious and political interference in scientific and scholarly studies: It paralyzes intellectual progress, damages scientific progress, and deprives our children and our society of the excitement and wonder associated with an enquiring mind.

In the early 21^st century we should not be tolerating a new political and religious inquisition in our schools and on our campuses. Besides simply being wrong, it has the potential of disabling our economy. As we face increasingly stiff competition from Japan, China, India, and the European Union in scientific and technical fields, letting biased political ideologues dictate what goes on within the academy is simply national intellectual suicide. The political lunatics cannot be put in charge of our children’s future.