Academic Freedom For Who?

Accuracy in Academia ^ | July 29, 2010 | Malcolm A. Kline

[AccuracyAcademia]

Left-wing radicals throughout history have at least one thing in common: They like to claim that their own freedom of speech is endangered while endangering the first amendment rights of others.

For example, the screenwriters in Hollywood who claimed their constitutional rights were violated by the House UnAmerican Activities Committee in the 1940s with questions about their membership in the Communist Party did not talk about the anticommunist references they had been keeping out of films. They did their level best to keep anti-communists out of the industry itself but were never called on it either, even by allegedly red-baiting Republicans on the committee such as Richard Nixon.

This practice has become so enshrined in universities that it is practically part of the student handbook. On those campuses that still have speech codes, it is in fact codified.

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) does a fairly comprehensive job of tracking the latter. “FIRE found that while the percentage of public campuses that unconstitutionally restrict student speech dropped from 77 percent to 71 percent, the percentage of private campuses that similarly restrict freedom of speech has risen by 3 points from 67 to 70 percent,” the group reports.

“The modern university is essentially captured by the secular left,” David French of the Alliance Defense Fund (ADF) told the American Family Association (AFA) Journal. “If you look at the numbers, the imbalance is staggering.”

“At elite universities, more than nine out of ten professors are going to be self-identified leftists.”