Friday, April 01, 2005

The Academic Bill of Rights comes to Maine, and the bullshit deepens.


It seems that, given an ongoing dialogue in the comments section of this earlier piece, it's worth taking a closer look at what's going down in Maine and, by all accounts, we have another complete crock cooked up by David Horowitz, the Students for Academic Freedom, College Republicans and sympathetic but clueless conservative professors. Where to even begin? First, just to get the flavour, go read that earlier article and the comments from one Prof. Jon Reisman, then I'll go to work.

Now, I'm going to do this in reverse chronological order, just because I want to and because it's going to be more amusing that way. Let's start with one of the links provided by Prof. Reisman himself here, which opens with:

Several University of Maine System students told lawmakers Wednesday they have been treated unfairly on their campuses because they are politically conservative. All members of the College Republicans, the students testified before the Legislature's Education Committee in favor of LD 1194, which would require state colleges and universities to publish an "academic bill of rights" to keep students and instructors from being penalized for expressing unpopular viewpoints both in and out of the classroom.

Not to generalize but, given that the two previous high-profile cases of alleged anti-conservative bias -- Ahmad Al-Qloushi at Foothill College in California and the student at the University of Northern Colorado -- turned out to be total crap (see numerous earlier postings at this blog), you really, really hope that the wingnuts at the SAF and the College Republicans have learned their lesson and won't make any sweeping, grandiose claims about sinister, pro-liberal bias on campus without researching them carefully and having the evidence to back them up. Sadly, you'd be mistaken:

Allison Geagan of the University of Maine said one professor - whom she didn't identify - spoke in class against President Bush for 20 minutes, but wouldn't allow her to offer an opposing view.

Lovely. More anonymous slander. But that's just annoying -- the next sentence gets downright illogical:

Mia Dow, also from UM, said she was afraid of revealing her Republican status to professors for fear they would give her a grade "based on my political party and not on my work ethic."

Aha! So Dow's devastating, irrefutable, smoking gun evidence of anti-conservative bias is that ... she has not been given a bad grade because of her political beliefs. But she's sure that she would have if she admitted to being a Republican. Apparently, this is what passes for critical thinking among College Republicans these days. And it just gets more bizarre every time Dow opens her mouth:

"I have been taunted, sworn at and humiliated beyond the realm of imagination and I am sick of this treatment," she said

Of course, it's curious as to how she would be treated so inhumanely if, as she has already claimed, she hasn't revealed her Republican status to professors. A real puzzler that, no? No matter -- why employ logic and reason when ridiculous, unsubstantiated hyperbole will do? You can read the rest of that article to see if I missed anything important.

And the second link from Reisman doesn't add a whole lot to the first. Oh, look, here's Ms. Dow again:

"I am here today with my fellow College Republicans because I feel you must be made aware of a scary trend occurring on all Maine campuses," said Mia Dow, a member of the College Republicans at the University of Maine, Orono. "I have been taunted, sworn at and humiliated beyond the realm of imagination, and I am sick of this treatment," she said.

You know, that's got to be some pretty devastating, horrific persecution if it's "beyond the realm of imagination". What a shame Dow didn't see fit to provide a single example of it. And, once again, how odd that unimaginable persecution when Dow openly admits she hasn't even revealed her Republican leanings to her profs. Go figure.

And then we meet the irrepressible Prof. Reisman again:

But Jon Reisman, professor at the University of Maine at Machias, supported the bill. Colleges around the state have made strides in the last decade to combat discrimination in areas of gender and ethnicity, he said, but intellectual diversity is now at risk.

"We don't have intellectual pluralism on our campuses today and the research shows it," he said.

At which point this would be the perfect place to show us some of that research but ... no. Dang. Again, read the entire piece and see if you can tease out any actual evidence. But here's the funniest part. Really. You're going to enjoy this.

As you can read here in this piece from the Bangor Daily News over at the SAF's web site,

"Republicans and conservatives are in the closet mostly," said Jon Reisman, a professor at the University of Maine at Machias, who noted that he is the only member of the faculty with a Bush-Cheney sticker on his car.

"We have to speak up more, but the culture is pretty negative," he said, recalling that when Hilary Clinton visited the University of Maine as first lady, "it was almost a coronation," in contrast to Laura Bush's visit, which elicited "a pretty cool reception."

Go back and read that again slowly, just so you're clear on what Reisman is suggesting. He's suggesting that there is a clear anti-conservative bias on campus because Hillary Clinton was received more exuberantly than Laura Bush.

Note that he's not claiming that Laura Bush was prevented from coming to campus, or that she was treated rudely, or perhaps even heckled beyond the bounds of imagination or anything like that. His beef is that people at his college were simply more enthusiastic about Clinton's visit.

Apparently, the concept of "freedom of expression" is utterly lost on Reisman, who is upset that members of the college community have the unmitigated gall, the breathtaking audacity, to be more excited about the visit of an accomplished, sitting United States senator than that of Stepford wife Laura Bush. Hard to believe, yes, but Reisman's solution is to pass an Academic Bill of Rights, not to address actual anti-conservative bias on campus, but apparently to make sure folks show the same enthusiasm for conservative visitors, whether they mean it or not. In short, Reisman wants to tackle, not what people actually do, but simply what they think.

In Reisman's world, there are just too many people who like liberals more than conservatives and, if he can't persuade them otherwise, well then, he'll just legislate them into line. Sorry, what was all that about "academic freedom" again?

P.S. I'm not done with Prof. Reisman yet. Someone that dense truly deserves more than one smackdown and, as always, I'm happy to oblige.

AFTERTHOUGHTS: I'm more than a little puzzled by these excerpts from one of the news pieces covering the College Republicans getting their say before lawmakers:

Several University of Maine System students told lawmakers Wednesday they have been treated unfairly on their campuses because they are politically conservative. All members of the College Republicans, the students testified before the Legislature's Education Committee in favor of LD 1194, which would require state colleges and universities to publish an "academic bill of rights" to keep students and instructors from being penalized for expressing unpopular viewpoints both in and out of the classroom.

Note well that these little fascists aren't just yapping off to a newspaper reporter, they're testifying before a state legislature committee, so one would think they'd come thoroughly prepared, with solid evidence of their claims. Instead, we have the aforementioned Mia Dow, taking hyperbole to, well, unimaginable heights, after which the article simply moves on:

"I have been taunted, sworn at and humiliated beyond the realm of imagination and I am sick of this treatment," she said.

While supporters believe the bill is necessary ...

And even though this is official testimony, no lawmaker has the presence of mind to ask something as innocuous as, "Um ... could you maybe give us an example of all of this?" Truly pathetic reporting.

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