Your daily slap upside the head of the SAF.

(Additional Sunday afternoon thoughts added below.)

So, it's Sunday, which means it's time for another installment of "Just how biased or stupid are the folks at the Students for Academic Freedom?" Today's episode: How to encourage students to rat on their profs in a shamelessly dishonest and slanted way.

As Exhibit A, we have a link from the SAF's main page, entitled:

Is Your Professor Using the Classroom as a Platform for Political Agendas?

Learn How to Place an Ad in your College Newspaper.

at which point we follow the link here to find:

The 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure declared: "Teachers are entitled to freedom in the classroom in discussing their subject, but they should be careful not to introduce into their teaching controversial matter which has no relation to their subject." (This clause was reaffirmed in 1970.)

OK, that sounds reasonable -- I have no problem with that. But that doesn't seem to give the folks at the SAF the right to draw the following bizarre conclusion:

"If you are not taking a course whose subject is the war in Iraq, your professor should not be making statements about the war in class."

Do tell. So unless you're taking "War in Iraq 101", any comments on the Iraqi invasion are out of bounds? Is that it? What if the class is "Middle East Geopolitical Studies"? Or "Theory of Diplomacy"? Or perhaps "Principles of War Crimes, Past and Present"? Or maybe even "International Conflict Resolution"? Gosh, one would think that the "war in Iraq" would be eminently appropriate in any of those courses, wouldn't you? Well, you would unless you were a right-wing cheerleader at the SAF.

And how about this delightful continuation:

Or about George Bush, if the class is not on contemporary American presidents, presidential administration or some similar subject.

Really? So any non-presidential discussion of President Chimpy is out of bounds, even in courses such as, oh, "American Political Dynasties and Corruption," or "The Influence of the Religious Right on Modern Politics," or "The Modern American Empire and neo-Conservatism," or even "Neurology and Speech Pathology: Recognizing Symptoms of Early Dementia". All out of bounds, is that it?

And isn't it fascinating that, of all the people the SAF could have chosen as an example, it was Smirky. Not, say, Bill Clinton, or Michael Moore. Funny how that works, isn't it?

Please tell me none of this surprises you any more.

TYPICALLY PEDANTIC MEANDERING: I wasn't sure whether to add this part but I figure most of my readership (with a couple glaring exceptions) are clever enough to follow it, so let me explain a more subtle bit of dishonesty on the SAF's part.

Read carefully the cautions in that "Statement of Principles" above:

... [teachers] should be careful not to introduce into their teaching controversial matter which has no relation to their subject.

Note well that the caution is against material that is both controversial and unrelated to the subject. Did you catch that? Not either controversial or unrelated, but both controversial and unrelated. And what does that mean?

Well, it means that, according to the Statement that the SAF is waving around so proudly, there is absolutely nothing untoward in talking about the invasion of Iraq in an unrelated class so long as those statements can be considered uncontroversial.

And what might be uncontroversial? I imagine it's safe to say that all of the following are pretty much no-brainers by now:

1. that the U.S. clearly over-emphasized the dangers of (and the very existence of) Iraq's WMDs,
2. that the U.S. imagined they would be greeted wildly and joyfully as liberators,
3. that the U.S. believed that Iraqi oil would finance Iraq's own reconstruction,

and on and on. None of the above can be denied since they are all part of the public record and therefore uncontroversial, making them apparently acceptable for classroom discussion even in unrelated classes. But that's not how the SAF phrases it, as they write:

"If you are not taking a course whose subject is the war in Iraq, your professor should not be making statements about the war in class."

Poor SAF -- incapable of reading and parsing even simple English. It's no wonder they have such empathy with others who get failing grades.