How Freedom Of The Press Is Deprived By Lack Of Intellectual Diversity

I am going to use conservative and liberal commentary to show how the lack of intellectual diversity on Campus has deprived the people of the United States of their freedom. The first point is that education and the press share one thing is common. That is that they both impart information on which their constituents base their worldview. The need for a free country to have a free and impartial press is also the need for a free and impartial education. Thomas Jefferson addressed this point when speaking about freedom of the press.

"The most effectual engines for [pacifying a nation] are the public papers... [A despotic] government always [keeps] a kind of standing army of newswriters who, without any regard to truth or to what should be like truth, [invent] and put into the papers whatever might serve the ministers. This suffices with the mass of the people who have no means of distinguishing the false from the true paragraphs of a newspaper." --Thomas Jefferson to G. K. van Hogendorp, Oct. 13, 1785. (*) ME 5:181, Papers 8:632

What happens if those newswriters are university professors and the government is liberal organizations. The university professors belong to Unions such as the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) which are left wing organizations. AAUP was formed in 1915 which was an important but little known period in the history of the United States.

More than eighty years later the AAUP is still addressing the kinds of abuse that spurred Lovejoy and Dewey to organize the Association. Academia has changed a lot since 1915, but there are still people who want to control what professors teach and write. Thanks to the AAUP, academic freedom is recognized as the fundamental principle of our profession. Despite this acceptance, academic freedom remains vulnerable. The attacks are more subtle in some cases, but the response must always be decisive.

The AAUP considers that professors should be “free” to say what the AAUP wants them to say as the AAUP takes a political stance on such issues as homosexuality.

The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) supports the provision of such benefits to professors. The Association’s On Discrimination provides:

The Association is committed to use its procedures and to take measures, including censure, against colleges and universities practicing illegal or unconstitutional discrimination, or discrimination on a basis not demonstrably related to the job function involved, including but not limited to age, sex, disability, race, religion, national origin, marital status, or sexual orientation.

Stanley Fish who is critical of the right for bringing up the issue of intellectual diversity admits that the left dominates the curriculum at major universities with these words.

If victory for the right meant turning back or retarding the growth of programs like women's studies, African-American studies, Chicano studies, Latino studies, cultural studies, gay and lesbian (and now transgender) studies, postmodern studies, and poststructuralist theory, then the left won big time, for these programs flourish (especially among the young) and are the source of much of the intellectual energy in the liberal arts.

He seems to believe intellectual energy is when the young are only given one viewpoint of a given subject and when that perspective agrees with his worldview.

You should by this time see why intellectual diversity does not exist on campus and why the academic community that belongs to left wing union dominated organizations are howling about even minor attempts to change that fact. Below is commentary from Paul Weyrich about South Dakota and it’s attempted assault on these left wing unions and their dominion of the academic community.

Perhaps having learned how academia will stick together on such legislation we can recognize the effort was a bit of an overreach. Yet presently a far softer bill is making its way through the South Dakota Legislature. This bill, too, is eliciting howls from academia, which is telling the Legislature that, although even in this small State, a half a billion dollars annually is provided for higher education, the Legislature should have no say as to how the institutions of higher learning conduct themselves. This bill very simply requires the six South Dakota State universities which receive State funding to annually report what steps are being taken to insure "intellectual diversity."

The education of the United States is not free since student are receiving information that is delivered from only one side. This is not only a problem that exists in institutes of higher education since even "lower" education teachers are members of unions. One way that the United States will become free again is to destroy the dominion of organizations like the AAUP over the academic community. Those politicians that are willing to make the attempt need to be encouraged at every step.