Wednesday, the Associated Student Government will debate the Academic Bill of Rights, a resolution introduced by the College Republicans that calls for Northwestern to adopt policies promoting intellectual pluralism and political diversity.
At its heart, the principle is one that everyone should agree with: Students learn better when their ideas are challenged. It forces students to re-evaluate their presuppositions, teaches them to better articulate their own arguments and lets them think for themselves rather than merely regurgitate the ideas of their professors.
Many of the best classes I’ve had at NU have been taught by professors with whom I strongly disagreed — the vehemently pro-choice sociology professor who led me in an independent study on the history of abortion law, for example. The reason is obvious: When a professor disagrees with you, he or she’s more likely to see the flaws in your argument and force you to confront them. For students who really are interested in learning, it’s this sort of vigorous intellectual interaction that makes an NU education worth $40,000 a year.
Unfortunately, at a university where 90 percent of the faculty agrees with 80 percent of the students, it’s an interaction that is all too rare. This bill seeks to alleviate the problem by encouraging professors to present a variety of different viewpoints in their classes — to play well-informed, scholarly devil’s advocates, if you will. Such a policy would benefit everyone at NU, not just those of us whose ideas seem underrepresented behind the lecterns.
Seeing the bill defeated, though, has become the cause du jour of the Progressive Alliance and other liberal organizations on campus. They claim that if the bill is passed, the university would have to provide liberal and conservative groups with equal funding.
This is an obvious cause of concern for the Progressive Alliance, which last year received almost $90,000 more than all the conservative A-status groups on campus combined (that is, the College Republicans).
Even worse, the group warns apocalyptically that roving bands of McCarthyist students would start storming the classrooms of liberal professors, impeding their professorial autonomy and forcing them to teach dangerous ideas like intelligent design or evolutionary psychology.
While this hyperbolic doomsaying may be fun to read, it betrays a willful ignorance of the bill’s true meaning. We’ve made clear that the funding provisions would neither demand equality in funding nor apply to the funds doled out by ASG and the Student Activity Finance Board.
The bill itself contains no enforcement provisions, leaving it up to the administration to decide how best to encourage intellectual diversity in the classroom. This means that the McCarthyist mob that opponents of the bill warn about would have to be led by University President Henry Bienen. And if the worst possible outcome of the bill is Bienen running from one classroom to the next blacklisting professors for their liberal views, I think it’s safe to say the bill is harmless.
Once you get past these deliberate mischaracterizations, it’s obvious that the purpose of the bill is not to infuse conservatism into the classroom; it is to reintroduce the war of ideas that forms the foundation of American democracy and once stood at the center of the university. Apparently, though, it’s a war that the intellectual pacifists of Northwestern’s Progressive Alliance have decided they’d rather not fight.
Weinberg junior Ben Snyder is president of College Republicans. He can be reached at [email protected].
