Washington

Flag waving: conservative David Horowitz is touring campuses to promote his academic bills of rights. Credit: D. TAM

University faculty members in the United States are gearing up to oppose state bills that are being put forward by conservatives in the name of academic freedom.

Critics say that these ‘Academic Bills of Rights’, which are written to make sure that each side of an issue is presented in lectures at public universities, could in fact stifle academic freedom — and disrupt the teaching of science in contentious fields such as evolution and global warming.

“This would be a right-wing political takeover of the universities,” says Tom Auxter, president of the United Faculty of Florida, the state's main academics' union.

Along with introducing protection from discrimination based on political or religious convictions, a bill being proposed in Florida calls on faculty members to refrain from introducing “controversial matter” unrelated to the course subject. It also requires them to present “serious scholarly viewpoints” other than their own.

Although the bill was written primarily with the humanities in mind, it would apply to all academic disciplines. On 22 March, Dennis Baxley (Republican, Ocala), who is backing the bill, said that it would make sure that alternatives to evolution are not shut out of universities.

“I do believe it has implications for the hard sciences,” says Auxter. “It will waste a lot of time in the classroom because you will have to spend time covering a bunch of extraneous stuff — every crazy idea out there.”

The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) is opposing similar bills nationally, saying that faculty members should decide course content. “This effort is part of a larger pressure on higher education to politicize the agenda,” says Ruth Flower, the AAUP's director of public policy.

David Horowitz, a marxist radical turned conservative activist, has written a template for the bills introduced in Florida and elsewhere. The Center for the Study of Popular Culture, a Los Angeles-based think-tank co-founded by Horowitz, has helped to establish campus-based groups to back the measure.

The campaign has gathered steam in recent weeks, with bills introduced in several states. Georgia passed a non-binding motion supporting the idea in March 2004, and Colorado dropped the bill only when major universities agreed to adopt its language at the administrative level. Other states, among them Maryland and Washington, have already rejected bills or put them on hold.

The AAUP also objects to a clause in Horowitz's draft of the bill that requires universities and professional societies to “maintain a posture of organizational neutrality with respect to the substantive disagreements that divide researchers on questions within, or outside, their fields of inquiry”. Most states have dropped this clause, as they do not have jurisdiction over national societies.

According to the AAUP, Florida could be the first state to pass the bill. Baxley, a close ally of Governor Jeb Bush, says the outraged reception is evidence that academics are too inflexible. “I've been called an ass in the school newspaper at the University of Florida,” he says, “and that demonstrates exactly what I am talking about.”