[. . .]
The War Has Started
Now for the bad news. Academic freedom is under sustained, ferocious attack from right-wing extremists — and, dammit, they’re making progress.
There’s been a concerted campaign for years, of course, to create a “conventional wisdom” about colleges and universities — namely, that left-wing “political correctness” prevents conservative students from airing their views. Preventing them from doing so, conservatives say, is the left-wing professoriate, including “tenured radicals,” who do all they can to indoctrinate impressionable youths.
Conservatives have come up with some entirely bogus statistics “proving” that liberal professors outnumber their conservative counterparts by a factor of 10:1. And they’re determined to even the score — preferably, by eliminating tenure, firing all the left-wingers, and hiring a new generation of faculty who meet their ideological litmus tests. The free market nuts join in at this point, arguing that tenure is inefficient and prevents universities from becoming dynamic, entrepreneurial, for-profit institutions.
What’s more, right-wing extremists want to stop Federal funding for research on subjects they don’t want researched [1], such as HIV/AIDS, stem cells, homosexuality, birth control, sexual enslavement, child kidnapping, child abuse, and spousal abuse.
OK, that’s the background.
[. . .]
Go read this entire post. If you want a look into the VRWC to stifle academia, you have to.
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