Pharyngula

Pharyngula: "Is that David Horowitz I smell?

Category: Academics

The beautiful state of Washington, my native home and still home to many of my family members, has some people ready to enact some major legislative stupidity. David Horowitz was a right-wing nut who was making noise a few years ago with his witch hunt for evil leftists (Hi, Michael!) and his promotion of an Academic Bill of Rights, which was basically a ham-handed attempt to force academia to grant special privileges to intellectually bankrupt ideas, all under the guise of 'fairness'. The Washington bill reeks of that familiar stench.

This bill aims to impose the ideological biases of ignorant politicians on the curricula of the state's universities. It claims to be about 'intellectual diversity,' but it's really about stripping intellectual responsibility from the hands of professors. You can read the whole thing, but as an example of the kind of superficial promises the bill wants to make, but which do little more than corrupt the integrity of the classroom, look at this clause:

Develop a procedure in which a student may present his or her objection to a classroom assignment due to its opposition with the student's conscience.

What, exactly, is a student's conscience here? Well, if a UW biology professor tries to demand her students understand the mechanisms of evolution, a creationist student cou"

Here is the beginning of my post. And here is the rest of it.