Academic Right(ist)s

Two far-right Republicans in the Minnesota legislature have introduced David Horowitz's "Academic Bill of Rights" for consideration as state law. The Minneapolis Star-Tribune says the bill "would require the state's publicly funded colleges and universities to adopt policies that would mandate that professors not use their classrooms to promote their personal political or ideological beliefs."

Horowitz, as these recent blistering blog posts by Michael Bérubé show, is a semi-intellectual rightwinger who has long been tilting against the windmill of the liberal academy. His purported "bill of rights" is really just a cover for imposing a conservative political correctness on the academy, hushing liberal or radical faculty (and probably students). In Minnesota, for instance, the two legislators' press conference featured "students and professors who talked of feeling punished for their conservative views. No speakers complained about conservative instructors." The political slant of Horowitz and his supporters is apparent even in its silences: it does not call for economics or management professors to shut their pro-capitalist pie-holes, dammit. (What about the anarchist undergrads who can't pass microeconomics? What about them, huh?) The "rights," as they so often do in Bush's America, are intended to be the possessions of a politically correct elite, not the citizenry at large.

Coincidentally, Michele Bachmann - one of the bill's sponsors in Minnesota, a candidate for a U.S. House of Representative seat next year, and a wingnut to beat the band - was just profiled by the Minneapolis City Pages: "Bachmann's track record in the legislature reads like a parody of right-wing talk radio. She has introduced or signed onto bills that would make English the official state language, halt grants to clinics that perform abortions, make proof of citizenship a requirement at voting booths, and allow stillbirths to be officially designated as births by the state. Bachmann is also the legislator behind the Reagan fetish at the Capitol this time around, proposing that Interstates 494 and 694 be renamed Ronald Reagan Beltway, and declaring February 6, the dead president's birthday, officially recognized." As Napoleon would say, "Gosh."