Academic Freedom: A Stealth Attack from the Right

Some interesting comments by Tula Connell at Firedoglake. This is not one I'd thought about much, except to scratch my head and mutter "WTF?" when I run across the poor "conservatives" who are being force-fed ideas on campus. I think Connell hits it right on the head here:

What these measures do is sanction interference on the part of legislatures or boards of trustees to ensure that college curriculums and faculties are “balanced.” Most measures mandate that “all sides” of an issue should be taught—no matter how discredited they are within (or irrelevant to) a discipline. While the competing debates within an academic discipline should be (and most certainly are) discussed in a college classroom, should legislators and trustees be in the game of ensuring that ideas based on biblical inerrancy are given equal consideration in a class on biology? Of course not. And the very fact that ACTA and Horowitz want governing bodies involved in curricular and hiring decisions flies in the face of the very principles that academic freedom was designed to uphold—that scholars should be able to pursue their work free from the politicized demands of those from outside who are not professionally engaged in the fields they are attempting to regulate.

This only reinforces what I've been saying all along: these are not people who believe in America, in our ideals or in our system. They're the same ones who are complaining because the Massachusetts legislature declined to put an anti-marriage amendment on the ballot -- in perfect obedience to the process adopted by the people of Massachusetts to consider such things. These are the people who lobby legislators and school boards to enforce the teaching of Bible studies in biology classrooms. These are the people who think fawning idiots like Peter Pace are only exercising their "freedom of speech" when they utter their hateful comments in official contexts. These are people who don't like freedom.

I labeled this "right-wing hysteria." Thinking about it, the hysteria is a tactic, obviously, as in the Beauchamp matter (and so many others -- sort of like pre-election "terror alerts"). It's self-generated and entirely for effect. I'm reminded of a comment in C. J. Cherryh's Legions of Hell, in which Marcus Antonius is trying to get Tiberius to do something and gets hysterical, because if you get hysterical, the old wacko thinks he was enthusiastic about it a minute ago. Sort of like the right-wing shills and their base.

Why did it take me so long to figure that out?