Senate Bill 24

I saw this excellent editorial in the BGNews yesterday:
Senate Bill 24 doubts students, faculty By Megan Schmidt

If State Senator Mumper wasn't such an asshole, he'd make a great comedian. This is a man who told the Columbus Dispatch:

"80 percent or so of them (professors) are Democrats, liberals or socialists or card-carrying Communists."

Gee, Senator Mumper, are there 57 card-carrying Communists in the Defense Department, too? That quote just creeps me out...

In any event, this whole issue is nonexistant. Take a careful look at what Mumper (and dodos like Horowitz) are saying and you'll see what they're really after. What they claim is that professors are over politicising classrooms by presenting one-sided views, which leads to indoctrination of students.

There are really two issues at stake here. One is laughably minor and the other concerns the fate of our nation.

The indoctrination accusation is already a load of horse hockey. These are college students here, not 2nd graders. There's no indoctrination happening in college classrooms. If you're a student, you know the score...When a professor goes off about something controversial, there are two types of people in that room:

1. People who don't care.
2. People who already opposed the professors viewpoint and aren't changing their minds.
   

The issue is moot. The so-called complaints that dolts like Mumper gets are from people in option 2 there. Everyone else doesn't care, and no one got "indoctrinated". Unless a professor is running a cult, I'd have to say that claims of indoctrination are vastly exaggerated.

So, what's the real agenda here? Senate Bill 24 would require colleges to ensure that classes that cover controversial subjects present "balanced" viewpoints. This is designed to destroy departments like Women's Studies and American Culture Studies. If these departments were required to teach "balanced" courses, it would defeat the point of the exercise. These are departments that study history created by liberals of the past, read books written by liberals, and produce research on topics of interest to liberal causes. Most, if not all of the people who teach these courses and take these degrees are more liberal than the average person on the street. If you wanted to be blunt about it, you could say that these departments are taxpayer funded enclaves for people with unconventional political beliefs. That's what Horowitz and Mumper want to eliminate. It's also why they're deeply wrong.

By the same logic, you could call the Math department a taxpayer-funded enclave for people who love math. I mean, most of the population hates math and actively tries to avoid having to involve themselves in it. Should we try to target math departments for destruction? Astronomers seem to be more interested in the stars than most people, does that mean we should destroy that department too?

The fact is that colleges exist not only to educate students, but to act as incubators for research to be done in a myriad of relatively esoteric fields. The people who make up the Women Studies department, or the American Culture Studies are undoubtedly more liberal that most of the nation, but the fact is that researching the place of women in society and the effect of race on our society are just as worthy a project as supporting mathematics or psychology research. We're talking about universities here...Uni as in universal. The whole point of these institutions is to act as incubators for a diverse set of ideas in a diverse set of fields.

The society we have today is undoubtledly a knowledge based, post industrial society. We have a knowledge based economy and the Internet is a knowledge based communication system. Universities are to a knowledge based society what steel mills are to an industrial society. Without steel mills you don't have ships and trains and bridges and skyscrapers. Steel mills are the foundation that allows you to build everything else. In a knowledge based society, universities are the foundation, they allow you to build everything else. Whether or not Mumper and Horowitz like it, universities only work when they're allowed to work without restrictions, planting the seeds of the future in a diverse set of fields. In a society where change and growth come from unpredictable sources, the only way to ensure your future is to put your eggs into as many baskets as possible.