When I arrived in DC last Monday for the new semester my family wanted to go see a few of the monuments, and we went to the Jefferson, which strangely my father had never been to. In the monument I was reminded of Jefferson’s writings that call knowledge the light to which we may peruse liberty. Reflecting upon that I read an article about UCLA’s newest alumni group which is encouraging student to help expose the most radical professors at the university.

The move has been so controversial that a controversial member stepped down when the program began:

News of the campaign prompted former Republican congressman James Rogan, who helped lead impeachment proceedings against former President
Bill Clinton in the U.S. House of Representatives, to resign from the group’s advisory board.

“I am uncomfortable to say the least with this tactic,” Rogan, now a lawyer in private practice in California, said in an e-mail resignation made public by the Los Angeles Times. “It places students in jeopardy of violating myriad regulations and laws.”

Of course the law in question here is the professor’s right to copyright over the lecture and materials they produce, and the program’s offer of $100 for recordings of these lectures.

As a college student, and as many readers of our site are also college students, I felt that a discussion on the topic of academic freedom would be appropriate. I should start by saying I do know people who have been affected by a denial of academic freedom. In this case because of the extracurricular choices of a persons activity were in conflict with a professor’s one student has had difficulty with the professor, and I’d be lying by omission if I also did not state that the professor in question is indeed a liberal. Equally a friend at a different university shared the same story with this professor being conservative. Both professors should hardly deserve to be allowed to teach if they allow their political views to rule over their academic obligation to allow students academic freedom to pursue their interests, and evaluate them fairly based upon academics.

However, the UCLA group isn’t out to find these professors. For all the noise they make it’s not the professors who are abusing their authority that are their enemy, but instead professors who have left-wing even extreme left-wing views. To punish a professor for their political views is the opposite of academic freedom. In my experience here at GW I have been fortunate enough to have professors of all political orientations, but not one of them has evaluated me unfairly for my deeply held and expressed convictions. I would not seek to name the conservative even the extreme conservative professors as evil, for the entire point of academic freedom is to pursue knowledge and understanding, and that road can bring different people to different conclusions about their values.

Academic freedom does not require that professors teach both sides of anything, unless the information is knowingly false. For example a history professor telling students the holocaust is a farce would be inappropriate. But if I have a professor tell me that abortion is wrong as he outlines his reasons then while I may disagree, and should have the freedom to engage him over this and still be graded fairly. But to say that he hampers my freedom by expressing his own views is a pretty fallacious argument being perpetrated here. College and upper level studies are often one sided, and that is what comes with years of research and writing upon a specific topic does to people, to ask them to be devoid of their opinions is to remove their own freedom to continue their research.

What alumni groups like this are after isn’t academic freedom, but academic sterility. They wish to sterilize our campuses from any view that they find offensive. High school is largely the place for open and balanced presentation of topics, in college it is you, and only you, who can now pursue knowledge. Academic freedom is the ability to pursue the light of knowledge that leads us to the liberty Jefferson dreamed of, anything less than that would be an offense to Light & Liberty.