Fighting Words 101

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Legislators wield one potent weapon: money. In January, Utah state senators quietly red-lined funding for a $37 million digital-learning center at Utah Valley State College. The senators were worried about "the drift of the campus," says UVSC president Bill Sederburg, who fielded complaints from them about an Oct. 20 campus speech by Michael Moore, a student production of The Vagina Monologues and a course on queer theory in literature. "The legislators are saying 'We don't want the college to go too far and lose touch with the community.' But we have an obligation to protect academic freedom."

Lawmakers left and right say freedom is exactly what they want to safeguard. "We are having witch hunts," says Hagedorn. A Metro State colleague, ethnic-studies professor Oneida Meranto, came under attack last winter after clashing with Republicans in her class. (She was later reprimanded not for her political views but for breach of privacy when she said that one of the complainants was going to flunk her class.)

For those on the right, true freedom requires more diversity--which, to them, means more conservatives in faculty ranks. "If the system were fair," says Larry Mumper, sponsor of the Ohio bill, "Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity would be tenured professors somewhere." Says Wisconsin assemblyman Steve Nass, a UW-Whitewater alumnus and chief sponsor of the Churchill resolution: "[Legislators] deal with the tax dollars that are put into the UW system. We have a responsibility to see that they are used appropriately." He may soon propose a Horowitz-inspired bill in Wisconsin.

The lawmakers approach academic freedom from different angles but end up in a similar place. The Hagedorn bill and the Horowitz-based bills cover the rights of faculty and students, although Hagedorn emphasizes professors' rights while the others focus on students'. They all trumpet the primacy of "intellectual independence." And they all reject political and religious views as grounds for hiring, firing, reward and punishment. Students on Horowitz's side have even supported the Hagedorn bill, "particularly as it talks about the need for multiple viewpoints," says Ryan Call, Denver-based regional director of Students for Academic Freedom, which is allied with Horowitz. "Legislation should be the last alternative, but a lot of administrators are reticent to make any changes."

Critics question whether fair-mindedness in education can be legislated. "Legislators are acting out of frustration, with no great tools at their disposal," says David French, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a nonpartisan civil-liberties group. "How do you mandate balance?" It's unclear, for instance, how either Hagedorn's bill or the Horowitz version would have made a difference in the case of Metro State's Meranto; neither prescribes penalties. Even if the bills passed, "there's a risk that [they] may set a precedent of legislators becoming micromanagers," says Robert O'Neil, director of the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression in Charlottesville, Va.