Congress Amends Higher Education Act to Secure Students Free Speech Rights

A heads up from our friends at The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education:

President Bush signed the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act into law yesterday. Referred to by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) as a bipartisan effort, the new law recognizes the importance of free speech and due process rights for college students across the nation.

Congress amended the law to include provisions stating that it was the sense of the Congress that “an institution of higher education should facilitate the free and open exchange of ideas” and that “students should not be intimidated, harassed, discouraged from speaking out, or discriminated against.” In defense of due process, Congress added that college “students should be treated equally and fairly” and any sanctions of students should be imposed “objectively and fairly.”

http://www.thefire.org/index.php/article/9604.html?PHPSESSID=5d3d1c733608766c78e1a9b65d56c56d

Combine this with dozens of court rulings and the latest statements from the US Commission on Civil Rights and the US Department of Education Office of Civil Rights and it amounts to a warning to abusive college administrators and faculty. Abuse students rights at you and your institutions legal peril. While for years it was only the courts taking these abuses seriously. The states and the feds are now taking notice. That is why I suggest to all students and to my friends at FIRE that any abuses of these rights result in a complaint with the US Commission on Civil Rights and the US Department of Education. University EEO and AAO officers have all but abdicated all responsibility in enforcing civil rights laws and more and more often are participants in violating them. We need to take charge and get the enforcement for ourselves.

Just How Nutty are Far Secular Leftist Academics? …

…This op-ed in the Chronicle of Higher education shows us just how nutty. Marshall Sahlins’ hateful screed against Nobel Prize winning economist Dr. Milton Friedman, whose work is a staple of economic study, compares Friedman to Louis Farrakhan, and blames Friedman for the tyrannical excesses of Pinochet.

This screed contains such ideological silliness that anyone with access to a search engine and a couple of hours to spend could deconstruct it and rightly call it out as the neo-Marxist propaganda that it is. [What I am saying here is that his argument is so silly that it hardly merits serious refutation – however a reader asked me to tackle some of the arguments in detail so be sure to read the comments section below.]

What I find most interesting is that Marshall Sahlins believes that this will be the “extra-academic, partisan interests” that will be passed for Academics. Sahlins, who hails from the school of social work science, (some online sources said Sahlins was in social work but after firing up the peer reviewed material and examining one of his books its clear that he is in social science) big shocker there isn’t it, should take a close look at this field where many students are forced into partisan activity often against their will (and this link is one example of many).

Most parents would find it unacceptable that radicalized, out of touch, neo-Marxist propagandists like Sahlins were/are able to get in front of a classroom filled with their children in the first place. Most parents are not aware that a large number of liberal arts academics hold similar view and gobble up nonsense such as this and work every day to convince our children of it.

Sahlins treats words such as “capitalist” and “free market” as if they are terms of sheer horror. To a Marxist [and many assorted leftists] they are. Such academics tremble at the thought that American prosperity and exceptionalism came not from the government ran by his elitist friends, but rather the common man, who holds Marxist views in contempt, whose genius and creativity was unleashed in greater amounts by the American system than any other that had come before it.

Here is how the article starts off. Follow the link for more:

Institute Will Give the U. of Chicago a Bad Name

By MARSHALL SAHLINS

The University of Chicago has announced the establishment of a multimillion-dollar Milton Friedman Institute for the study of economy and society on prime real estate it has acquired for that purpose adjacent to the central campus. The projected cost of the institute is $140- to $200-million, to be financed largely and directly by private donations – indeed, donors who contribute a million or more will thereby be qualified to participate in its academic deliberations. Why not also a Louis Farrakhan Center for Religious Studies? Or a Friedrich Engels Institute for Political Science?

Friedman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist who died in 2006 after a long career at the university, was known for his radical laissez-faire approach to society and the economy. Of course, to many observers at home and abroad, the establishment of a monumental institute named after Friedman and directly subsidized by private funds, will brand the University of Chicago as an academic instrument of a certain ideology. It will make the university party to an extremist version of liberal capitalism that has proven to serve the welfare of the ruling elite in a number of countries at the cost of whom it may concern – notably the society in general and the poor in particular.

http://chronicle.com/temp/email2.php?id=jRcgpygvwgXggWGSbcgwNm4MyPw3ghqP

When I have the financial resources, provided that Marxist academics are not allowed to invade it for the purpose of destroying it (remember the Hamilton Center), I intend to make a large donation to the Milton Friedman Center for the Study of Economics at the University of Chicago, in Marshall Sahlins’ name.