Sunday, April 17, 2005

Academic Freedom and Tolerance

I'm not a big fan of the term "academic freedom", at least in K-12 education. We have very specific things we're supposed to cover, and I question whether we should have hundreds of thousands of teachers each deciding individually what material they will cover.

In colleges and universities, academic freedom is a bit more important. From the Instructivist we get this quote:

Universities discover and invoke academic freedom and tolerance when controversies like the Ward Churchill affair arise. But, as this article shows, academic freedom and tolerance are invoked and applied selectively.

They link to this story, which is chilling in its implications:
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=17712

Update #1, 4/19/05, 9:59 am: Mike Adams is fairly well known in conservative education circles. Erin O'Connor at Critical Mass has a short piece about him here, and links to other recent articles about the good professor.

Update #2, 4/20/05, 5:15pm: And then there's this.

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