David Horowitz, "College professors should be made to teach, not preach" (2005)

One feminist professor stormed out of the room, and before you knew it, activists were clamoring for Summers' resignation. Soon after, he embarked on an apology tour for even raising the point that aroused them.

If the president of Harvard cannot raise intellectual questions in a university setting without jeopardizing his job, what does that tell you about the state of higher education in America? It tells you that American universities are in trouble. They are less free than they were in the McCarthy era (when I was in school), and something must be done to rectify the situation.

Two years ago, I drafted an Academic Bill of Rights that would defend "intellectual diversity" on college campuses and remove politics from the classroom. The idea has steadily gained traction as the public and, indeed, legislators hear what's happening at universities across the country.

Interest across the USA

Last month, I met with Minnesota legislators who have agreed to sponsor an Academic Bill of Rights based on my model. Similar legislation is before legislatures in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida, Tennessee, Missouri, Georgia and a dozen other states this spring.

Why do we need legislation? There are too many people like Ward Churchill — the University of Colorado professor who compared 9/11 victims with Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann — on faculties across the nation. They confuse their classrooms with a political soap box.

The issue is not one of their free speech as citizens, but what is appropriate to an education.

We don't go to our doctor's offices expecting to get political lectures. That is because doctors are professionals who have taken an oath to treat all, regardless of political belief. To introduce divisive matters into a medical consultation would injure the trust between doctor and patient that is crucial to healing. Why is the profession of education any different? It isn't.

Examples dot the U.S. higher education landscape:

•It is not an education when a midterm examination contains a required essay on the topic, "Make the argument that the military action of the U.S. attacking Iraq was criminal." Yet a criminology final exam at the University of Northern Colorado did just that.

•It is not an education when a professor of property law tells his class that the "R" in Republican stands for "racist," and devotes an entire class hour to explaining why Americans deserved to die on 9/11. But that happened at the Colorado University Law School.

•It is not an education when professors try to get their students to vote against President Bush or to demonstrate against the war in Iraq, but that has happened in classrooms across the country.

The Academic Bill of Rights says that a university "shall provide its students with a learning environment in which the students have access to a broad range of serious scholarly opinion pertaining to the subjects they study." It's not so revolutionary.

The leading opponent of my bill is the American Association of University Professors, the oldest and largest organization of faculty members. The AAUP contends that the bill would restrict professors' free speech rights. It wouldn't. Professors can still express their political opinions, but outside the classroom. In the classroom, they must distinguish between their official responsibilities as teachers and their private rights as citizens.

Once upon a time ...

Ironically, the AAUP once recognized this distinction. In 1940, a year when the nation was also divided over a war, the AAUP warned: "Teachers ... should be careful not to introduce into their teaching controversial matter which has no relation to their subject."

The Academic Bill of Rights uses identical language.

Too many professors indoctrinate students, while university administrators are intimidated from enforcing their own guidelines. It is because of this that legislatures are the last resort for providing a remedy and setting universities back on their intended course: educating our kids, not brainwashing them.

David Horowitz wrote the Academic Bill of Rights and is the founder of Students for Academic Freedom, an organization with chapters on 150 American campuses.