Professor David Beito is a libertarian, Professor K.C. Johnson a conservative whose job I defended when it was under attack, and Professor Ralph Luker a liberal who is obssessive in his hatred for myself and this website. The three put up a resolution at the rececent convention of the American Historical Association which would have simultaneously condemned my Academic Bill of Rights and speech codes. The leftwingers who run the AHA of course support speech codes because they are totalitarians. The resolution they passed condemned the Academic Bill of Rights and was silent about speech codes.

Beito, Johnson and Luker turned a blind eye to the fact that the AHA leadership is an enemy of academic freedom because it is professionally easier to attack an academic pariah like myself than to take on the powers responsible for the stifling of intellectual diversity and the debasement of the intellectual curriculum in the university. Recently, they defended their position, which I have posted following my response. My response is this:

I am impressed by the hypocrisy and intellectual cowardice of Beito, Luker and Johnson as revealed in this explanation of their condemnation of the Academic Bill of Rights at the AHA convention. The main AHA resolution, which all three voted for, claimed that the ABOR would impose political standards on the curriculum and hiring process. This was a lie. To dramatize the fact that it was a lie, I offered $10,000 to any member of the AHA who could point to language in the text of the ABOR that would substantiate their claim. I had no takers.

In this article, Beito, Luker and Johnson shift ground. Now it is their claim that by promoting intellectual diversity the ABOR risks encouraging students to make false claims of indoctrination, thus chilling professorial discourse. This is like opposing the First Amendment to the Constitution on the grounds that someone might make a false claim that their free speech right had been infringed. The solution to this problem is quite simple. Universities can set up grievance committees to ajudicate such claims. In fact they could simply extend the mandates of existing grievance committees that deal with racial and sexual discrimination to handle these matters. What's the problem, then?

Meanwhile there are courses in universities across the country which are self-evidently courses in indoctrination for which there is no present remedy. Social Work 510 at Kansas State University, for example, is billed in the catalogue as a course in Social Welfare. The entire syllabus, however, is a chapter by chapter reading of Howard Zinn's atrocious diatribe,"A People's History of the United States." The ABOR is a suggested remedy for a widespread problem which is corrupting the intellectual enterprise of universities across the country. But Beito, Luker and Johnson prefer to ignore this problem in favor of addressing the greater threat allegedly presented by my bill. Interestingly not of them or anyone else in the academic community has approached me with any suggestion as to how the wording of my bill might be changed to accommodate their concerns while achieving its goals of promoting intellectual diversity and ending the practice of political indoctrination in our academic classrooms. This failure shows their bad faith. I have been open from the beginning to suggestions from sincere critics of my bill -- that is critics who are concerned about the political abuse of the universities by faculty activists. I once had the illusion that David Beito and K.C. Johnson might be such critics. I no longer am. Their AHA resolution was an attempt to strengthen the credibility of the enemies of academic freedom in the university at the expense of an effort to protect it.

Click here to read Ralph Luker's response.