David Horowitz Turn In Your Professor Effort Goes Defunct
Five years ago, ultraconservative David Horowitz created a web site mistitled “Students for Academic Freedom.” The whole “students” bit was added to make it appear that Horowitz wasn’t the driving force of the effort, and the whole effort was about “Academic Freedom” to the extent that George W. Bush’s “Clear Skies Initiative” was really about clear skies. No, the page was really set up to discourage the academic freedom of professors, making a place where students could report their professors for the offense of differing with them. All over this land, Horowitz claimed, we’d have students coming out of the woodwork to rat their undergraduate instructors out for exposing them to new and disagreeable ideas. Ideas! At a University! Horror!
Well, folks, there hasn’t been a new report to the “Students for Academic Freedom” web page for eighteen months. Over five years, only 440 students posted complaints, a great number of which contain sentence fragments of misspelled anger at professors grading down their perfect, perfect essays.
I think that you will find that a great number of students in universities can’t spell very well, or write well for that matter. A great credit to the teachers and their union.
I believe the is merit in the postion Mr. Horowitz takes. As a case in point, while my oldest daughter was in junior college, she had a critical thinking class. One assignment was to defend a closely held belief. The position she wrote on was against abortion (abortions being the liberals poster child) her paper was articulate, grammatically correct,well reasoned, and persuasive. However the grade she received was evidence of the contempt her professor felt for the position she had taken. Nothing more or less.