[URPE] Princeton Adopts an "Academic Bill of Rights" -- opening for radicals!!

[Michael Meeropol]

Dear Folks:  Something very interesting just happened at Princeton.  In 
a student referendum, 51% of Princeton students voting adopted an 
ACADEMIC BILL OF RIGHTS which has been touted all over the country by 
the newest personal incarnation of the witch-hunt, ex Marxist David 
Horowitz.  If anyone is interested in how he operates, I would be happy 
to share with you my personal experience when he came to speak at my 
college (Western New England College in Springfield, MA) on March 9 
(though you can catch his rant at DUKE on March 7, which was on C-SPAN a 
week or so later).

I am not writing to talk about Horowitz.  Instead I want to propose a 
concerted effort to take advantage of what Princeton just did.

The key to the Academic Bill of Rights is that students have the "right" 
to demand that they not be indoctrinated in the classroom based on the 
Professor's biases.  Horowitz and his crew of course insist that the 
LEFT controls the Universities and routinely blacklists conservatives 
and conservative viewpoints.  Hence, the need for students to demand 
"balance" in the classroom.

In fact, of course, we know that the vast majority of Economics 
Departments not only do not have radical economists teaching there, they 
don't even SERIOUSLY TEACH about radical subjects.

In the Princeton University publication announcing the result of the 
vote, they quoted the person who had organized opposition to the vote, a 
student named Asheesh Siddique (class of '07), that he "plans on filing 
a complaint with the USG regarding an introductory economics course, 
because it ignores 'Marxist economic viewpoints, privileging capitalist 
ones exclusively'."  I propose that we begin to give the Princeton 
Economics Department a hard time if IN FACT (let's not pre-judge this) 
they do present a completely traditional curriculum with no introduction 
of radical alternatives in their principles and other courses.  Let's 
see if the student government is willing to put its muscle where its 
voting majority was!!

What do people think?

Mike Meeropol
mameerop at wnec.edu

PS:  Horowitz admitted that Economics departments are the exception to 
his generalization that the left has taken over.  His reason -- [I kid 
you not] "Economics involves a lot of math and Marxists (leftists) are 
too dumb to do that math..."

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: text/html
Size: 2983 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/pipermail/urpe-announcements/attachments/20060501/e2db24ea/attachment.txt>