At last Saturday’s Take Back Georgetown Day event, conservative students presented an Academic Freedom Resolution – proposed and passed in modified form this week by GUSA – nominally designed to protect the classroom rights of students from politically biased professors. The resolution, however, despite apparent impartiality, had unfortunate partisan roots and failed to properly address the real issue of preventing unwarranted bias in the classroom.
The resolution proved impractical because its sponsors have a clearly stated conservative agenda and a narrow constituency. Furthermore, it makes political climate a criterion for course evaluations, which is inappropriate for measuring the efficacy of the course. All of the TBGD rhetoric focused on protecting conservatives from the specter of classroom liberalism, while seeming to have no qualms with the spread of conservative values in any situation.
It is indeed uncalled-for when professors of any political persuasion, or any other bias, interject unnecessary opinions into class in situations where they are irrelevant. Even the most offhand comments taint the credibility of the professor and the educational experience of the course. When students know the convictions of their teacher, they are more apt to either agree with that professor in the name of improving their grade, or shrink away from participation if they are in full opposition. This poisons a Georgetown education and jeopardizes the free exchange of ideas on campus. The best professors are the ones who guard their political views.
To remedy such situations, we propose a mechanism for reporting all types of biases in class. Georgetown should implement a bias reporting system that will handle all kinds of discrimination, whether it be racial, sexual, political or otherwise. An unbiased internal administrator could easily be found to head up this project.
Georgetown does indeed have a faculty that is liberal on average, but for the most part that should not—and does not—affect the greater educational experience. Hiring a more diverse faculty may be another goal for the administration to look into, but ultimately this should be a non-issue: the political leanings of a professor should never change the classroom experience.
While the overall Georgetown culture may seem slanted to the left as well, trips to many of our peer institutions would reveal that our university tis extremely moderate. Institutions such as the College Republicans and the Knights of Columbus keep conservative culture active on campus, and no substantiated claims of ideological bias in the classroom have arisen to date. Bias protection should reasonably be offered to all, then, not just one political ideology.
A version of the Academic Freedom Resolution thus improved would be a positive step, as long as bias protection were offered to all members of the community on all legitimate grounds. Otherwise, it becomes political meandering that counteracts the stated intention.
