We have written of the educational travesty being committed against Bill Felkner by the Rhode Island College School of Social Work before. Now, similarly outraged, Brian Bishop of The Foundation for Intellectual Diversity at Brown University has produced a well-reasoned explanation as to why so many of us find the actions of those who run RIC’s School of Social Work intellectually wrongheaded and discriminatory.

The extent to which various paradigms of benefit provision lead toward independence is the fundamental measure of welfare’s effectiveness, according to both social workers and “wascally Wepublicans.” As would be expected, the greatest debate in substantive welfare reform is how to characterize the results of different approaches.
In Rhode Island, such debate is expected to take place at the School of Social Work at Rhode Island College. But recent public scrutiny indicates that the school views itself as an advocate for a single outlook, rather than as an academic institution considering, with openness, the merits of diverse methods.
The School of Social Work — joined at the hip to RIC’s Poverty Institute — operates on the premise that government benefits confer personal dignity, especially as opposed to dogged self-reliance or private charity.
The school’s charter appears to suggest that it is a failing of the rest of society that folks lie in mean estate, and thus the responsibility of society to provide for them in a nonjudgmental way. It teaches that a panoply of benefits are virtual rights for potential recipients. If any of the assistance available under the ironic rubric of promoting family “independence” is not used, the program is condemned as inflexible.
Thus, the latest marching orders for School of Social Work students is to lobby, as part of a required course, for extending educational benefits to those on welfare beyond the first two years of eligibility. The reasoning behind extending benefits is that a new mother either has little choice about spending these early years with her child or might prefer to do so.

Bishop explained Felkner’s case and contrasted the attitude of the RIC SSW with the students at Brown University who “recognized what their faculty did not: that a refusal to permit certain ideas to be expressed based on presupposition about their merits is an embarrassment to the tradition of liberal education.” While I’m heartened to see such “activism” by Brown’s students, I’m not surprised that there seems to be little faculty support. (Though the fact that Bishop’s foundation is at Brown is cause for hope). Nonetheless, Bishop properly asked the Rhode Island government to put the heat on the state funded schools to insist on academic diversity.

It is not the business of the state to tell private institutions what constitutes a proper academic environment, but these are state institutions. Thus, it is not only proper but paramount for the legislature to adopt a similar academic bill of rights for the state’s university and its colleges, as these schools seem disinclined to confront their failings on their own.

We shall see.
ADDENDUM: A “source” tells us that, thanks in large part to the efforts of Brian Bishop, RI State Senator Kevin Breene will be submitting a bill that will allow the RI Board of Governors for Higher Education to implement an Academic Bill of Rights. Presumably, this will be applicable to all of the schools under the purview of the board: URI, RIC, and CCRI. When the bill becomes available online, we will post it here.

The problem of intellectual harassment in academia is so pervasive that, I am sorry to say, Where is the Moral Outrage? is now an ongoing series. This posting builds on previous postings here, here, and here.
Marc has highlighted several other recent examples of a Brown University professor and Ward Churchill at the University of Colorado.
In further commentary on Ward Churchill, Power Line highlights another example of the pathetic behavior within the academy. In that posting, they quote Michael Ledeen of the American Enterprises Institute:

First, “freedom of speech” on most major university campuses nowadays is a fraud. When America’s greatest living historian of the antebellum south, Stephan Thernstrom [of Harvard], is prevented from teaching that course [“The Peopling of America”] because black students protest against a white man teaching it, you know that free speech is over. I work at a place staffed with people who should, by the quality of their work, be in major university chairs, but they are not because the universities do not want people with those ideas. So nobody should think that there’s “freedom of speech” to defend.

Continuing on, they then expand on the Thernstrom situation:

In 1988 three students accused Professor Thernstrom of “racial insensitivity” in teaching his “Peopling of America” course as a result of his discussion of Jim Crow laws and his quotation from Southern plantation journals in a lecture. The response of the Harvard administration to the students’ baseless charges against him left Professor Thernstrom profoundly unsatisfied:

I felt like a rape victim, and yet the silence of the administration seemed to give the benefit of the doubt to the students who attacked me. Maybe I was naive, but I expected the university to come to my defense. I mean, that’s what academic freedom is about, isn’t it? Instead I was left out there by myself, guilty without being proven guilty. I could not even defend myself, because the charge of racism and racial insensitivity is ultimately unanswerable.

Professor Thernstrom decided for the foreseeable future not to offer his “Peopling of America” course. “It just isn’t worth it,” he said. “Professors who teach race issues encounter such a culture of hostility, among some students, that some of these questions are simply not teachable any more, at least not in an honest, critical way.”

The American academy should be ashamed of itself. This is behavior we would expect out of the former Soviet Union, not America.

Brown University President Ruth Simmons spoke about intellectual diversity on campus at her Spring Semester Opening Address on Wednesday.

After her speech. . .Simmons responded to students’ questions on. . . the impact of faculty sharing political opinions in class. . .
Simmons began by telling the audience that one of the questions she receives most frequently when visiting Brown alums and parents around the country is, “What is the University doing about the lack of diversity of opinion on campus?” She said that students on campus of all political stripes have told her of “a chilling effect caused by the dominance of certain voices on the spectrum of moral and political thought.”
Such a chilling effect is detrimental to education and intellectual inquiry because “we are often creatures of habit when it comes to learning. . .Familiar and appetizing offerings can certainly be a pleasing dimension of learning, but too much repetition of what we desire to hear can become intellectually debilitating,” she said. . .
Simmons posed several questions she said should be addressed. . . whether Brown is “suppressing expression, limiting debate (and) fostering hostility to particular ideas and different perspectives. . .Why do so many hold up Brown as an example of the way that universities today circumscribe free expression?”
Simmons said a reasoned challenge to a perspective is “the most important obligation of scholarship” and the duty to enter debates lies with students themselves.
“Unchallenged opinion is a dark place that must be exposed to light,” she said.
. . . To that end, Simmons said she would ask faculty leaders to produce a report for the Community Council that will explore “the climate for open debate on the campus” and suggest any remedies for improving students’ “perceived sense of freedom … with regard to expression and debate.”
In the question-and-answer session following the speech, Danny Doncan ’05 asked Simmons about the impact of faculty sharing their opinions and political positions in classes.
Simmons said though freedom of expression must apply to all, including faculty, “there is a relationship of power that exists in the classroom.” She said her advice to professors would be “to ensure that every student feels empowered to enter into debate.”
“One thing that’s very hard for us to do as faculty is really (to) withhold enthusiasm for a subject. … I remember when I was first starting as a faculty member, I discovered that the more I talked in class, the less the students did.”
. . . With regard to Simmons’ announcement of the new lecture fund, Etan Green ’08 told The Herald he thought it was significant that the three most visible speakers last semester were Howard Dean, Noam Chomsky and Jesse Jackson. Green wondered if the new fund would work.
“With the significant leftist leanings, will anyone take advantage of (the fund), and will anyone show up?” he said.

Simmons is to be applauded for making this effort. Initially, I believed she was being either naive or disengenuous when she stated, according to the report, that challenging a point of view is “the most important obligation of scholarship” and that it was up to the student to engage in debate. However, in answer to a question, she later acknowledged the “relationship of power. . . in the classroom” between professor and student and recommended that every professor should “ensure that every student feels empowered to enter into debate.” This left me to conclude that she understands the problem.
Apparently, so does the University of Colorado, which is taking steps to address the actions of Ward Churchill, “who likened World Trade Center victims to a notorious Nazi” and has lied about being an American Indian for the purpose of adding credibility to his radical teachings. The whole brouhaha started when Churchill was invited to speak at Hamilton College. (via Instapundit and The Belmont Club)