It seems some of the Penn State faculty are closing ranks to hold onto their “right” to push left-wing agendas. Centre Daily Times reports that faculty met to form an AAUP chapter last night.
It’s not quite the massive movement you might think from reading the headline: “Professors organize in response to bill.” Read on, and the first paragraph states that “several professors” attended, then saying in the next paragraph that the organizational meeting drew “more than 30 people.” Read on, however, and at the very end you find that only a dozen actually joined the AAUP.
Acting as temporary Premier, er, President of the newly formed AAUP chapter is resident left-wing nutball and post-modernist Michael Berube. If you don’t know how wacked out he is, you can check here, here, or if you can stand it from the horse’s mouth, his own webpage, here.
After stating that the AAUP would not be a collective bargaining organization, the wackjob pretty much laid it on the line:
Rather, he said, it will be a political group, sparked by opposition here to state House Resolution 177. It’s the measure that created a legislative subcommittee on academic freedom, which is investigating allegations of political bias at Pennsylvania’s state-funded universities.
Berube has called it an affront to academic autonomy. “The AAUP is not opposed to accountability,” he said. “What we’re opposed to is direct legislative oversight” of curriculum.
Let’s translate this from liberalese to English:
Rather, he said, it will be a political group, to maintain the ultra-left status quo in hiring, administration, and teaching.
“The AAUP is not opposed to accountability,” [more on this in a moment] he said. “What we’re opposed to is anybody screwing with our pro-terrorist left-wing agenda on campus.”
Accountability. I know many faculty members, and I can count the number who understand the concept of accountability on two hands. And why should they know what it means? No tenured faculty member is in any way accountable for anything, and that is exactly the way they want it to stay.
The AAUP either insists that there is no left-wing bias on campuses, or claims that a left-wing bias exists because only stupid people are conservative; and that universities should police their own. But that hasn’t worked, has it? Forget Ward Churchill: How about all the faculty across the country who signed petitions in support of him, yet called for Summers’s head on a platter. Universities have no interest in doing anything to change their indoctrination. Hence, somebody has to make them do it.
Kudos to David Warren Saxe, Associate Professor of Education and conservative, who attended. We need more like him.