NWSA in the News: No Ideologue Left Behind?
No Ideologue Left Behind:
The American Association of University Professors defends indoctrination.
by David Horowitz,
11/12/2007, Volume 013, Issue 09
In a Weekly Standard article, "No Ideologue Left Behind," David Horowitz takes aim at women's studies and other "soft" disciplines for what he identifies as political nature.
NWSA Executive Director Allison Kimmich responded to Horowitz in an interview with Free Exchange on Campus, an advocacy group.
A variety of feminist bloggers including Feministing are getting into the conversation, too.
Download Horowitz (pdf)
Download Kimmich (pdf)
The National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA) opposes any and all infringements on academic freedoms such as the so-called Academic Bill of Rights (ABOR) and other similar measures.
The Center for Popular Culture, a leading organization behind attacks on women’s/gender, ethnic/multicultural, and peace studies programs and faculty contributing to them, is campaigning for ABOR’s adoption by university and college campuses throughout the US. Several states are considering versions of the ABOR as legislation.
The explicit aim of ABOR is to increase the number of conservative faculty in U.S. universities, but ABOR and legislative versions of ABOR cloak this intention in a vocabulary of freedom and rights.
In fact, ABOR, variously named legislation patterned on ABOR, and other measures with like intent actually infringe on academic freedoms even as these proposals purport to protect them. For example, ABOR and legislative measures that share its goals would mandate that universities and colleges use partisan rather than scholarly standards to hire and evaluate faculty and to assess student performance.
ABOR is at odds with NWSA’s mission and core values. NWSA and urges faculty, students, and staff in American universities to oppose ABOR’s adoption by their campuses and their elected representatives and to organize against any and all attempts to limit academic freedoms regardless their sponsor.
Footnote:
1)The Center for Popular Culture this year campaigned against Purdue University’s Peace Studies Program and faculty teaching in it. The Center condemned the Peace Program’s interdisciplinary curriculum: “The Peace Studies program at Purdue is designed to indoctrinate unsuspecting undergraduates . . . .The ‘Committee on Peace Studies’. . . is composed of faculty from the departments of English, History, Philosophy, Women's Studies, and Child Development and Family Studies, whose courses are incorporated into its curriculum (examples: ‘Gender, Colonialism and Development,’ ‘Black Women Rising’).” The Center for Popular Culture objects to Program Director Harry Targ’s view that “We need to clarify the connections between U.S. capitalism, global conquest, and visions of empire…[and] discover where multinational corporations and international financiers stand, whether the oil and/or military industries are driving the doctrine of preemption, and which, if any, sectors of the ruling class regard unilateralism, globalism, and militarism as a threat to global trade, production, investment and speculation.”
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