Beware the Button Police :: Inside Higher Ed :: Higher Education's Source for News, Views and Jobs: "Sporting an Obama or McCain button? Driving a car with one of the campaigns’ bumper stickers? You might need to be careful on University of Illinois campuses.The university system’s ethics office sent a notice to all employees, including faculty members, telling them that they could not wear political buttons on campus or feature bumper stickers on cars parked in campus lots unless the messages on those buttons and stickers were strictly nonpartisan. In addition, professors were told that they could not attend political rallies on campuses if those rallies express support for a candidate or political party. Faculty leaders were stunned by the directives. Some wrote to the ethics office to ask if the message was intended to apply to professors; they were told that it was. At Illinois campuses, as elsewhere, many professors do demonstrate their political convictions on buttons, bumper stickers and the like."
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Yes, they do "demonstrate their political convictions." But the University of Illinois faculty's political convictions are about 99% on one side: the left. So what we are really talking about is suppression of Obama buttons, Obama bumper stickers, and attendance at Obama rallies. And many professors also demonstrate their convictions in the classroom, which I noticed didn't pop up on the list, presumably because of legitimate concerns about the professors' academic freedom. So, the hard question is, who, if anybody, makes sure professors respect the students' freedoms? How do you address that concern without trampling on the professors?
2 comments:
Well, setting aside your unsupported claims about "99%" and "many demonstrate their convictions in the classroom" . . . which "student freedoms" are you worried about? Students don't have a "freedom to never be exposed to political sentiment."
If you're talking about students' freedom to express their own ideas without penalty, this policy obviously misses the mark. An unscrupulous liberal professor could downgrade a conservative student's work for political reasons whether or not the professor was wearing a campaign button at the time.
BTW, I agree that teachers shouldn't use their classrooms or office hours as a soapbox. I just don't believe this practice is widespread. In those rare cases where the practice might have affected a student, universities have appropriate appeals procedures in place already.
If buttons, stickers, and rally attendance were causing real problems, UI would be able to come up with real examples, and UI could tailor its policy to address those real examples. The lack of actual examples of a problem goes a long way to show why this policy is so idiotic.
This policy strikes me as utterly offensive. The administration at our campus in Ohio is given to authoritarian, vindictive, even idiotic pronouncements but something like this would see a lawsuit filed before the close of business.
The supposed liberal bias of the university could be addressed if the more conservative elemnts would abandon 7-figure jobs, spend years in graduate school and seek positions as assistant profs...or, given the recent trends, as non-tenere-tracked Lecturers, rather than to continue with their utterly unsuccessful attempts to muzzle academic freedom.
And Beth, you could have equally said "An unscrupulous conservative professor could downgrade a liberal student's work for political reasons..." In my experience a more commen occurrence.
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