This is chilling. It is about growing fascism. If people can have beliefs that are never challenged, on either ideological end, they become extremist idealogues. The university is a place where biased professors teach their views and they should always get challenged! I was more left than they were in history and more right than they were in philosophy. A bill like this that attempts to eliminate "political orthodoxy" only serves to squelch debate and political challenges all around--it's toxic and the opposite of freedom. Professors and students should be free to be orthodox!!! My G-d, I went to a liberal college that had a history professor who believed that women caused the fall of Rome. Freedom exists!
I also read the actual bill linked at the end of this article and having had a lot of academic exposure I can tell that these paranoid, controlling right-wing folks are very interested in promoting extremist professors who don't have much academic credibility. They are trying to lower the scholarly standards used to give professors tenure, and elevate religious materials, so that questionable "reasonable scholarly credentials" can count toward tenure. One can easily imagine a holocaust-denier who's written a "research" book without peer review suing a university who, justifiably, won't hire him/her.
t r u t h o u t - House Bill Attacks 'Leftist' Professors, Allows Students to Sue over Beliefs: "Students who believe their professor is singling them out for 'public ridicule' - for instance, when professors use the Socratic method to force students to explain their theories in class - would also be given the right to sue. "
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