"Scott: I don’t think the accusations of bias and lack of balance are credible. I’ve already discussed my reactions to the attack on professors of Middle East studies in my response to your last question. The call for “balance” has also come from neoconservatives, led by David Horowitz and his campaigners for the “Academic Bill of Rights.” There is, of course, a connection between the pro-Sharon lobby and many of these campaigners on substantive grounds and in their self- representation as victims of discrimination, when in fact they represent a majority viewpoint in American society. On Committee A, we were particularly disturbed because Horowitz cites our principles in support of his bill. But there’s a world of difference between our notion of academic freedom and his. (There’s a very good analysis of these differences on the AAUP Web site.) Horowitz’s goal is to secure the same conservative hegemony in the classroom that already exists in the White House, the Congress, and corporate boardrooms. He wants to end the critical function of the university, to take away the role of the professor as gadfly and require instead a studied neutrality in regard to “substantive disagreements that divide researchers on questions within, or outside, their fields of inquiry.” This means that creationism and the denial of the Holocaust must get equal time in science and history courses. And it means that the judgments of quality and the ethical commitments that are part of academic discourse must be put aside. But conflicts of values and ethics, as well as of interpretation, are part of the process of knowledge production; they inform it, drive it, trouble it. The commitments of scholars to ideas of justice, for example, are at the heart of many an important investigation in political theory, philosophy, and history; they cannot be suppressed as irrelevant “opinion.” And because such commitments cannot be separated from scholarship and teaching, there are mechanisms internal to academic life that monitor abuses, distinguishing between serious, responsible work and polemic, between teaching that aims to unsettle received opinion and teaching that is indoctrination. They are not perfect by any means, but they will not work better if government oversight is substituted for community self-surveillance. This is how John Dewey and Arthur Lovejoy, founders in 1915 of the AAUP, understood the need for academic freedom. The protections of academic freedom and tenure for faculty are necessary precisely to prevent the invasion of the academy by outside forces—trustees, legislators, judges, lobbyists, and agitators like Horowitz. Horowitz’s call for “balance” and for the “rights” of students to be spared having to listen to lectures that challenge their politics is an attack on academic freedom as the AAUP defines it, and on the integrity of the liberal university as well." (thanks Besharah)