In the news

Congratulations to the BoT for making the national news. An article covering the policy-making zeal of some of its members appeared in Insidehighered.com

Unlike the local papers that seemed to provide a slightly nuanced account of events, this article exposes the extreme-right motives of the architects of the new policies.

Most people, myself included, are blissfully unaware of the "Academic Bill or Rights," known as ABOR, and its architect David Horowitz. It turns out that the "Educational Philosophy" in the BoT's proposed manual is an essential lifting of the language from ABOR. At first I didn't understand why some of my more clued-in colleagues were upset. On the surface it all seems harmless enough; on the surface the language seems inoffensive and indeed entirely reasonable. Below the surface lurk the dangers; for the ABOR was devised to wrest academic institutions away from the overly left-wing faculties that supposedly controlled them. The ABOR could be used, for example, to insert Creationism (see archives for comments on that) into the teaching of biology and so on. The extremists have become very cunning at adopting language that seems unarguable as a kind of Trojan Horse to infiltrate unwary academic institutions. The Intelligent Designers did not die in Dover; they have simply morphed into other even more subtle forms.

Now here we are at our little community college, in the shallower pools and further ebbs of higher education, seemingly having to deal with this nonsense. Even more reason to be vigilant come April.