Washington University of St. Louis will be awarding one of six honorary degrees to conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly at tomorrow's commencement exercises.  Given Ms. Schlafly's prominence over the last three decades - especially in the fight to stop the Equal Rights Amendment - it's not surprising that more than a few people are upset that the university would choose to dignify her with such an honor.

There are some who feel that such controversial characters on the dais or behind the podium at commencement ceremonies are a distraction to the celebration of the achievements of recently-minted graduates - a sentiment made explicit in Northwestern University's decision to rescind its offer of an honorary degree to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.  While there's certainly a case to be made that this sort of sideshow detracts from the main event, it's more important to note that the decision to honor Ms. Schlafly has touched off the sort of vigorous debate that is part and parcel of the college experience.  Members of the campus community have used this opportunity to have a spirited engagement about Schlafly's views and actions as a public figure.  And that is unequivocally a good thing.

Washington University should be free to award honorary degrees to whomever it chooses - even if some doubt that a recipient's achievements merit such an award.  Likewise, students, faculty members, and others are free to disagree with those choices and to vigorously express that disagreement.  So long as all sides are able to make their points heard on the issue, the experience will be a net positive.  In fact, such lively expressions guarantee that the final act of many students' college experience will be carried out in the same spirit as the rest of their education, characterized by a free and open exchange of ideas.

University of Oklahoma freshman John Tyler Hammons was elected mayor of the town of Muskogee, Oklahoma yesterday with over 70% of the vote.  Mr. Hammons, age 19, has just completed his first year of a college indoctrina... erm, education and, as our friends at Campus Progress note, could assume awesome dictatorial powers should martial law be declared.

Muahahahaha! 

Via PZ Myers, we learn about the latest legislative abomination to threaten education in the great state of Oklahoma:

[Oklahoma legislator Sally Kern] had earlier sponsored something called the Religious Viewpoints Antidiscrimination Act, a ghastly piece of legislation that would require teachers to pass any old crap a student turned in, as long as the student said it was his religious belief - it prioritized belief over evidence. That bill died in a senate committee, fortunately.

But now it has been resurrected! The language from the earlier bill has been inserted into Oklahoma House Bill 2633.

A controversial provision in House Bill 2633 states that "students may express their beliefs about religion in homework, artwork, and other written and oral assignments free from discrimination based on the religious content of their submissions."

A note to meddling legislators - and to Representative Kern in particular: classroom assignments are not free-for-all expositions for a student to share her beliefs with her instructor.  They serve the important pedagogical functions of helping students integrate the concepts and facts about which they've been learning and providing a means to evaluate how well students understand the course content.

Perhaps an example would be illustrative.  When I was a TA for a class on demography, I had to grade the following paraphrased short essay question: "Compare and contrast the causes of food scarcity advanced by proponents of the Green Revolution and by critics of neo-liberal trade policies."  The short answer is that the former would attribute food scarcity to a shortfall in production and the latter to inequality in the distribution of food.  One student - a star player on that year's basketball team, no less - answered that food scarcity was a punishment from God meted out to those who refused to provide the proper obeisance to His Authority.  The student received a grade of zero for that particular question, not because I objected to his religious views, but because he didn't answer the question to demonstrate that he understood the material.  I could care less whether or not he modified his religious beliefs in light of one of the two explanations on which he was to answer.  My job was to ascertain whether or not he had learned the material at hand, and from the answer given, I could only conclude that either he hadn't learned it or he willingly ignored it.

Myers is right - this proposed legislation is completely insane and gives students an excuse not to have to learn anything that butts up against their preconceived notions.  And it is the very antithesis of education. 

The Chancellor for the University of Colorado has recently proposed raising money for what some see as a rather peculiar position:

Chancellor G.P. "Bud" Peterson surveys this landscape with unease. A college that champions diversity, he believes, must think beyond courses in gay literature, Chicano studies and feminist theory. "We should also talk about intellectual diversity," he says. So over the next year, Mr. Peterson plans to raise $9 million to create an endowed chair for what is thought to be the nation's first Professor of Conservative Thought and Policy.

And in a move that might garner me a position as a columnist for Frontpagemag.com, I actually agree with David Horowitz on this point:

While he approves of efforts to bolster a conservative presence on campus, Mr. Horowitz fears that setting up a token right-winger as The Conservative at Boulder will brand the person as a curiosity, like "an animal in the zoo."

Peterson's proposal seems to potentially institutionalize the very problem about which Horowitz and others complain - the politicization of the hiring process.  Rather than hiring someone on the basis of their scholarship, teaching, and service, CU is seeking to create a position to be awarded to someone on the basis of their political views. 

Of course, it should be noted that it's Horowitz and his cadre's over-simplistic view of intellectual diversity (taking head-counts of faculty voter registration, for example) that directly leads to these sorts of proposals in the first place.

Those don’t mean anything, really; I can move on.

Today, I was reading a David Horowitz piece on his Front Page Magazine site where he once again reproduces that cartoon with a stereotyped picture of a Jew labeled “Horowitz” (anti-Semitic? Yes. Worth reproducing? No more than those Danish cartoons). I flew through his bragging about how Muslim Student Association chapters hadn’t responded to his “Declaration Against Genocide” (a document purposely couched in terms that the MSA would have to reject) and, before I could pull myself to a stop, had passed this by:

This attack on a free press was abetted by leftwing faculty members such as Michael Bérubé at Penn State. In the Penn State ad we referred to the fact (checked by the editors) that the Penn State MSA had invited an imam to campus who blamed the United States for the attack on the World Trade Center and called for gays to be killed. Bérubé is a member of the national council of the American Association of University Professors, but instead of decrying the attempts to abridge freedom of the press on the campus, or the expressing dismay at the imam’s remarks, he attacked David Horowitz as a campus provocateur.