Academic Monologues

Ruth Malhotra’s involvement in the College Republicans attracted attention from Georgia Tech where she is an International Relations and Public Policy major, when the CRs held a protest of The Vagina Monologues. The students had a sign with quotes from the Eve Ensler play [being shown on campus], and were ordered to white-out some of the quotes by university officials. When the CRs attempted to hold a diversity bake sale to call attention to Georgia Tech’s affirmative action policies they were shut down by campus police.

Malhotra offered these recollections while speaking on a panel with other dissident students at a conference on academic freedom.

In the wake of these confrontations, Malhotra filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against her school last month with the help of the Alliance Defense Fund, she told the crowd at the conference, which was sponsored by Students for Academic Freedom.

Brett Mock who graduated from Ball State University last May, said that he thinks most critics of the academic freedom movement believe that because many supporters are Republicans or conservatives that they “just don’t like liberals talking,” but that is not the case.

“Let’s look at the classroom as a product. It is advertised one way, but presented very differently at times,” said Mock who believes many colleges are engaged in a form of consumer fraud.

Mock, who was a Peace Studies major with a Conflict resolution minor, explained that the closed environment of the classroom means that students have to worry about their grades and will consider whether debating a professor will affect the class grade.

Most will not decide to “pass on my law degree to show how brave I am and argue with the professor,” said Mock.

Personally, Mock took a class in peace studies taught by a professor of music performance who he said “had absolutely no qualifications for teaching peace studies.” It was in this class that Mock was marked down for not understanding Gandhian philosophy when he wrote in a compare-and-contrast paper that he didn’t think his parents could have successfully used Gandhi’s methods on him as a child. He challenged the professor’s grading and got the points back, but worried for the rest of the semester. For one of his last assignments, a book review, he was told no when he requested to use a pro-war book because all of the suggested books were anti-war or anti-military. So Mock ignored his own views and wrote a pro-Chomsky paper for which he earned an A+ and 10 points of extra credit.

“I must make better arguments when I write in favor of my professor’s opinion,” Mock said sarcastically.

Dan Schuberth of Maine’s Bowdoin College is a vocal proponent of the Academic Bill of Rights (ABOR) in his position as Vice Chairman of the Maine Republican Party. Schuberth talked about how the ABOR was proposed a year ago in the Maine house by Representative Stephen Bowen, R-Rockport. Twelve College Republicans testified before a committee and brought with them a box of testimony.

“Not one student stood against us. The opposition was the Maine ACLU, Maine teachers’ unions and other bureaucrats,” said Schuberth who explained that a full vote failed by only one vote. “We’re gonna get it done,” he said.

Nathaniel Walton followed Schuberth to wrap up the student panel and expressed the purpose of the movement when he asked, “If we don’t have a market of ideas, how can we be leaders tomorrow?”

Walton, who is a student of Bates College in Maine and became the Chairman of the Maine College Republicans last July, said that the ABOR has helped motivate students to become involved and keep their CR chapters alive.

Julia A. Seymour is a staff writer for Accuracy in Academia.