🤔🤔🤔
Here’s A Story on this from Tuscon.com, and an important exerpt:
Rep. Bob Thorpe said a 2010 law that targeted “ethnic studies” courses at some public schools, including those at Tucson Unified School District, does not go far enough with its prohibition against teaching anything that promotes resentment toward another race. He wants to expand that list to include gender, religion, political affiliation and social class.
So his bill could also be used to block discussion on economic inequality and class politics, meaning this could be used to gag most history and political science courses. Another distressing bit:
And Thorpe wants a ban on not just classes but any events or activities that “negatively target specific nationalities or countries.”
Given the recent popularity of the BDS movement on college campuses(inspired by the anti-apartheid movement), and the conservative backlash against it focused on banning speech or actions taken to support it, this seems particularly significant to me.
And this isn’t an isolated thing. There’s a guy in Missouri who, under the guise of trying to make college “more transparent” and geared to the job market, wants to get rid of tenure. He sort of gives away the game though when, in that interview, he says stuff like this:
Like I said, in what area do you have protection of your job for whatever you say, whatever you do, you’re protected? You don’t have that. Their job is to educate, to ensure that students are able to propel themselves into a work force and be successful. That’s their job.
If they are going off the rails and not doing what they are supposed to as a hired staff of educating those kids, should they not be held accountable? Should they have the freedom to do whatever they wish on the taxpayers’ dime and on the students’ dime? That should be more the question: Should they have that freedom to do that? Their focus should be to ensure that we have an educated person to be able to succeed beyond their wildest dreams.
...
Something’s wrong, something’s broken, and a professor that should be educating our kids, should be concentrating on ensuring that they’re propelling to a better future, but instead are engaging in political stuff that they shouldn’t be engaged in. Because they have tenure, they’re allowed to do so. And that is wrong.
...
Q. Let’s say a geologist at the University of Missouri is tenured and his responsibility entails research. Part of his job is to do research on publicly funded dollars. Do you think that should be publicly funded?
A. If that’s his job and he was hired by the university to do x, y, and z, and he’s performing x, y, and z, that’s what he was hired to do. It’s when these professors receive tenure that they are all of a sudden allowed this astronomical freedom to do whatever they wish, and they’re virtually untouchable, I’m sorry, it’s taxpayer dollars.
What this is really about is opening professors up to reprisal for their political veiws, and for engaging in research(for instance, climate science) that Republicans are ideologically opposed to. And remember: thanks to ALEC this stuff is going to get reproduced and disseminated all over the US, and likely at the Federal level. These guys didn’t write these bills -they barely even know what’s in them!- so this sort of things going to expand going forward.
