It looks like the Conservative proponents of the Academic Bill of Rights had a victory in Pennsylvania. This from Inside Higher Ed:

But on Tuesday, the Pennsylvania House of Representatives passed a resolution creating a special committee that is charged with investigating — at public colleges in the state — how faculty members are hired and promoted, whether students are fairly evaluated, and whether students have the right to express their views without fear of being punished for them.

The language in the resolution closely follows that of the Academic Bill of Rights, which has been pushed nationwide by David Horowitz, a former 60s radical who is now a conservative activist.

Let’s be honest, not all professors are fair, and some use their position as a pedestal on which to indoctrinate the youth of America. Whether they are wrong or right, we have to make sure that students have the opportunity to freely express their ideas. If only it were about fairness. We all know that this is just another attempt by people like Horowitz to push a Conservative agenda in our higher educational institutions. Fairness is one thing, but they want to be able to not teach the theory of evolution and allow people to teach revisionist history when it comes to the Holocaust. That cannot stand. I also think that the teachers need to come up with some alternative plan. If we say that we are for fairness, then we have to mean it. We can’t just be against things, because then we look like obstructionists.

Michael Berube had some interesting comments on his blog about this. He quotes frequent Young Philly Politics reader Representative Cohen, who lead the fight against the bill:

This pseudo-investigation has the potential to cause intimidation of many professors and to make the investigators a national laughingstock.

Not a single text of a Pennsylvania complaint was released, but the Horowitz web site, Students for Academic Freedom, quotes one student as saying he or she was victimized for conservative beliefs because his or her paper was both spellchecked and proofread and therefore had to be deserving of a high grade.

Concerned Pennsylvania legislators could use back-up support from state and national members of the academic community. We need to know about reality-based practices and principles to be able to win the media war against Horowitz developed theories and fantasies.

Props go out to Ray for pointing me towards this entry and Representative Cohen for leading the fight against this horrible Bill.