When William Mullaney assigned his English Literature students to read a book about two suburban families experimenting with sex in the 1970s, he never imagined he would end up the target of state legislation.
One of his students at Chandler-Gilbert Community College found the book's sexual content offensive and asked for a different assignment. Mullaney refused, saying there was no comparable book. He also reminded the student that his course syllabus warned that some reading material would have adult themes.
The student took the issue to the college president, Maria Hesse, who assigned a group of faculty members to review the course content for appropriateness. Ultimately, both Hesse and the faculty members sided with Mullaney.
The student didn't give up, though, and he finally found a sympathetic ear in Republican Thayer Verschoor, a state senator from Gilbert.
Earlier this year, Verschoor introduced Senate Bill 1331 in the Arizona Legislature, requiring professors in public universities to offer alternative assignments to students offended by assignments that included sexual content.
Mullaney viewed the bill as no less than an assault on academic freedom. He is not alone, and his is not an isolated case.
Professors and free speech advocates across the country are concerned about what they say is a movement by conservatives to dictate "appropriate" content for classrooms. The real agenda, they say, is to alter the so-called "liberal landscape" on college campuses.
In recent years, professors in places like Colorado, Ohio, Virginia, Pennsylvania and South Dakota have been accused of spouting leftist agendas in their classrooms and more and more, state legislatures are taking note.
Legislatures get involved
Increasingly, the fight over academic freedom is cropping up in state legislatures around the country.
The reason lies largely from David Horowitz, conservative commentator and founder of Students for Academic Freedom, who has been lobbying state legislatures around the country to pass his Academic Bill of Rights. The bill requires professors to include dissenting viewpoints in class and prevents universities from punishing a professor based on his or her political or religious beliefs.
Between 2004 and 2005, 14 state legislatures, including Arizona's, dealt with bills based on Horowitz's proposals, according to the American Association of University Professors.
While none were approved, the Colorado and Ohio legislatures did work out agreements with public colleges and universities to ensure that students were aware of their rights to have a broad range of scholarly opinion in classrooms, to not be subjected to controversial matters that have no bearing on the subject being taught, and to be graded based on knowledge of a subject and not their political or religious beliefs.
Horowitz's efforts have irked groups such as the National Coalition for Censorship and the American Civil Liberties Union, which call them a restriction of free speech.
Joan Bertin, executive director at NCAC, said state legislatures shouldn't interfere with what goes on in university classrooms. "More and more state legislatures are coming out with bills that seek to ultimately restrict faculty control over content," she said in a phone interview from New York.
In Arizona, Verschoor's bill made it past the Higher Education Committee, but in March, it was defeated 17-12 in the full Senate.
Legislators arguing against the bill said students need to be exposed to sensitive yet controversial issues such as racism or gender bias. They held up books like "The Color Purple" and "Huckleberry Finn," pointing out that there really aren't alternatives for such books, said Mullaney, who followed the debate.
Mullaney also got support from former state Sen. Harry Mitchell (D-Tempe). "People go to college to open their minds, and this bill would have defeated the purpose of a university education," he said.
Mullaney said the bill was defeated in large part because of opposition and strong lobbying on the part of the Chandler-Gilbert Community College and Arizona State University.
Horowitz did not overtly back Verschoor's bill. In fact, during a visit to ASU this spring, Horowitz said, "I support the Republican Legislature in Arizona, but this bill overreached. It will destroy teacher-student relationship."
But Bertin remains skeptical. She said Horowitz' proposals and S.B. 1331, which failed to pass the Arizona Legislature, are cut from the same cloth.
"I hope Horowitz wasn't behind (S.B.) 1331, but he's being disingenuous if he denies any connection between the kinds of proposals he's been making and what Arizona did," she said.
Targeting professors
The debate about biased teaching in classrooms peaked in early 2005 over an essay University of Colorado ethics professor Ward Churchill had written right after Sept. 11, labeling Sept. 11 victims "little Eichmanns" and implying that they deserved to die.
The essay infuriated many Americans and led to a campaign that attempted to get Churchill fired. While the university could not fire Churchill based directly on the Sept. 11 paper, the chancellor of CU recently called for Churchill to be fired after a university-led investigation charged Churchill with academic research misconduct.
"Conservatives got a great excuse to use that reprehensible essay to rally support for what they are calling a widespread leftist 'indoctrination' of college students," Jentleson said.
Another prominent case involved a political science professor at Metropolitan State College of Denver. Between 2003 and 2004, three students there complained about Oneida Meranto, accusing her of bias against conservative students and of unfair grading. One student was incensed that Meranto showed a film that insulted the military.
According to an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Meranto, who even got death threats, did not initially receive much faculty support. Eventually, the college's president dismissed all the complaints, saying she had not displayed any bias in the classroom or in grading. Still, Meranto resorted to taping her lectures as a precautionary measure.
At ASU, there have been no high-profile cases such as these, but there are plenty of strong feelings on the part of both faculty and students.
Nine ASU professors in different departments interviewed for this article said they would be opposed to any legislation controlling classroom content. But several say there is a need to tone down political ideology in classrooms.
And conservative students are increasingly speaking up. The College Republicans highlighted issues such as academic freedom and liberal bias in the classroom during its "Conservative Pride Week" on campus last spring.
Mike Jaskie, president of the group, said the aim was to demonstrate that there are many conservative students on campus who refuse to sit quietly while liberal professors spout their viewpoints in class. "I've been receiving many student complaints about unfair grading and students complaining that professors told them their essays were not agreeable," the math senior said.
Marianne Jennings, professor of legal and ethical studies in the W.P. Carey School of Business and a conservative newspaper columnist, said she believes that a few colleagues do espouse their political ideologies in class.
"It's a huge position of responsibility, but some professors do stray off subjects and give their personal views," she said. "They think they're presenting analytical views, but they don't realize they're injecting their opinion."
Jennings said she would prefer no regulation of classroom content, "but it's a consequence when professors become intransigent."
"Professors used to share common ground that we didn't cross a certain line in material presented in classes, but that's been lost in recent years."
History professor Brian Gratton agreed, saying that professors have grown increasingly leftist and dogmatic. "Students receive propaganda rather than scholarship in most ethnic studies departments and in many classes in other humanities departments," he said.
Gratton said he sometimes hears from students who think that classroom readings are too conservative. An example, he said, is Samuel Huntington's book "Who Are We," which argues for restrictions on immigration.
"It's not a book I necessarily agree with, but I don't want my students telling me that I can't discuss it in class," he said. "We must allow any literature in classrooms, as long as it's germane to the class."
F. Miguel Valenti wants open discussions, too. Valenti teaches film at ASU's Herberger College and is upset about attempts to weed out violent or sexual scenes in movies. During one semester one of Valenti's students brought an edited version of "12 Monkeys," a violent, R-rated science-fiction thriller, to class, and Valenti objected.
"Church groups have been hiring people to edit movies," he said. "I have a problem when it's not the filmmaker creating a milder version, but people with no editing experience. I shouldn't have to show vanilla versions of a movie."
In fact, Valenti said if he's teaching a course on sex and violence, he deliberately pushes it to the limit.
"'Natural Born Killers' is an offensive film, but I show it to my students to explain to them how terrible violence can be and maybe they could change the system," he said.
Valenti said legislators shouldn't dictate that professors must offer alternatives to students offended by assignments. "We're damaging the ability of educators to do what they do best-and that is to teach," he said.
Valenti believes there's a hidden Christian agenda behind this increased questioning of professors. "The stronger the conservative Christian right pushes in one direction, professors will go off in the other direction," he said.
But he says it's not OK for professors to discuss their political beliefs in class. "A number of them do cross the line," he said.
Conservative voices
Valenti's words are heartening for conservative students on campus, who say they are tired of hearing socialist or anti-Bush comments in class.
Take business sophomore Troy Hyde, for instance, who's still angry about remarks made by Professor Benjamin Lewin. Hyde, state chairman of the Arizona Federation of College Republicans, was one of nearly 200 students in a Sociology 101 lecture in early March when Lewin discussed socialist Karl Marx. Hyde said the professor overstepped when he pronounced Marx to be "grossly misunderstood."
"The office of a professor isn't a license to preach on a message," said Hyde, 19. "ASU has government funds and it is not a position of a government employee to favor one side or the other. It's a way of indoctrination."
Hyde said he thinks that the bigger the class, the more liberty professors tend to take, as students have little chance to voice their opinions or engage in discussion. Sometimes he can't wait to get the professor evaluation sheet at the end of this semester.
Hyde's comments did not surprise Lewin. He said he gets a few complaints every semester about his teaching of Marxist theories in his introductory sociology class. "Students who object to my teachings on Marx misinterpret them as me endorsing him rather than just one of other sociologists that I talk about," he said.
He added if students don't think a professor is doing a good job, they have the right not to take a class with that professor. "But they certainly don't have a right to put constraints on what a professor teaches in class," he said.
Hyde also complained about another professor, Robert Short. On the first day of a Psychology 101 class this past semester, "Short called suicide bombers reasonable people," Hyde said.
Hyde said he confronted Short about the statement after class and "the professor simply said suicide bombers reason things out their way."
When asked about Hyde's complaint, Short said he was using suicide bombers as an anecdote to illustrate how normal people can be brought to do extreme things under extreme situations. "Sometimes we term people crazy, underestimating the situation that could have triggered their actions," he said.
"It's unfortunate this student still thinks I literally meant suicide bombers are good," Short said. "I also do wish students would speak up in class and not after class. That way if others have similar doubts, they could be clarified."
Hyde is convinced that such incidents occur more often with liberal professors than conservative ones who "don't tend to display their agenda."
Former Academic Senate President George Watson, who teaches in the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, said he has heard complaints about biased teaching from students and complaints about a lack of support and understanding for academic freedom from faculty.
"Students feel like professors are biased in grading, while the faculty feels the system is against them and they aren't given enough support," he said.
'No politics please'
Business junior Hieu Tran, a member of College Republicans, said she feels lucky to be in a field where not many professors discuss politics in class. But accounting professor Karen Geiger was an exception, she said.
In November 2005, just after Thanksgiving, President Bush was visiting Arizona. Tran said Geiger, who lives in Scottsdale, complained about the streets that were closed in Scottsdale near where the President was staying. "The professor said she wanted to go shoot the President," Tran said. "It was a jovial tone, but shooting the President isn't something to joke about."
Tran decided to keep quiet, assuming the teacher wouldn't take her concern seriously. "But during evaluations, I mentioned that the professor should keep political sentiments out of the class," she said.
When asked to respond to Tran's complaint, Geiger said, "You cannot please all the people all the time. One student complaining out of thousands is a pretty good batting average, I'd say."
But political science senior Max Kafka agreed with Tran that there is a problem. "Most classes are about indoctrination and not education," he said. "Teachers use the word 'Bush' as a derogatory term. They can't seem to decide if he's an idiot puppet or an evil genius."
Math and computer science senior Matthew Matkin, 33, still remembers his experience years ago as a freshman at Eastern Arizona College in Thatcher, just southeast of Globe. Matkin was 18 and taking an entry-level political science class. He was assigned a book to read about the civil rights movement, but he says the book was laced with sexual undertones.
"I suggested alternative books that touched the same theme, but the instructor was unwilling to talk," he said. Matkin skipped the assignment and was marked down in the class.
"Those who do have morals or are sensitive to issues like sexual content in books or film have no recourse, which I think is unfortunate," he said.
Matkin said S.B. 1331 was a good idea, but its language was too broad. "Students could use it simply to skip an assignment they don't like under the pretext of it being offensive," he said.
But universities should provide a formal arbitration process for students with grievances, he said, and in every course, required reading should be disclosed in the syllabus up front.
That is already the policy in the Maricopa Community College District and it is a general practice at ASU, the University of Arizona and Northern Arizona University, officials said.
University policy
Currently at ASU, if students find class material objectionable, they can first go to the instructor and then the department chair to seek another assignment. If the issue still isn't resolved, they can go to the Provost's office.
"But we see very few students requesting this," said ASU Executive Vice President and Provost Milton Glick, who will step down from his post this month.
Glick said that asking faculty to create individualized courses of study for each student would reduce the quality of the curriculum. But after the Arizona Legislature took up S.B. 1331, he did ask ASU's Academic Senate to consider a formal requirement that all faculty members have clear syllabi of their courses.
"That way students can choose not to be in a course if they don't like what they see in the syllabus," Glick said.
Former Academic Senate President Susan Mattson said that class syllabi already tell students what will be covered, and a student who doesn't want to know about controversial topics like evolution or communism and Marxism shouldn't enroll. "And if it's a required course that they object to, then maybe they're in the wrong major," she said.
Patricia Baron, associate dean of the Graduate College at NAU, agreed. "We feel that there is already a process in place, then why this need to complicate things?"
At the University of Arizona, faculty members are supposed to state specifically in their syllabi whether a class contains potentially offensive material.
Wanda Howell, faculty chair at UA, said student complaints, which are few and far between, are considered on a case-by-case basis. "I'm in favor of working with individual instructors who have moral or ethical issues. We are opposed to the Legislature determining how we run our classes," she said.
Across the Fence
For every Kafka, Tran, Jaskie or Hyde, there's a student with an opposing and equally vehement viewpoint.
ASU physics freshman Eric Thomas, for instance, didn't buy Kafka's argument about biased grades. "I'm sorry, but that's a cop-out. I've disagreed with professors and challenged their opinion in class," he said. "Professors don't grade us for our opinions, but for how well thought-out they are."
Political science and Spanish junior Sara Myklebust remembered one class she took with Professor Kim Fridkin during which the students were divided into two groups-one to do a mock campaign for former presidential candidate John Kerry, the other for President Bush. "Students from both groups did well in that class and some didn't, regardless of which group they were in," Myklebust said.
She added that just because a student doesn't agree with something a professor says doesn't mean the student is learning any less. "I'm a liberal studying in a conservative state, but I'm enjoying my education here because I get to hear so many opposing viewpoints," Myklebust said.
Richard Sales, who represented the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences in student government before graduating last spring, said, "Some assignments might compromise one's beliefs, but part of going to a university is branching out to new ideas and alternative points of view."
Biology sophomore Benjamin Allen said he thinks professors often say things they don't believe in order to foster debate and challenge beliefs. "That's a wonderful thing to do," he said. "In some classes it may not make sense to discuss political or other controversial issues, but in others, a healthy discussion is great."
Anne Schneider, a professor in the School of Justice and Social Inquiry, said a professor's job is to get students to think critically. "If a class is full of left-leaning liberal kids, my job is to challenge those beliefs by presenting alternatives. Otherwise our students will be very shallow."
Lessons learned
Back at Chandler-Gilbert Community College, Mullaney said he's still amazed at how far things went over his assignment to read Rick Moody's book "The Ice Storm" last fall.
"On second thought, given the increasingly conservative nature of the Southeast Valley, the bill wasn't entirely unexpected," Mullaney said in a measured tone.
Since the maelstrom developed, he has spent many hours on the Internet, reading up about other cases at other universities. He said he's disturbed by how many are popping up.
"It's happened in high schools, but to think this is happening at the college level in public institutions is beyond me," he said.
Question him about Horowitz and Mullaney rolls his eyes. "His Academic Bill of Rights is the crystallization of the threat to academic freedom. It goes against everything higher education is all about."
President Hesse said the college did everything within its power to help the student who complained, even allowing him to withdraw from the course well after the official deadline without affecting his grades or scholarship.
"We've had students asking for alternate assignments before at the instructor's discretion," Hesse said. "But in this case the student wanted to determine what was or was not appropriate reading. That's unacceptable."
Despite the controversy, Mullaney says he'll assign the book again. "The worst outcome from all this would be if I started to censor material," he said. "The Legislature would win if I let this influence the choices I make for my classes."
Reach the reporter at sonu.munshi@asu.edu.
