Instructors Often Pressured to Censor Themselves, Says Professor Scolded for ‘Tea Party’ Email [View all]

[marmar]

(In These Times) Rachel Slocum was, until recently, not the kind of high-profile academic who typically turns up in news articles. As an assistant professor of geography at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, her solid career path of teaching and research on urban food systems had a progressive bent that did not stand out too much in the relatively liberal climate of the University of Wisconsin system. And then she sent out an email to a class of online students complaining about how the government shutdown was holding up an assignment requiring access to the then-shuttered Census Bureau website. Folded into the brief memo was a flip negative comment about the Republican Party and the Tea Party.

Within days, the email was seen round the world, ricocheting through the conservative social media sphere as a case study of what commentators perceived as academia’s pervasive liberal bias. National political fallout rained down on the La Crosse campus. Students barraged Chancellor Joe Gow with angry complaints about Slocum's alleged political polemicism, and Gow responded with an announcement to students that sternly disavowed Slocum's “highly partisan” message.

The media frenzy has since died down, but the brouhaha is hardly an isolated one. When a surreptitiously recorded video of snarky anti-GOP comments by Michigan State creative writing professor William Penn was aired on YouTube, administrators suspended him from teaching duties on the grounds that his screed had “negatively affected the learning environment." And earlier this year in New York, a public talk at the City University of New York about the pro-Palestinian boycott against Israel sparked a massive outcry from pro-Israeli activists both on campus and off, which led to faculty being vilified and denounced by local officials, and even threats from one City Councilman to cut the university's funding. ..................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/15878/instructors_forced_censor_themselves_rachel_slocum/