Academic freedom in jeopardy

Imagine that several women pediatricians in town find tacked to their office doors the section of the penal code that cites sex with minors to be a felony.

Then, as one of these doctors is being interviewed, people distribute a flier claiming responsibility for the postings and stating that they believe that these doctors are in violation of the stated law.

The group demands a "dialogue" on whether female doctors are more inclined to molest children than male doctors.

Suppose also that this is part of a nationwide campaign heavily financed by the neo-conservative right to cast doubt about the fitness of women to practice medicine.

Would you support that "dialogue" or claim that condemning these actions and affirming support of these doctors was, as Press Democrat columnist Paul Gullixson claimed on Sunday, "more than enough?"

You've heard that certain Santa Rosa Junior College instructors were "red starred," but you haven't heard the whole story.

Posted with the red star was a section of the education code that prohibits communist indoctrination and goes on to define communism as a plot to overthrow the government by force or violence.

The anonymous students who posted these fliers subsequently identified themselves and asserted in print that they believed that these instructors were in violation of the cited code - even though they admitted that not one of them had taken any of these instructors' classes.

Several lawyers have been consulted over the matter and not one will assert that the First Amendment covers the sum total of these actions. Though I was not, surprisingly, among the "All Stars," and though I have been foremost on campus in protecting the right of right-wing speech, I have no difficulty in agreeing to draw this line.

Contrary to Gullixson's column, this red-baiting is something more than some hothead professor in Colorado calling government workers who died in the World Trade Center attack "little Eichmanns." Morally repellent as the latter is, it is not an accusation of criminal conduct.

The JC instructors were recklessly and absurdly accused of treason in black and white by persons who had no knowledge of them - an accusation which, if true, would cost them their jobs and their liberties.

Consider that these students got their instruction from a national Web site with an agenda: to stifle academic freedom on college campuses so that those best qualified to inform the public about certain administration policies - the war, foreign policy in the Middle East, the assault on Social Security, environmental and energy policies hostile to the facts - would be intimidated into silence. The story has been covered by Time magazine and the Nation.

It's a big story, happening in your own back yard, and you're being misinformed about it.

And so what's wrong with Gullixson's column? Aside from overlooking the severity of the students' accusations, he assumes that there is a problem in the classroom at SRJC and recommends a "thorough review" of the grievance process.

There is no problem at the JC; no grievances have been filed against these exemplary instructors, one of whom is a nominee for a statewide award for excellence in teaching and none of whom has, in fact, done anything but exercise well-defined academic freedoms.

On the contrary, some of these instructors have felt physically threatened by the supporters of these students - both in the classroom and at a self-proclaimed "forum" sponsored by the conservative students' group.

Moreover, President Lee Bollinger of Columbia University, who Gullixson seems to support, opposes the action of the national organization under whose colors these students operate.

The truth is that the JC faculty, one of this community's most valuable resources generation after generation, has been unjustly maligned in the pages of our daily paper - which has misdiagnosed the problem and thereby asked us to sleep-walk through a forest fire engulfing the entire country.

Academic freedom is indispensable to a free society. It's time to wake up and smell it burning.