Persistence of Vision

University of Colorado chancellor Bud Peterson learned about intellectual diversity--and the failure of higher education to foster it reliably or responsibly--the hard way. He was at the helm when the Ward Churchill scandal broke, and he set the tone for the eventual decision to fire Churchill for research misconduct. His words then were indicative of his profound grasp of how failures of integrity such as Churchill's affect students:

I want to reaffirm that the University's decision was not based on Professor Churchill's writings, politics or expressed personal views, but rather upon his scholarship and its quality. That scholarship was examined by three separate panels and more than 20 tenured faculty members who conducted a thorough review, and who found that it fell beneath the acceptable standards of our profession and the expectations of faculty here at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Academic freedom carries with it a high level of responsibility that we as an academic community cannot allow to be compromised. When these issues are raised, we have a responsibility -- in fact, the obligation -- to act accordingly. Perhaps the most important lesson for our community in the painful ordeal surrounding Professor Churchill's case is rooted in the values we must uphold and convey to our students. The young people who come to us are transformed by this institution, and they, in turn, transform it with their energy, idealism and hard work. They deserve to be taught by faculty who embody high academic and personal standards. In a time such as ours, in which the very concept of "truth" is often bracketed by relativism, battered with cynicism and reduced by manipulation and "spin," our students must know that when they enter our classrooms, they occupy sacred territory where truth is always pursued on a foundation of ethics, honor and integrity.

Churchill was fired in 2007, and since then Peterson has worked hard to improve the academic climate at Boulder. Boulder has implemented new, improved policies for faculty review, based on a self-study that found serious lapses in the hiring, promotion, and post-tenure review processes. And Peterson is also seeking to bring more varied faculty perspectives to a campus that tends to be a political and intellectual monoculture--his current effort to raise $9 million to endow a chair of conservative policy and thought has drawn national attention, and, crucially, criticism from across the political spectrum.

The ongoing debate about higher ed reform tends to be quite polarized, and there are many issues upon which the different sides of the debate are seemingly never going to agree. But Peterson's plans for a conservative chair were different. They had a peculiar unifying effect as commenters from all sides expressed strong reservations about a faculty position that seemed more concerned with candidates' political viewpoints than with their expertise, and that also contained more than a hint of tokenism. Chancellor Peterson's efforts are understandable, many conceded, but that does not make them especially viable.

MPI followed the debate surrounding the proposed conservative chair with interest, as it expressed and embodied many of the problems, issues, and questions charted by MPI fellow Evan Coyne Maloney in Indoctrinate U. Maloney's sharp, hard-hitting expose of intolerance and double standards on campus has received rave reviews, and has been the subject of several articles in the New York Times and other major papers. It's also taken campuses by storm ever since its inaugural campus screening at Duke in January. So when we learned about Chancellor Peterson's interest in diversifying the intellectual atmosphere at Boulder, we took the liberty of sending him a copy of the film and encouraging him to schedule a campus screening when school is back in session. Indoctrinate U has already prompted constructive, searching dialogue on upwards of thirty campuses, including Cornell, UC Santa Cruz, Indiana, Wisconsin, Michigan State, Bucknell, Oberlin, and Rutgers. Here's hoping Boulder will add itself to that list.