Editorial:

'Intellectual Diversity' Act will squelch debate

Published April 13, 2007

Wednesday, the so-called "Intellectual Diversity" Act passed the Missouri House of Representatives. If it passes the Senate and the governor, the bill will require Missouri's public colleges to make an annual report to a committee in the Missouri General Assembly, most likely the House Higher Education Committee, stating the measures each institution has taken to ensure that Missouri's professors are addressing a variety of viewpoints. The bill will also require reports of the number of viewpoint discrimination claims made against each institution.

Of course, the "Intellectual Diversity" Act sounds like a decent idea. The bill's name has a nice ring to it. Who doesn't want to ensure intellectual diversity, especially in these polarizing times?

But the bill will only create more government (read: political) oversight of higher education, both in the sense of administration and of the highly partisan issue of viewpoint diversity.

Most public higher education institutions in Missouri, including MU, already have policies in place to address claims of viewpoint discrimination on its campuses. The "Intellectual Diversity" Act would only allow for more government micromanagement of Missouri's state colleges. Instead of an administration made up of trained educators and other teaching professionals making judgments about whether a viewpoint discrimination claim has been thoroughly addressed, the responsibility will fall on the shoulders of House members — House members who are far more likely to have some political axe to grind than they are to have the students' best interests in mind.

The House should leave the jobs of teaching and ensuring a vigorous intellectual debate to the teachers, not to politicians. Surely if there is a real issue, students should address it through the venues that are already in place by going to the Provost Office or contacting Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs Cathy Scroggs.

In addition, government oversight of this magnitude isn't cheap. Although there are no available cost estimates, any money spent would be money wasted. Why not use the money it would cost to make a committee to address the "Intellectual Diversity" Act claims to create more scholarships for students or to reward good teachers? Either one would do more to ensure a better education for Missouri students than another layer of government bureaucracy and political oversight.

Besides, if the act is passed into law, it will do little to maintain true intellectual diversity. Instead, it will create a culture of passive teachers who will benefit more from shying away from charged discussions than from embracing and encouraging those discussions. If a government committee can cite a teacher for failing to give equal weight to intelligent design and evolution in a biology class or for failing to give equal weight to communism and capitalism in a finance class, how are teachers expected to teach with confidence? The effects could only be chilling to real debate and real inquiry. In the hollowed-out shell of real academic exploration, only a sterile, hands-off approach to teaching will remain.

A university should be a place of thoughtful discussion and lively debate, not a place that fosters complaints to some far-off government board from tattle-tale students who want to get back at their teachers for giving them bad grades or telling them something they might not want to hear.

An environment that encourages such complaining will create two troublesome types of students. One type will be students who cannot handle ideas that clash with their own. The other will be the students who have bad grades and want to pass the blame onto their professor. Neither should be able to impair professors from conducting informed debate and instruction.

Let the teachers teach.