Brooker bill meets mixed response
April 3, 2007
Hsin-Yin Lee, a journalism graduate student from Taiwan, peers outside of a bird blind on March 11 to focus on a flock of Sandhill Cranes taking flight from the Platte River in Kearney, Neb.
A controversial bill in the House led members of the Missouri National Education Association, an advocacy group for public education in which several MU professors hold membership, to meet March 22 at the Anheuser-Busch Natural Resources Building to discuss the legislation.
NEA members, as well as members of various student political groups, offered personal criticism of the Emily Brooker Intellectual Diversity Act, which was passed in February by the House Higher Education Committee for a subsequent vote in the House.
The measure has passed out of committee but has not been brought up for debate in the full House.
The meeting was intended to not only serve as an informational conference to educate NEA members on the legislation but also to allow professors and students to voice their concerns and to encourage an open report with state legislators.
"I think we underestimate the importance of a legislator having a serious conversation with someone in higher education," said Steve McLuckie, organizing director for Missouri NEA, during the meeting.
College Democrats spokesman Rick Puig said he attended the meeting because he wanted to voice student concerns to professors.
Puig, who testified in Jefferson City at the House Higher Education Committee hearings against the intellectual diversity act, said the bill inhibits the intellectual process.
"It doesn't do anything tangible for the university," Puig said.
Puig said more pressing issues facing higher education, such as rising tuition costs, should be addressed before the issue of intellectual diversity.
"That's the travesty about the debate," Puig said.
Sociology professor Victoria Johnson said NEA is taking steps to fight intellectual diversity legislation.
"It is part of a larger movement among the extreme right in a lot of different fronts to try to have a witch hunt, if you will, within academia," Johnson said.
Johnson said universities and colleges are among "the few institutions where people are in a position to be able to critically analyze people with power."
Johnson said intellectual diversity legislation is reminiscent of Sen. Joseph McCarthy's "witch hunts" for suspected Communists during the Cold War, only now professors in higher education with liberal ideals are the prey.
The Emily Brooker Intellectual Diversity Act attributes its namesake to a Missouri State University graduate who, while still a student at MSU last year, filed suit against the school, claiming one of her professors had lowered her grade because she refused to sign a letter to Missouri legislators in support of adoption for same-sex couples.
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