On telling the truth to those in your care, Classroom Brainwashing:
When the only paradigm promoted is false, what can one reasonably expect?Academic freedom is the freedom to do academic things -- teach chemistry or accounting the way you think chemistry or accounting should be taught. It is also freedom to engage in the political activities of other citizens -- on their own time, outside the classroom -- without being fired.
Nowhere else do people think that it is OK to engage in politics instead of doing the job for which they are being paid. When you hire a plumber to fix a leak, you don't want to find your home being flooded while he whiles away the hours talking about Congressional elections or foreign policy.
It doesn't matter whether his political opinions are good, bad, or indifferent if he is being paid to do a different job.
Only among "educators" is there such confusion that merely exposing what they are doing behind the backs of parents and taxpayers is regarded as a violation of their rights. Tenure is apparently supposed to confer carte blanche.
The Colorado geography teacher is not unique. A professor at UCLA wrote an indignant article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, denouncing organized efforts of students to record lectures of professors who impose their politics in class instead of teaching the subject they were hired to teach.
All across the country, from the elementary schools to the universities, students report being propagandized. That the propaganda is almost invariably from the political left is secondary. The fact that it is political propaganda instead of the subject matter of the class is what is crucial.
The lopsided imbalance among college professors in their political parties is a symptom of the problem, rather than the fundamental problem itself.
If physicists taught physics and economists taught economics, what they did on their own time politically would be no more relevant than whether they go swimming or sky diving on their days off. But politics is intruded, not only into the classroom, but into hiring decisions as well.
Even top scholars who are conservatives are unlikely to be hired by many colleges and universities. Similarly with people training to become public school teachers. Some in schools of education have said that, to be qualified, you have to see teaching as a means of social change -- meaning change in a leftward direction.
Such attitudes lead to lopsided politics among professors. At Stanford University, for example, the faculty includes 275 registered Democrats and 36 registered Republicans.
Such ratios are not uncommon at other universities -- despite all the rhetoric about "diversity." Only physical diversity seems to matter.