Thin skinned Rep. Dennis Baxley has been in the news lately as a pro-feeding tube, anti-family GOP thug. He’s also been acting as a water boy for David Horowitz’s dishonest drive to fix liberal bias in the nation’s colleges.
Like Horowitz, Baxley is short on actual facts and big on unverifiable anecdotes that he says prove that conservatives face 4 years of bias and ridicule simply for matriculating at a state university.
A few weeks ago, some Baxley claims were shown to be, uh, just a little exaggerated. Actually, the professor who was mentioned came out and called the allegations against him nonsense, but that is not enough, apparently, to stop the SP Times from producing a puff piece that cites many other flimsy and unproven stories straight from the vaults of David Horowitz.
From his seat on a key education committee, Rep. Dennis Baxley helps shape the budget of every public university in Florida.
But when he appeared Thursday before the state’s university presidents, Baxley portrayed himself as a victim.
“I have not come with a set of demands,” he said in a soft voice. “I have come with a burden.”
The Ocala Republican told the presidents he has been humiliated for his conservative views. He showed them a cartoon published in the University of Florida student newspaper that depicted a naked Baxley crawling behind a monkey in the evolutionary chain.
Baxley’s request: Protect conservatives like him from ridicule by the “liberal elite” on Florida campuses.
The presidents nodded politely, but didn’t agree to do anything specific. Instead, they told Baxley about policies already in place to protect students treated unfairly for any reason.
“It’s our job to make sure that those policies work,” said University of West Florida president John Cavanaugh, who chairs the state association of university presidents.
The compromise seemed to satisfy Baxley, who is pushing legislation that would give students the right to object if professors repeatedly discuss controversial issues irrelevant to a class.
The compromise should also satisfy professors, many of whom saw Baxley’s bill as a threat to academic freedom and their control of the classroom.
Though he got no specific concessions, Baxley said after the meeting that he thinks the presidents “have embraced my intentions.”
His conciliatory stance also reflects political reality: His bill is on life support. Gov. Bush doesn’t support it, and it has made no progress in the Senate.
……Baxley’s bill has become a part of a national debate over whether university faculties are hotbeds of radicalism. Before filing his bill, Baxley consulted conservative activist David Horowitz, who is pushing similar legislation in other states.
A former Marxist turned conservative, Horowitz has traveled the nation speaking about bias on college campus, he is author of Hating Whitey: And Other Progressive Causes and How to Beat the Democrats: and Other Subversive Ideas.
Horowitz argues that at many universities, conservative thinkers are shut out of tenure, graduate programs and classroom discussions.
A recent study published in The Forum, a political journal, supports that view. The survey of 1,643 professors at 183 institutions found that academics do appear tilted toward liberal positions. It also acknowledged that many complaints are based on student perceptions of their own grades and views.
……Baxley brought up a complaint of his own Thursday, about an FSU professor who supposedly told a Tallahassee police officer taking a graduate course: “I don’t give Republicans A’s.”
Wetherell, the FSU president, pressed for details, including a name.
“I have not seen many tentative Tallahassee police officers that don’t speak up,” he said.
No name, no proof of bias, just whining, disgruntled former students trying to get back at professors whose views they refuse to acknowledge as legitimate.
Oh, and “The Forum,” cited as a definitive source of proof of campus bias?
First, the study appears in the March issue of the Forum, an online political science journal funded by the Randolph Foundation, a right-wing group that has given grants to such ultra-conservative organizations as the Independent Women’s Forum and Americans for Tax Reform.
The leading researcher of the study, Robert Lichter of George Mason University, used to work for the conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute and has a long history of calling things “liberally biased.”
Between 1986 and 1988, Lichter held the DeWitt Wallace Chair in Mass Communications at the American Enterprise Institute. Also, at a conference sponsored by the right-wing group Accuracy In Media after the first Gulf War, Lichter was reported by The Associated Press to have said that he was “disappointed in statements by (Peter) Arnett upon his return from Baghdad that he was in the enemy capital on behalf of all CNN viewers, not just Americans.
“I see a trend toward journalists seeing themselves as citizens of the world rather than patriotic Americans,” Lichter said.
The study has also been debunked by Media Matters.
Furthermore, the study does not even show, much less “prove,” that conservatives have been discriminated against in hiring and promotion. Few would doubt that liberals outnumber conservatives among university faculty. But justifying claims about hiring and promotion would require data on the number of conservatives and liberals who applied for various positions or came up for tenure review. Despite Lichter’s comments, the study’s authors present no data addressing the issue. (Academic promotion is extraordinarily complex; in such a study, researchers would have to determine, for instance, which respondents were denied tenure at a first-tier institution, then received tenure at a second-tier institution, then decide how such a person should be classified.)
The conservative claim of bias (as opposed to mere underrepresentation) rests on the idea that there are significant numbers of conservative Ph.D.s who have been denied faculty positions or tenure because of their political views. Lichter, Rothman, and Nevitte provide no evidence to support this assumption.
The Florida Library Association has also passed a resolution against this bill.
Horowitz has no credibility and is only after self-promotion.
Jeb, however, has called him a “fighter for freedom.” http://www.newsmax.com/archives/ic/2005/4/6/233459.shtml