Progressive Nation

April 17th, 2006

RE: Student Bill of Rights

Howard, you are right; however, I do not think that their editorial is a good one. They rightly reject the College Republicans’ SBOR, but they suggest that if it were amended, it would be fine and they would editorialize in favor of it:

A more clearly-articulated SBOR that is free of redundant sections would give students the opportunity to clarify what we see as essential to a fair learning environment that is free from unnecessary politicization. But the current bill proposed by the College Republicans is not this ideal bill.

This is still the wrong position to take. The editorial board’s position here is like the liberal hawk position on Iraq: a good idea, but badly executed. Similarly, the ed board says SBOR is a good idea, but the College Republicans’ version is badly executed. This is precisely akin to the “incompetence dodge” used by liberal hawks vis-a-vis the Iraq war. Just like the liberal hawks say the war was a good idea but badly executed, the newspaper’s editorial board says the SBOR is a good idea, but badly executed. But the liberal hawks were wrong, and the Princetonian editorial board is wrong as well: the SBOR is a bad idea, period. They write that “we support the general values outlined by the SBOR because we strongly believe that students should actively affirm their desire for a fair and open classroom.” In this they misunderstand what the general values outlined by SBOR actually are. Like far too many Princeton students, they think “academic freedom” means “academic freedom” when the College Republicans say it. This is naive: “academic freedom” is a Lakoffian frame employed by the CR’s disguise a partisan agenda. I would not even support a revised SBOR on principle, because students simply have no right to dictate to faculty how they should teach their classes. If you are being harrassed, that’s illegal, and you should take it up with the authorities. Even if we were to concede that English professors have no business talking about the Iraq war in class, the principle of SBOR is still wrong, because students have no business telling a professor how they should run their classes or what they should say.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 17th, 2006 at 1:08 pm and is filed under Princeton University. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

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