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Today, we would call such academic practices “indoctrination,” a project antithetic to the very idea of a democratic education. In a democracy, educators are expected to teach students how to think — not what to think. In teaching controversial issues, they are expected to refrain from telling students which side of the controversy is “politically correct.” Instead, they are tasked with developing students’ abilities to think for themselves.
Professional restraint is thus a condition of academic freedom as applied to the instruction of students. Fortunately, it is still observed by most members of the academic community, regardless of their political disposition. Stanley Fish, himself a distinguished liberal academic, has summarized this discipline with admirable clarity: “Academic freedom is the freedom of academics to study anything they like; the freedom, that is, to subject any body of material, however unpromising it might seem, to academic interrogation and analysis…. Any idea can be brought into the classroom if the point is to inquire into its structure, history, influence and so forth. But no idea belongs in the classroom if the point of introducing it is to recruit your students for the political agenda it may be thought to imply.”
– Preface to the paperback edition of The Professors
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