aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Saturday, February 17, 2007

Intellectual diversity, Georgia style

So we got us a bill here in the Georgia House - House Bill 154 the “Intellectual Diversity in Higher Education Act” - that sets out to authoritatively define just exactly what diversity means:

the bill states that “Teachers should not take unfair advantage of the immaturity of students by indoctrinating them with their own opinions before the students have had an opportunity to examine other opinions.” This presupposes that the ideas of teachers, most of whom have post-graduate degrees, are uninformed by their years of study and that students should regard those ideas with suspicion. It presupposes that a geneticist does not know more about the genome than his students, and it encourages his students to take what he tells them as simply his opinion. It presupposes that an ecologist does not know more about climate change than her students. For a teacher to impart what he or she thinks is not to “take unfair advantage of the immaturity of students.” It is to empower students to develop their own good judgment on the basis of sound knowledge about the world.

From the Georgia constitution:

(b) The board of regents shall have the exclusive authority to create new public colleges, junior colleges, and universities in the State of Georgia, subject to approval by majority vote in the House of Representatives and the Senate. Such vote shall not be required to change the status of a college, institution or university existing on the effective date of this Constitution. The government, control, and management of the University System of Georgia and all of the institutions in said system shall be vested in the Board of Regents of the University System of Georgia. (Article VIII , Section IV(b))

Via Jim’s blog, “So, how does all this legislation fit within a conservative philosophy of government?”