Gagging the UW: Critics worry campus speech bill is another attack on academic freedom

Gagging the UW: Critics worry campus speech bill is another attack on academic freedom


http://host.madison.com/ct/news/local/education/university/gagging-the-uw-critics-worry-campus-speech-bill-is-another/article_cc7e994b-e6f2-5d16-8ff2-11513bc03033.html

PAT SCHNEIDER | The Capital Times | pschneider@madison.com 21 hrs ago

Rep. Terese Berceau, a Madison Democrat, was quizzing Rep. Jesse Kremer, her Republican colleague from Kewaskum, at a hearing for his proposed Campus Free Speech Act before the state Assembly’s Committee on Colleges and Universities recently.

Berceau wondered what would happen under the bill — which requires University of Wisconsin System institutions to be neutral on “controversies of the day” — if a student in a geology class argued the Biblical theory that the earth is only 6,000 years old.

“Is it okay for the professor to tell them they’re wrong?” Berceau asked during the lengthy session on May 11.

“The earth is 6,000 years old,” Kremer offered. “That’s a fact.”

But, he said, “this bill stays out of the classroom.”

Yet Kremer immediately speculated that students who felt intimidated from expressing their opinions in class could bring their complaints to the Council on Free Expression, an oversight board created in the bill. So the law could potentially cover things that happen in the classroom, he suggested.

The exchange illuminated critics’ concerns over a little-debated clause of the Campus Free Speech Act, a bill that has stirred controversy for its provisions compelling the UW to punish students who disrupt campus speeches.................................




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