rrizzo@bbncca.ARPA (Ron Rizzo) (11/01/85)
[culled from NPR's "All Things Considered", 10/31/85. Trick or treat.] Regularly denying leftist faculty tenure is oldhat at many schools, but a new twist in academic intolerance is on the rise. Two social scientists at the University of Massachusetts/Amherst, "whose prestige [in their fields] alone should have been enough to get them tenure" according to other faculty members, have been denied it, apparently because they both teach about "alter- native sexual lifestyles." One of the two, Allan (?Alec?) MacDonald, of the Center for the Family in the Home Economics department, was told by another Center faculty member that the Center is "an advocacy center for the traditional nuclear family" ! Since when have univer- sities, especially public ones, become advocacy rather than study centers?!? Talk about proselytizing! MacDonald said that many people, including his colleagues and even his wife, told him he was crazy to study subjects like homophobia, homo/bisexuality, to be an advisor to a gay students group: it was professionally suicidal. Nevertheless, over the past few years he's changed his major research interest to the study of sexuality. At a previous post at the University of West Virginia, a colleague suggested it was physically dangerous: he might be killed. The other instructor denied tenure, Roger Libby, is suing UMass for $165,000 (MacDonald has waived the right to suit in exchange for one more semester at UMass; he'll continue his research on his own). His original areas of specialization were also marriage & the family. Colleagues believe he was turned down for both his subject (alternate sexual lifestyles) and his colorful teaching style. UMass isn't the only campus on which academic conservatism [sic.] is taking this particularly ugly form. Not only are certain opinions (eg, Marxist ones) verboten, but some subjects as well. Have academic careers become such a rat race that the drivel that passes for Reagan-era opinion in this country is considered not only teachable & arguable in an academic setting, but the insti- tutional norm as well? Disgusted, Ron Rizzo