The Academic Senate of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign on Monday overwhelmingly passed a resolution urging university officials to cut formal ties with a foundation that espouses free-market ideals, to avoid the appearance of endorsing its views. The University Senates Conference, which represents faculty members on all three University of Illinois campuses, passed a similar resolution last month. Faculty leaders thought they had persuaded university officials to sever formal ties with the foundation, the Academy on Capitalism and Limited Government, in 2008, but a report issued in August by the Urbana-Champaign senate’s executive committee concluded that the foundation remains formally affiliated with the university and its fund-raising arm. A spokesman for the university system has said its president, Michael J. Hogan, plans to meet with faculty and student leaders to discuss the issue, according to The News-Gazette, a local newspaper.
RSS
Follow The Ticker through your favorite RSS reader.
6 Responses to U. of Illinois Urged by Academic Senate to Cut Ties With Conservative Group
11159766 - October 5, 2010 at 9:34 pm
The University of Illinois has betrayed its faculty and students by affiliating with this right-wing propaganda group.
blue_state_academic - October 5, 2010 at 10:12 pm
so much for the marketplace of ideas
jjehrmann - October 6, 2010 at 8:37 am
Lest we so soon forget that radical leftist William Ayers was a member of the faculty here…smells a little hypocritical.
quidditas - October 6, 2010 at 8:43 am
It would have been nice to know their rationale for doing so. In the wake of the financial crisis we have seen very few institutional statements criticizing the deregulatory cycles reaching back through Clinton to Reagan and even Carter from the tenured academic community that so loves the “academic freedom” it so seldom uses in the public interest. Even, apparently, when that interest is their own. However, I don’t want to see “we campus liberals are ideologically against promoting the free market.” I want to see a fact based analysis of how repeated crises in the financial sector impact the institution and the broader public that it serves.Is that what we have here? Certainly the intellectual capacity to write such a statement is available to the U Illinois faculty.
dank48 - October 6, 2010 at 9:44 am
How would “U. of Illinois Urged by Faculty Senate to Cut Ties with Liberal Group” fly as a headline?
crunchycon - October 6, 2010 at 10:09 am
Despite protestations to the contrary, the objections and the resolution reek of political partisianship or at least ideology. Faculty in the College of Business are not in complete agreement with the resolution or proposed action.Further, it isn’t a “right-wing” group, the name, “Academy on Capitalism and Limited Government,” is support for the way the founders intended the government to function — in limited ways.According to an article in the The News Gazette (the local paper in Champaign-Urbana), “The Academy on Capitalism and Limited Government is a nonprofit foundation that supports scholarly research and teaching about free-market capitalism, individual rights and responsibility, limited government, entrepreneurship and enterprise.”It was established in 2006 as a fund within the University of Illinois Foundation.”Those ideals (free-market capitalism, individual rights and responsibility, limited government, entrepreneurship and enterprise) are definitely not “liberal”, so perhaps that is why liberals assign the “right-wing” label.That the faculty at U of Illinois do not support the scholarly reasearch and teaching of these topics speaks volumes. quittidas has it right — “academic freedom” is supported by liberals apparently when it supports their own interests. Aand dank48, that would never happen. Do you know that within the state of Illinois, only a very few counties were “blue” in the last presidential election, and that Champaign County was one and has consistently been one for decades?