I've had occasion to look at a lot of college and university policies on dissent, protest, disorderly conduct, and so on of late for a project I'm working on. Usually those policies are tucked in along with related statements on academic freedom, free expression, and so on, and at times, as I noted in my post on SUNY, some very interesting--or disturbing--wording crops up.

I've been looking at Swarthmore's "Statement of Student Rights, Responsibilities, and Code of Conduct" this morning, and found some language on students' academic freedom and professors' obligations toward students that I like a lot:

Students are entitled to an atmosphere conducive to learning and to even-handed treatment in all aspects of the teacher-student relationship. Faculty members may not refuse to enroll or teach students on the grounds of their beliefs or the possible uses to which they may put the knowledge to be gained in a course. The student should not be forced by the authority inherent in the instructional role to make particular personal choices as to political action or his own part in society. Evaluation of students and the award of credit must be based on academic performance professionally judged and not on matters irrelevant to that performance, such as personality, race, religion, degree of political activism, or personal beliefs.

The scenarios envisioned by Swarthmore's provisions recall the recent scandal at Columbia regarding the Middle East studies faculty's treatment of Jewish students (Columbia responded in part by deciding to institute grievance procedures of the sort mentioned above). They also recall last spring's Berkeley course designed to recruit students to work on a pro-affirmative action political initiative whose results would then be presented to campus administrators and used to conceptualize Berkeley's own diversity plan. They also implicitly take seriously the experiential impressions of students, many of whom, as ACTA found in a study conducted in 2004, feel their professors inappropriately bring their politics into the classroom and the grading process.

So, good for Swarthmore. More schools should put such language on the books.

This was the language I had in mind when we had our disagreement some time back about whether Swarthmore had a speech code, as I recalled the efforts that went into crafting a clear statement of principle. As you observed in the course of our discussion, we elsewhere have language (which partly comes from the administrative side) that is in tension with this statement and more typical of various implicit "speech codes", which is probably a typical problem--directives which conflict or contradict coming from different parts of a college or university.

But I really think that the language you cite would trump anything else if it came to it.

http://www.abqjournal.com/opinion/guest_columns/501842opinion10-15-06.htm?splashtop

Is an inferential speech code.