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I'm sorry... I'm going to go off now... I think this is so wrong. The government should never tell professors what to say in class. Furthermore, opening them up to suit personally is insane. The whole point of higher education is to expose students to new ideas, some of which hopefully are outside of their comfort zone. Otherwise... What's the point? The point isn't to make the professor see the other side of the argument. The point is to have the student explain their own views and see some of the breaks in logic which exist in their own arguments. Whether they retain that view or adopt the view of the professor or somewhere in between, now they are looking at in a new way and thinking about different issues. Without that college would be no different than high school, just memorizing facts and figures.
What always weirds me out about these academic balance arguments is that it is not like there are tons of highly qualified, published, well educated creationists, revisionists, and radicals running around getting refused teaching positions. I went to the most conservative top tier law school in the country and we had quite a few conservative professors but they were very hard to come by. The truth is that many conservatives choose to go to less prestigous religious or philosophically run schools which don't have the prestige required to get hired at a major research university like Florida. Also, many of them reject publication and peer review or they choose only to publish in ideological journals. They refuse to have their work critiqued for the most part. I am sorry but I don't think a teaching position should be taken away from some left-leaning Harvard educated professor who has been published in well respected journals in his field and has submitted his work for critique by his peers so that it can go to some graduate of Liberty or Bob Jones University who's never been published in anything but ideological rags just for the sake of "academic diversity."
Churchill, whom I'm assuming sparked this thing, has published a lot of stuff in peer reviewed journals and has been heavily critiqued. He also has academic supporters. He had never been accused of marking a student poorly or degrading a student for not agreeing with him. The truth is that he was teaching and publishing controversy free until he made one specific comment. The comment was shocking but his point really wasn't. The idea that the 9/11 attacks should be seen in the context of U.S. commercial and military imperialism isn't exactly such a stretch. It's actually some of his other theories which are considered academically shakey. The firestorm around him now is because some are accusing him of stealing his ideas from someone else. If he gets fired, it won't be for his comment or ideas or because of how he treated his students; it will be for academic fraud.
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