Libertarian students at the University of Michigan are sick and tired of being treated like second-class citizens, watching their administration fawn over and pander to a vocal group of radical students while they’re treated like pariahs.
A letter two student leaders of the campus libertarian group sent to campus administrators and regents this week sums up their frustration. It reads in part:
As students at the University of Michigan, we have become keenly aware that there is a general under representation of libertarian and conservative views on campus. Nearly every course we have taken has been taught from a liberal perspective by a liberal professor. This is troubling not because liberalism is being promoted on campus, but because of the general lack of opposing viewpoints students have access to. A campus ought to be a free marketplace of ideas where students can reevaluate and refine the beliefs that will shape the rest of their lives. If all schools of thought are not more equally represented, many students may never encounter them in fair setting. For a university that prides itself on its supposed liberal values, this is unacceptable. Moreover, it is dishonest.
We would ask that you force students to take courses that fairly represent libertarian thought, as you have done so with other course requirements, but we could not do so without forfeiting our character as libertarians. Rather, we ask simply that you make these courses available, that, for example, the free market school of thought be entered into the economics curriculum to be taught by competent and fair free market professors; that history courses taught from perspectives other than the postmodern be made available; that for every course on race and ethnicity, there be a course on intellectual diversity which includes liberal, conservative and libertarian cultural and political ideas.
We ask, additionally, that an increased budget be developed and extra curricular programs created to help foster this intellectual diversity outside of the classroom. This would allow students from across the disciplines to engage in fair minded and open discussion with their peers about all ideologies, not just those that the university sanctions.
It’s great to see brave students stand up for themselves, and what’s right.
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