Intellectual Freedom

Intellectual freedom is the cornerstone of higher education.  In the American experience, the idea of intellectual freedom was tied to the way God made the mind of mankind.  It was Thomas Jefferson, the Founder of the University of Virginia, who articulated this relationship when he observed in 1786:  "Well aware that the opinions and belief of men depend not on their own will, but follow involuntarily the evidence proposed to their minds; that Almighty God hath created the mind free, and manifested his supreme will that free it shall remain by making it altogether insustiple of restraint."

Concurring with this observation, the Commonwealth of Virginia proceeded to enact state laws which essentially disestablished state control over religion and churches first, and later on restricted state control over higher education.  The State of Michigan eventually followed suit.  Its people established a State Constitution placing its research Universities on a legal footing, independent of state legislative control.

While state legislative control is not today a significant threat to intellectual and academic freedom, the current Board of Regents and leadership of the University of Michigan have successfully institutionalized new threats to those freedoms.  Those threats are reflected in its rabid implementation of racial profiling in college admissions and belligerent enforcement of its student "speech code."

New leadership can eliminate these threats, but only if you vote for a candidate that understands the times and knows what must be done. 

Kerry L. Morgan is that Candidate.   Vote for him on November 4, 2008.

Vote Libertarian-Real Choice, Real Freedom.

More information

For more information check out these fine organizations:

• http://www.thefire.org/index.php/schools/818 

  The mission of FIRE is to defend and sustain individual rights at America's colleges and universities. These rights include freedom of speech, legal equality, due process, religious liberty, and sanctity of conscience—the essential qualities of individual liberty and dignity.  FIRE's core mission is to protect the unprotected and to educate the public and communities of concerned Americans about the threats to these rights on our campuses and about the means to preserve them.

• http://www.cir-usa.org/  

  Center for Individual Rights (CIR) is a nonprofit public interest law firm dedicated to the defense of individual liberties against the increasingly aggressive and unchecked authority of federal and state governments.  CIR seeks to enforce constitutional limits on state and federal power.  CIR has established dozens of legal precedents designed to counter the selective use of the First Amendment to disfavor speech based on the political views of the speaker.

  Following its 1996 victory in Hopwood v. Texas, which struck down the dual admissions systems of the University of Texas Law School, CIR challenged similar policies at the University of Washington (Smith v. University of Washington) the University of Michigan Undergraduate College of Literature, Sciences and the Arts (Gratz v. Bollinger), and the University of Michigan Law School (Grutter v. Bollinger). CIR's goal was to put the issue of racial double standards before the country and the Supreme Court.

  CIR succeeded in doing both.  The publicity that the Michigan cases received exposed the fraud of race-based admissions to the whole country.

• http://www.michigancivilrights.org/    

  The Michigan Civil Rights Initiative is a coalition of Democrats, Republicans, and Independents that support ending preferences based on race, sex, skin color, ethnicity or national origin in public employment, public contracting and college admissions.  Through its efforts, Proposal 2 was overwhelmingly adopted by Michigan Voters in 2006.