Are you in contact with the Rocky Mountain Progressive Network? And given that the GOP just lost both houses of the Co. legislature I'd think the pressure to push the bill forward has attenuated.
http://www.rmpn.org/weblog/archives3/permalink/003656.cfm Deconstructing David Horowitz Posted by Alan - December 24, 2004 09:13 AM
We don't call him Crazy Davey for nothing...
David Horowitz's nationally coordinated campaign to pass his Academic Bill of Rights is said to have targeted 20 states for action next year. Nationally, with the right wing flush from widespread victory at the polls, he probably feels good about its chances.
But he's confronted with the problem of what to say about Colorado...
Horowitz has consistently claimed victory for ABOR in Colorado, even though the both resolutions introduced by his surrogates failed. After weeks of delaying a vote of the main measure, Shawn Mitchell's HB-1315, the bill was killed in exchange for a token agreement from the schools to uphold their existing policies regarding free expression in the classroom.
More importantly, the specific cases brought to the legislature as evidence of liberal bias against rightwing students themselves spectacularly failed. Horowitz was a key figure in the original organization of the Auraria College Republicans student group, which subsequently waged a year-long war against the reputation of a Metro State professor named Oneida Meranto. Hoping to build repeated allegations of bias into a case to justify the passage of ABOR in the state legislature, numerous complaints were filed against her using the school's existing grievance procedure...
RMPN documented the whole course of these events: beginning with Horowitz's original trip to Colorado in the summer of 2003, when he met discreetly with key state GOP leadership to plot out the fall's events. His subsequent speaking engagement at Metro State instantly produced a belligerent College Republican chapter, their ouster of MSCD's student body president (who had the temerity to protest Horowitz's visit), and the budding case against Oneida Meranto.
Dr. Meranto committed one error during this siege: at the time of Senator John Andrews' December 2003 hearing on 'campus liberal bias' (which paraded one aggrieved Republican after another, having given potential opposition hardly any notice at all), then ACR president George Culpepper took his allegations against her to the press. Dr. Meranto offered her explanation for why Culpepper dropped the class in response to repeated press inquiries -- and this was deemed a violation of FERPA, which forbids the unauthorized disclosure of a student's academic record.
Other than that, multiple investigations have proven that Dr. Meranto has never acted with bias towards any complaining student. Moreover, as the seedy details began to emerge about these students being rewarded for their testimony in support of ABOR with high-profile legislative internships, and the paid operatives from the Independence Institute shadowing meetings held on the subject, as well as 'preparing' students to testify before the legislature, the considerable steam that ABOR had been gaining suddenly fell apart.
Another reason for the ABOR intiative's decline was David Horowitz personally -- in February of 2004, about a month before HB-1315 was withdrawn, revelations about a highly dubious "guide to the political left" online database being constructed by Horowitz made the front page of the Rocky Mountain News. This database, which listed numerous mainstream Colorado charities and nonprofits right alongside terrorist groups like Abu Sayyaf and Al Qaeda, revealed at the very least some amount of paranoia on the part of Mr. Horowitz. This story significantly changed many people's view of Horowitz, as well as his quixotic crusade to eradicate 'liberal bias' on college campuses.
In the end, Metro State administration was unequivocal: Students have demanded that professors be terminated for expressing in the classroom viewpoints and ideas with which the students strongly disagree. On their face, these allegations simply are not violations of the College's standards of professional conduct...
Complaints solely based on the grounds that the professor has offered a view that the student considers offensive or biased have been and will continue to be dismissed by the College.
In the specific case of Dr. Meranto, and her alleged 'persecution' of conservatives: "You are entirely within your legal rights to hold and express views contrary to your students' on Latin American politics, current public issues like the 'student bill of rights,' and the proper responsibilities of student organizations you advise and its members," Mr. Kieft wrote in his decision, on August 9. "The College cannot and will not presume that your treatment of students reflects ideological bias or prejudice merely because you express your point of view."
Despite this clear decision, and the subsequent failure of numerous, increasingly outrageous claims filed by Culpepper and other College Republicans, there are fresh rumors swirling of new attempt to harass Dr. Meranto next semester -- including large numbers of College Republicans purposefully registering for her classes. Culpepper, as well as another former complaintant Nick Bahl, have both expressed their intentions to do so. Mr Bahl is in fact returning to Metro State, having graduated, specifically to take her course. Given the history here, the only reasonable conclusion is that they intend to foster a hostile environment in her classrooms once again.
None of this looks particularly good for Horowitz's Students for Academic Freedom as they prepare the same campaign all across the fruited plain...their solution? At least in the short run, it's angry spin control.
From the beginning of its campaign for an Academic Bill of Rights in Colorado, Students for Academic Freedom has had to cope with a partisan press...
Yeah, it's that pesky left-wing media that carefully prepared and invented the 'crisis' his pet law was going to solve; then irresponsibly covered the fact that his pack of instigators were in fact bumbling usual-suspect cronies. Not to mention that he himself is a paranoid extremist of the worst Osama-baiting kind.
In Davey's latest retelling of the Colorado ABOR saga, he seeks to portray Dr. Meranto as the belligerent 'aggressor,' conveniently leaving out the biggest part of the story -- that is, his masterminding of the entire campaign against her. His direction, through willing local accomplices like the Independence Institute, of these students to initiate the complaints. His publication of Nick Bahl's rambling indictment of Dr. Meranto, which resulted in the much-ballyhooed death threats against her.
Several claims made in this article are openly false, such as a claim that Dr. Meranto 'asked students' in a Native American campus group to 'try to get Culpepper expelled,' and that Dr. Meranto sought to exclude Republicans from membership in a campus Political Science club. Both claims have been repudiated during lengthy on-campus investigations.
Horowitz's writer never even explains that these allegations were (except for the FERPA/Denver Post business) all proven meritless! While she points out correctly that counterclaims filed by Dr. Meranto and others against Culpepper have also failed, this was done because the intent of student conduct codes is not to expel students if at all possible. Schools exist to serve students, not faculty. The administration correctly saw the bigger picture here, and has chosen not to punish students for adolescent tantrums they may well later regret -- especially considering the outside agitation whipping them into this frenzy.
I've said before that the actions of Colorado's rightwing legislature -- that is, their fixation on partisan crusades like ABOR while the state's financial situation deteriorated, definitely contributed to their ouster
from power on November 2nd.
In the end, Colorado's example doesn't fit very well with Horowitz's desired public image of the ABOR campaign; which explains why he feels the need to lay the spin down so thickly... -- Michael Pugliese