By the way, regulating my private property when I am not harming anyone else is not necessarily socialist, but it definitely is authoritarian. Most so-called conservatives today are authoritarians.

Most especially, no student should ever feel that they need to agree with a professors politics to get a good grade; or to deny their own politics to avoid recieving a bad one; and I know personally of dozens, and anecdotally of hundreds of students who have had jsut that problem.

The classroom is no place for ideology, it is a place for fact and critical thinking.

Now, if a private institution wishes to include ideology in their teaching, so be it, the student has made the market driven choice to pay for such ideological isntruction. Public universities on the other hand are largely paid for by the public; and thus should be entirely ideologically neutral.

No, a rofessor should not be forced to preach against their own politics; but neither should they be allowed to preach for them; IN THE PERFORMANCE OF THEIR DUTIES AS A PROFESSOR.

In any other circumstance, they can preach whatever they like…

I would assume that the argument is that since the government is employing these people, that as their employer they should be allowed to set the terms of employment.

In my mind, government doesn’t operate by the normal rules of competition. I.e. government can largely out-compete private institutions by relying on coercive taxation, and thus we should hold government “enterprises” to a different standard when it comes to free speech/discrimination than we might hold a private institution.

However, even if the argument that the state, as employer, should set these rules, I still disagree with the rules, and would oppose them politically. But therein lies the problem with putting these sorts of rules up to democratic processes. I, for example, think that we should be fostering open debate on our college campuses, where many of the people who lambast universities for being left-wing indoctrination centers want them to be little more than advanced job-training facilities.

Why shouldn’t the First Amendment apply in the classroom as well ?

Ok, if these restrictions apply in the classroom of a state university, then fine I have no problem with it.

If those restrictions are general however, that’s another story entirely. That’s unlawful restraint of a persons freedom of conscience, and their freedom of association.

The source article has no detail on this proposal, and I can’t find the text online yet.