In August 2003, the conservative Young America’s Foundation released a report surveying 50,000 college courses. According to the report, only a dozen showed “conservative ideas and authors in a positive light.”

The AFA deemed many others as “eccentric, bizarre and politically correct” courses that must not be taught on any campus receiving any tax funds. The AFA has been working on Congress and state legislatures to do something about the courses it doesn’t like.

Among the courses singled out by the AFA study are: Black Marxism; Practicing Feminism: A Study of Political Activism; Black and Queer: Reading the Harlem Renaissance; and Here and Queer: Placing Homosexuality, Lesbian Lives and Culture, Ideologies and Technologies of Motherhood.

The course that is number one on the list is the University of Michigan’s How to be Gay: Male Homosexuality and Initiation.

Professor David Halperin is openly gay and teaches the course as English 317. He says the course doesn’t “teach students to be homosexual.” Rather, the course “examines critically the odd notion that there are right and wrong ways to be gay, that homosexuality is not just a sexual practice or desire but a set of specific tastes in music, movies, and other cultural forms — a notion which is shared by straight and gay people alike.”

The course description says students “will examine a number of cultural artifacts and activities” including “camp, diva-worship, drag, muscle culture, taste, style and political activism.”

Michigan Rep. Jack Hoogendyk (R-Portage) is carrying a bill that would let the Michigan Legislature pick and choose the courses it wants to fund at public universities in Michigan. His bill would make it possible for lawmakers to withhold funding to an institution that offers courses they don’t like.

The gay classes are not alone. Hoogendyk also doesn’t like courses such as Multi-cultural Education and The Psychology of Human Intimacy and Sexuality. He also wants to ban Sociology of Deviant Behavior. This is ironic because this is the course using texts that historically categorized gays and lesbians as sexual deviants.

Regardless of the fate of this proposal, it’s scary because legislative funding bodies, like a state Legislature and Congress, can and do attach strings to funding. For example, colleges may not discriminate on the basis of race and gender or they will lose federal financial aid. If a college wants to discriminate on the basis of race, as Bob Jones University insisted upon doing, it had to forfeit federal funds and its tax-exempt status.

Ironically, while the AFA is behind the effort to curtail free academic inquiry in Michigan, it is doing the same in the U.S. Senate, except this time its using academic freedom as a pretext for cutting classes it doesn’t like.

In the Republican-controlled Senate, the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education and Labor held a hearing last week entitled, “Is Intellectual Diversity an Endangered Species on American College Campuses?”

Chairman of the Committee, Sen. Judd Gregg (R-NH) said, “Students are being exposed to narrow viewpoints through politicized course offerings, an ideological faculty and significant restrictions on free speech.”

There’s no question that both the left and the right have been guilty of excesses in this regard. The federal courts have struck down “speech codes” that potentially would punish students for the use of offensive words. The Supreme Court has struck down efforts by the right to cut funding for GLBT campus groups.

The First Amendment has to protect speech of all sorts on campus and it traditionally has. However, the only reason the Senate is looking at the issue now is because of right wing efforts to gut liberal views they dislike in the liberal arts.

Until recently, neither federal nor state laws attempted to dictate curriculum to colleges. State legislatures have dictated curricular demands only upon K-12. For example, California requires that sex education curriculum stress “abstinence before heterosexual marriage.” But the courts have generally deferred to the spending power of Congress and state governments. Last spring the Supreme Court upheld a federal law that cuts off aid to libraries that do not install filtering software on library computers even though the filtering software blocks out sites that are not pornographic.

So there’s a concern that the right wing will pressure Congress and state legislatures to use spending power to cut funds from colleges offering anything the right wing doesn’t like.

During the height of the McCarthy era, the Supreme Court defended the First Amendment right of the academy to express controversial ideas in the curriculum, even if it meant that communist professors taught Marxism.

The Court said the classroom is “peculiarly the marketplace of ideas” and that “vigilant protection of constitutional freedoms is vital in American universities.”

But if the AFA prevails, the Supreme Court may soon decide whether funds can be withheld from schools that offer gay studies.