As governor, Mitch Daniels waged war on Howard Zinn.
Indiana Prof says ““Mitch knows the faculty control the curriculum and I am pretty sure he respects it.”
According to emails obtained last summer by the s
Associated Press: Mitch Daniels, now the president of Purdue University, as governor of Indiana, threatened to cut off state funding to universities that gave voice to liberal historian Howard Zinn, according to recent reports. The emails show Daniels lambasting Zinn’s work as “execrable” and “anti-factual.” He authorized Indiana education personnel to find — and root out — liberal bias in the classrooms of colleges that receive public funding.
President Daniels stood by that record, but claimed he that he only intended to restrict the influence of historians like Zinn in elementary school classrooms. “We must not falsely teach American history in our schools,” he said in a statement to the Associated Press. “Howard Zinn, by his own admission a biased writer, purposely falsified American history. His books have no more place in Indiana history classrooms than phrenology or Lysenkoism would in our biology classes or the `Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ in world history courses. We have a law requiring state textbook oversight to guard against frauds like Zinn, and it was encouraging to find that no Hoosier school district had inflicted his book on its students.”
Cary Nelson, former President of the AAUP and a Professor of English at the Unioversity of Illinois , said “It is astonishing and shocking that such a person is now the head of a major research university, making decisions about the curriculum, that one painfully suspects embodies the same ignorance and racism these comments embody,” sa
at Purdue over the years, the faculty still are the ones that establish the academic standards and the curricula – and we are not easily moved,” “Mitch knows this, and I am pretty sure he respects it – even more now that he is here than when he was outside.”