I arrived in Los Angeles for the annual Congress of the United States Student Association early this afternoon, just in time for officer nominations, and those nominations suggest that there’s an interesting Congress in store.

USSA has two national officers — a president and a vice president. For many years, each year’s vice president has run for president at the end of his or her term, and has won. This informal practice has ensured that each year’s president has had a year’s experience in the Association’s national office before taking over.

That apprenticeship is particularly significant given USSA’s structure. The Association does not have an Executive Director or  any other permanent staff — with the exception of its office manager, all USSA’s employees serve short terms. The organization, unlike many student and youth organizations, is led by its elected officers, who are invariably recent college graduates themselves.

So the office of USSA president is a big and complex one, and it would be difficult for anyone to walk into it and be effective without having served a year as veep first. It’s possible, certainly, and there’s nothing in the USSA constitution to prohibit it — each year’s presidential election gives the Association’s membership an opportunity to block the outgoing vice president from becoming president — but it’s not something that has happened in the Association’s modern history.

Which is why it’s interesting that the competition this year is in the vice presidential slot.

USSA officer elections are often uncontested, with the outgoing vice president selecting his or her successor, and the Congress ratifying that choice. (For more on this historical background, see this followup post.) But this year there are two legitimate candidates for vice president — Daniel Ramos of Colorado and Victor Sanchez of California.

I’ll have more on this race tomorrow.

As I mentioned earlier this week, the United States Student Association’s annual Congress starts today at UCLA. What follows is a short history of USSA and its predecessor, the National Student Association — it’s the latest revision of an essay that I wrote for distribution within USSA when I served as its national secretary as an undergrad in the early 1990s.

–Angus Johnston

Although discussions of American student movements frequently begin and end with the radical activism of the 1960s, the real history of those movements begin far earlier. American students have been organizing for centuries, and USSA has been an important part of that organizing since the end of the Second World War — as a newly-created national student union in the late forties, as an increasingly activist association of student governments in the sixties, as a radical antiwar outfit in the early seventies, and as a broad-based advocacy group in the eighties and nineties. Today, with a growing membership and a powerful lobbying presence in the country’s capital, USSA stands as the largest, most inclusive national student association in the nation.

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The New York Times this morning reports on a lawsuit currently working its way through the federal court system. At issue is whether competitive cheerleading is a sport.

Quinnipiac University in Connecticut recently eliminated its women’s volleyball team as a budget-cutting measure. But as the Times notes, the anti-discrimination law known as Title IX requires colleges to “provide equal athletic opportunities for men and women.” (Actually, it’s a little more complicated than that, but never mind.)

And so Quinnipiac decided to replace women’s volleyball with competitive cheerleading — the cheerleading squad, it turns out, costs the school some $5,000 less per student to run than the volleyball team does.

Hence the lawsuit.

If competitive cheerleading is a sport, then it counts toward satisfying Quinnipiac’s Title IX obligations. If it isn’t, it doesn’t. The volleyball team is arguing that it isn’t, and that the university should be barred from dissolving their squad. So far they’ve been successful — a temporary injunction has kept their sport alive at Quinnipiac for the last year — with the judge’s final decision expected in the coming days.

A Washington DC police officer who was caught on video last winter brandishing his gun at a snowball fight has blamed anarchist panic for his actions.

Detective Michael Baylor was driving home in his Hummer last December 19 when his car was pelted with snowballs. Amateur video later posted on the internet showed him standing in the street with a gun in his hand, calling for backup.

Baylor told investigators that he “got scared and drew his weapon” because he “believed the group were anarchists.”

Kenneth Howell, an adjunct professor of religion at the University of Illinois, has been let go after sending his students an email about Catholic moral theories of homosexuality that one student described as “hate speech.”

Debate on the firing has proceeded along two lines of dispute — firstly whether Howell’s perceived bigotry places him outside the protections of academic freedom, and secondly whether the concept of academic freedom can even be properly applied to an adjunct faculty member with a semester-by-semester contract.

But I don’t want to talk about either of those issues today.

What I want to talk about is this defense of Howell’s email, posted at National Review’s “Phi Beta Cons” blog:

The university is making a conscious decision to enforce ignorance on its students. The university would rather see its students remain ignorant of one of the world’s most common moral theories than have their delicate feelings damaged. This is not education; it’s indoctrination in its purest form.

The charge that UI is “making a conscious decision to enforce ignorance” proceeds from the assumption that Howell is competent to teach moral philosophy.

At least, I hope it’s an assumption. Because by the evidence of the email, Howell is utterly ignorant of the subject he was hired to teach:

• He badly bungles his discussion of utilitarianism, as when he asserts that any utilitarian would necessarily regard children and animals as capable of consenting to sex.

• Despite cautioning students against drawing conclusions about human sexual morality unless they “have done extensive research into homosexuality,” he bases his own conclusions on a conversation with “a physician”  who told him that gay men “have been known to engage in certain types of actions for which their bodies are not fitted.”

• He contends that “what lies behind the idea of sex change operations” is the belief “that we can use our bodies sexually in whatever ways we choose without regard to their actual structure and meaning.”

This isn’t serious philosophical or theological instruction. It’s not a scholarly discussion of human sexuality. It’s what we in the academy refer to as “talking out of your ass.”

Faculty are entitled to considerable latitude in their classroom approach. But students are entitled to be taught by faculty who have engaged in serious study of the subjects they teach, and by faculty who understand the difference between scholarly analysis and uninformed opinion.

This is not a matter of politics or of political correctness. It’s a matter of taking the role of a professor seriously, of acquainting yourself with the basic facts of a subject under discussion before you present yourself to students as an authority. It is wrong for a professor to suggest that transgenderism is grounded in beliefs about how we may “use our bodies sexually” not because that statement is offensive, but because it is ignorant.

By the available evidence, Howell has been scrupulous about declaring his students’ right to disagree with his assertions. But academic freedom doesn’t protect a math professor’s right to misstate the Pythagorean theorem, or an economist’s ignorance of the Laffer curve, even if he’s willing to allow students to disagree with his misstatements.

Similarly, academics at all points on the ideological spectrum share an obligation to accurately present the views of those with whom they differ. If you cannot accurately describe the views of those with whom you disagree, then you do not — in a very real sense — understand your own position.

Howell’s biggest defect as a professor isn’t his ideology, it’s his ineptitude.

Update | The good folks at The Nation have reposted this piece at their Extra Credit blog, with a very kind tip of the hat to yours truly. Thanks, good folks at The Nation, and welcome Nation readers!