Authoritarian campuses

PROFESSOR PAUL Abramson is only partly right in positing that universities' overly restrictive prohibitions against teacher/student intimate relationships are explained by its being "a topic that touches on sex" and by fear of lawsuits for "sexual harassment" ("The right to romance," Ideas, Sept. 30). There is another explanation, namely the modern university's in loco parentis notion that it has the right to form, or reform as the case may be, the student's attitudes toward a wide variety of what should be personal moral, political, and philosophical choices.

Thus, for example, the typical freshman orientation program at many colleges seeks to inculcate in students the academy's approved attitudes on such hot-button issues as race, gender, sexual orientation, and, at some campuses, even politics. So-called mandatory sensitivity training for undergraduates is really a species of thought reform and political indoctrination, entirely inappropriate for students who are presumptive adults and in theory endowed with academic freedom. And yet our freshmen are assaulted with such authoritarian programs as soon as they arrive on campus, as if they are there to serve a prison sentence rather than to get a liberal arts education and learn to think for themselves.

HARVEY A. SILVERGLATE
Cambridge

The writer is chairman of the board of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education.