Opposition to State Interference in College Curricula
The Executive Council approved the following statement in August 2013.
The recently released e-mail messages by Purdue University President Mitchell E. Daniels, Jr., violate the spirit of teachers’ academic freedom to select their reading assignments. The e-mail messages, written in 2010, during Daniels’s term as Indiana governor, condemn the use of Howard Zinn’s history textbook A People’s History of the United States in courses at Indiana University. The MLA joins the American Historical Association and the Organization of American Historians in their objection to any state official’s interference in college curricula and course reading assignments and in their restatement of the principle that free inquiry is the cornerstone of democratic education.