In a message dated 8/29/05 4:52:39 PM, Jim Henderson writes:
Art finds "standardless, unbridled discretion" discussions to have little to do with the real world ...
No, that's not what I was trying to say. I think many First Amendment cases can still be won -- some by me, I hope -- because the government is engaged in "standardless, unbridled discretion." What I was trying to say was that Jim's assertion that the UC system was engaged in "standardless, unbridled discretion" when it refused to accept credits from, e.g., a science course that used a young earth
creationist textbook, had "little to do with the real world."
In other words, it seems to me that the rejection of credits from such a course is a clear example of *applying* reasonable and relevant academic standards, not the absence of standards. (I suppose it's possible that discovery will reveal that the UC system decides which high school courses to accept and which not to accept in an arbitrary and irrational way, but that seems to me quite unlikely.)
What would be literally "standardless" (although not necessarily unconstitutional) would be for the UC system to accept credits from any course given by any high school, regardless of whether the course met minimum academic standards.
And in a message dated 8/29/05 4:33:44 PM, Rick Duncan writes:
In an e-mail message cited in the lawsuit, a university admissions official wrote that the content of courses that use textbooks from the two publishers is "not consistent with the viewpoints and knowledge generally accepted in the scientific community."
* * *
The email quoted by the Chronicle may be a forgery, but if it is accurate it amounts to an admission that the university is targeting, at least in part, the religious viewpoints expressed in the textbooks.
Not necessarily. It depends what the official meant when he used the word "viewpoints." Most likely he or she had not just read Lamb's Chapel, and was not using the word in a First Amendment viewpoint-discrimination sense. If what the official meant was that the course was rejected because it taught biology from the "viewpoint" that the earth was created 6,000 years ago and all facts about life on earth must be made to fit within that 6,000-year span, then the statement is not an "admission" of anything that will be disadvantageous to the UC system in litigation.
I suppose "the earth was created 6,000 years ago" is a religious viewpoint, but then I suppose so is "circumference equals 3x diameter," see I Kings 7:23. But nothing in Lamb's Chapel or its progeny would require the UC system to accept credit from a high school geometry course that was based upon that "viewpoint."
Art Spitzer
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