Douglas Alexander: “I hope my friends in the university community will see in me someone who values higher education, who defends the…”

“I hope my friends in the university community will see in me someone who values higher education, who defends the importance of it in our society, who is working hard to keep our brainpower advantage in the world marketplace, who supports funding it generously, but who also believes that the greatest Achilles' heel of our system of higher education today is political correctness and a failure to take it seriously. Colleges and universities are places where people ought to be allowed to say even outrageous things from the right and from the left. It is not a free and academic environment if you are only allowed to say outrageous things from the left. Without belaboring that point, I conclude my remarks by expressing my appreciation once more to Senators Kennedy and Enzi. This is a first-rate bill. It will help students. It will help our country. It has a great many good ideas in it, and I hope there are others in this body and in the House of Representatives who will join me in recognizing that along with political correctness, the greatest threat to quality of higher education, in my view, is overregulation by the Federal Government, and perhaps over time we can find some sensible ways to give it a little more freedom from this big stack of regulations that piled up over the years.”