Dive Summary:
- Purdue University President Mitch Daniels issued a statement on the school's website Wednesday denying that e-mails he sent while serving as governor of Indiana proposed any kind of censorship or were harmful to academic freedom.
- The e-mails, sent in 2010 and released by the Associated Press on Tuesday, called for a "clean-up of what is credit-worthy" at the state's colleges after he heard a textbook presenting "a falsified version of history" written by historian and antiwar activist Howard Zinn was used in a summer Indiana University course for teachers.
- Another e-mail discussed cutting funding for a program operated by a university professor critical of the former governor, but Daniels said in interviews with reporters Wednesday that the AP report was "unfair and erroneous."
From the article:
... In a statement posted on Purdue's website on Wednesday, Daniels said, "In truth, my emails infringed on no one's academic freedom and proposed absolutely no censorship of any person or viewpoint."
"In fact, the question I asked on one day in 2010 had nothing to do with higher education at all. I merely wanted to make certain that Howard Zinn's textbook, which represents a falsified version of history, was not being foisted upon our young people in Indiana's public K-12 classrooms." ...