Should a professor require students to attend a teach-in?

A reader (student?) asks what I think of this: the International Forum on Globalization and some other presumably left-liberal organizations hold a "teach-in" at George Washington University called "Confronting the Global Triple Crisis: Climate Change, Peak Oil & Global Resource Depletion." They send an email to faculty at area universitites inviting them to send students and offering to provide scholarships to students whose professors require attendance. The question: should professors require attendance at an activist teach-in?

To me this case lies in a gray area. Here are some principles I believe in that inform my answer to the question.

1. While in any particular course the professor ought to strive for objectivity (by which I mean not neutrality, but disinterested consideration of opposing views), a good course, in the social sciences at least, will expose students to ideas with which they disagree. In fact I think challenging students' beliefs is a professor's duty - my father in law the minister says his job is to "comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable," which I think is my job as well.

2. But the professor needs to take care that the things he requires students to read or the lectures he requires students to attend are, even if "biased" in one direction or another, backed by sound scholarship. I would not send students to a conference on "the global warming hoax" or the "CIA's 9-11 conspiracy" because (in all probability) what students would get there would be propaganda rather than analysis.

3. And the professor needs to give students the opportunity to critically evaluate the information they receive at such an event. I would hope that a lecture or two would be set aside to help students digest the information from the teach-in, at which the professor would provide sound opposing views and help students critique some of the arguments they heard.

4. One of the advantages of going to a school in or around a place like Washington D.C. is the opportunity to attend conferences and lectures that present interesting, pointed, controversial points of view. There's no point making a fetish out of neutrality towards political issues - if you do, you cut students off from potentially valuable experiences.

So I guess my answer is, I have no objection to a professor requiring students to attend conferences like the one at GW, provided there's serious scholarship going on there and the professor gives students an opportunity to evaluate critically what they learned.

P.S. There's a twist: the organizers provide students with a scholarship provided that they agree to "volunteer" for a few hours at the teach-in. That makes me uncomfortable because it potentially puts students in the position of being forced to advocate for a cause in which they don't believe. If I wanted to send my students to that teach-in, I think I'd look for alternative sources of funding.