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Faith and federal funding

Has the federal government overstepped in giving nearly half a million dollars of funding to an Alaskan Bible college? The Freedom From Religion Foundation says it has, and is suing the U.S. Secretary of Education for violating the establishment clause of the First Amendment. Alaskan Christian College is an overtly religious school with a Bible-centered curriculum--but it is also a school that serves Native American communities and works to ensure that Native Americans in the area have access to higher education. It's on that basis that the college receives federal funding, and the dispute at hand has to do with whether it can fairly be said that the secular aspects of the school's mission outweigh its openly faith-based institutional philosophy. In the past, the courts have allowed religious schools to receive federal funds that were clearly earmarked for secular purposes; at issue in this case will be whether the college is more interested in educating Native Americans or in converting them.

Posted by acta online at 08:53 AM | Comments (0)

Election opens a can of worms

Dartmouth College alumni are currently electing two new members to the Board of Trustees--and what one would normally expect to be a fairly mundane and staid process has proven to be a fascinating struggle over not just how issues of policy and procedure at Dartmouth ought to be discussed, but whether they may be discussed at all. What will happen is anybody's guess, but the one thing that is certain is that the free exchange of ideas is not alive and well at Dartmouth. Read about it at National Review Online.

Posted by acta online at 06:42 AM | Comments (0)

Fresh air

A fascinating student editorial on free speech and ideological double standards appears in today's Harvard Crimson:

Since January, an intolerant atmosphere has prevailed on campus. Summers’ remarks on the innate differences between men and women may have been politically incorrect, but the response of the Harvard faculty and the national media was even more disgusting. Despite a month of national coverage, most critics did not even address Summers’ comments, simply dismissing them as inappropriate for someone in his position. While I respect and support the few journalists who thoughtfully analyzed the claims and provided opinions from which we could form our own thoughts, the reaction of the rest of society should act as a warning sign to all who were watching. The day that our academic minds are stifled is the same day that our society stops progressing.

The author goes on to draw connections between the anti-intellectualism that characterizes politicized attitudes toward campus speech and the ever-broader speech codes that are appearing in the workplace. It's a refreshing alternative to the increasingly entrenched notion that what we should all be striving for is a world in which no one need ever be offended, and in which this desire is often elevated to the status of a right. Well worth a read.

Posted by acta online at 03:50 PM | Comments (0)

The limits of academic freedom

The winter provided ample fare for followers of campus scandals centered on speech. There were Ward Churchill and his "little Eichmanns," Lawrence Summers and his politically incorrect speculations about sexual difference, the David Project and Columbia University's investigation into its Middle East studies department. Spring promises to be just as provocative. Presently, the person whose beliefs are attracting attention is a political science professor at North Carolina Wesleyan College named Jane Christensen. Christensen harbors some extreme beliefs about 9/11, beliefs that make Ward Churchill's vitriolic comments sound positively tame. She maintains a website outlining those beliefs and featuring a photo of herself decked out like a terrorist. She also teaches a course centered on her theories about 9/11 entitled, "9-11; The Road to Tyranny." According to a news article about the course, it "teaches that the official story about Sept. 11 is the result of 'government involvement in the coverup.''"

Christensen is absolutely convinced that her course reveals the one right way to understand the attacks: "I teach the truth about 9/11 in all of my courses," she has told the press. She has also said that criticism of courses such as hers amounts to "a war by the extreme right wing motivated by the Zionists to quash academic freedom on campus," adding that students will "never find anything that resembles the truth about 9/11 or the war in Iraq from the mainstream media."

NC Wesleyan president Ian Newbould is defending Christensen's academic freedom. "We don't tell professors what to think," he says. "We don't tell professors what to teach. ... What makes America great is we don't do that. I've often used a quotation that they say comes from Voltaire, `I may disagree with what you say but I'll fight to your death your right to say it.' " Tom Betts, who chairs the college's Board of Trustees, has similar things to say: "I find what's on her Web site to be distasteful and despicable, and I disagree with everything on it. In the most polite of terms, it is disgraceful. ... However, this is America, and academic freedom and free speech is what sets us apart from the rest of the world. And I believe and hope most people will see this Web site for what it is — the opinions of a very, very far left person. And any sensible person would see this as a joke — a very bad joke."

Christensen's critics maintain that this is not an issue of academic freedom, but of blatant fraud. Academic gadfly and UNC-Wilmington professor Mike Adams, for example, has devoted a column to Christensen, arguing that her work is filled with "slander and anti-Semitism" and that she is "a bigot posing as a scholar." The Pope Center's Jon Sanders calls Christensen's course "crackpot," and an editorial in the Rocky Mountain Telegram argues that defenses of academic freedom--as important as they are--ought not to be used to mask the fact that Christensen's course is founded on questionably sourced, biased material. A companion article in the Telegram broaches the idea that Christensen is not using her 9/11 course to educate, but is instead using it to indoctrinate.

What Christensen posts on her web site is one thing; what she does in her courses is another. In her course, Christensen is openly uninterested in presenting a balanced look at the debates surrounding 9/11; she is freely expounding a conspiracy theory as the truth. In its deliberate one-sidedness, hers is not a course that encourages students to become as knowledgeable as they can about an issue, and then to make up their own minds about it. Easy invocations of academic freedom sidestep the important problem of how Christensen is using--or abusing--hers; indeed, they work counterproductively, to cover up that problem and even to define it away.

UPDATE 4/29: KC Johnson has much more to say, all of it well worth reading.

Posted by acta online at 05:24 PM | Comments (0)

Bowling for dollars

Last fall, filmmaker and political provocateur Michael Moore was invited to speak at Cal State San Marcos--and then he was disinvited. The reason given by CSUSM president Karen Hynes was that the school was forbidden by law to devote state funds to politically partisan activity; in the absence of adequate time to schedule a speaker whose views would balance Moore's, San Marcos administrators decided it would be unwise to allow Moore to appear as scheduled. Moore spoke anyhow, after outraged students raised the $45,000 needed to bring him to speak at a fairgrounds off campus; he drew a crowd of 10,000 people, among them Joan Baez, who sang, and a number of protesters.

At his talk, Moore vowed to use the proceeds of his appearance to establish a "hellraiser" scholarship for Cal State San Marcos students who defy the administration. Now he has made good on his promise. The Michael Moore Freedom of Speech Scholarship will award $2500 annually to two students "who have done the most to fight for issues of student rights by standing up to the administration." Applicants must be enrolled at Cal State San Marcos and must have at least a 2.5 grade point average. Applications are due May 11, and awards for the coming school year will be announced in June.

"I hope this scholarship will encourage students to show courage and stand up for what they believe in," Moore stated in a press release posted on his website. "It’s not easy to take on the establishment, but when students do so for the right reasons, they should be rewarded. ... At a time when the media and politicians have shown a lack of courage, we should look to America’s universities and America’s young people to show us how patriotic dissent is. The University should not be a place for fear, but a place for bravery, free thought, and a little bit of rebellion."

At his talk, Moore engaged in the Bush-bashing for which he is known. But he also welcomed the Republicans who attended (and who protested outside the fairgrounds). According to an article that appeared in the North County Times, Moore "said it did not matter why people were there Tuesday -- in fact, he said, he welcomed the Republicans who showed up to disagree -- as long as they were going to get involved and vote." Moore now has an opportunity to put his money where his mouth is by administering his scholarship in the true spirit of the free and open expression it aims to support. That would mean, theoretically, funding the odd conservative or religious student who has worked to secure the expressive and associative rights that such students often struggle to preserve. Will he do that? When the awards are announced in June, it will be worth noting who gets them--and who does not.

Posted by acta online at 11:18 AM | Comments (0)

Changing face of undergraduates

City Journal editor Brian Anderson's new book, South Park Conservatives: The Revolt Against Liberal Media Bias, is a trenchant and timely analysis of how the rise of conservative mass media marks a major revolution in both the quality and tone of political debate in this country. Anderson devotes chapters to conservative talk radio, the FOX News Channel, conservative book publishing, Comedy Central's irreverent anti-PC cartoon South Park, and the blogosphere. He also devotes a riveting chapter to the college campus, arguing that even as the professoriate remains overwhelmingly liberal, the student body is gradually becoming increasingly conservative.

Anderson notes that six years ago, there were only 400 campus chapters of the College Republicans, whereas today there are 1,148 chapters with over 120,000 members; by contrast, there are only about 900 College Democrats chapters, serving about 100,000 members. Noting the increasing popularity of conservative student organizations such as gun clubs and right-of-center student publications, Anderson observes that over the past decade there has been a "general rightward shift in college students' views":

Back in 1995, reports UCLA's Higher Education Research Institute, 66 percent of freshmen felt that the wealthy should pay a fatter chunk of taxes. Today, only 50 percent do. Some 17 percent of students now think it's important to take part in an environmental program, half the percentage that did in 1992. Support for abortion stood at two-thirds of students in the early 1990s; now it's just over half. A late-2003 Harvard University's Institute of Politics study found that college kids had moved to the right of the general population, with 31 percent identifying themselves as Republican, 27 percent as Democrats, and the rest independent or unaffiliated. "College campuses aren't a hotbed of liberalism anymore," Dan Glickman, director of the Institute of Politics, commented about the findings of the survey. "It's a different world." (141)

Anderson suggests that the rise of campus conservatism has much to do with the palpable failure of the Left to confront the post-9/11 world intelligibly. He also notes that when the prevailing campus orthodoxy is liberal--as evidenced by the speech codes, mandatory sensitivity training, and politically one-sided curricula that have become all too common features of the undergraduate experience--conservatism begins to look like a radical, even subversive stance.

Posted by acta online at 09:11 AM | Comments (0)

Trustees have free speech, too

On Tuesday, the ACLU filed a lawsuit on behalf of Thomas Hamilton, a member of St. Clair Community College's Board of Trustees. Hamilton has for the past several years been an increasingly outspoken critic of the College's president, Rose Bellanca; he has also repeatedly questioned whether the Board has adequately supervised what he sees as her questionable performance. Last November, the Board adopted a new "Code of Ethics and Responsibilities" that amounted to a speech code specially directed at trustees. Among its provisions are the stipulations that trustees must "engage in positive public relations for the college," that they must "not solicit or encourage faculty, student or employee concerns, whether by telephone,  Internet (e-mail), or any other verbal or written communication unless previously authorized by the board," that they must "not participate in any meeting outside of a legal assembly of the board in which matters of board substance are discussed," and that they must "not visit the campus in order to talk with students, faculty or employees without first notifying the college president." The code effectively muzzles Hamilton, who had previously been pressured to stop criticizing Bellanca, and who has since had to give up his practice of meeting with interested groups to discuss the college. As such, argues the ACLU, the code violates the expressive and associative rights not only of Hamilton, but of all members of the Board of Trustees. Read more at InsideHigherEd.com.

Posted by acta online at 09:09 AM | Comments (0)

Out of the frying pan...

Harvard president Lawrence Summers spent the better part of the winter backpedalling after suggesting that biological differences may account at least in part for the comparatively low numbers of women working in the hard sciences and in engineering. The suggestion was mild, balanced, and speculative, framed not as an assertion but as one of several possibilities that researchers might consider investigating. The reaction to the suggestion, however, was one of sustained outrage; it culminated in the Harvard arts and sciences faculty passing a vote of "no confidence" in their politically incorrect leader.

Now it looks as though Summers may be in for another round of accusations, apologies, and attacks on both his character and his qualifications as a leader. This time the subject is Native Americans, and this time Summers has caused offense by citing documented facts that, according to some, don't mesh well with our increasingly simplified historical picture of murderously racist white Americans setting out to destroy innocent Native American communities. In a recent talk, Summers noted that

For everyone who was killed or maimed in some attack by European-descended Americans on the Native American population, for every conscious death that came in war, 10 were a consequence of the diseases that came to North America with the European immigrants. There are fragmentary accounts of a kind of early biological warfare. You know, let’s wrap a blanket around somebody who has smallpox and then encourage some other people to use that blanket. But the vast majority of the suffering that was visited on the Native American population as the Europeans came was not a plan or an attack, it was in many ways a coincidence that was a consequence of that assimilation. Nobody’s plan. But that coincidence caused an enormous amount of suffering.

According to a piece in today's edition of InsideHigherEd.com, Summers' critics are offended not because he got his facts wrong, but because the facts he cited "minimized the responsibility of the United States for the deaths of so many American Indians" and because he made note of problems within Native American communities. Summers has already begun apologizing for referencing politically inconvenient information, telling the Harvard student paper, The Crimson, that he "did not mean for a moment to diminish the severity or ferocity of the widespread violence that claimed very many lives," and noting that his "aim was to point to the need for conscious efforts at Harvard and in the nation more broadly to contribute to the prosperity and health of Native American communities. I regret if my remarks were understood otherwise."

Summers gave the talk containing this new batch of offensive comments last September. The comments are only now being publicized because they are being used to make a broader political case against Summers' suitability to serve as president of Harvard. The agent in this instance is The Washington Post, which ran a long article last week on Summers' alleged history of offending minority groups. The piece discussed the debacle of the winter, and then moved on to suggest that Summers has a habit of making impolitic and hurtful remarks. It mentioned the September talk, as well as Summers' now infamous run-in with former Harvard professor Cornel West, who decamped to Princeton several years ago after Summers questioned the seriousness of his work. Summers' friendliness to the ROTC program and his disapproval of a 2002 petition urging universities to divest from Israel are also cited as instances of his political impropriety. Late in the article, the author does attempt to capture the complexities of Summers' controversial leadership, but the concluding note is a telling one: "there are a lot of people at Harvard who wonder what will come out of Summers's mouth next, and what, in the end, their institution will look like if Summers succeeds in molding it in his own image." Summers takes shape here as a loose cannon, someone whose demagogic inability to control or craft his words threatens the integrity of Harvard itself. The picture is tellingly overdrawn, its emphasis on Summers' speech revealing in its implicit hostility to the free exchange of ideas institutions such as Harvard are supposed to embody. But it appears to have done its work: This morning, The Crimson is running a long piece that builds on the WaPo article. The snowballing appears to have begun.

Last week, Harvard announced the hire of two tenure-track professors specializing in Native American studies.

Posted by acta online at 05:00 AM | Comments (0)

Speaking of trustees

Earlier this month, a group of Illinois State University students submitted a petition to Governor Rod Blagojevich asking him not to reappoint ISU alumnus and prominent businessman Jay D. Bergman to the Board of Trustees. Bergman runs Petco Petroleum Company; The ISU Student Environmental Action Coalition disapproves of the company's checkered environmental record, and specifically objects to how Petco Petroleum has handled recent conflicts with state regulators--currently, Petco is fighting an environmental lawsuit filed against the company by the Illinois attorney general. Bergman's term as trustee expired in January.

When Bergman learned of the petition, he dismissed it as the product of the group's "radical, leftist agenda," observing that "From what I understand, they are so far to the left they make Jane Fonda look like Ronald Reagan." That's when the real trouble started. ISU president Al Bowman publicly criticized Bergman for his remarks, stating that Bergman's comments showed disrespect for ISU's goal of encouraging student civic engagement; the ISU Academic Senate has decided first to study Bergman's remarks and then to issue a statement in response. According to a piece in the local Pantagraph, Bergman's comments have launched a debate about whether trustees have an obligation to encourage and preserve the free expression of students; the paper quotes foreign language professor and faculty senator Jim Reid as saying, "We need to ask whether a trustee has a responsibility to encourage academic freedom." Other critics of Bergman's remark have understood him as disrespecting the First Amendment rights of students, and, more basically, of showing a lamentable lack of civility. Bergman has not apologized for his remarks, and has noted that while he respects the rights of students to express their opinions, he also has the right to express himself freely.

At issue in this case is not merely whether trustees may criticize the actions of politicized student groups--who are speaking for themselves and not for the school they attend--but whether, too, trustees are expected to align their own beliefs, or at least their public portrayal of them, with the institution's own political agendas. ISU formally espouses as one of its core values the goal of instilling in its students a sense of environmental stewardship; in this instance, that mission is clashing with the professional pursuits of one of its exceptionally well-heeled trustees (Bergman has pledged nearly half a million dollars to ISU for a VIP visitors' center). One might also say that both ISU's environmental mission and its goal of encouraging student activism clash with the university's ethical obligation, as a federally funded institution, not to impose political stances or activist agendas on its student body. While Bergman could certainly have been more civil, perhaps the most troubling aspect of this situation thus far is the apparent inability of ISU administrators, faculty, and students to see the issues clearly.

Posted by acta online at 05:54 AM | Comments (1)

Fairness in funding

In 1985, the state of Wisconsin established the Ben R. Lawton Minority Undergraduate Grant Program, which reserves scholarship money for black, Hispanic, and American Indian students, as well as students whose families are refugees from Cambodia, Vietnam, and Laos. The program centers on helping students who have completed their freshman year and who fit the designated racial and ethnic profile stay in college; the average award is on the order of $1400. Similar aid programs, in which money is earmarked for minority students, have come under fire in recent years. The Office of Civil Rights has investigated a number of such programs at Carnegie Mellon, Harvard, Yale, and other schools, and has declared them to be discriminatory. In response, nearly seventy colleges and universities across the country have adjusted their aid programs to be more inclusive, and thus more fair to all potential applicants.

The University of Wisconsin, however, is unimpressed by what has become, at this point, a national effort to ensure that misguided--if well-intentioned--minority aid programs are restructured along legally acceptable lines. The University is defending its practice of reserving scholarship money for minority students, despite a complaint filed with federal officials by a retired UW economics professor, W. Lee Hansen. Hansen's complaint claims that the Lawton program violates Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which forbids any institution that receives federal funds from engaging in racial discrimination. The Office of Civil Rights is presently investigating. Hansen has been challenging the Lawton grants for years.

The Chronicle of Higher Education has the details, including a telling quote from David Glisch-Sanchez, who is director of academic affairs at the Madison campus. According to Glisch-Sanchez, who spoke about this issue at the February meeting of the UW Board of regents, the university should mount "a strong show of support for programs like the Lawton grants in order to send a clear message to those who would forsake race-conscious efforts." In other words, the rationale for the complaint is lost on Glisch-Sanchez, whose primary concern seems to be to preserve a form of activism that the law expressly forbids. Glisch-Sanchez went on to declare that those who would see minority aid programs become race-blind aid programs are ignoring "how poverty is tied to race and gender." Poverty may be tied to race and gender, but it is also tied to itself: a race-blind aid program centered strictly on need should work well to help ensure that students of all colors and all backgrounds get the help they need to stay in school.

Posted by acta online at 06:22 AM | Comments (0)

Initiating public trust

The recent fiasco at Columbia University about whether anti-Semitic sentiment is tolerated and even encouraged in the Middle East studies program has inspired a sharply critical staff editorial at The New York Times. Opening with an unequivocal condemnation of Columbia's handling of the situation--"Sad to say, the school has botched the handling of this emotionally charged issue from the start, thereby allowing festering concerns to erupt into a full-scale boil"--the editorial goes on to count the ways in which Columbia's lack of foresight and inadequate grievance procedure compounded the problem in the name of resolving it.

According to the Times, Columbia botched its investigation by assigning pro-Palestinian professors to the investigative panel, thereby guaranteeing that the panel's results would be "greeted with skepticism," and by conducting its investigation too narrowly: "Most student complaints were not really about intimidation, but about allegations of stridently pro-Palestinian, anti-Israeli bias on the part of several professors. The panel had no mandate to examine the quality and fairness of teaching." The editorial concludes with a fairly unconvincing (because unconvinced?) expression of hope that as Columbia continues to clean up its internal mess, it will conduct itself with more "determination and care" than it has to this point.

The piece's sharp and cutting criticisms, combined with its faint concluding sentiment, together express not only a specific disappointment in Columbia, but also a more general distrust of college and university comportment. It's as if the Times staff had said to themselves, "Well, we should write an editorial urging Columbia to clean up its act--but we can't really expect anything to come of it."

Such moments speak to the growing breach of faith between the American public and the higher education establishment. Tuition prices are soaring even as tales of administrative malfeasance and institutionalized bias circulate in the media; there is an increasing sense on the part of the American public that higher education is not what it should be, and there is a related sense on the part of people who work in higher education that the public does not fully grasp the work that colleges and universities do. So pressing has the problem become that a new organization is forming with the express purpose of repairing this rift. The Public Trust Initiative will most likely be launched this fall, and will consist of a nationwide effort to educate the public about the value of higher education not just to individuals, but to society as a whole. According to InsideHigherEd.com,

The Public Trust Initiative will involve efforts in every state and with every sector of higher education. The effort will feature both a national ad campaign and attempts to have colleges shift some of their communications with their own constituencies--students, parents, alumni, opinion leaders, taxpayers generally--away from messages about individual institutions and toward messages about higher education.

"There have been a number of calls recently for a new national dialogue on the social compact between higher education and society," said Stanley O. Ikenberry, former president of the American Council on Education and the University of Illinois, who is leading the effort. "What we are trying to do is to launch such a dialogue."

[...]

Ikenberry said that much of the work thus far has been trying to get a handle on what the public knows and doesn’t know about higher education, and to figure out which messages will work. For example, he said it was important that academics not to talk about higher education as being "in crisis."

"The public doesn't see higher education in crisis. Some of us may see that, but the public isn't convinced of that, and even if they were, the public isn't ready to take on yet one more crisis," with Iraq and other issues already center stage, Ikenberry said. "The public may well be in crisis overload."

He said that the message of the campaign would be a positive one, with the emphasis on "why access to higher education is important to society broadly." He said colleges need to talk about how having an educated populace affects health care, crime prevention, the economy, the quality of life, etc.

Ikenberry said that the campaign, to date, has not focused on fighting images of higher education that come up in the culture wars, such as the idea that Ward Churchill is representative of faculty members. Ikenberry said he is hopeful that this controversy will pass, but "if that's seriously and persistently on the public's list of concerns, obviously we would have to address it."

The Public Trust Initiative is an interesting and a necessary project--but it's also one that won't succeed if it tries to define away some of the most pressing problems facing higher education today. A campaign to promote support for higher education that sees--or hopes to see--major national flashpoints such as the Ward Churchill scandal as tangential to its purpose is a campaign that risks limiting its potential power and credibility.

Posted by acta online at 06:04 AM | Comments (0)

Penn rethinks governance

At the University of Pennsylvania, a group of alumni has proposed a way to bridge the gap between Penn students and Penn trustees. Concerned that students and recent graduates have no real say in key university decisions, the group has outlined a procedure for ensuring that current and recent Penn students have some say in who is elected to be a Penn trustee. According to The Daily Pennsylvanian,

The proposal seeks to create two new positions on the Penn Alumni Board of Directors and is designed to balance the makeup of the board -- which currently has few recent graduates serving.

The proposal would give both a current student and a recent Penn graduate the opportunity to play a larger role in determining who is elected to serve on the University Board of Trustees -- the most important governing body of the University.

Set to be voted on in mid-May, the proposal would add the president of the Penn Alumni Student Society and a recent Penn graduate -- appointed by the president of the Penn Alumni -- to the group that recommends the 14 alumni trustees.

Penn Alumni President Paul Williams -- who said he was hopeful that these changes will go through -- said that with approximately 10,000 undergraduates but more than 250,000 living Penn alumni, these two new positions will help balance the constituencies that the board represents.

"The composition of the Penn Alumni Board has been specifically described as trying to get a real balance of representation of the component parts of the alumni community," the 1967 Wharton graduate said.

At the moment, the only means by which students can communicate their concerns directly to the trustees is by serving as liaisons on university committees. Student liaisons have no voting privileges, and are excluded from executive sessions, so their role is minimal and their potential impact negligible. By contrast, each year Princeton elects a senior to serve as a trustee; at any given moment, there are four Young Alumni Trustees who enjoy the same rights, responsibilities, and privileges as the rest of Princeton's trustees.

The DP is all for greater student involvement with the trustees, arguing in a staff editorial that while the proposed new arrangement is intriguing, it is not enough:

Trustees should be listening to the concerns of students, and many are undoubtedly eager to hear what undergraduates have to say, but there is not currently a sufficient line of communication between the two parties.

As it stands now, a handful of students picked by the Nominations and Elections Committee get to sit in and offer some input to six trustee committees. While this may be valuable to an extent, it is not enough. These members do not have unfettered access to trustee meetings and have no formal vote -- much like delegates to the U.S. Congress.

What Penn ought to do is create a handful of full-fledged trustee positions for current upperclassmen. Juniors, for example, could be elected to two-year terms. Not only would this create more interest among students since they would have actual power at trustee meetings, but it would also foster a more collegial relationship between students and trustees.

These are timely issues that promise provocative debate. It will be interesting to chart how Penn responds.

Posted by acta online at 07:33 AM | Comments (0)

Trusting trustees

Last week, Columbia University concluded its now-notorious investigation into allegations that anti-Semitism runs rampant--or at least unchecked and unchallenged--in its department of Middle East studies. Some observers found the results of the report, which found no evidence of rampant anti-Semitism and which only flagged as inappropriate one incident with one professor, to be credible and honorably determined; others suggested the investigation was not all it should be, noting that certain members of the investigative committee were known for their anti-Israel activism, and that some of the more disturbing allegations were dismissed. One particularly noteworthy question was asked by the New York Sun in a staff editorial:

... many are starting to ask privately, "Where are the trustees?" They are a distinguished group. Jose Cabranes is one of our nation's greatest judges. Harold Varmus, a Nobel laureate who runs Memorial Sloan-Kettering, is one of our greatest scientists. Esta Stecher is involved with the Jewish community through service on the New York regional board of the Anti-Defamation League and on the board of the Metropolitan New York Coordinating Council on Jewish Poverty. Evan Davis is a masterful lawyer who, in retrospect, might have been a better New York attorney general than Eliot Spitzer. We name but a few.

Yet with the exception of Mr. Bollinger and the chairman, David Stern, not one of the 22 trustees has deigned to utter a peep of public comment to clarify where they stand in respect of what is happening at their university. We invite our readers to study the list above. Has the cat got all their tongues?

It's an interesting question, no matter where you stand on the issue. The Sun openly suggests that the investigation was a whitewash, and insinuates that the trustees' silence marks a complicity with a coverup of monumental proportions. But it isn't necessary to tie the trustees' silence to guilt in order to see a problem with that silence--at a moment when the reputation of the university is on the line, where there has been an unprecedented investigation into whether the university has been engaging in systematic discrimination against Jews, and where there is considerable question, even after the release of the report, as to whether the allegations have been honestly assessed, the voice of the trustees ought to be heard. They are, after all, the university's ethical bottom line; it is ultimately their obligation and prerogative to ensure that Columbia conducts itself with absolute integrity. If it is possible for them to defend Columbia's conduct, to promise the public that there has been no wrongdoing and that Columbia remains, as ever, absolutely committed to the ongoing work of guaranteeing free inquiry and tolerance for all, then why don't they do so? Because trustees are largely invisible, their importance to the universities and colleges they oversee tends to be forgotten; indeed, their existence tends to be forgotten. But they shouldn't be. They are accountable, and if they do not acknowledge that voluntarily, the public must remind them.

Posted by acta online at 04:55 PM | Comments (0)

Look to your left, look to your right

In The Future and Its Enemies, Virginia Postrel astutely observes that in American politics, the positions and tactics of far left and far right are increasingly becoming indistinguishable. Citing the dovetailing attitudes of left and right toward trade restriction, immigration, technology, and the market, Postrel observes that "what all these left-right alliances have in common is a sense of anguish over the open-ended future ... a future too diverse and fluid for critics to comprehend." Her point? The left/right distinction that we so often use to classify and compartmentalize debate is not necessarily the most accurate or informative rubric for understanding either our debates or the nature of the conflict they exemplify. Postrel devotes her book to delineating an alternative distinction that she claims can frequently tell us much more about the philosophical and psychological motivations underlying some of the most contentiously argued issues of our day; we would do better, she suggests, to think in terms of dynamism and stasism than we would to think in terms of left and right. Dynamists are people who are open to change, who welcome movement as both inevitable and good, and who look with consequent optimism toward the future. Stasists, by contrast, fear and resist change; they are likely to exhibit nostalgia for a romanticized, stable past, and they are equally likely to regard the future as that which must be predicted, planned, managed, and controlled. For Postrel, innovation is the provenance of dynamism; the real conservatism, by contrast, is that evinced by stasism--which emanates from the left as well as the right.

Postrel's observations explain a lot about contemporary attitudes toward free speech, especially when that speech is situated in academe. For the past two months and more, the media has regaled us with the details of two scandals centered on two instances of unpopular academic speech: Harvard president Lawrence Summers' question about whether the comparative dearth of women in engineering and the hard sciences may have a biological component, and University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill's comments about the "little Eichmanns" who died in the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center. In each instance, we have watched an extended, partisan attack on both the utterances and the individuals who made them. There are those on the right who want to see Churchill fired, and who have succeeded in getting him investigated for academic dishonesty; there are those on the left who want to see Summers ousted, who have pilloried him in the media, and and who have succeeded in staging a vote of no confidence in him at Harvard. As Donald Downs notes in a recent editorial, "Suddenly, academic freedom is besieged from both the left and the right."

Two academics, two unpopular statements, two organized attacks that assume the validity of a tactical, politically motivated censorship: We have right now in academe what we might call a "Postrel moment," an instance when we can observe the denizens of left and right agitating for the same essential thing, the right to monitor and punish others' speech in order to enforce conformity to their own views. Summers' enemies might be horrified to realize they have much in common with Churchill's enemies; Churchill's would hardly see themselves as versions of the shrill ideologues who have attacked Summers. But the family resemblance is there, and the nature of that resemblance is their shared stasism--their fear of difference, of challenge, of dissent, and of where those things might lead if they were given free reign.

It might seem unreasonable to compare Summers--whose remarks were qualified and temperate and hardly incendiary--and Churchill, whose comments were designedly extreme and wilfully provocative. Summers' statements were posed earnestly, in the spirit of a quest for answers to legitimate questions, while Churchill's were an obvious instance of rhetorical agitprop, a patently ideological effort to paint America, and Americans, in the worst possible light. And yet it is important to compare--though not to equate--them, if only because it allows us to see how similarly their critics have responded to them. Summers' opponents want to punish him for asking a question because they fear how that question might be answered; Churchill's critics want to silence him because they don't trust the marketplace of ideas to firmly and decisively expose his rhetoric for the glaring example of bad intellectual faith that it is. In each case, distrust of debate and where it might lead took the form of a desire to punish those who expressed certain threatening thoughts. That desire to punish was in turn the expression of a desire to prevent future articulations of similar thoughts. If it is not possible to erase the comments that Summers and Churchill made, it is certainly possible to respond to their comments in such a way that others will think twice before they make the professionally dangerous mistake of speaking their minds.

Over the last two months, the left and the right have collaborated--however unwittingly--in a campaign to chill the climate of academic debate. As such, they have exposed a lack of faith in both intellectual endeavor and reasoned disagreement that transcends political affiliations and that bespeaks an entirely different order of problem, one that has more to do with the creeping stasism of the academy than with political disagreements within it. The very project of the university--to pursue knowledge, wherever it might lead, and to foster an environment in which ideas are rigorously tested--becomes an impossible joke if the culture of academe is hostile to the inevitably unpredictable and unsettling process of inquiry.

The fight to defend free speech and academic freedom must be conducted in an impartial, nonpartisan way if it is to be an intellectually honest fight. Anything less is hypocrisy. Anything less exposes the university as the scene not of learning, but of lying.

Posted by acta online at 06:11 AM | Comments (0)

Happy Birthday, ACTA

The American Council of Trustees and Alumni is celebrating its tenth anniversary this year. Founded in 1995 by Lynne Cheney and Senator Joe Lieberman, ACTA has from its inception been dedicated to ensuring that America's colleges and universities are accountable for their actions. ACTA is also the only national organization that approaches the problem of accountability through an administrative pragmatics of resource allocation: ACTA works closely with alumni, trustees, legislators, independent donors, and higher education administrators to inform them about what's happening on campus and to advise them about related matters of giving and governance.

Committed to the goals and ideals of a genuinely liberal education, ACTA has been deeply concerned by certain recent trends: the gutting of the liberal arts curriculum, grade inflation, and the lack of political and intellectual diversity within the professoriate. One of the oldest and most influential campus watchdog organizations, ACTA has worked consistently to educate the public about what really is--and is not--being taught on our campuses. Over the years, ACTA has published detailed and groundbreaking reports on the progressive impoverishment of literary and historical study, for example; it has also created numerous tactical programs and guides for donors, trustees, and legislators.

Most recently, ACTA has studied whether--and how--the documented political uniformity of the professoriate has affected the quality of undergraduate education in this country. In response to the recent barrage of anecdotal charges that academia has become an ideological war zone in which education too often cedes to indoctrination, ACTA commissioned the University of Connecticut's Center for Survey Research and Analysis to survey students at U.S. News & World Report's top fifty colleges. In December, the striking results were released: Nearly half of those surveyed said that their professors use the classroom to present their personal political views, and nearly one third felt that they had to parrot those views in order to earn a good grade. Seventy-four per cent of students said professors made positive remarks about liberals; forty-seven per cent reported that their professors made negative comments about conservatives.

Always, ACTA has argued that knowledge is power, that an informed and engaged public is the best steward for America's intellectual future. Conducting necessary research, appearing regularly at conferences, striving always to educate, ACTA has been a leader in the increasingly important fight to guarantee that colleges and universities are accountable to their students, to their graduates, and to the public whose tax dollars and private donations support them.

As part of its continuing commitment to being a standard bearer in higher education, ACTA is commemorating its tenth birthday by launching a weblog. Here you will find regular posts on the defining issues and events of contemporary academe. In keeping with ACTA's belief in free, unfettered inquiry, the tone of the blog will be temperate and searching; its aim will be to offer incisive commentary, to ask thoughtful questions, and to provide useful historical and intellectual contextualization for current academic events. And in keeping with ACTA's parallel emphasis on the crucial importance of robust, vigorous discussion and debate, readers are welcome to contribute their reflections, criticisms, and questions. Readers should respond by email to [insert address]; with their permission, their thoughts and ideas will be posted here.

Posted by acta online at 11:04 AM | Comments (0)