ACTA's Must-Reads

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The only bad press is no press?

Hamilton College has not had a good year, publicity-wise. First, there was the job offer to Susan Rosenberg, the ex-Weather Underground activist who spent sixteen years in jail for weapons possession and was indicted for her role in a bank robbery in which three people were killed (Rosenberg, who was scheduled to teach a month-long writing course entitled "Resistance Memoirs: Writing, Identity, and Change," did not accept the post). Then, there was the invitation to Ward Churchill to speak (he was disinvited for security reasons). Then there was the college's decision to restrict and defund the Kirkland Project, which had issued the invitations to both Churchill and Ward, thereby potentially compromising the chances of bringing in controversial speakers of any political stripe. Then there is the college's current alumni election, whose restrictive campaign rules are effectively quashing open debate among candidates.

But it would seem that the only really bad press is no press at all. Though Hamilton has not acquitted itself particularly well over the course of the past year, the College has just announced that its incoming class has the highest SAT scores and highest overall class standing of any freshman class in the history of the school; the average SAT score for this year's freshmen is 1346, and 69% of them ranked in the top 10% of their high school classes. The College also had a record fundraising year, raising $5.44 million for its annual fund and $18 million overall, despite a drop in the overall number of alumni who contributed.

Posted by acta online at 04:35 AM | Comments (0)

Informed giving 101

Writing for City Journal, Heather MacDonald has put together a powerful and important piece on the trials and tribulations of alumni giving. Opening with a cautionary tale about Sidney R. Knafel, a corporate mogul and Harvard alum who also happens to be one of Harvard's most generous--and most misguided--donors, MacDonald explains how easily well-meaning but ultimately ignorant alumni can wind up financing initiatives and agendas that would appall them if they truly understood them. Noting that trustees tend not to be much better informed than alumni, and noting, too, how politically gun-shy and hence paralyzed more savvy trustees often are, MacDonald paints a picture of irresponsible and uninformed governance in which very few people in a position to monitor, challenge, and even alter some of the more suspect trends in higher education--what she terms the "campus follies"--are actually willing and able to do so.

MacDonald's analysis is damning in its wealth of depressing detail. But what makes her article so powerful is the manner in which she moves beyond damning analysis of academe, which has, after all, become so common these days as to risk falling redundantly flat. MacDonald doesn't just outline what's wrong with the present state of alumni naivete and trustee ostrichism, but offers practical examples of how a few genuinely motivated and enterprising donors are ensuring that their money actually does something that they consider to be valuable and worthy:

A few savvy alumni entrepreneurs are already creating a blueprint for breaking the monopoly of the academic Left and bringing traditional scholarship and intellectual diversity back to campus.

The model is as follows: find a tenured professor committed to classical learning. Give him resources to expand his jurisdiction by bringing in new faculty or offering new courses. A tenured prof, it turns out, often has leeway to recruit faculty on a temporary basis and to set them to teaching--as long as the prof is highly respected and has his own pot of money independent of the university budget, and as long as he, not the donor, is the actual and the perceived force behind the new program.

MacDonald goes on to describe Princeton's James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions, Brown's Political Theory Project, and Duke's Gerst Program in Political, Economic, and Humanistic Studies, noting that at at least two other Ivy League schools, similar programs are stealthily in the works. Each initiative aims to reinvigorate the undergraduate curriculum by diversifying its offerings; more specifically, each program seeks to enable undergraduates to take courses in areas that are at once deeply traditional and increasingly under-represented on campus: the James Madison Project focusses on constitutional law and the nature of freedom; the Political Theory Project sponsors freshman seminars on liberty, democracy, and free-market thought; the Gerst Program offers courses and sponsors conferences on liberty, democracy, and morality.

"Would-be alumni entrepreneurs should seize the moment," MacDonald writes. "The model for starting a revolution has already been forged: fund professors already in place. If you can't find anyone committed to liberal education at your own university, send your money instead to places that are more open to traditional scholarship. The National Association of Scholars and the American Council of Trustees and Alumni have databases of worthy candidates." Learn about ACTA's resources for alumni donors here.

Posted by acta online at 03:47 AM | Comments (1)

Colorado's new core curriculum

Writing for the Rocky Mountain News, ACTA president Anne Neal praises Colorado's return to a more traditional concept of the college curriculum:

Colorado's focus on a strong general education will give its college graduates a competitive edge. Students in other states can graduate with a patchwork of narrow and often trendy courses outside of their majors. Colorado's graduates will have the advantage of a coherent and cohesive general education requirement - precisely the broad exposure needed for productive workers, informed citizens and lifelong learners.

It used to be that all colleges and universities in America insisted on a rigorous, sequential curriculum that ensured students a broad, general education in addition to the specialization provided by their major. Courses covered the most important events, ideas or works known to mankind - material considered essential for an educated person. Students were given a common educational foundation on which to build. This was, truly, learning for a lifetime.

Nowadays, however, virtually unlimited choice has supplanted the concept of a rigorous general education. The Hollow Core, a recent study by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, found that 48 percent of the colleges surveyed, including the Big 10, the Big 12, the Ivy League and the Seven Sisters, require no more than two true core courses, and 24 percent require one or no course at all. The University of Colorado got a "D" for its general education curriculum because its graduates need not complete any solid courses in writing, literature, government, history, economics or mathematics.

Today's colleges give the appearance of providing a core curriculum because they require students to take courses in several subject areas - the so-called distribution requirements. Within each subject area, however, it is not uncommon for students to have dozens, even hundreds, of courses from which to choose - many of them narrow and even frivolous.

Left to their own devices, students tend to pick courses that sound sexy, or are easy A's, or meet after 10 in the morning. The result has been a dumbing down of general education with potentially disastrous consequences for an entire generation of college graduates.

By revamping its general education curriculum, Colorado can lead the nation in reversing the trend. Success here will encourage governing boards around the country to insist that faculty design and require general education courses that are limited in number and broad in scope, courses that together form a coherent whole. Only such a curriculum can address lifelong educational needs, not mere youthful interests.

Neal goes on to note that the smorgasboard approach to general requirements currently in place at most colleges and universities virtually ensures that America's college graduates are not prepared to comprehend--and therefore to navigate--our increasingly complex and rapidly changing world.

In part, Neal notes, this lack of preparation amounts to a fundamental illiteracy about how economies work. College students today are not required to take an economics course to graduate, and yet every adult in this country needs to understand basic economic principles: "On any single day, news headlines talk about tax cuts, deficits, globalization, trade barriers, oil prices, interest rates, inflation, monetary policy, free markets, etc. If you want to succeed in today's economy - or vote intelligently in elections - you have to understand not only what these terms mean, but also the basic ideas of economics: how the law of supply and demand affects oil prices, how government spending affects inflation, how interest rates affect the stock market, how tax cuts affect investment, and so on." The result, Neal points out, is that we are fast becoming a nation of economic illiterates. More generally, Neal argues, the lack of a solid core curriculum means that college students are not reliably learning to distinguish between sound reasoning and its deceptive relations, "sophistry" and "rationalization": "Only by disciplines that teach them these differences can they hope to resist the demagogue and propagandist."

Read about the "hollow core" at the heart of the higher education curriculum at the American Council for Trustees and Alumni website. For more information on how that core got hollowed out, see Charles Sykes' hard-hitting Profscam.

Posted by acta online at 04:23 AM | Comments (1)

ACTA speaks out on Hamilton College election

The Chronicle of Higher Education is covering the Hamilton College trustee election fiasco reported here last week. Hamilton's election rules--which limit petition candidates to 100-word statements on the paper ballot, which mandate that candidates may not use their one hundred words to "include any contact information or references to specific hard copy or online resource material," which deny candidates the use of Hamilton College of Alumni Association listervs, and which urge candidates not to use mass emails for campaign purposes--are peculiarly hostile to the free exchange of ideas that should characterize elections; Hamilton has set up an alumni message board that is ostensibly intended to serve as a forum for discussion during the election, but the board is an awkward medium and has been largely inactive. Some are speculating that Hamilton's electoral restrictions have much to do with the college's desire to avoid criticism during a year that featured a number of scandals, including the now-infamous decision to invite--and then disinvite--Ward Churchill to speak.

ACTA plays a prominent role in the Chronicle piece:

Those rules are unfair to the petition candidates, which the college is treating as "outside agitators," said Anne D. Neal, president of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni. Ms. Neal said the officially nominated candidates had received a boost from a recent letter to alumni, signed by the chairman of Hamilton's board, that encouraged alumni to vote for the three candidates named by the Alumni Council. ...

"They're not able to express their views fully," Ms. Neal said of the petition candidates. Ms. Neal, whose arguments echoed those raised in a recent statement from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, compared the election restrictions to those placed on a hotly contested trustee election in May at Dartmouth College, in which two petition candidates were elected to the board.

Hamilton College administrators may have been hoping to avert further bad press by restricting the speech of petition candidates whose platforms center on a desire to clean up the college's governance procedures. But in the proceess, they are making a new national scandal entirely on their own.

Posted by acta online at 06:39 AM | Comments (1)

Churchill ad infinitum

Ward Churchill defends himself at length in an interview with CounterPunch. Responding with extended and convoluted gusto to the charges that he is a falsifier of historical fact and a plagiarist of others' prose, Churchill also deflects attention from himself by levelling accusations at others who, he claims, are guilty of precisely the kinds of intellectual crimes and misdemeanors of which he himself is innocent. Michelle Malkin comes in for some particularly harsh condemnation:

WC: Take the issue of plagiarism, for example. I'm currently-and falsely-accused of it. The allegations have been advanced in a tone of tremendous indignation from the right and attended for the most part by endless tongue clicking on the left. Everybody's suddenly worried about whether I gave proper attribution to a left environmental group in Canada when using material included in a 12- page pamphlet they produced in 1972. Well, I did. But here's the key. While you've got a feature on this weighty "controversy" in the Rocky Mountain News, a follow-up editorial in Boulder's Daily Camera, and the area Clear Channel stations having devoted maybe 24 solid hours to it over the past couple of weeks, you've had not a single word said in any medium about Michelle Malkin.

JF: Why Malkin?

WC: Well, she came out with a book titled In Defense of Internment in 2004, highly touted in hard right circles, that not only seeks to justify the mass internment of Japanese and Japanese Americans during World War II but argues that the same procedure could be used against Arabs and Arab Americans today. Setting aside the squalor of her thesis, and the gross distortions of data to which she resorts in "supporting" it, the fact is that the bulk of her argument on the World War II internment derives from a fairly obscure right-winger named Lillian Baker. Yet Baker's material is cited nowhere in Malkin's book. In fact, she isn't so much as mentioned (perhaps because Baker, who passed away some years back, was exposed by Deborah Lipstadt in Denying the Holocaust as having employed the same "scholarly methods" as neonazi holocaust deniers).

What's the payout for Malkin? Let's start with a stint as a regular commentator-read, pet "minority" (she's Filipina)-on Fox News and Clear Channel. And let's end with an all but total silence about her "scholarly integrity" from the left. Why? Because she worked with the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a right-wing think-tank, rather than holding a regular faculty position somewhere? Gimme a break on that one. Her book is used in classes, and she speaks regularly on campuses across the country. If the left is going to indulge in condemning scholarly lapses-real or imaginary-where its own are concerned, it has at the very least an obligation to hold the right accountable to the same standards, and to do so to the best of its ability- through alternative media, if nothing else-using the same tools as the right.

But for the most part it doesn't, and it hasn't even tried for the past quarter-century or more. Look at the record. Michael Bellesiles was destroyed on the basis of what amount at most to trivial mistakes while, on the other hand, you've got John Lott, a right-winger who was revealed to have fabricating an entire survey with which to underpin his contention that the use of firearms reduces social violence. His book, More Guns, Less Crime, has never been revised to eliminate the fraudulent material, yet it's still listed under the imprimatur of the University of Chicago Press and I don't hear any resulting chorus of outrage from left academics about Goth U's "lack of scholarly integrity." Do you?

In an email appended to the interview, Malkin refutes Churchill's claims and threatens to sue him for defamation.

The CounterPunch interview is part one of a two part series. More is yet to come. Meanwhile, the commentary at Elephants in Academia--which notes that "Ward Churchill identifies himself as an extremist political activist not a scholar, and to call him a scholar or to place him on the faculty of an esteemed public institution of higher education is a travesty"--is worth a read.

Posted by acta online at 02:12 AM | Comments (0)

Scraping the bottom of the syllabus

The invaluable and intrepid University Diaries has updated her regular feature detailing the absurdities of academic syllabus creation. Building on earlier installments to Syllabum Omnium, Margaret Soltan pays particular note to a Rutgers course on deviance that requires students to "do deviance" while threatening to refer them to the dean and the office of the prosecutor if they do too much too deviantly; an English course at Drew University in which students could not pass the course without proving that they had voted in the presidential election; and the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point course called "Healthy American" that offered extra credit to students who ate at non-smoking restaurants and then presented "proof of eating" paperwork to their professor, all as part of helping along an anti-smoking referendum.

Finally, Soltan cites John Rosenberg's most recent find, a DeAnza College course called "Grassroots Democracy: Race, Culture, and Liberation" that offers extra credit for attending a pro-affirmative action teach-in sponsored by the radical group BAMN (By Any Means Necessary) and then writing to Governor Schwarzenegger with recommendations for how he can "level the racial playing field in higher education." The course syllabus also offers cautionary words to all enrolled students about the dangers of contracting romantic ties with fellow students:

over the course of learning and using the emotionally-based tools taught in this class you may feel tempted to extend your relationship into more intimate realms. This is because we are setting up a learning environment that can allow for closeness and trust that some of you may have not previously experienced in a school environment. While we encourage you to develop close and trusting friendships and working relationships, our experience has been that building "romantic" relationships with members of the class (where such relationships do not already exist) can be harmful to our primary goals of learning. Therefore we encourage you to be thoughtful about the nature of the relationships you establish. Explicitly, this means especially refraining from any unwelcome intimate advances. Should this occur to you or should you have questions about this policy, please contact the instructor immediately.

Students in this course all sign an agreement promising to preserve the confidentiality of discussions with class-based "listening partners," who are assigned as part of the course's therapeutic endeavor to incorporate into class discussion the techniques of "Reevaluation Counseling"--defined as " a process of focused listening and talking to heighten our abilities to think and act through the release of emotional tension associated with past hurts."

Posted by acta online at 03:37 AM | Comments (0)

Hamilton College digs a deeper hole

Hamilton College is currently running its first alumni trustee election in over thirty years--and, despite the terrible press Dartmouth garnered when it tried to place unreasonable restrictions on candidates' speech during its own recent alumni trustee election, Hamilton appears to be doing exactly the same thing. A reader writes:

Typically, the alumni trustees are nominated by the Alumni Council and, absent any nominees acting by petition, duly appointed. This year four alumni have submitted petitions for nomination as alumni trustee.

A series of events, some nationally known, some less so, have damaged the reputation of the school. These include but are not limited to the matters of Eugene Tobin's plagiarism, resignation, severance package, and the subsequent endowment of a chair in his name; Susan Rosenberg; and Ward Churchill.

A group of concerned alumni formed Hamilton College Alumni for Governance Reform (HCAGR) to review various matters of Hamilton College and offer suggestions and candidates to reform & improve governance of the College. Our objective is to restore Hamilton's reputation and credibility as one of the premier liberal arts institutions in the world.

We currently are sponsoring three candidates by petition for alumni trustee.

We created a web site, www.hcagr.modblog.com, early this year to serve as a forum [for] all views on Hamilton; submitted a position paper dated Feb. 17, 2005, that includes specific recommendations regarding governance and policy to the President and trustees of Hamilton College; and have gathered what we believe to be a significant following among like minded alumni.

We invite you, as a party interested in educational matters and freedom of speech, to comment on the rules regarding the conduct of the election.

Evidently, Hamilton feels a compelling need to limit what candidates can say and their manner of communication. Freedom of speech, it seems, only goes so far when it comes to elections run by Hamilton and its Alumni Council:

For example, candidates for Alumni Trustee "may not include any contact information or references to specific hard copy or online resource material..." in their statements of candidacy which are limited to "100 words in length" and will be mailed to all alumni. Further, "Candidates and their supporters are urged not to use email for campaign purposes" (source: Hamilton College Alumni Association, 2005 Alumni Trustee Election Procedures, June 17, 2005).

These specific prohibitions on the content of the statements of candidacy are tailored to prohibit the mention of HCAGR's website, the articles and views thereon, and its position paper of Feb. 17, 2005. The 100 word limitation is clearly designed to preclude any substantive discussion of issues, particularly in light of the other limitations.

See for yourself. The rules of the election are posted on

www.hcagr.modblog.com
or at
http://my.hamilton.edu/alumni/AlumniTrusteeElectionProcedures.pdf.

Hamilton may be reeling from recent publicity disasters--but the administration's attempt to prevent additional ones by muzzling discussion about college governance during an election whose purpose is to elect a new member to its board of trustees bids fair to be the college's worst publicity disaster yet. Worse, it's a predictable and preventable one, one that arises not out of individual faculty members' misconduct or a committee's controversial decisions about whom to invite to speak, but rather out of the administration's shockingly naive notion that censorship is an effective method of damage control.

Read all about the election at Hamilton College Alumni for Governance Reform and read FIRE's commentary here.

Dartmouth's dark horse candidates won; may Hamilton's alumni also succeed in electing a new trustee who genuinely champions the free exchange of ideas--even if that means criticizing the college itself.

Posted by acta online at 04:14 AM | Comments (1)

Vanderbilt concedes defeat

In May, a Tennessee court ruled that Vanderbilt University does not have the right to remove the word "confederate" from a dormitory that has carried the name "Confederate Memorial Hall" since it was erected almost seventy years ago with funding from the United Daughters of the Confederacy. Vanderbilt had wanted to remove the word "confederate" from the building because it offended various campus constituencies who felt it amounted to an insensitive glorification of the South's inauspicious slaveholding past; the United Daughters of the Confederacy argued that Vanderbilt had a contractual obligation to conserve the name that had been agreed upon when it made its funding contributions years ago. Vanderbilt vowed to contest the ruling--but the university has now conceded defeat, and will leave the offending name where it is, carved onto the face of the building. Vanderbilt will also be minimizing the prominence and primacy of that name, too, however; on Monday, the university announced that it will not use the word "confederate" when referring to the building in official publications, maps, and public statements. Vanderbilt could have removed the name from the building, and thus expunged it, along with the building's historical origin in a commemorative gesture that has over time become highly politically charged, had the school been willing to repay the money that the United Daughters of the Confederacy had donated to the building. When asked why the school did not foot the $50,000 bill, university spokesperson Michael Schoenfeld said that "We didn't think that was a wise use of Vanderbilt's resources." Vanderbilt plans to address the ongoing strife caused--or perhaps simply crystallized--by the building's name by establishing an annual campuswide event dedicated to reasoned discussion of the Civil War's legacy.

Posted by acta online at 07:15 AM | Comments (1)

Time, place, and manner

Jim Paine, a.k.a. Pirate Ballerina, argues that Ward Churchill's ongoing pattern of inflammatory expression is far from self-destructive--that it is, in fact, a highly ingenious strategy for protecting his job by clouding the reasons why that job is in jeopardy. Paine's own expression is pretty inflammatary, but if you can get past the gratuitous comment about the "moonbat Left" and its "crude and violent illogic," he has a good point to make about how Churchill is working the court of public opinion:

The looming court battle over Churchill's tenure (and employment) with the University of Colorado will boil down to a single question: Is Churchill being terminated due to plagiarism, scholarly misconduct and race fraud, or is he being fired over free speech and academic freedom issues? If CU can prove it terminated his tenure/employment because of misconduct rather than for what he said, CU wins. That outcome seems less likely with each new speaking engagement.

In this light, it's easy to understand why his latest remarks concerning the fragging of line officers in Iraq are slyly short of actual incitement (inevitably couched in rhetorical terms in what should be considered a rather daring prostitution of the Socratic method), as have been most of his other provocative comments. It's increasingly clear that as long as Churchill can keep the argument (and outrage) centered on his words rather than his actions (without stepping into "incitement" territory), the outcome of the legal question of "Why is he losing his job?" will most certainly be "because he said outrageous and hurtful things."

We pointed out that back in February, Churchill (and the Left) would work strenuously to recast the argument in First Amendment and academic freedom terms. We didn't realize at the time, however, that Churchill would take such a proactive approach to that recasting, ensuring with each new "frag the officers" outrage that it would be more difficult for a judge to see the argument as anything but a freedom of speech issue.

And that means Churchill wins -- he keeps his job or gets a huge settlement from CU, or both -- and the CU system and the people of the state of Colorado lose.

The University of Colorado has a damning case against Churchill, one that is centered entirely on the question of his academic integrity, and not his speech. But Paine is right that Churchill is skewing the issue by playing the public as he is--as shown by the fact that Churchill's got Colorado governor Bill Owens waxing apoplectic about his "unconscionable" and "outrageous" speech, to the point where he calls Churchill names ("Weasel Churchill") and proclaims that Churchill should not be allowed to express his opinions on fragging: "For him to suggest the fragging of officers as a means of political discourse is clearly beyond the pale .... You don't have the right in times of war to advocate fragging." The University of Colorado has made it very clear that Churchill's expression is not at issue, but that doesn't mean it won't have a public relations disaster on its hands if it attempts to fire the vociferous and calculating professor.

An irony: Churchill has been using the Ethnic Studies department homepage as his own personal soapbox since January. Where most department webpages describe their academic programs and outline their educational missions, UC Boulder's presently functions as a university-sponsored platform for Churchill's self-defense.

Thanks to Brian O'Connor for the link to Paine's article.

Posted by acta online at 08:01 AM | Comments (0)

Churchill decompensates

Although University of Colorado - Boulder administrators rightly ruled that ethnic studies professor Ward Churchill's inflammatory comments about 9/11 were protected speech, the jury is still out about whether Churchill will be dismissed for academic fraud. As a special UC committee spends the summer investigating charges that Churchill has been a serial plagiarist, a falsifier of historical facts, and a liar about his own ethnic background, Churchill is doing absolutely nothing to help his own case.

One might think Churchill would find it fruitful to spend some time carefully and scrupulously refuting the charges against him (a point-by-point refutation of the Rocky Mountain News' magisterial four-part series documenting the validity of those charges, which has now become a part of the formal UD investigation, would be a place to start). Failing that, one might at least expect that the embattled Churchill would make a special effort to behave professionally during a period when his career is in jeopardy. But Churchill is doing just the opposite. He is making headlines now for his comments praising "fragging" (which occurs when soldiers kill officers), and is thus engaging in more injudicious, if ultimately protected, speech (the governor of Colorado, Bill Owens, is so sick of Churchill at this point that he is referring to him as "Weasel Churchill").

More to the point, Churchill is openly mocking UC's investigation of him--he has filed a complaint against himself with the university, accusing himself of failing to acknowledge his graduate research assistants' help. Churchill has never had a research assistant, but in a letter to UC administrators last week, he observed that this fact "should by no means deter you." A university spokeswoman has acknowledged receipt of the complaint, and has informed the press that the university is "taking it under advisement."

Churchill says that if the university tries to fire him, he will sue.

For more general reflections on academe's ethical lacunae, see Candace de Russy and Mitchell Langbert's piece in today's edition of InsideHigherEd.com.

Posted by acta online at 09:23 AM | Comments (1)

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of ignorance

In 2000, ACTA's report on historical illiteracy among American college students, Losing America's Memory, documented a shocking degree of ignorance among the brightest and best educated of this country's young adults. Noting that there was not a single school among America's top 55 colleges and universities that required students to take a course in American history, the report reflected on the wider implications of elite college and university seniors' inability to pass what was essentially a basic high school-level test, one whose questions were heavily drawn from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests given to high school students: "Few students leave high school with an adequate knowledge of American history and even the best colleges and universities do nothing to close the 'knowledge gap,'" the authors observed; "if a hostile power wanted to erase America's civic heritage, it could hardly do a better job--short of actually prohibiting the study of American history--than America's elite colleges and universities are doing."

It's still true that you don't have to take U.S. history to graduate from college--though increasingly you are required to take courses in foreign cultures, and to balance those with courses on cultural diversity in the U.S. The American higher education establishment is making a massive effort to ensure that students graduate with an appreciation of "difference" as defined in terms of race, class, gender, ethnicity, and sexuality, and it is doing so because administrators and policymakers nationwide agree that appreciating these kinds of differences is essential to a proper liberal arts education. But the problems posed by American undergraduates' documented ignorance about the founding principles and general history of their country are being ignored. The result is frightening indeed if we take seriously Thomas Jefferson's comment that "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free it expects what never was and what never will be."

But if colleges and universities are able to disregard the serious potential consequences of failing to produce historically aware graduates, the pressure is on for high schools to begin graduating students who have some understanding of what it means to be a citizen of this country. At a Senate hearing last Thursday, educators and historians argued for legislation that would expand national testing to include U.S. history.

National history and civics assessments show that most fourth-graders can't identify the opening passage of the Declaration of Independence, and that most high school seniors can't explain the checks-and-balances theory behind the three branches of the US government. Testifying in favor of proposed legislation, the history specialists--including renowned historian David McCullough--told a Senate education subcommittee that most of the country's schoolchildren lack sufficient knowledge to become informed voters and don't understand why they enjoy rights like free speech and freedom of religion.

''I think we are sadly failing our children, and have been for a long time," said McCullough, America's preeminent popular historian and a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner for biographies of presidents Harry S. Truman and John Adams. ''I think to bring testing assessment of performance in the grade schools and high schools of public schools nationwide is long overdue."

The American History Achievement Act would budget $14 million so that ten states could test eighth-graders and twelfth-graders. The idea would be to use those tests to draw national attention to the need for more intensive and systematic history curricula in K-12 education. The NAEP, whose questions so brutally stumped college seniors in 2000, would conduct the tests. Tennessee senator Lamar Alexander, who introduced the legislation in April with Massachusetts senator Ted Kennedy, explains it in detail here.

Link via Joanne Jacobs.

Posted by acta online at 12:58 PM | Comments (1)

The collegiality trap

As debate continues in Indiana about whether untenured IU law professor William Bradford has anything to worry about from senior colleagues who vociferously oppose his pro-war politics, KC Johnson goes to the heart of the matter at Cliopatria. Johnson's point is that the question is not whether Bradford's colleagues will deem him collegial despite their ideological differences, but whether it is ever ethical to use "collegiality" as a criterion for tenure review. Drawing on a recent InsideHigherEd piece on collegiality by psychologist and tenure coach Mary McKinney, Johnson parses the problems with an assessment system that not only facilitates petty politicking and spineless conformism, but in so doing also undermines the exemplary independent-mindedness that lies at the heart of the academic ideal. The conventional wisdom is that the tenure system is needed to protect free inquiry, but as Johnson shows--and knows from experience--it can also be used to undermine it.

McKinney's piece, it should be noted, doesn't take a position one way or the other on whether collegiality should be used; rather, it's a "how-to guide" for untenured faculty working within an institution that uses the collegiality criterion, either formally or informally.

A lot of McKinney's rules (i.e.--don't whine, look for a mentor, be a good listener) are common sense. Others strike me as more off-putting: "the rules of collegiality are similar to the rules of dating"; "sometimes, make your concrete, focused compliments in front of a third party (such as right before a faculty meeting begins)"; "if there are 10 people at the meeting, make sure that you speak less than 10 percent of the time"; "avoid campus when you've got to write and reserve tasks that require less focus for your office."

McKinney sounds like she's quite good at what she does, and I have no doubt that someone who followed all 15 of her rules would be likely to get tenure. That said, McKinney's rules also offer insight on why the use of collegiality is such a dangerous criterion.

First, several of her rules amount to advice to suck up to figures in power and show deference, whether appropriate or not, to those in authority. Obviously, no one, junior or senior, should go out of their way to attack people. But the principle of academic freedom depends on the argument that faculty self-governance is the best way for the academy to function. Will someone who has spent six or seven years of his or her life as an untenured professor following McKinney's collegiality rules suddenly be likely, upon receiving tenure, to function as an autonomous unit within a self-governing structure? Or is it more likely that this professor, having received tenure by engaging in self-censorship, deference, and not challenging those in power, will continue to do so upon receiving tenure?

Second, McKinney's rules illustrate the subtle but pervasive bias against research inherent in the use of collegiality as a criterion. She advises untenured professors not to come to the office to do writing or scholarly-based activities, since senior colleagues like to stop by and chat. But for many untenured faculty, especially those with families, the office is a refuge from distractions and a good place to write. Moreover, as she herself concedes, we all know of people who have followed the "pro-collegiality" path to compensate for mediocre or worse research records. That's not exactly something the academy as a whole should encourage.

Collegiality has become a common enough criterion in tenure cases that in 1999 the American Association of University Professors published a statement about the dangers therein. Noting that "collegiality is not a distinct capacity to be assessed independently of the traditional triumvirate of scholarship, teaching, and service" but "is rather a quality whose value is expressed in the successful execution of these three functions," the AAUP warns against establishing collegiality as an independent category of professional assessment:

The current tendency to isolate collegiality as a distinct dimension of evaluation, however, poses several dangers. Historically, "collegiality" has not infrequently been associated with ensuring homogeneity, and hence with practices that exclude persons on the basis of their difference from a perceived norm. The invocation of "collegiality" may also threaten academic freedom. In the heat of important decisions regarding promotion or tenure, as well as other matters involving such traditional areas of faculty responsibility as curriculum or academic hiring, collegiality may be confused with the expectation that a faculty member display "enthusiasm" or "dedication," evince "a constructive attitude" that will "foster harmony," or display an excessive deference to administrative or faculty decisions where these may require reasoned discussion. Such expectations are flatly contrary to elementary principles of academic freedom, which protect a faculty member's right to dissent from the judgments of colleagues and administrators.

A distinct criterion of collegiality also holds the potential of chilling faculty debate and discussion. Criticism and opposition do not necessarily conflict with collegiality. Gadflies, critics of institutional practices or collegial norms, even the occasional malcontent, have all been known to play an invaluable and constructive role in the life of academic departments and institutions. They have sometimes proved collegial in the deepest and truest sense. Certainly a college or university replete with genial Babbitts is not the place to which society is likely to look for leadership. It is sometimes exceedingly difficult to distinguish the constructive engagement that characterizes true collegiality from an obstructiveness or truculence that inhibits collegiality. Yet the failure to do so may invite the suppression of dissent. The very real potential for a distinct criterion of "collegiality" to cast a pall of stale uniformity places it in direct tension with the value of faculty diversity in all its contemporary manifestations.

Some might say that the AAUP's statement is alarmist in its vision of a bland and brainless academy of Babbitts. But the fact that there are now people in the business of coaching junior faculty in the etiquette of tenure--and even to present that etiquette as a professional version of "The Rules"--suggests that the AAUP was right on the mark. Bradford may not have been denied a promotion at Indiana, but he is right to worry that the word "uncollegial" has been applied to him in a formal evaluative setting. In academe--to continue McKinney's dating metaphor--that label is the kiss of death.

But the malicious use of collegiality criteria can only happen effectively in the confidential setting of the formal review process. Now that Bradford's story is in the media, things are bound to play out differently. Bradford has been blunt: he told Indianapolis' WISH TV that "Florence Roisman's trying to allege that because I have viewpoints that are different from hers in terms of the war on terror - she thinks it's an aggressive war; I think it's a just war, to liberate the people there and help enhance our security. Because of that difference of opinion, I am a bad person. I am an uncollegial person. I need to be politically cleansed." And administrators have been correspondingly clear about their intention to give Bradford a "fair shake": "there will be a number of people looking at [Bradford's case] and a number of people beyond the law school that will be involved in the decision," a spokesperson told WISH TV.

Posted by acta online at 09:13 AM | Comments (0)