ACTA's Must-Reads

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A useful exchange ...

Has begun at Timothy Burke's blog. "Withywindle" writes:

Tim: I still await your answer on some questions I had the last time around:

"Do I take it correctly that you accept 1) that academia, in principle, does and should incorporate mutual monitoring as an aspect of its professional ethics; 2) that academia could, in principle, extend this monitoring to include aspects of classroom pedagogy including encouragement of free inquiry by their students (no agit-prop) and intellectual openness (no partisan narrowness)? If you are willing to accept these two principles, then I would encourage you, as said before, *to develop yourself* an institutional system of monitoring that takes into account your worries about mutual respect and proportionality …. Let us grant there is no current standard of pedagogical malpractice; let us grant it will be difficult to develop one; do you believe it is impossible? Do you believe the profession shouldn't even try?"

Not to beat a dead horse, but you are still writing on the same subject, and I do think your answers to these questions are relevant.

Burke responds:

I think yes, we could have some form of monitoring or quality assessment that we do not presently have. I think we could look for encouragement of free inquiry and intellectual openness in that process, but I don't accept your parenthetical definitions of those two values, for reasons I made clear in the other thread and in this one. I think the thing to think about is how to make teaching more visible and shared as an activity: I think a system of monitoring that involved a designated monitor coming in to a classroom to watch and record a given teaching session would be: a) extraordinarily expensive if it was done on the scale required to be fair; b) intrusive and artificial. As you noted with the other examples of professional monitoring, most monitoring of doctors and lawyers happens as a routine outgrowth of the kind of work they do (e.g., surgery or diagnosis often happens in the presence of other professionals, a paper trail is created that's extensive; law often happens in a courtroom, and records of legal consultations are often created as the consultation occurs). So that's really what we need, rather than people with notepads sitting in the back of classrooms. How do we get it? How about making publically accessible class weblogs an expected or conventional part of most courses, for one example? Encouraging team teaching would be another possibility (though it's extremely expensive to do routinely). Posting of detailed syllabi as a requirement. And so on: doing what we can to make teaching transparent and transcribed would, for me, be enough to constitute a useful system of monitoring.

This looks promising. Here's hoping the discussion develops, maintains its present temperate tone, and involves a range of contributors.

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How Many Misreadings? Part 3

Responses to ACTA's report have ranged from the deeply wrong to the deeply confused.

Most interesting and misleading, though, are the criticisms of ACTA's report that center on methodology. These criticisms argue that because ACTA does not provide quantitative analysis of academic course offerings, ACTA's argument--that there are many politicized college courses masquerading as valid educational offerings and that this is a problem that needs to be addressed--is totally invalid. Timothy Burke initiated this meme on his blog, though he does not mention quantitative analysis per se, and a number of commenters at InsideHigherEd.com have taken it up as proof positive that ACTA's report has no merit; following Burke, they see ACTA as having "cherrypicked" examples to suit a predefined thesis, and, following Burke, they dismiss ACTA's argument wholesale for failing to adhere to standards of statistical analysis.

But the categorical methodological rejection of the report is a much more complex move than it looks on the surface, and contains a host of false assumptions about what--even on academic terms--constitutes valid analysis. Humanists, as Burke well knows, don't amass statistical data, but they do still make valid arguments by accumulating examples and by analyzing them; ACTA's approach, centered as it is on the rhetorically suggestive course descriptions posted by academic departments across the country, necessarily has far more in common with the humanist technique of assembling textual evidence in order to demonstrate the existence of telling linguistic patterns than it does with a number-crunching methodology, and Burke, himself a historian whose work hardly inhabits the hard data world, knows this. His own responses to ACTA's report have relied on personal anecdote and close reading of course descriptions. It sounds so reasonable to say that ACTA should have quantified its data. But it's not at all reasonable to say so when one considers that ACTA's method centered on identifying linguistic patterns, not on counting kinds of courses.

It's not just that dismissing the ACTA report for methodological reasons is itself methodologically flawed, however. It's also that, in doing so, the report's opponents cast their unwillingness to receive or respond to legitimate criticism as a lofty insistence on scholarly standards. ACTA's report may not be the result of high-level quantitative data analysis; ACTA may not crunch numbers, or offer graphs and tables and standard deviations and means. But what ACTA does offer is close to seventy course descriptions and syllabi, drawn from a well-defined sample of 47 schools, that stood out as politically loaded or worrisome in some way. The course descriptions included in the report are, as ACTA has stressed repeatedly, drawn from a large reservoire of similar-sounding courses; ACTA could, indeed, have written the same report several times over, each with entirely different course descriptions.

The course descriptions cited in ACTA's report have a cumulatively suggestive weight that should be cause for concern among people who care about the quality of undergraduate education; when ACTA's critics dismiss the cumulative weight of ACTA's examples--which themselves are part of the cumulative weight of cases assembled by FIRE; of courses posted at NoIndoctrination.org; of recent writing by KC Johnson, Mark Bauerlein, and others about politicized curricular and scholarly standards, to mention a very few additional centers of critical gravity--they reveal that what matters far more to them than the quality of undergraduate education is not being called to account. But that revelation only deepens the concern of organizations such as ACTA that academics are not doing the essential work of self-regulation that they are obligated, as terrifically independent workers who serve the public good, to do.

David French puts the problem in uncompromisingly blunt terms:

In a typical college career, a student will take between 30 and 40 different courses. How many of them have to be ridiculously politicized to constitute a problem? 5? 10? 15? At law school, easily one third of my classes were absolutely polluted with condescension and vitriol towards conservatives (and especially Christian conservatives). Of course I chose to wade into the minefield of classes like "Family Law" and "Child, Family, and the State." But why must classes that deal with stereotypically "women's" issues be no-go zones for conservatives?

To understand the essential ridiculousness of Burke's argument, imagine his response to a group of conservative academics denying systemic problems in academia if the reality were reversed. Imagine that 90% of elite college academics were conservative with a large group of those conservatives anchoring the absolute extreme right wing. Then imagine that thousands of those professors offered courses that, by design, glorified military service, defended American involvement in Vietnam and Iraq, and routinely mocked protesting leftists as idiotic, evil, murderous, or racist. Imagine that the professors least likely to obtain tenure (even after controlling for educational background and numbers of publications) were self-described liberals. Imagine that "women's studies" trained women to become pro-life activists, argue for a return of the nuclear family, and glorify homemakers as the feminine ideal. And then imagine if the conservative status quo defended those realities by saying, "well, it's only a minority of classes that are truly political."

French's question is a pressing one. Do we really need elaborate statistical tables to determine what an acceptable percentage of unacceptably ideological courses would be? Do we all need to agree that every example in ACTA's report is ideologically loaded and equally so? Aren't both expectations unreasonable in their assertion that ACTA's report may be dismissed wholesale if it does not meet them? Of course not everyone will see every example ACTA cites in the same way; of course some of those course descriptions will point to courses that are nowhere near as problematically taught as others, while there will also be politically fraught courses whose tendentiousness is not signalled by the course description; of course course descriptions bear only metonymic relationships to courses themselves. But that should not prevent us from trying to work out a respectable, sensitive protocol for determining what's really happening in classrooms. Ideologically loaded course descriptions are most likely correlated with ideologically biased teaching. The responsible thing to do with them is not to look the other way in the name of academic freedom. Academic freedom, as the AAUP itself has stipulated since 1915, does not exempt professors from the obligation to ensure that students learn about all sides of controversial issues.

A proposal: Wouldn't it be more reasonable to agree, following David French's question, that no unacceptably ideological courses are acceptable? If we can agree on that point--and why on earth couldn't we?--then we can agree that ACTA has a point. And if we can agree that ACTA has a point, couldn't we all stop wasting our time sparring on the internet, and begin working together to figure out how best to frame the problem, to assess it, and to address it? Couldn't we join forces to set about making academia--which Alan Jacobs acknowledges in a comment to this post suffers from "truly serious political distortions"--into the best it can be?

That's the challenge ACTA's report lays out. The question now is whether that challenge will even be recognized, let alone accepted, by academics themselves.

It's worth quoting what the AAUP said about politicized teaching in 1915:

Since there are no rights without corresponding duties, the considerations heretofore set down with respect to the freedom of the academic teacher entail certain correlative obligations. The claim to freedom of teaching is made in the interest of integrity and of the progress of scientific inquiry; it is, therefore, only those who carry on their work in the temper of the scientific inquirer who may justly assert this claim. The liberty of the scholar within the university to set forth his conclusions, be they what they may, is conditioned by their being conclusions gained by a scholar's method and held in a scholar's spirit; that is to say, they must be the fruits of competent and patient and sincere inquiry, and they should be set forth with dignity, courtesy, and temperateness of language. The university teacher, in giving instructions upon controversial matters, while he is under no obligation to hide his own opinion under a mountain of equivocal verbiage, should, if he is fit in dealing with such subjects, set forth justly, without suppression or innuendo, the divergent opinions of other investigators; he should cause his students to become familiar with the best published expressions of the great historic types of doctrine upon the questions at issue; and he should, above all, remember that his business is not to provide his students with ready-made conclusions, but to train them to think for themselves, and to provide them access to those materials which they need if they are to think intelligently.

...The teacher ought also to be especially on his guard against taking unfair advantage of the students' immaturity by indoctrinating him with the teacher's own opinions before the student has had an opportunity fairly to examine other opinions upon the matters of question, and before he has sufficient knowledge and ripeness of judgment to be entitled to form any definitive opinion of his own. It is not the least service which a college or university may render to those under its instruction, to habituate them to looking not only patiently but methodically on both sides, before adopting any conclusion upon controverted issues.

ACTA quotes this passage in its report. It is what underwrites the spirit of the report. The report's critics remain convinced that, in Burke's words, "ACTA is calling for such a heavy regulatory hand (though they protest that this is not their goal, and point to their previous reports as evidence) that the effect of their criticism would be to smooth out all the interesting character and diversity of teaching and scholarship, all the eccentrics and outliers and characters." But this claim is yet another misreading of ACTA's report. ACTA is reminding academics of their obligations as teachers; is pointing them to the AAUP's original conception of the college teacher's role; and is urging academics to begin the difficult conceptual and procedural work of self-regulation--not to prevent professors from articulating political views in the classroom (though this has quickly become a common caricature of ACTA's message) but to prevent them from presenting a politically lopsided picture of issues that utimately disserves students and discredits academe.

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How Many Misreadings? Part 2

ACTA's report has drawn a range of responses from academics who object to both the report's message and to the fact that the message is coming from outside academe (not to mention from outside the narrow political spectrum that defines academic culture). In addition to the telling misrepresentations put forth by critics such as John K. Wilson and the unapologetically anonymous "Unapologetically Tenured," there are also some telling misunderstandings.

Consider "Concerned Observer," who appears in the comments to Anne Neal's recent article at InsideHigherEd.com, and whose parody of the mindset of someone who could object to the courses ACTA's report cites has failed to read like a parody to a number of academics who can see no difference between a conservative critique of academic curricular trends and a caricature of a moral idiot.

"I agree that the course descriptions are indicative of the far-left mentality that infects American universities. If anything, Ms. Neal has understated her case in this essay," Concerned Observer writes; "Where will this madness stop? Why would anyone investigate the 'social construction of the human/animal boundary' and try to prove that animals are thinking and feeling. . . unless they wanted to marry one? Shouldn't parents and taxpayers (and trustees!) be outraged that our universities are filled with professors promoting this kind of agenda? College should not be a place for exploring the moral status of animals, or indeed for 'exploring' animals in any way."

There is more such stuff from Concerned Observer, who does eventually admit that "I've tried my best to parody the ACTA fans." But that doesn't stop New Kid on the Hallway, a "tenure-track medievalist," from believing Concerned Observer to be an actual ACTA fan, rather than a parody of one: "I get utterly sick of reading comments like this one, from 'Concerned Observer,'" New Kid writes, while reprinting the comment; "Honestly, I'd wonder if this comment were a parody of conservative objections, but there's no reason to think Concerned Observer is anything but serious. (Usually someone writing a parody is more careful to signal that it is a parody.)" New Kid goes on to speculate about the nature of Concerned Observer's no-nothingism, and concludes that Concerned Observer is a prime example of why it's so annoying when "non-academics consider themselves in a position to comment so trenchantly on what people in my profession do" and why "people who are not members of [the academic] profession should not expect to be able to critique it wholesale without some greater understanding of what it actually does."

New Kid's commenters agree with her. Laura writes that "It's really frustrating trying to explain to people outside of the academy the reasons behind the research and the courses," and concludes that this is because "most people who object to these things not only don't see any kind of practical application, but they also don't want to think, and that's exactly what these classes are designed to get them to do." Others chime in with shock and awe at the moral idiocy of conservatives such as Concerned Observer. "I'm still wondering how even the craziest right-wing nut can believe that animals don't think or feel," pi writes. Turtlebella wonders "if the propensity of non-academics to feel like they have the right to comment on how academics should do their job is due to the increase in consumerism in academia," and qualifies her hypothesis with a tongue-in-cheek jab at Concerned Observer, whose own tongue-in-cheek tone appears to have escaped her entirely: "But I could just be paranoid about the corporatization of university! (just as Concerned Observer is clearly paranoid about the leftist/homosexual take over of America)."

New Kid and others on her site bridle at the manner in which non-academics--who are cast in her post as conservative blockheads--feel entitled to question the work academics do. One wonders if, by New Kind's criteria, it's legitimate for non-academics to point out that her stereotypical political assumptions are getting in the way of her ability to reason logically. That is, after all, one of the concerns ACTA's report raises about academic pedagogy in an era when faculties are overwhelmingly skewed to the left.

The nature of New Kid's assumptions, it's worth noting, are neatly laid out by a commenter responding to the companion piece to Neal's article, Dennis Baron's essay on academic freedom and the Ward Churchill case. "The reason that there are so many more left-leaning people in academia is not because they've been chosen for those views by other left-leaning academics, nor because they've been indoctrinated into their views by academic experience," writes one Willie Mink.

The avoided elephant in the room here is the fact that clearminded thought, research, and work into the complexities of human experience leads one toward left-leaning views. That's because left-leaning views acknowledge the context-bound complexity of social experience much more fully than do views from the right. The right offers simple interpretations and answers, while the left offers much more complex ones, again because it acknowledges more fully the complexity of human experience. Thus, since academic inquiry calls for indepth analysis and interpretation, academia contains a preponderance of left-leaning thinkers. In sum: a ratio of 1:1 right and left would constitute a degradation of academic inquiry.

Further down, Mink explains how conservatives are screened out of academia:

A hiring committee comprised of well-informed academics (especially in the humanities) is not going to resist hiring a blatant conservative because of who or what that person IS. They'll resist because his or her ideas and work are simplistic, and they'll be simplisitc in that they'll be ungrounded in convincingly complex research and evidence. Whether the ideas are clearly 'conservative' or not is a factor unlikely to even enter the picture.

Mink's comments go some way toward explaining why academics such as New Kid on the Hallway and her readers would mistake Concerned Observer's cruel caricature of conservative critique for an earnest expression of conservative values; Mink not only outlines a working assumption about how conservatives' intellectual power is inherently inferior to liberals,' but also suggestively indicates how that assumption might ensure that academics such as New Kid don't have their assumptions challenged by the presence of actual conservative colleagues.

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How Many Misreadings?

ACTA's most recent report, How Many Ward Churchills?, has, quite predictably, met with harsh and dismissive response from certain academic quarters. Anne Neal's response to John K. Wilson and Timothy Burke, the report's most vocal critics, has, in turn, drawn quite a revealing array of responses. Over the next few days I'll discuss a number of them.

The first response worth noting is that posted by Wilson himself. Wilson's comment shamelessly duplicates the mistakes he made in his initial critique of the report. Rather than admit he misrepresented (and misread) ACTA's report when he characterized it as threatening professors with censorship, Wilson digs himself into an even deeper and more mendacious hole with still more wilful misreadings:

Neal's essay shows why I worry about right-wingers dramatically expanding the meaning of "research misconduct," since she accuses me of research misconduct for my essay expressing concern about her group's report.

In fact, my concerns about ACTA wanting a regime of censorship are quite correct. Consider these quotes: "far from trying to silence politically engaged professors, ACTA defends academic freedom while at the same time noting that 1) academic freedom does not mean freedom from criticism or freedom from accountability; and 2) students have academic freedom too." "greater accountability means more responsible decision-making on the part of academic administrators" "We must insist that, in their classrooms, they teach fairly, fostering an open and robust exchange of ideas and refusing to succumb to a proselytizing or otherwise biased pedagogy."

What, in practical terms, does ACTA want? If it means only criticism of professors, that's perfectly fine (although I will continue to criticize ACTA's criticism if it's unfair). But ACTA explicitly separates "freedom from criticism" and "freedom from accountability." So what does "accountability" mean? ACTA never defines it, although they demand that administrators do it.

Until ACTA and Neal explicitly define accountability and explain how their proposed system will work, I will have to continue to presume that accountability in fact means what it seems to mean: an administrative process for banning professors from teaching certain kinds of classes that seem too left-wing.

Wilson might--might--have a point if ACTA really had left the concept of accountability wide open and ominously undefined. But ACTA has defined what it means by accountability in elaborate, extended detail; its December report, Intellectual Diversity: Time for Action, painstakingly documents how administrators can work to ensure the accountability of professors to their scholarly and pedagogical obligations as well as how administrators can work to ensure the accountability of institutions to the public; the report is careful at every point to frame ways administrators can do this work while still respecting academic freedom and the tradition of self-governance. How Many Ward Churchills? references this report, and outlines accountability measures drawn from it; likewise, Anne Neal's response to Wilson and Burke links to this report, noting that "ACTA has already outlined ways campus leaders can review departments and programs while still being fair, respectful, and sensitive to academic freedom and academic autonomy. Our 2005 report, 'Intellectual Diversity: Time for Action,' was praised for its sensitivity to academic freedom and self-governance.' Again, either Wilson has trouble reading carefully or he's hoping his readers don't check his claims against his sources.

UPDATE 5/27/06: Another commenter, "Unapologetically Tenured," has followed in Wilson's footsteps. "One of the amusing aspects of Ms. Neal's argument is the claim that ACTA wishes to be 'fair, respectful, and sensitive to academic freedom and academic autonomy,'" UT writes. "By 'academic freedom', ACTA apparently means that professors have the freedom to cover course material in any manner they wish as long as it satisfies Ms. Neal's standards of objectivity. By 'academic autonomy', ACTA evidently means that departments can hire anyone they want, so long as they meet the proper quota of conservatives and libertarians. The term 'Orwellian' is overused these days, but I think it fits here."

UT's first claim--that academic freedom is whatever Anne Neal wants it to be--is not one that can stand up to even moderately close examination of ACTA's work. When ACTA discusses what academic freedom is, as it does in this most recent report, ACTA cites AAUP statements about academic freedom to define the term; ACTA is not inventing its own standard of academic freedom, so much as it is suggesting that colleges and universities have lost track of parts of the AAUP's own, universally accepted definition of the term. UT, like Wilson, appears to be counting on his readers not actually reading ACTA's report. If they did, they would see how spurious his claim here is.

UT's second claim--that academic autonomy means departments can hire anyone they want as long as they hire a proper quota of conservatives and libertarians--is also patently false. Nowhere does ACTA call for hiring quotas for conservatives and libertarians; quotas are not and never have been consistent with ACTA's mission. UT would do well to get his facts straight before opining in paranoid terms about what's wrong with ACTA's work.

Posted by acta online at 01:35 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

The Chronicle chimes in

I'm happy to report that just in the past few hours, The Chronicle of Higher Education put forth its first bit of coverage of ACTA's new report:

The American Council of Trustees and Alumni has issued a report that says outspoken professors who defy balanced course curricula and transmit their own political agendas to students are more common than might be believed. The report, called "How Many Ward Churchills?," says that Mr. Churchill--the University of Colorado professor of ethnic studies who likened some victims of the World Trade Center attack to "little Eichmanns" and who just last week was found to have committed research misconduct (The Chronicle, May 17)--is not an anomaly.

Anne D. Neal, the council's president, says a study of university and faculty Web sites turned up several examples of courses in which professors used their classrooms as "platforms for propaganda, sites of sensitivity training, and launching pads for political activisim." The report says universities should not punish professors for what they say but should "expose them" and "invite them to debate ideas," while ensuring that students have access to a wide range of "intellectual diversity" on their faculties.

Posted by cmitchell at 03:02 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

More support -- and an idea

Mark Bauerlein has weighed in with his support for ACTA's latest report, noting in particular how ACTA's focus on course descriptions is an important move that deserves more thoughtful attention than it has yet received:

ACTA's report, "How Many Ward Churchills," got some nice (and not-so-nice) notice last week, but we should hope that the direction laid out by the document receives further attention. It's the best approach to the ideological and other biases haunting higher education. While documenting specific episodes of misconduct (because of their value in attracting attention to the problem), we should also focus on the substance of the curriculum. As Anne puts it in her introduction, "the solution is not to fire professors who express extreme views, but to expose them, to compel them to defend their positions, invite them to debate ideas, and, above all, to insist that they do their job of teaching students well and empowering them to make up their own minds."

Hence the decision to fill the document with course descriptions. They are tendentious, cliched, and argumentative. The solemnities about social justice, the catchphrases on "constructed identities," the blanket indictments (example: "We also explore and discuss, both from a historical and present day perspective, ways in which our culture covertly and overtly condones the abuse of women by their intimate partners")--they numb the intellect. But they are also far too respectable in the scholarly world, and the labor of exploding their doctrinaire aura will be a slow and deliberate one. The university needs to undergo a massive change in principle, especially the principle that distinguishes education from activism, political analysis from political indoctrination, but the change will only come incrementally.

Bauerlein takes as a given what critics of ACTA's report have vociferously denied--that course descriptions can tell us something meaningful about the current state of undergraduate education. And he also points to a possible explanation for why the same course description might strike some as "tendentious, cliched, and argumentative" while striking others as so eminently uncontroversial and respectable as to be virtually innocuous--the sheer familiarity of tendentious course offerings, combined with the numbing commonness of their most cherished rhetorical solemnities, normalizes them and even appears to neutralize them. A fine example of the sort of perceptual impasse Bauerlein's comment evokes may be found in the comment thread to Timothy Burke's extended expression of outrage at ACTA's report , in which "Withywindle," Burke, and others debate whether a particular course description is or is not ideologically loaded.

Bauerlein concludes his post with the suggestion that an exit exam for college seniors may be one means of counterbalancing a one-sided professional culture that selects for like-minded sorts over a protracted apprenticeship period:

Each senior professor today is the outcome of a twenty-year process beginning with the freshman year and ending with tenure, and they have an intense and enduring acculturation steering their thoughts and actions. Few of them will change. But the curriculum they manage and the courses they offer are subject to scrutiny, and if students graduate with a half- or quarter-knowledge of history, civics, arts and culture, science, and math--notwithstanding all the high-sounding talk about critique, society, America, etc. in the course descriptions--we may call for an accountability. It may take the form, say, of a low-stakes exit exam for graduating seniors to measure core knowledge in the basic subjects, but somehow we need systemic evidence matching curricula with outcomes. It may feel like shifting a plodding ocean liner off-course one small degree at a time, but it's progress.

It's well known that college students are graduating with woeful reading, writing, and reasoning skills. It's also well known that their levels of cultural literacy, not to mention their basic knowledge of such foundational areas as U.S. history, are poor. Exit exams pegged to students' varying curricula would be an intriguing way of pinpointing not only where and how students aren't learning, but also of correlating that information with the political tenor of the courses they take.

Posted by acta online at 08:38 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

A smear and a show of support

Yesterday, InsideHigherEd.com ran an op-ed by John K. Wilson that went out of its way to misrepresent ACTA's latest report. Thanks to Brooklyn College professor Mitchell Langbert for noticing. In the discussion thread attached to Wilson's highly flawed piece, Langbert writes:

Professor Wilson's claim that "ACTA threatens that academic freedom will be revoked from colleges unless they start censoring their professors and ban such courses" puzzles me. I have the ACTA report in front of me, which was forwarded to me by Charles Mitchell of ACTA, and I do not see any statement indicating an intention to advocate revocation of academic freedom.

Indeed, Wilson's statement is nonsensical because ACTA has no authority over academic freedom. Rather, academic hiring committees have such authority, as do university administrations. Since both academic hiring committees and university administrations are more likely to be dominated by left wing extremists than by conservatives, it would hardly seem likely that a conservative group like ACTA would have much influence over academic freedom.

Rather, Wilson once again illustrates the Orwellian use of the term academic freedom characteristic of the suppressive left wing McCarthyites who dominate universities and suppress and fire anyone who disagrees with their dumb hypotheses, such as caucasians are responsible for high crime rates in Cote d'Ivoire, Aristotle lynched Hispanics, and there are no differences between males and females. Rather, such crackpot views have come to dominate universities, and most who disagree, like Lawrence Summers at Harvard, are driven out by the left wing bigots who dominate these institutions.

How could ACTA threaten academic freedom when left wing campus bigots have already destroyed it?

Langbert follows up with another comment in which he develops his thoughts on ACTA's stance on academic freedom and reprints a letter he has written in support of ACTA's work:

In the introduction to the ACTA report Anne Neal makes the statement: "the solution is not to fire professors who express extreme views but to expose them, to compel them to defend their positions, invite them to debate ideas and above all, to insist that they do their job of teaching students well ... the faculty's academic freedom should end at the point where profesors abuse the special trust they are given to respect students' academic freedom to learn." These remarks are entirely consistent with the statements of the American Association of University Professors.

Of course, leftists like Wilson find the idea that he should be required to respect students' academic freedom troubling, even baffling.

Since Wilson's remarks about ACTA are characteristic of the misrepresentation in which academics engage in suppressing conservatives' academic freedom, I have written the following letter of support to ACTA:

"In cataloguing ideologically- and politically-driven courses in nearly four dozen well-known institutions of higher learning, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni has performed an important public service. You have broadened and further documented Roger Kimball's insights in Tenured Radicals. The courses that you describe in "How Many Ward Churchills: A Study by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni" do not deserve the appellation "academic." Rather, the courses that you describe amount to trash; that is, shrill advocacy of left wing ideology and biases, reverse racism, and anti-American demogoguery. The courses that you describe are the handiwork of cranks. Sadly, the broad prevalence of such courses across a wide swath of the country's best colleges suggests a decline in standards in higher education to which the public needs to be alerted. Alumni are not getting what they think when they contribute; the public does not get what it thinks when it provides tax exemptions; employers do not get what they think when they insist on credentials from institutions; and parents do not get what they think when they pay tens of thousands of dollars to be told that the most free, wealthiest and creative society in history, the United States of America, is inferior to the left wing prison camps of the Soviet Union or Cuba, or the backward, suppressive and closed-minded cultures of the third world."

Of course, our left-wing campus cranks do not volunteer to emigrate to North Korea beause, er, well, you figure it out.

The conclusion to ACTA's study deals closely with the question of how to balance the claims of academic freedom against the need to ensure that college teachers really are teaching and not preaching. What is especially worth noting about the report is how it urges college and university officials to find their own, institutionally appropriate ways of striking that balance; the report suggests that academic officials consider a range of potential measures that are wholly consistent with institutional self-governance, including post-tenure review, self-study, revised hiring processes, and the hiring of administrators committed to intellectual diversity.

In short, what ACTA is recommending is very far from what Wilson's outrageous caricature suggests. It's also--in its respect for institutions' academic freedom to govern themselves--harder to grasp (or dismiss) than a caricature is. But ACTA's message is worth trying to grasp. It's in many ways the furthest thing from the threat (the "right-wing witch hunt") that Wilson takes it to be: It's a series of recommendations for how colleges and universities can develop their own means of ensuring that they are living up to their obligations.

The final two paragraphs of the study say it most succinctly:

Ultimately, greater accountability means more responsible decision-making on the part of academic administrators, more judicious hiring on the part of departments, and more balanced, genuinely tolerant teaching on the part of faculties. It also means acknowledging--openly and unapologetically--that education and advocacy are not one and the same, that the invaluable work of opening minds and honing critical thinking skills cannot be done when professors are more interested in seeing their own beliefs put into political practice.

Finally, it means defending the academic freedom of even the most militantly radical academics. Our aim should not be to fire the Ward Churchills for their views, but to insist that they do their job -- regardless of their ideological commitments. We must insist that, in their classrooms, they teach fairly, fostering an open and robust exchange of ideas and refusing to succumb to a proselytizing or otherwise biased pedagogy. Only then will their ideas be subject to debate; only then will they and their students learn to defend their positions in the marketplace of ideas. Only then will other views challenge, complicate, and even displace theirs. Only then can we hope to create a truly diverse academy.

What's so threatening about that?

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ACTA report available online

Read ACTA's latest report, How Many Ward Churchills?, here.

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Churchill verdict and context

Reactions to the University of Colorado's report finding ethnic studies professor Ward Churchill guilty of academic misconduct are a fascinating window into some of the defining schisms of contemporary American culture, particularly when it comes to debates about higher education. Despite a report lodging over 100 pages' worth of carefully amassed evidence documenting Churchill's wilfully fraudulent scholarly practices, there are still those who argue that he is the victim of a right-wing witch hunt, and there are even those who would argue that the report--and the discipline that will follow it--mark a blow against academic freedom.

A telling sampling of such perspectives is on display in the comments section to InsideHigherEd.com's coverage, which notes that two of Churchill's investigators are uneasy about punishing him severely because doing so might "have an adverse effect on other scholars' ability to conduct their research with due freedom" and in which various commenters argue that "he is in the trouble he's in because conservative media and knee-jerk right wing politicans did not appreciate his comments about the victims of the 9/11 attacks," that "the 'trial' of Ward Churchill [is] a blatant witch hunt" run by a "kangaroo court," and that we should all "leave aside [our] feelings about Churchill for a moment and understand this for what it is and for what it portends for academic freedom." It speaks to the quality of InsideHigherEd.com's forum that there is plenty of robust debate surrounding these positions.

Meanwhile, Eugene Volokh takes on both the question of whether there is a constitutional problem with the manner in which Churchill's protected speech led to his being investigated (Volokh says there isn't) and the question of what the Churchill verdict--which centers entirely on Churchill's published scholarship--means for pedagogy: "How can his future students be confident that things he says in class are accurate? (Yes, we try to instill skepticism in our students, but they still rightly expect that they can count on our factual assertions, rather than double-checking every word.) How can his colleagues, and Colorado taxpayers, be confident that his students are learning things accurately? ... It seems to me that keeping him on the faculty would be a substantial disservice to Colorado students, Colorado taxpayers, and the academic fields in which he works. I hope that in its sympathy for a colleague, and its desire to avoid hassle or even litigation, the University doesn't lose sight of that."

Though saying so will no doubt induce apoplectic fits in those who see Churchill as the victim of a right-wing witch hunt, one might readily extend Volokh's points to the broader questions of what is going on in American college classrooms, of how contemporary collegiate pedagogy is tied to the political goals of an overwhelmingly left-leaning faculty, and of what might be done to assess the situation--and manage any problems assessment reveals--while still respecting professors' expressive freedoms.

ACTA's new report seeks to pose just that problem--not by cherry-picking outrageous courses or by attacking individual professors, but by simply documenting in exhaustive detail the kinds of course offerings that are becoming increasingly representative of today's college curriculum. You can read a sampling of these course offerings here. They include:

--A University of Texas course called "American Dilemmas" that teaches that "problems in the economy and political system, social class and income inequality, racial/ethnic inequality, gender inequality and heterosexism" are "natural outgrowths of our existing social structure."

--A Vassar course called "Domestic Violence" that explores how "our culture covertly and overtly condones the abuse of women by their intimate partners."

--A Duke University course that "call[s] into question the dominant Eurocentric diffusionist model-what James Blaut calls the 'colonizer's model of the world'" by showing how "Europe built on powerful older civilizations, at least as advanced as and probably more so than Europe at that time." Assigned texts include Ward Churchill's A Little Matter of Genocide.

--An anthropology course at Davidson College that requires students to produce a 15-20 minute skit on one of a select group of topics, including "Five Ways to demonize an ethnic minority," "More Ways than One to be White," and "More Segregation in Integration."

Ward Churchill's public utterances raised legitimate questions about the quality of his academic work. An investigation revealed that this work was indeed gravely flawed. Course descriptions such as those cited above likewise raise legitimate questions about what is happening in college classrooms, and about whether what goes on there bears more resemblance to indoctrination than education. Each description cited is the public utterance of the instructor; each description unapologetically announces the course's intention to deliver a political message. This is a problem. And instead of filibustering with accusations of witch hunts and intimations of the end of academic freedom, defenders of the academy should be putting their heads together to devise responsible ways to address the problems signalled by such course descriptions. If it really is the case that there is no legitimate institutional way to ensure that professors fulfill their professional obligation to teach rather than preach, then academe has an even bigger problem than the one posed by the course descriptions.

UPDATE 5/18: The report is now online.

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AAUP Watch

The AAUP is known for defending professors who run afoul of institutional doctrine at religious colleges and universities; among the schools the AAUP has censured in recent years may be found a number of faith-based institutions that have fired faculty members for asking the wrong questions, having the wrong ideas, and teaching the wrong texts. Invariably, these faculty members' great failing is that they are thinking more liberally than their institutions want them to--hence the cases of Michael Hartwig at Albertus Magnus College, whose homosexuality eventually cost him his job; of Carmel McEnroy of St. Meinrad School of Technology, whose self-described "moderate feminism" cost her her job; of June Hagen of Nyack College, whose support for gay rights cost her her job; and of Gail Houston, the Brigham Young English professor whose feminism resulted in a denial of tenure.

The pattern of such cases is a predictable one; it is not surprising that faith-based institutions would find their faculty members occasionally falling afoul of institutional orthodoxy, nor is it surprising that typically, those who fall afoul of institutional orthodoxy do so by failing to adhere to some of their institutions' stricter norms. Private schools of this sort have every right to police their boundaries in this way; where they run into trouble is when they violate their own policies in the attempt to do so. The AAUP has established something of a cottage industry defending professors who get caught between their schools' doctrinal requirements and their stated commitment to academic freedom--which should not surprise us in the least. Such cases neatly align the principles of academic freedom and the broad liberalism of the AAUP itself, and as such are excellent advertisements for the organization.

To the AAUP's credit, it has recently taken up two very different sorts of cases. Greenville College has recently fired a professor for believing that the college is failing to live up to its orthodox mission. New Mexico Highlands University has recently fired two professors who argued that the University is favoring ethnicity over merit in personnel decisions. The AAUP has in each case defended professors whose views don't mesh readily with the AAUP's own political commitments--and yet the AAUP has in each case maintained an admirably content-neutral stance, defending principles of due process and academic freedom wherever they may lead.

Now there is a new dust-up at a Christian college where disputes about doctrine have clashed with the principles of academic freedom. Five of Patrick Henry College's sixteen fulltime faculty members are leaving after President Michael Farris began meddling with professors' classroom and public speech; one was fired after reading the college's statement on faith to his class and asking students who felt he failed to live up to it either to speak with him about it or to leave the class. Farris has consistently objected to professors' belief that the Bible is not the only source of truth, and that Christianity compels its adherents to seek the truth wherever that search may lead them.

The Patrick Henry case draws in much cleaner lines issues that arise in many of the AAUP cases centered on religious institutions; this is a school that aspires to be both a Christian institution and a liberal arts college, and the clash between the faculty and the president hinges absolutely on the question of whether, and how, these two missions can be coordinated with one another. And in this sense, Patrick Henry College may have a great deal to teach us about the uneasy tension between inquiry and belief that defines so many areas of American culture and that makes for such unpleasant doings not only in our religious schools, but also our secular ones.

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Highlights from "How Many Ward Churchills?"

Some excerpts from ACTA's newest study:

Though the controversy surrounding Ward Churchill now focuses on whether the University of
Colorado will find him guilty of professional misconduct, Churchill's case raises questions that
extend far beyond his career. These questions have to do with how to place him in context. Is
there really only one Ward Churchill? Or are there many Ward Churchills, academics who use
their positions as scholars to promote their politics, to present propaganda as reasoned research,
and even to impose their politics on others? Just how typical--or atypical--is the man who
praised the 9/11 attacks?

As public awareness of the problem mounts--and as a movement for legislative intervention
gains momentum--it's important to explore just how widespread the "Ward Churchill
Phenomenon" really is. In order to answer that question, we took a look at the course offerings of
some of the most prominent and influential colleges and universities in the country. Focusing on
the U.S. News & World Report's 2005 list of the top twenty-five private colleges and universities,
the Big 10 conference schools, and the Big 12 conference schools, we examined publicly
available department websites, on-line course descriptions, electronic course syllabi, and faculty
home pages in a wide range of liberal arts disciplines. What we found is that Ward Churchill is
not alone, and that the kinds of politically extreme opinions for which he has become justly
infamous are not only quite common in academe, but enthusiastically embraced and rewarded by
it.

In colleges and universities across the country, in both traditional disciplines and new-fangled
programs, the classes offered and the faculty who teach them are displaying an ideological slant
that is frequently as uniform as it is severe....

Throughout American higher education, professors are using their classrooms to push political
agendas in the name of teaching students to think critically. In course after course, department
after department, and institution after institution, indoctrination is replacing education.

Encouraging students to think independently has been too often supplanted by the impulse to tell
them what to think about some of the most pressing issues of our day.

In the past, administrators have shied away from assessing the state of the classroom. They have
worried that doing so might--as many faculty claim--create a "chilling effect" or verge on
wrongful censorship. Ironically, fears of endangering academic freedom have prevented higher
education officials from following up on concerns that faculties may be abusing the privileges
academic freedom confers.

Their fears rest on a basic misapprehension about what academic freedom is--and what it is not.
Academic freedom is not insulation from oversight or accountability. It does not license
professors to ignore their duties to teach and research responsibly, and it does not license
institutions to fail to ensure that they do so. Nor does academic freedom exempt institutions or
individuals from criticism.

Too often, however, members of the academy equate academic freedom--the right to teach,
research, and speak publicly--with the right to institutional autonomy. Too often, they expect
that, in the name of academic freedom, they should be immune from scrutiny and that they should
not have to answer to the public. But academic freedom only grants faculties intellectual and
pedagogical independence on the condition that they honor their reciprocal obligation to respect
students' academic freedom to learn.

Academic freedom is essentially a public trust founded on the condition that universities foster a
robust exchange of ideas that acknowledges the existence of multiple perspectives and enables
students to decide for themselves what they think and believe. Academic freedom ends where
violations of that trust begin.

...academic freedom isn't just the freedom to be extreme in the public forum. It is also a series of
interlocking responsibilities. It is the responsibility to conduct research and to share that research
with the public. It is the responsibility to teach students well and to empower them to make up
their own minds. Producing propaganda is not doing research. Preaching one's politics in the
classroom is not teaching.

Disturbingly, as this study shows, college and university teachers across the country are
profoundly confused on these points. When institutions of higher learning proudly and
unabashedly dedicate their pedagogical resources to political advocacy, activism, sensitivity
training, and social change, students, parents, trustees, administrators, and taxpayers have a right
to be concerned. They also have the right to raise questions, demand answers, and compel action.

Though biased course descriptions and syllabi do not themselves prove that a course will be
graded unfairly, they do tell us a great deal about their instructors' slanted presentation, and they
do strongly suggest that their instructors are neither particularly interested in or respectful of the
full range of opinions on the issues at hand. They also tell us--through their prominent
omissions--that students who wish to uncover alternative viewpoints are going to have to do so
on their own....

Faced with substantial evidence of academic bias and pedagogical malfeasance, with course
catalogs and professorial websites that openly declare war on impartial, objective teaching,
institutions that do not take action deserve the criticism of public officials, taxpayers, students,
and parents. Colleges and universities must ensure that they provide education, not indoctrination.

This report aims to inform elected officials, trustees, administrators, parents, alumni, students,
and citizens about what is happening, virtually unrecognized and unchallenged, in college
classrooms across the nation. It urges them to demand better information and more accountability
from the colleges and universities they support.

Likewise, colleges and universities must amend their questionable practices and begin fulfilling
their professional obligations. They must also recognize that if they do not take swift and decisive
action, they risk losing the independence and the privilege they have traditionally enjoyed.

More to come.

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How Many Ward Churchills?

As the University of Colorado prepares to announce the results of its investigation of ethnic studies professor Ward Churchill, ACTA is releasing a study on the broader implications of Churchill's case. Here's the press release announcing the publication of ACTA's latest report:

Study Asks: How Many Ward Churchills?
Answer: Ward Churchills Abound

Universities Exhorted to Stop Promoting Extremism
and Insist on Academic Integrity

CU Report on Churchill Due May 16


Washington, DC (May 12, 2006) -- As the University of Colorado prepares to issue a report on tenured ethnic studies professor Ward Churchill, a new study by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) concludes that professors like Churchill are systematically promoted by colleges and universities across the country at the expense of academic standards and integrity.

In the report, entitled How Many Ward Churchills?, ACTA places Churchill in context and finds that "Ward Churchill is not only not alone--he is quite common." Focusing on U.S. News & World Report's top 25 private colleges and universities, and the Big 10 and Big 12 conference schools, the report examines departmental websites, on-line course descriptions, electronic course syllabi, and faculty home pages in a wide range of liberal arts disciplines.

From this broad survey of publicly available materials, ACTA finds that "the kinds of politically extreme opinions for which Ward Churchill has become justly infamous are not only quite common in academe, but enthusiastically embraced and rewarded by it." The study concludes that "throughout American higher education, professors are using their classrooms to push political agendas in the name of teaching students to think critically."

The study comes in the wake of an extended public controversy involving the outspoken Colorado professor whose article describing the victims of 9-11 as "little Eichmanns" came to light early in 2005. A number of legislators and political leaders called for Churchill's firing, while the Colorado Board of Regents demanded that university administrators undertake a study to determine whether Churchill should be fired for "professional incompetence." Their report will be released on May 16.

"All Americans--whether on the left, right, or in the center--should be outraged by the one-sided, doctrinaire perspective that, too often, today defines the college experience," the ACTA report finds. "Today's college students are not being prepared for leadership--or even for full, engaged citizenship. College and universities must ensure that they provide education, not indoctrination."

"The solution to the problem Ward Churchill poses is not to fire him--or others like him--for expressing extreme beliefs," the report says. Rather, institutions should "assess much more closely and systematically than they have yet done whether--and how--extremist professors adversely affect the intellectual climate on campuses across the country."

"In the past, administrators and trustees have shied away from assessing the state of the classroom. Worried that doing so might--as many faculty claim--create a chilling effect, or verge on wrongful censorship, they have failed to act," said ACTA president Anne D. Neal. "But academic freedom is not insulation from oversight or accountability. It does not license professors to ignore their duties to teach and research responsibly and it most certainly does not mean institutions or individuals are exempt from criticism."

Calling on institutions to "take steps to guarantee a proper balance between students' academic freedom to learn and professors' academic freedom to teach, research, and publish," the study offers concrete steps colleges and universities can take to ensure a vibrant learning environment. These include:

--Performing post-tenure review of faculty;
--Undergoing a self-study to assess the atmosphere in the classroom;
--Reviewing hiring and promotion practices to ensure that scholarship and teaching--not ideological litmus tests--are the foundation for lifelong job security; and
--Hiring administrators who are committed to intellectual diversity.

Most broadly, the report calls on students, parents, alumni, trustees, elected officials, and concerned citizens to make the intellectual climate of higher education their business--to demand better information about what is happening in colleges across America and to exact more accountability from the colleges and universities they support.

Chapters include "The Politicized Liberal Arts Curriculum," "Coursework as Sensitivity Training," "Educating in Activism," and "Social Justice and the New Intolerance."

More to come.

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Waiting on Ward

Yesterday marked the completion of the lengthy investigation of Ward Churchill that the University of Colorado launched last fall. Having spent last summer investigating whether to investigate Churchill, and having run into difficulties when two panel members resigned after word got out that their presence on the panel represented a conflict of interest, the university has spent over a year attempting to decide how to adjudicate Churchill's case. The investigative panel turned in its final report yesterday, and the results should be made public next week. UC chancellor Phil DiStefano is expected to announce a final decision on Churchill's fate on June 8.

But even if Churchill is exonerated, this does not mark the end of the strife between him and Colorado administrators. Last May, additional charges of academic misconduct were filed against Churchill, and the university has just announced that it will open a new investigation to assess their merit. Churchill and his lawyer claim the new charges--which center on the misreporting of some facts in a book Churchill co-authored before joining the Colorado faculty--are spurious, and that Churchill will file suit against the university for harassment if it does not drop them. "It's not going to be the endless Ward Churchill investigation," Churchill told the Associated Press.

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Telling it like it is

Mark Bauerlein--who KC Johnson rightly notes has written some spectacular short critiques of the contemporary academy--tells it like it is at Phi Beta Cons:

As the intellectual-diversity movement unfolds in state legislatures and in the media, a pattern of resistance has developed, and it's a potent one. It came up in questions posed during the hearings in Pennsylvania, and it was echoed in news stories .... In those cases, the focus swerved from the actual locus of the bias. Bias was postulated in the wrong places, and when they didn't find it there, legislators and skeptical journalists declared the whole issue a false problem.

Here is where went gone wrong. The inquiry was set up to focus on specific events and actions. Have professors punished conservative students at grading time? Have partisan incidents spread through classrooms? Are there intimidated professors and harassed students lurking underground? In these cases, the attention fell on individual teachers and episodes. It was the personal contact that counted.

For an inquiry into bias in an institution the size and complexity of the university, this is a dead end. Academia is a subculture, an insider's universe. People join it by undergoing a slow and selective process, over many years learning to give lectures, conduct research, and handle students. At each stage, they're judged by people who have already passed through the system. This makes for a social component in the training. What happens is what happens in any closed group over time. A set of mores, protocols, attitudes, and norms develops. In its better forms, it goes by the name of professionalism. But how easily do those attitudes and norms slide into cliquish, parochial, or ideological behavior, especially when professionals talk only to themselves. Bias, then, operates more systematically, less overtly than in a rant against George Bush in the classroom, less individualistically than in one person's exercise of power. It becomes proper to the whole discipline.

Here's an example. Among the general goals listed in the College of Education at Penn State is this: "Enhance the commitment of faculty, staff, and students to the centrality of diversity, social justice, and democratic citizenship." This is an ideological demand. "Social justice" is a loaded political term, and its range of meanings includes government policies to redistribute wealth and resources down the income ladder. It may, and should, be part of the curriculum, a practice to be studied. But to insert social justice into a mission statement is to make it an entrance requirement. If you subscribe to it, you may join.

When prospective students who don't share the social-justice outlook encounter such statements, they don't file complaints. They walk away. When professors in the program assume the rightness of social justice, they don't think they're acting partisan. They're merely abiding by the standards of their field. What is a political position is made to look like a professional one. The habit has become so ingrained in academic behavior that liberal bias proceeds in professional-looking ways--in the books selected for a syllabus, in the topics considered relevant and cutting-edge in a field, in the themes chosen for conferences. Nobody needs to say, "We don't want any conservative or libertarian views around here!" The system already takes care of it.

Here is where attention should go. Which programs and departments make an ideological belief definitive of responsible academic conduct? Professors who blatantly push an ideological agenda are far outnumbered by those who don't, and individual cases of discrimination may be cast as exceptions. But the norms that preside over the humanities, schools of education, and many social-science departments are there for the exposure--if one wishes to take the time and trouble to chart them.

Former FIRE president and Alliance Defense League attorney David French concurs.

Critics of the contemporary campus climate have made it easy for naysayers within academe to dismiss their arguments by, as Bauerlein notes, failing to frame their case in a manner that both accurately describes the problem and that makes it possible to analyze the problem in a constructive, informative way. There is a great deal of growing momentum surrounding the idea that something must be done to restore genuine intellectual pluralism to college and university campuses. But that energy is going to have to be harnessed more effectively than it has so far if real understanding is to be cultivated, and if substantive changes are to be made. As Bauerlein points out, too much of the public attention to this issue thus far has been analytically flawed, focussed more on specific interpersonal interactions than on systemic ideological expectations and trends. While the former is certainly easier to document than the latter, the power of the latter has minimized the need for the former. That's how ideology works. It doesn't have to be imposed or enforced when it is at its most effective. It's simply there in the air we breathe.

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AAUP Watch

Last week, the AAUP did two noteworthy things: It issued a policy statement on controversial campus speakers, and it came out on the side of graduate student unionization.

The AAUP's new statement on Academic Freedom and Outside Visitors reaffirmed its 1967 statement supporting the practice of bringing controversial and provocative speakers to campus, noting that in recent years a disturbing tendency to "disinvite" tendentious figures has arisen among academic administrators. The statement reviews the various reasons administrators give for disinviting speakers--from worries about safety to concerns about "balance"--and methodically dismantles the often specious rationales campus officials use to prevent potentially incendiary visitors from coming to campus. The statement clarifies that allowing a speaker to address the campus does not mean an institution endorses that speaker's views; it concludes with a simple, powerful reminder that "There can be no more appropriate site for the discussion of controversial ideas and issues than a college or university campus."

The statement was timely and wise. The second gesture was more troublesome, signalling the AAUP's opinion that there is no conflict of interest between protecting academic freedom (defending a principle) and taking up partisan positions (promoting an agenda).

Last week, outgoing AAUP president Jane Buck joined incoming AAUP president Cary Nelson at NYU, where they devoted the day to protesting the university's decision not to allow graduate students to unionize, and where they even managed to get themselves arrested for the cause. By inviting Buck to join him, Nelson was clearly tying his activism to his new position as AAUP president; he also announced plans to encourage a nationwide faculty boycott of NYU. "We're here to put our bodies where our words have been--to signal to our membership that this is a cause worthy of the long, honorable tradition of civil disobedience, that this is a fundamental issue of employee rights, and in truth this is the watershed academic labor crisis of our generation," he told InsideHigherEd.com. "People need to start making moral decisions about what to do."

They do indeed--and one thing that people need to decide is whether it is moral and ethical for the AAUP to use its position as defender and protector of academic freedom to endorse highly contentious political views, and to do so by casting them as transparently obvious and uncontroversial questions of academic freedom. Academic freedom does confer on faculty and students the right to advocate for ideas and views that compel them; the defense of academic freedom, however, should proceed according to a far more impartial model of advocacy.

The AAUP has been a vocal supporter of graduate student unions for some time. But we should seriously question whether its position on graduate student unions is consistent with the organization's founding goals. It may be that unionization is the right and proper solution for graduate students wishing to secure better treatment. But if so, that does not mean that the AAUP is the organization best suited to promote that cause.

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ACTA launches AAUP Watch

This week ACTA is launching a new program: AAUP Watch. Inspired by a growing sense that the American Association of University Professors is not doing all that it could to protect and promote academic freedom, AAUP Watch will draw attention to the statements and activities of the organization that, more than any other, is charged with preserving the essential freedom of students and faculty members to explore, debate, and develop ideas.

Founded in 1915 to advance the causes of academic freedom and shared governance in America's colleges and universities, the AAUP has since then made our most seminal statements about what academic freedom is and how it must be preserved. But at the same time, the AAUP has not always lived up to the standards set by its own declarations of principle.

An occasional feature on this weblog, AAUP Watch will document both pivotal moments when the AAUP upholds the ideal of academic freedom as well as those when it does not. Over time, AAUP Watch will seek to show how the the country's foremost institutional advocate of academic freedom has subtly but definitively begun to shift the concept of academic freedom away from its original meaning.

Stay tuned.

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