ACTA's Must-Reads
« ACTA report available online | Main | More support -- and an idea »
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?
Posted by acta online at May 20, 2006 10:18 AM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.goactablog.org/blog/mt-tb.cgi/154
Comments
Interesting.
I await with interest Dr. Burke's exhaustive and penetrating deconstruction of Wilson's IHE OpEd (or has he published one that I am unaware of?).
Of course, the absence of such an analysis would itself be an example of exactly what the ACTA report and others like it are getting at: the one-sidedness of academic thought.
Brian
Posted by: Brian at May 20, 2006 12:09 PM
I have been following the reaction to the Churchill report with more than a little shock. I have long known how degraded many departments in modern universities are, but I never expected wholesale defense of theft, fabrication, and fraud. This is a gift to David Horowitz because it makes perfectly apparent that academics cannot be trusted to control themselves emotionally, or to conduct themselves with even a modicum of honesty and professionalism.
They really don't give a hot damn about knowledge, education, or students. And they are the ones making hiring and tenure decisions. The universities are doomed.
Posted by: Federal Dog at May 20, 2006 05:37 PM
Brian,
Maybe Burke didn't respond because the comments there on the page of Wilson's statement, and Ralph Luker's response at HNN, were sufficient. He also may be busy with other things, given a review team on his campus this weekend.
Posted by: Sherman Dorn at May 20, 2006 06:34 PM
I understand that Timothy is busy, but it would reassure those who accept the criteria by which he evaluated the ACTA report that he is entirely impartial, were he himself to deconstruct Mr. Wilson's piece as aggressively as he did ACTA's. I would hope he'd not omit commenting on Mr. Wilson's mischaracterization of the ACTA report.
For my part, I'm afraid I don't accept that Mr. Burke's criteria are appropriate for judging either the ACTA report or Mr. Wilson's OpEd, however appropriate those criteria might be for evaluating a manuscript submitted to an academic journal. Unless Mr. Burke can show that ACTA's report was intended for publication in an academic journal, he's aiming at the wrong target.
So I agree with this insightful piece posted on Occidentality, which although a response to a Ralph Luker post, applies equally well to Mr. Burke's assumptions:
[ . . .]
However, this misunderstands what ACTA has produced. ACTA has created a polemic, and as such, their arguments can be rejected or accepted. But Luker's criticism in fact holds them to a higher standard than the academics ACTA criticizes, and, if followed, would dismiss ACTA's arguments for reasons other than their persuasiveness and truthfulness, the only criteria on which a polemic should be judged.
[ . . . ]
The test of whether ACTA or David Horowitz is worth listening to is not the academic perfection of their scholarship, but whether their conclusions are persuasive to those who have experienced contemporary University scholarship first hand. In my experience, their criticisms are fair and accurate. I would further argue that if their initial conclusions are pursued more thoroughly, that academics would look even worse than ACTA's report makes them look.
Thus one could agree with every criticism Mr. Burke, Mr. Luker and other academics made about the ACTA report, and still find the report to be a legitimate and persuasive piece, a useful contribution to a debate about "intellectual pluralism" (as Candace de Russy aptly phrased it) that has been too long in coming.
Further, once one strips away academic-standard criticisms of methodology, conclusions etc., one is still left with at least some raw data, viz., the examples of course descriptions themselves. The importance of descriptions should not be underestimated: faculty craft them precisely to tell the student what she is to expect from the course. So either the course descriptions accurately reflect what the instructors intend the thrust of their courses to be, or they do not -- and if they do not, then they are at best unintentionally misleading, at worst outright deceptive.
Frankly, I agree with McKreck at Occidentality, "that academics would look even worse than ACTA's report makes them look" were someone to pursue this issue in more depth.
Translation: be careful what you ask for -- you just might get it.
Brian
Posted by: Brian at May 21, 2006 12:57 AM
In the midst of this oh-so-serious debate on "academic freedom" (for the WC army, not the masses) -- possibly the most satirical opinion column on WC, Mr. Horowitz, et al.:
http://www.pirateballerina.com/blog/entry.php?id=42
Ward's a double-agent?
Posted by: Art D. at May 21, 2006 08:06 AM
The Churchill matter has become surreal. While there are those who are following the core issue (WC and his performance) -- others are going off on side issues (ACTA, 9/11, Bush, HNN, finer points of the U.S. Constitution, degrees of guilt, etc.)
IMHO: by casually dropping phrases such as "right-wing" and "far-right," Mr. Wilson clearly indicated that he is an advocate. He's hardly a non-polemicist.
I think most reasonable persons would believe that. But in today's Alice-in-Wonderland world of taxpayer-owned academia, where truth is what you say it is, the only agreement is to get someone else to pay the bills (e.g., students, taxpayers).
As for "evidence" -- well, say a student records a high school teacher comparing Mr. Bush to Hitler at a high volume -- the student winds up taking 80% of the questioning.
All this leaves me wondering -- will there ever be a recording of a teacher praising America for something? Or, say, how many people perished under Communism -- Stalin, Great Leap Forward, Cultural Revolution, the 1956 uprisings, Berlin Wall, re-education camps?
(Oh, I forgot -- those people [including my relatives] were NOT actually murdered. They killed themselves, right? Sorry -- I'm so traditional.)
P.S.: BTW -- someone please tell Mr. Occidentialty that consultants, as people, are "who's" and not "that's." Thank you.
Posted by: Art D. at May 21, 2006 08:52 PM