ACTA's Must-Reads
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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.
Posted by acta online at May 29, 2006 10:22 PM
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Erin O'Connor (in her guise as ACTA blogger) and David French have responded to Timothy Burke's critique of the How Many Ward Churchills? paper essentially by saying, (1) asking the report to quantify is unfair and (2) it doesn't matter how infrequentl... [Read More]
Tracked on May 31, 2006 06:46 PM
Comments
You claim that Burke's position is that "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." But look at what Burke actually wrote: "in fact I agree with some of the criticisms of the academy that resemble the ones ACTA is trying to write about here. Because I do want to see the academy substantially reformed, because I do want to see academics learn to break up their insularity, because I do hate classes that have fixed or polemical answers to complex problems. I react strongly because I’d love to read a really smart, interesting, thoroughly researched, wholly responsible report that made the case for reform." In other words, Burke is clearly a natural ally in this cause that -- because he criticizes the rhetoric and methodology of the report -- ACTA is trying to stigmatize as an enemy. If you really want to "join forces" with others, then try paying attention to what they actually write, and take their criticisms as good-faith efforts to sharpen and clarify the necessary critique rather than as tokens of sheer enmity. Isn't it at least possible that the ACTA report -- and, still more, Anne Neal's subsequent comments -- have framed the issues poorly and are in need at least of rhetorical adjustment? A call for reform that alienates people like Tim Burke and me, that is, people who are already aware of the need for reform, is a poorly articulated call. At best.
Posted by: Alan Jacobs at May 30, 2006 08:32 AM
You want the ACTA report judged by humanistic rather than social-science standards? Okay: Would you allow a student to write a paper for you using only blurbs on the covers of books?
As I've commented elsewhere, a number of academics would be far more willing to grant ACTA credibility if it didn't have a history of deliberately distorting faculty views (i.e., the late-2001 "report"), covering up its own flaws (rewriting that "report" and removing the original from the website without acknowledging the problems), having no sense of accountability for its own activities (e.g., "training" trustees at 11 public universities in Florida and never noting that within short order, the trustees were engaging in such liberal-arts-friendly stuff as approving programs for "hospitality management"), and rarely commenting on the broader university management issues that are tough on liberal arts (such as the typical treatment of English departments at large research universities). When an organization devotes a disproportionate amount of energy to portraying faculty as villains, why should anyone be surprised when faculty cast a skeptical eye at reports that distort what we do?
Posted by: Sherman Dorn at May 30, 2006 08:59 AM
I honestly don't care what grounds ACTA chooses to defend the report on.
The course descriptions exist. They are observations, and as such are data points.
They may be incomplete data, and we may not presently know what they mean, if they mean anything at all. But as stand-alones, the data are provocative and should form the basis of further investigations.
The detractors of the debate have been so focussed on the report's failings as a definitive, well-controlled study (which I doubt it was ever intended to be) that they have distracted attention away from the data itself.
I view the study as a "Preliminary Report," one inviting further investigation. Am I unreasonable for doing so?
I have to ask myself this: if the report's distractors were deliberately trying to squash the data of the report and prevent further investigation that would add more data and help determine what they might mean, what would they do differently?
Posted by: Clawmute at May 30, 2006 10:07 AM
This is because ACTA, even here, continues to use terms like many politicized college courses (and even the title "How MANY Ward Churchills?") that clearly imply a level of quantitative assessment of the problem, with zero evidence of the same.
Furthermore, having read the ACTA report, I find very little evidence even of their primary point: that courses are politicized. ACTA takes it as prima facie evidence of politicization that a course may teach students about the �systematic marginalization� of people of color (to select just the first of many tendentious statements from the ACTA Report).
That race in American society has, throughout our history, been a fundamentally divisive issue, and that we have, from the subjugation of Native Americans to slavery to Jim Crow to nativist movements to overwhelming data on income disparities and mobility, been a society that has systematically marginalized people of color is not a political opinion, it is an indisputable FACT.
What we learn from such facts about how we might move toward a egalitarian, non-racist future may be a point of political dispute. But ACTA argues that simply teaching about these subject is "politicized" in some unacceptable way, whereas in fact, NOT teaching these sometimes uncomfortable realities (no matter that many in American society would like to close their eyes to them) is fundamentally political and anti-intellectual.
Posted by: john prentice at May 30, 2006 03:33 PM
" .. But ACTA argues that simply teaching about these subject is "politicized" in some unacceptable way, whereas in fact, NOT teaching these sometimes uncomfortable realities .. is fundamentally political and anti-intellectual."
OK .. so, "in fact," if Oliver North and Ward Churchill were both teaching about the Vietnam Conflict -- Churchill's would be accurate and North's would NOT?
Hardly. Both views need to be heard. But in Churchill's classroom, you only get ONE view. How "anti-intellectual."
BTW: North saw combat in Vietnam, according to his USNA-Annapolis classmate James Webb. Like up to his neck, screaming and cursing at just about everything. Recall Billy Joel's "Goodbye Saigon" --
"And who was wrong?
"And who was right?
"It didn't matter in the thick of the fight"
Churchill claims to have seen combat. But his service record doesn't reflect any combat experience.
Who's the "anti-intellectual?" What is "truth?" What are "facts?"
Churchill said in the debate with Mr. Horowitz that the truth "is what we say it is." So -- now I can say, what kind of intellectual he is -- the lowest-performing kind.
Posted by: R.A.S. at June 13, 2006 09:35 AM