ACTA's Must-Reads
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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 May 23, 2006 08:38 AM
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