ACTA's Must-Reads
« A useful exchange ... | Main | Pope Center weighs in on ACTA report »
Witch hunt at California Institute of Integral Studies
Debates surrounding ACTA's recent report, How Many Ward Churchills?, have turned in part on the question of whether there really is a problem with political bias in the academy. Amassing examples of instances in which such bias is demonstrated--through the defunding of conservative and Christian student groups, or the disinviting of controversial conservative speakers, or the reworking of the curriculum to accommodate the ideology of social justice, or the persecution of conservative students and professors for their speech, and so on--has not been enough to convince some interested observers (many of whom are comfortably ensconced academics who have quite transparent reasons for defending the status quo) that there is a problem. But there is a problem, and it is systemic, and it's just plain nuts to pretend otherwise.
One example of a systemic imposition of left-oriented ideology on an entire university is presently unfolding at the University of Oregon, where the new Diversity Plan amounts to a brief for imposing a highly tendentious multiculturalist vision on every aspect of the university. It includes diversity training at freshmen orientation, regular diversity training for faculty, strong pressure for faculty to incorporate diversity issues into their courses, and a strong overall emphasis on ensuring that every member of the Oregon community becomes "culturally competent" in precisely the ways that the university--in patent disregard for individual conscience, values, and belief--defines that term.
Another example is to be found at the California Institute of Integral Studies, where a student-initiated witch hunt against a professor who assigned an article that offended them has resulted in a university-led investigation of whether this professor has, in assigning the article, committed "institutional racism." FIRE is defending the professor, and has all the hair-raising details.
Both the Oregon and the CIIS case involve institution-wide attempts to impose orthodoxy on faculty and students. In the one case, this is being pursued via a "plan" for how the university may systematically impose both a worldview and an institutional agenda that embodies that view; in the other, it is being pursued via McCarthyesque tactics that, in pandering to aggrieved students (who, it's worth mentioning, took their complaint the CIIS' "Diversity Action Team") and making a scapegoat of a single professor who dared to assign a controversial article, are chilling and censorious in the extreme.
Both schools are sacrificing academic freedom in the attempt to promote their diversity agendas (Oregon is actually imposing a loyalty oath by requiring job candidates to subscribe to its definition of diversity). Both schools are pretending this is not a problem; both schools are wrong. These are issues--and cases--that should concern all academics, even those who are in favor of diversity as an institutional agenda. That agenda is not friendly to academic freedom and self-governance, and even though it emerges from the existing liberal campus culture, it's going to eat that culture alive if faculties don't do something to stop it.
Posted by acta online at June 1, 2006 12:10 PM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.goactablog.org/blog/mt-tb.cgi/163
Comments
I have no problem with schools being perfectly open about their faculty thought requirements. Unquestioning loyalty to prevailing academic orthodoxies is in fact essential to any faculty appointment, and stating that thought requirement overtly in the job announcement is simply being honest.
This thought requirement has been intact and destroying careers for at least two decades. You'd have to fundamentally change the hiring process and committees to get around it at this point.
Posted by: Federal Dog at June 2, 2006 07:53 AM
The irony, in this context, of the CIIS case is that the professor is being investigated because they simply heard he assigned something without asking him why he assigned it--they just saw some buzzwords and came to some conclusions about his motivations.
Posted by: Timothy Burke at June 2, 2006 08:47 AM