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Kevin Barrett in context

The discussion about University of Wisconsin lecturer Kevin Barrett has rightly swung away from academic freedom to issues of hiring and internal review: Ringing evocations of academic freedom in Barrett's case both misconstrue academic freedom--which is not the freedom to push political viewpoints or junk science in class, and which is not the freedom to teach whatever one wants however one wants--and deflect attention away from the real issue at hand, which is how Barrett came to be hired in the first place. UW clearly needs to pay more attention to its hiring processes, and it needs to pay particular care to its mechanisms for evaluating applicants for part-time teaching jobs of the sort Barrett has. Instead, it has issued ringing endorsements of academic freedom: "We cannot allow political pressure from critics of unpopular ideas to inhibit the free exchange of ideas," says Provost Patrick Farrell. "That classroom interaction is central to this university's mission and to the expansion of knowledge. Silencing that exchange now would only open the door to more onerous and sweeping restrictions."

But UW is not alone in either its casual approach to hiring adjunct lecturers or its apparent lack of established procedures for assessing what teachers are teaching and whether they are teaching well. Nor is it alone in its willingness to fall back on hollow evocations of academic freedom when weaknesses in its present personnel practices are exposed.

Consider a strikingly similar case from the spring of 2005, when the media got hold of the information that a North Carolina Wesleyan political science professor named Jane Christensen not only subscribed to a conspiracy theory of 9/11, but openly advocated that theory in the classroom. Christensen maintained a faculty home page where she outlined her beliefs (it also featured a photo of herself dressed as a terrorist). She also taught a course entitled "9-11; The Road to Tyranny," in which she advocated her position: "I teach the truth about 9/11 in all of my courses," she told the press, adding that criticism of courses such as hers amount to "a war by the extreme right wing motivated by the Zionists to quash academic freedom on campus."

When the media spread the news that Christensen was using her classroom to advocate a crackpot theory rather than to teach students to think for themelves, NC Wesleyan responded in the hackneyed and self-discrediting way that has become commonplace when academic administrators are confronted with evidence of faculty malfeasance--they defended Christensen's academic freedom, and refused to draw a necessary distinction between her right to pursue the truth as a scholar and her obligations not to impose her views on students. "We don't tell professors what to think," said NC Wesleyan president Ian Newbould. "We don't tell professors what to teach. ... What makes America great is we don't do that. I've often used a quotation that they say comes from Voltaire, `I may disagree with what you say but I'll fight to your death your right to say it.' "

Similarly lame comments came from Tom Betts, who chairs the college's Board of Trustees: "I find what's on her Web site to be distasteful and despicable, and I disagree with everything on it. In the most polite of terms, it is disgraceful. ... However, this is America, and academic freedom and free speech is what sets us apart from the rest of the world. And I believe and hope most people will see this Web site for what it is--the opinions of a very, very far left person. And any sensible person would see this as a joke--a very bad joke."

The combination of relativism and disavowal here is classic--both men recognized that Christensen was promoting crackpot views, and they distanced themselves from those views as such; but both men also used the concept of academic freedom to absolve themselves of responsibility for determining whether such views may be legitimately advocated in the classroom, and also for asking the larger question of what it means that anti-intellectual extremists such as Christensen enjoy comfortable, tenured positions at taxpayers' expense.

ACTA Online covered the Christensen case when it broke in April 2005, as did KC Johnson, who took a close and revealing look at its partisan syllabus. Both noted the manner in which NC Wesleyan administrators relied on a bad faith evocation of academic freedom to refuse to respond to criticism; both noted, too, that professors' classroom conduct can and should be accountable in ways that NC Wesleyan administrators were not prepared to accept, implement, or ensure.

Christensen has since passed away, and the specific issues raised by her case have passed on with her. NC Wesleyan no longer offers "9-11; The Road to Tyranny," and students are no longer exhorted by her to accept propaganda as fact. But as the Kevin Barrett case shows, the problems posed by her class and her position remain--they were not unique to her, nor to her institution. Likewise, her institution's total inability to respond appropriately to her classroom proselytizing and its deep confusion about the obligations academic freedom imposes on teachers, were far from unique. UW's present predicament is representative of a much larger one; that predicament, in turn, revolves around inadequate hiring and review practices. When administrators attempt to mask this by declaring themselves to be champions of academic freedom, they do their institutions, not to mention the concept of academic freedom, a terrific disservice.

Posted by acta online at 07:27 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

"UW-Madison's easy decision"

ACTA has an op-ed in today's Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel on the current imbroglio at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Here's how it begins:

It's easy to understand why the University of Wisconsin-Madison chose to investigate the teaching of instructor and 9-11 conspiracy theorist Kevin Barrett.

Indeed, one can sincerely wonder why a university would hire someone who claims that the collapse of the World Trade Center was an "inside job" in the first place.

Fortunately for Barrett, UW-Madison apparently discovered that he is a fair teacher and does not indoctrinate his students. But, unfortunately, the administration's response since then has been remarkably tone deaf.

If the university does not reverse course - which it can, easily - the present melee will continue to escalate and, even worse, occur again.

Read the rest here.

Posted by cmitchell at 12:03 AM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

Reflections on ROTC

Writing for the Chronicle of Higher Education, Second Lt. John Renehan argues that it is not enough simply to have ROTC on campus--campus leaders must also set a tone that encourages undergraduates to register the importance of serving your country:

...for a swath of affluent and educated young people, the idea of military service is completely foreign, and was so before September 11, 2001, or the war in Iraq. That, more than risk aversion or political beliefs, is what is fundamentally at work in low service rates among college students. Military service is just not something that most college students--particularly those at elite campuses--seriously consider, and it has not been for some time.

The Selective Service once imposed the hardness of the wider world upon the mind of every male student (and upon the bodies of many). No more. Since the abolition of the peacetime draft in 1973, duty has become "duty" strictly a matter of personal choice, for men and women alike. And many now choose to see military service as, frankly, bizarre.

[...]

Such broad absence from service on the part of the country's elite cannot be justified by its opposition to the Iraq war. The wisdom of invading Iraq is irrelevant to the question of what we should do there now--and many people in both main political parties agree that a U.S. military presence in Iraq remains critical. What we have here is a bona fide national burden, and the privileged classes have largely excused themselves from it.

No recruiting effort, however heroic, can fundamentally change that. It can only be done by individuals, influenced by ideas, choosing to influence others--by persuasion or (most persuasive of all) by example.

The Solomon Amendment and its litigious aftermath have effectively framed the question of campus ROTC as a question of access (though much of the controversy surrounding Solomon has focussed on military recruiters at law schools, it's important to remember that the law covers ROTC as well). There are good, practical reasons for this--when access is what's being denied, as was increasingly the case before the Amendment became law, then access is what must be reinstated.

But access is not everything, and campus climates are enormously powerful, if amorphous, things. On many campuses today, a strong anti-military bias is fed by the faculty and is underscored by administrators' deep reluctance to allow the military to set foot on campus (Rumsfeld v. FAIR testified powerfully to the depth of that bias and to the breadth of that reluctance). Student-led anti-military protests abound, while campus-wide discussions of citizenship, civic duty, and service are virtually absent (in their place we find speech codes, sensitivity training, awareness education, and a host of other rituals and rules designed to encourage individuals to see themselves not as Americans with a duty to their country, but as members of more or less aggrieved groups that deserve reparation and special protection from those in power).

Are administrators likely to take up Renehan's challenge? No. But that just emphasizes the importance of his larger point.

Posted by acta online at 03:14 AM | Comments (10) | TrackBack

Conservative critics need not apply

Tenure protects--but not absolutely. SUNY Fredonia philosophy professor Stephen Kershnar found that out recently when he applied for promotion to full professor--and was turned down because, in the words of Fredonia president Dennis Hefner, he had made "deliberate and repeated misrepresentations of campus policies and procedure ... to the media" that "impugned the reputation of SUNY Fredonia."

Kershnar's crime? He was critical of affirmative action, he questioned academic attitudes toward conservatives, and he spoke out against a campus policy designed to root out and punish students who fail to report others' violations of the student conduct code. Kershnar expressed his views in a local newspaper column, an activity that, while wholly protected by both the First Amendment and by the AAUP's statements about academic freedom, earned him personal reprimands from Hefner, who once sent him an email informing him, "You need to start acting like a responsible member of this campus community."

Criticism is not misrepresentation, but Fredonia administrators have blurred the difference between the two in order to paint Kershnar--a critic whose opinions are protected expression--as a liar whose expressions are not protected at all.

FIRE has taken up Kershnar's case, which involves, among other things, an attempt by the university to compel Kershnar to submit all written work regarding the university to a committee for unanimous approval before publishing it. It's an outrageous and clearcut case, and it's one that should interest the AAUP. So far, though, only silence from that quarter....

UPDATE: More at InsideHigherEd.com.

Posted by acta online at 03:32 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

Fish on academic freedom

Stanley Fish takes up the Kevin Barrett case in the editorial pages of today's New York TImes, explaining what academic freedom is and how misunderstandings thereof have contributed to the public relations disaster that UW now faces as state legislators demand that Kevin Barrett be fired.

Fish begins with a quick parsing of the concept of academic freedom:

Mr. Barrett's critics argue that academic freedom has limits and should not be invoked to justify the dissemination of lies and fantasies. Mr. Barrett's supporters (most of whom are not partisans of his conspiracy theory) insist that it is the very point of an academic institution to entertain all points of view, however unpopular. (This was the position taken by the university's provost, Patrick Farrell, when he ruled on July 10 that Mr. Barrett would be retained: "We cannot allow political pressure from critics of unpopular ideas to inhibit the free exchange of ideas.")

Both sides get it wrong. The problem is that each assumes that academic freedom is about protecting the content of a professor's speech; one side thinks that no content should be ruled out in advance; while the other would draw the line at propositions (like the denial of the Holocaust or the flatness of the world) considered by almost everyone to be crazy or dangerous.

But in fact, academic freedom has nothing to do with content. It is not a subset of the general freedom of Americans to say anything they like (so long as it is not an incitement to violence or is treasonous or libelous). Rather, academic freedom is the freedom of academics to study anything they like; the freedom, that is, to subject any body of material, however unpromising it might seem, to academic interrogation and analysis.

Academic freedom means that if I think that there may be an intellectual payoff to be had by turning an academic lens on material others consider trivial--golf tees, gourmet coffee, lingerie ads, convenience stores, street names, whatever--I should get a chance to try. If I manage to demonstrate to my peers and students that studying this material yields insights into matters of general intellectual interest, there is a new topic under the academic sun and a new subject for classroom discussion.

In other words, academic freedom, according to Fish, is the freedom to choose topics of investigation. It is not the freedom to dispense with reasoned analysis, or to subscribe to crackpot theories in lieu of logical consideration. Academic freedom, for Fish, is the freedom to undertake courses of study; it is not the freedom to reach any and all conclusions.

Fish goes on to articulate a position on classroom conduct that resonates strongly with ACTA's own. Explaining "where the line between the responsible and irresponsible practice of academic freedom should always be drawn," Fish notes that

Any idea can be brought into the classroom if the point is to inquire into its structure, history, influence and so forth. But no idea belongs in the classroom if the point of introducing it is to recruit your students for the political agenda it may be thought to imply. ... It is perfectly possible to teach a viewpoint without embracing it and urging it. But the moment a professor does embrace and urge it, academic study has ceased and been replaced by partisan advocacy. And that is a moment no college administration should allow to occur.

At this point, Fish--himself a former administrator--delivers a procedural tutorial to UW officials with the aim of revealing to them how their misunderstanding of academic freedom has worsened their predicament at the precise point that they sought to resolve it:

Provost Farrell doesn't quite see it that way, because he is too hung up on questions of content and balance. He thinks that the important thing is to assure a diversity of views in the classroom, and so he is reassured when Mr. Barrett promises to surround his "unconventional" ideas and "personal opinions" with readings "representing a variety of viewpoints."

But the number of viewpoints Mr. Barrett presents to his students is not the measure of his responsibility. There is, in fact, no academic requirement to include more than one view of an academic issue, although it is usually pedagogically useful to do so. The true requirement is that no matter how many (or few) views are presented to the students, they should be offered as objects of analysis rather than as candidates for allegiance.

There is a world of difference, for example, between surveying the pro and con arguments about the Iraq war, a perfectly appropriate academic assignment, and pressing students to come down on your side. Of course the instructor who presides over such a survey is likely to be a partisan of one position or the other--after all, who doesn't have an opinion on the Iraq war?--but it is part of a teacher's job to set personal conviction aside for the hour or two when a class is in session and allow the techniques and protocols of academic research full sway.

This restraint should not be too difficult to exercise. After all, we require and expect it of judges, referees and reporters. And while its exercise may not always be total, it is both important and possible to make the effort.

Thus the question Provost Farrell should put to Mr. Barrett is not "Do you hold these views?" (he can hold any views he likes) or "Do you proclaim them in public?" (he has that right no less that the rest of us) or even "Do you surround them with the views of others?"

Rather, the question should be: "Do you separate yourself from your partisan identity when you are in the employ of the citizens of Wisconsin and teach subject matter--whatever it is--rather than urge political action?" If the answer is yes, allowing Mr. Barrett to remain in the classroom is warranted. If the answer is no, (or if a yes answer is followed by classroom behavior that contradicts it) he should be shown the door. Not because he would be teaching the "wrong" things, but because he would have abandoned teaching for indoctrination.

The advantage of this way of thinking about the issue is that it outflanks the sloganeering and posturing both sides indulge in: on the one hand, faculty members who shout "academic freedom" and mean by it an instructor's right to say or advocate anything at all with impunity; on the other hand, state legislators who shout "not on our dime" and mean by it that they can tell academics what ideas they can and cannot bring into the classroom.

All you have to do is remember that academic freedom is just that: the freedom to do an academic job without external interference. It is not the freedom to do other jobs, jobs you are neither trained for nor paid to perform. While there should be no restrictions on what can be taught--no list of interdicted ideas or topics--there should be an absolute restriction on appropriating the scene of teaching for partisan political ideals. Teachers who use the classroom to indoctrinate make the enterprise of higher education vulnerable to its critics and shortchange students in the guise of showing them the true way.

Among other things, Fish's analysis amounts to an acknowledgement that UW was right to investigate Barrett's fitness to teach the course, as well as a tacit recommendation that his teaching should be closely monitored, and that he should be fired if he crosses the line between educating and proselytizing. More broadly, Fish takes as a given what too many defenders of the academic status quo refuse to acknowledge: that there are teachers out there who do use the classroom to indoctrinate, and that there are administrators out there who are seriously ill-equipped to address that problem in any meaningful way when it does arise.

The Times' publication of this piece, written by one of the great old lions of the academic culture wars (recall that Fish chaired the English department at Duke during the years when it was making a serious bid to become the most politically and theoretically avant-garde department in the country), is highly significant. Perhaps the time has finally come for a national discussion about what academic freedom is, why it matters, what it protects, and, crucially, where its privileges end.

Posted by acta online at 04:30 AM | Comments (10) | TrackBack

Commission needs to regain focus

In response to the Commission on the Future of Higher Education's conciliatory and bloodless second draft, ACTA called on the Commission to rethink its course of action and to rework its recommendations--particularly when it comes to curricular issues. In a press release issued yesterday, ACTA president Anne Neal urged the Commissioners to stop focussing on appeasing the higher ed establishment and to refocus on what students learn:

FEDERAL COMMISSION ON HIGHER EDUCATION FORGETS ITS MISSION

ACTA Calls on Commission to Address What College Students Are Not Learning

WASHINGTON, DC (July 19, 2006)--In the words of the Secretary of Education, the federal Commission on the Future of Higher Education is tasked with "ensuring that America's system of higher education remains the finest in the world." According to the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, the second draft of the Commission's report on American colleges and universities--issued earlier this week--completely betrays this mandate.

"The only thing the Commission's latest draft ensures is that the academic establishment will not squeal too loudly," ACTA president Anne D. Neal said. "Unless the Commission regains a focus on what institutions are teaching and why it matters, it will have done the Secretary and the American people a disservice."

In its first draft, issued on June 26, the Commission noted with alarm the "lack of coherence and lax standards that often characterize the undergraduate curriculum." It pointed out the incredible number of universities that no longer require their students to take courses in American history, Western civilization, math, science, or even writing--problems ACTA documented in its acclaimed 2004 report The Hollow Core.

But the academic establishment responded with horror to the first draft. New York University president John Sexton called it "a disaster," Muhlenberg College president Peyton Helm labeled it "an astounding collection of some of the worst ideas for higher education," and the American Association of University Professors said it was "harshly critical of higher education."

In response, the Commission has removed curricular issues from its latest draft. ACTA believes, however, that if the Commission wishes to produce a report that will--in its own words--ensure that "our country gets what it needs from our higher education system," it must underscore the nature and importance of general education in a free society.

"In a time of global competition and conflict, transparency and assessments don't matter if the product itself is not worthy," Neal noted. "Access and completion rates are simply irrelevant if the education received is incoherent and fails to guarantee the common ground of training and outlook on which our society depends."

"Higher education's failure to address this bigger and broader public purpose is leaving our next generation of leaders unable to think deeply, or collectively, about permanent values or the future of civilization itself," she continued. "Instead of contributing to this failure, the Commission must boldly outline the public need for the academy to provide a core of common knowledge and common experience--a curriculum that prepares students for informed citizenship, diverse careers, and lifelong learning in a democratic society."

"The status quo in higher education is unacceptable," Neal concluded. "Colleges and universities receive millions in federal funds even as they are failing to graduate educated citizens. To fix this, the Commission must urgently call for a coherent core curriculum, a campus culture that fosters open debate, and an end to the existing federal requirements that undermine those standards."

The American Council of Trustees and Alumni is a national education nonprofit dedicated to academic freedom, academic quality, and accountability. ACTA boasts a nationwide network of alumni and trustees and has issued numerous reports on higher education including How Many Ward Churchills?, Intellectual Diversity: Time for Action, The Hollow Core, and Losing America's Memory: Historical Illiteracy in the 21st Century. For further information, contact ACTA at 202-467-6787.

Posted by acta online at 02:24 AM | Comments (10) | TrackBack

It takes guts not to write a gutted report

Has the Education Department's Commission on the Future of Higher Education been a waste of time? Based on the eviscerated second draft of its report, Candace de Russy says it has:

Anne, Charles, and George rightfully inveigh against the "gutting" and "softening" of the second draft of the Secretary of Education's Commission on the Future of Higher Education.

But this draft's regrettable dropping of focus on declining undergraduate education should not surprise us. There are too many higher education insiders serving on the commission, and it is not in their self-interest to demand serious curricular reform and an end to grade inflation as well as to show open-mindedness to innovative means for delivering higher education.

These insiders are now flexing their muscle in behalf of the status quo and emasculating the report in the name of seeking consensus--which I believe is what commission member Richard Vedder meant when he commented that "as we move to maximize support within the commission, we run the risk of making it more of a pablum, inoffensive document that says relatively little."

Thus it's the commission itself that ought to be gutted and re-constituted with members with (pardon the expression) real guts. Barring that, it is likely that this entire exercise will in the end do little or nothing to ameliorate higher education.

De Russy references comments by Anne Neal (who laments the manner in which the new draft abandons its initial focus on teaching and the curriculum), Charles Mitchell (who seconds Anne), and George Leef, who thinks colleges and universities have allowed a "beer and circuses" mentality to overtake education.

InsideHigherEd.com quotes Anne in its coverage of the new "sugar-coated" (that's Commissioneer Richard Vedder's word) draft:

...the first draft's focus on "important curricular issues--and their connection to the serious cultural illiteracy that the commission recognizes--are utterly supplanted by a studiously process-oriented focus on how to make colleges and universities more accessible, more affordable, and more accountable."

"In a time of global competition and conflict, transparency and assessments don't matter if the product is not worthy," Neal added. "Access and completion rates are simply irrelevant if the education received is incoherent and fails to guarantee the common ground of training and outlook on which our society depends. Yet the commission remains silent on these critical points."

Are the commissioners listening? Will they respond appropriately? Is De Russy correct that this is not a commission that can do the job with which it has been charged?

The second draft of the report pulls its punches because the first draft's uncompromising tone offended academic insiders. But this draft's capitulations are themselves offensive, and critics of academe are rightfully scornful of the Commission for yielding so easily to the demands--indeed, the sensibilities--of those insiders. It's time for the Commission to stop trying to accommodate viewpoints and feelings, to stop seeking a consensus that will only ever amount to an unsatisfactory set of compromises, and to produce an honest report that responds not to constituencies, but to the facts.

Posted by acta online at 03:06 AM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

ACTA addresses Kevin Barrett case

ACTA has written to the University of Wisconsin Board of Regents and selected administrators regarding the Kevin Barrett case, advising UW about how it can avoid future situations like this one by tightening up its hiring practices.

Here's the press release:

How Wisconsin Can Avoid Future Kevin Barrett Controversies

National Organization Advises Regents, Administrators

MADISON, WI, (July 18, 2006)--For over two weeks, the University of Wisconsin has been under fire thanks to UW-Madison instructor Kevin Barrett, who claims 9/11 was an "inside job" orchestrated by the Bush administration. In response, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni has written to UW's leaders to advise them on how to avoid similar embarrassment in the future while still respecting academic freedom.

"UW was right to investigate whether Barrett's extreme views polluted his classroom," ACTA president Anne D. Neal said. "Indeed, one can sincerely wonder how he was hired in the first place. ACTA is happy to recommend proactive changes so that UW never finds itself in such a situation again."

In a July 17 letter to UW's Board of Regents and several administrators, ACTA pointed out that by instituting some simple reforms, UW can prevent problems like the Barrett controversy. As ACTA notes in the letter, "While it is chilling to use political criteria to single out individual instructors for review, reviewing course offerings and content as part of a broader, established mechanism of quality assurance is an excellent practice." UW authorities "owe it to taxpayers, families, and students to guarantee that UW not only receives the public's tax dollars, but also deserves its trust," the letter continues.

The recommendations in ACTA's letter are drawn from its 2005 report Intellectual Diversity: Time for Action, which experts lauded for its sensitivity to academic freedom. They are also in line with recent actions by the interim chancellor of the University of Colorado at Boulder, who has called upon CU's deans to review their practices to make sure individuals with questionable scholarly practices are not hired or promoted. ACTA's recommendations include:

• Performing an institutional self-study of the classroom environment;
• Instituting post-tenure review of faculty;
• Assessing hiring and promotion practices to ensure that quality of research and teaching--not ideological litmus tests--are the criteria for job security;
• Incorporating intellectual diversity concerns in guidelines on teaching; and
• Including intellectual diversity issues on course evaluations.

As the letter points out, the recent occurrences at UW are not an aberration. In another report, How Many Ward Churchills?, ACTA has documented an abundance of politicized teaching on our nation's campuses. Examples include a Vassar College course on how "our culture covertly and overtly condones the abuse of women by their intimate partners," a Penn State professor who promises to promote "un-learning" on the part of his students, and a Davidson College course that requires students to put on a 15- to 20-minute skit on a topic such as "five ways to demonize an ethnic minority" or "more ways than one to be white."

"Surely UW wishes to avoid the type of headlines it has gotten recently," Neal noted. "By adopting ACTA's recommendations, the regents can do just that--while also protecting academic freedom and, most importantly, enhancing the education their students receive. I trust they will not delay."

The American Council of Trustees and Alumni is a national education nonprofit dedicated to academic freedom, academic quality, and accountability. ACTA boasts a nationwide network of alumni and trustees and has issued numerous reports on higher education including How Many Ward Churchills?, Intellectual Diversity: Time for Action, The Hollow Core, and Losing America's Memory: Historical Illiteracy in the 21st Century. For further information, contact ACTA at 202-467-6787

Posted by acta online at 11:54 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

UW prof argues that Kevin Barrett should not be fired

University of Wisconsin professor and campus rights advocate Donald Downs explains why he thinks Kevin Barrett should be allowed to teach Intro to Islam this fall despite his extremist beliefs about who really planned 9/11. "The main argument against retaining Barrett is that anyone who believes in this conspiracy lacks the competence to teach a class at a major university. But when the dust settles, some fundamental principles of academic freedom support the provost's decision," he writes;

First, Farrell's investigation of Barrett's course and previous lecturing experience indicated that Barrett, regardless of his beliefs concerning 9/11, would teach the course responsibly, and that students had rated him a decent teacher. If the relevant department (in this case, languages and cultures of Asia) had decided against offering Barrett the one-course contract in the first place because of its assessment of his scholarship and teaching, that would have been the department's choice to make, based on its own academic judgment. But that is not the situation that we confront.

Second, firing Barrett from his one-course contract for this fall in the face of political pressure would set a bad precedent. Indeed, it would constitute the first time in anyone's memory that the university fired an instructor--hired by a department through the normal channels--before the termination of his contract because of political pressures exerted on account of the instructor's views. Even those who agree with Barrett's strongest critics on substantive grounds--as we do--should pause before opening this Pandora's Box.

Not allowing Barrett to teach according to the limited terms of his contract would mean that members of the media and legislature could dictate who teaches and who gets fired based upon their agreement or disagreement with the conclusions certain teachers reach. Though universities are hardly infallible in making their hiring decisions, such a precedent would seriously compromise the wide-open pursuit of truth for which the university properly stands.

Conservatives in the legislature need to remember that the principle of academic freedom protects the right as well as the left. And for most of the last 15 years, it is the right that has needed protection.

Downs goes on to summarize UW's historical relationship to academic freedom, beginning with the university's installation of an unconstitutional speech code during the 1990s, moving through the successful campus movement to abolish that speech code, and culminating in examples of how unpopular political speech--such as the campus paper's publication of one of the infamous Mohammed cartoons last spring--has been defended at UW since then.

Downs overlooks UW's occasional failures to defend free expression on campus--last winter's debacle over the rights of RAs to hold Bible study in their rooms comes to mind--but his essay is nonetheless a strong and necessary statement of why, in cases such as Barrett's, it's so important to adhere to principle. Commenters responding to Downs' argument disagree heartily with him--their arguments are well worth considering, as well.

Posted by acta online at 12:47 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

Take 2

The Commission on the Future of Higher Education has issued a second draft of its report. Summarized at InsideHigherEd.com and available there also as a PDf download, the draft is a kinder, gentler version of the original, whose uncompromising tone so offended some that it was virtually impossible to have a constructive discussion about the report's actual recommendations.

Perhaps that softened tone will now make visible both the report's promise and its shortcomings. This draft focusses on the need to control the cost of college and to track student outcomes, to prepare students better for college and to ensure that they graduate once get there, to reform the financial aid system and to create a system for comparing the effectiveness of institutions. Ease of access, maximization of opportunity, and institutional accountability are the watchwords of this draft.

These things matter. But in emphasizing them the report sidesteps the difficult but pivotal question of what colleges actually teach their students, how undergraduate education is structured, and whether serious reform of the curriculum is needed in order to ensure that colleges really do graduate educated students. The report recommends innovative pedagogy (by which is seems to mean "the use of technology in teaching") and it also recommends increasing funding for science education. Concern is expressed about the numbers of students who graduate with marginal literacy, numeracy, and reasoning skills, but that concern is allowed to float free of any observations about how the current shape of undergraduate education--with its smorgasbord approach to course work, its rampant grade inflation, and its failure to define a solid core of knowledge that all students should have--selects for just this type of incapacity.

ACTA president Anne Neal has noted that the single most important thing the Commission can do is give a mandate to governors--and the trustees they appoint--to restore a genuinely substantive core undergraduate curriculum. It's distressing indeed to see draft two pay even less attention to this issue than the first draft did.

Posted by acta online at 05:00 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Academic Freedom 101

The case of Kevin Barrett, the University of Wisconsin adjunct lecturer whose plans to teach his unorthodox ideas have become the center of heated controversy, demonstrates how confused the American public is about academic freedom.

When word got out that Barrett believes the U.S. government staged the events of 9/11, and that he intends to bring his beliefs into his fall course on Islam, the outcry was swift and decisive. State legislators, the media, and the general public were all calling for Barrett to be fired. When he wasn't--when UW instead issued a statement upholding Barrett's academic freedom to teach as he sees fit--the outcry intensified.

State representative Steve Nass announced his plan to lobby for budget cuts to the UW system: "If the overpaid administrators at UW-Madison feel justified in defending Kevin Barrett, then their decision will make it that much easier for me to fight for greater administrative cuts for the UW in the next budget. They have academic freedom, but the taxpayers and the legislature have the power of the purse string."

And the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel ran an editorial arguing that academic freedom should not protect teachers like Barrett from being fired:

Kevin Barrett should not be allowed to teach at the University of Wisconsin-Madison - and it's not because a large swath of the population finds his contention on who authored the 9-11 terrorist attacks odious.

He should be barred because academic freedom doesn't mean teachers get to teach fiction as fact - even in a university.

For that, please see the blogosphere or subscribe to Conspiracy Theory Monthly. In a classroom, particularly one funded with tax dollars, the public should have a reasonable expectation that what's taught has fact and truth as foundation.

[...]

Provost Patrick Farrell concluded on Monday that Barrett and his theory are fit for the classroom.
It was the wrong decision.

It's about that word: "theory." We don't for a second believe that Barrett views it as such.

Barrett said on Monday that students in his class would spend one week studying a variety of viewpoints on the 9-11 attacks, including that they were "probably an American operation to launch a war on Islam countries." His "probably" here doesn't do much to assuage.

The view that Americans - or Israel, for that matter - perpetrated the 9-11 attacks is very real in the Muslim world. A Pew Global Attitudes Project survey this year found Muslims believe that Arabs didn't carry out the attacks. Knowing this has value.

What doesn't have value is teaching something as patently false as the idea that the Bush administration purposely killed the 9-11 victims - even if it is taught with the word "probably" acting as convenient caveat. This is tantamount to teaching gravity probably doesn't exist or that up probably is down.

Farrell said, "We cannot allow political pressure from critics of unpopular ideas to inhibit the free exchange of ideas."

Agreed. But Farrell apparently failed to recognize the fundamental issue: standards - for what's taught and who's teaching.

Wacky ideas at universities abound. If they are taught in the context of theories among many and that some are demonstrably false, they might have some utility. We aren't convinced by anyone's assurances to date - Barrett's or the university's - that this will be the context in which this 9-11-as-American-plot will be taught.

Not only should Barrett, after review, have not been allowed to teach this course, he shouldn't have been hired to do it in the first place. No freedom, including academic freedom, is absolute. There are limits.

We have many problems with how President Bush led this nation to war in Iraq, but making the leap that his administration murdered on 9-11 crosses a line.

The editorial is a complicated one, allowing outrage at the fact that Barrett was hired to license the suggestion that it is reasonable to fire teachers for holding bizarre views. These issues must be kept separate, however. The University of Wisconsin has an obligation to hire responsibly, but it also has an obligation to defend the academic freedom, not to mention the First Amendment rights, of those it does hire.

After some hemming and hawing, UW did meet its second obligation. But it does not seem to have met the first one. Barrett was the only candidate for the job, and his principal qualification seemed to be that he had gone to graduate school at UW and had once TA'd for the course in question; in other words, he appears to have been hired because he was there, not because he was the best qualified person for the job. He seems to have caught the University by surprise with his announcement of his beliefs (hence the University's questionable investigation of Barrett once it learned what those beliefs were). And UW seems to have upheld Barrett's academic freedom not because it really supports either his ideas or his intention to pass them on to students, but because supporting him was the lesser of two evils. Given the tight spot UW had gotten itself into, administrators there clearly decided that firing Barrett for his views--before he had ever set foot in the classroom, and while he was promising to encourage a diversity of viewpoints among his students--would have been far worse.

The problem here is not academic freedom itself. The problem is sloppy hiring. All university teachers should have the academic freedom to teach as they see fit. But not everyone deserves to be a university teacher, and not everyone can be trusted with the privilege of academic freedom. UW needs to tighten up its hiring practices, and it needs to take the hiring of adjunct lecturers just as seriously as it takes the hiring of tenure-track teachers. Otherwise, it fails the student--and the taxpayer--in a fundamental obligation to ensure that those it allows into the classroom are legitimately there.

More broadly, colleges and universities across the country should be learning by example here. UW's casual approach to temporary academic labor is hardly unique; it's a widespread practice to hire part-time teachers without formal searches, without serious review of those teachers' credentials or scholarship. This is particularly true of "locals," who are often alums. But alumni status is not a professional qualification, and should not be used as a proxy for one.

The Kevin Barrett case is a cautionary tale about personnel procedures in an academic labor market that is increasingly organized around part-time workers (upwards of 60% of college teachers are not on the tenure-track). It is not a cautionary tale about academic freedom per se, and it should not be confused for one.

Keeping these things straight will, among other things, help protect the University from not only the reputational damage its misguided hiring has brought it, but also from the financial punishments of a state legislature that is tired of seeing taxpayers' money subsidize serious mismanagement.

Posted by acta online at 03:47 AM | Comments (11) | TrackBack

Goodnight, moon

What's worse -- a tasteless flyer featuring the bethonged buttocks of undergraduate men, or a provost who censors the flyer?

That's the question at North Carolina State, where a student journalism recruitment flyer was removed from the first-year orientation packet by a provost who could not stomach the idea that incoming freshmen would be exposed to the exposed men--whose nether parts are decorated with shamrocks in honor of St. Patrick's day.

Student journalists at the NC State campus paper handled the issue beautifully, meeting with administrators and reaching a compromise that allows the paper to continue to use the flyer while respecting the provost's concern that the paper's recruitment methods were too cheeky. The flyers will be included in future versions of the packet, but stickers--paid for by the NC State administration--will cover the controversial areas. The stickers will direct interested students to the Technician website, where they can read about the controversy and find out how to become involved in campus journalism.

Posted by acta online at 07:23 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Kettle responds to pot

At InsideHigherEd.com, Mark Bauerlein takes up the problem of academics' resistance to outside criticism, focussing particularly on their bad faith tendency to deny the validity of the very sorts of language-based critique they themselves popularized--and politicized--not too long ago:

Both camps would agree, however, that the disclosure of assumptions and biases in language does apply to certain contexts, especially those in which an institution weighs heavily upon the utterances. When the protocols of communication are strict, when a statement reflects a speaker's knowledge and legitimacy, when misstatements violate a group's sense of mission, when entry into the discourse requires a long and regulated preparation by the entrant--such settings are "overdetermined," and they need detailed analysis and thick description. The terms are loaded and the topics authorized. Statements impart norms as well as ideas, mores as well as referents. The expressions licensed there reinforce the institution and echo its rationale. The subtext is dynamic, and if we don't analyze it, then we do, indeed, break our promise to critique.

For this reason, it has been astonishing to watch the professors respond to indictments leveled recently by conservative, libertarian, and First Amendment figures against academic practice and politics. These figures cited voter registrations, campaign contributions, and occasional acts of oppression, but most of the time the first exhibit of bias and illiberalism was a sample of institutional language. Scholarly articles such as a 2003 study of the "conservative personality" that found fear and aggression at the heart of conservatism ("Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition," Psychological Bulletin. May 2003); course descriptions such as those gathered by American Council of Alumni and Trustees in a report issued last month; speech codes targeted by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education; paper titles culled by Frederick Hess and Laura LoGerfo from the last meeting of the American Educational Research Association ... these formed the evidence. They served well because of their patent absurdity, or because of their offense to public taste, or their adversarial dogma (anti-American, anti-capitalist, etc.).

But while the manifest content had an immediate impact, sometimes entering national circulation as a reviled token (e.g., "little Eichmanns"), many claimed a deeper meaning for them. In a word, they were offered as symptomatic expressions, an index of the values, norms, biases, and interests of academics. Conservatives and others presented them as precisely the kind of language packed with "linguistic assumptions," performing subtextual feats, and ripe for socio-political analysis.

And yet, how have the professors responded? Not by taking up the critical challenge and carrying out the analysis. Not by bouncing the samples off of the institution in which they appeared. Instead, they shot the messenger. They declared the samples isolated and un-representative, or they denied to them the symptoms alleged by the critics. The course description wasn't a fair stand-in for the course itself, they protested. Ward Churchill's post-9/11 rant was an aberration. The conference paper title was just a way to garner an audience, so let's not confuse it with the real substance of the paper. In sum, they put the most benign construction on the samples. That turned the allegations back upon the people who cited them, David Horowitz, Anne Neal, and the rest, who were cast as sinister crazies pushing a vile political agenda.

One can understand the professors' defensiveness, but to let it squelch the exercise of a practice that they have at other times wielded so boldly is a breach of their own ideals. Have they lived so long and so closely to "social justice," "social change," "queer," "whiteness," and "gender equality" that they do not recognize them as loaded terms? Have they imbibed the political currents of the campus so thoroughly that they regard a polemical phrasing in a course description as merely a lively description? By their own instruction, we should regard the widespread attention to race, gender, and their social construction as emanating from a world view and signaling an ideological commitment. When Ward Churchill's notorious speech made headlines, the professors were correct to cite his First Amendment rights and reprove those calling for his job. But as more information came to light, and his political attitudes seemed to bear a closer relation to his scholarship, academic doctrine demanded that the institution that rewarded him be reviewed. Roger Bowen, general secretary of the American Association of University Professors, has assured the Commission on the Future of Higher Education that "Faculty members are accountable for their work in many ways," including peer review of scholarship and grant applications and annual departmental review for salary and promotion. What, then, is the relationship between Churchill's high ascent in the profession and his discredited writings? Humanities and social science professors work backward from institutional statements to the culture of the institution itself all the time. Why exempt academic language from the process?

The academic defense comes down to this: conservatives and libertarians read too much into bits and pieces of language--an ironic turnabout, given that they used to make the same charge against literary theorists 20 years ago. Tim Burke, responding to the ACTA report, chooses the term "Eurocentric" as a case in point. While ACTA's report selected a course description containing the term as an instance of bias, Burke replied, "I'll let them in on a little secret: it can also be just a plain-old technical term for historiographical models that argue that modern world history has primarily been determined by factors that are endogamous to Europe itself." So it can, but even if we accept that as one meaning of Eurocentric, it doesn't erase the occasions when, as Burke concedes, "the term is also used as a fairly dumb epithet by nitwitted activists." That is precisely one of the dangers of loaded terms. They can function neutrally or tendentiously, and when pressed the users can always fall back upon claims of innocence.

Bauerlein concludes by reminding academics that their credibility rests with themselves, and that their responses to outside criticism are, too often, self-discrediting:

Academics already have a credibility problem when discussing their own practices, and if they wish to face down their many critics, they need to start extending those criticisms by themselves. Public observers realize, however reluctantly, that the best people to conduct that examination are the professors themselves, if only they will stop acting so proprietary. If academics don't assume the lead, then they will find their credibility falling still further, having revised one of their favorite dicta to their own advantage--"a ruthless criticism of everything existing," everything, that is, but their own.

It's good to see Bauerlein stepping back from the local fray of specific cases and offering a broader view of the dynamics of debate about higher education. It's an invitation to a new and better mode of debate--one that is less polarized, in which academics are less defensive, less dependent on ad hominem attack and political caricature, and more willing to scrutinize their own ways and means. It's an invitation to academics, in other words, to exercise their academic freedom in a way that is urgently needed right now: to criticize the terms upon which academic discourse, academic procedure, and academic pedagogy currently exist, and to work from that criticism toward an academy that does a better job of realizing the ideal of free inquiry and responsible teaching.

For more on academic reactions to ACTA's report, How Many Ward Churchills?, see ACTA Online's May archive.

Posted by acta online at 05:34 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Nonsense in New Hampshire

The Concord Monitor explains why it's petty and small-minded and--it goes without saying--conservative to be concerned about how Dartmouth's Alumni Association has reworked its election procedures in undemocratic ways:

Although the proposed electoral changes themselves are arcane, we are more than willing to acknowledge that people are all riled up about them. We can't help but wonder, though, whether this conservative angst isn't a bit myopic: While all this has been going on at Dartmouth, has anybody noticed that the Bush administration has assembled a vast centralized security state that systematically violates Americans' civil liberties, all the while asserting that executive power may not be checked by Congress, the courts or the press?

Now there's something that ought to truly outrage those of conservative persuasion.

The article goes on to recite a litany of complaints about the Bush administration:

Warrantless wiretapping and surveillance of other types of records on a large scale is only part of the story. Bush asserts the right to hold hundreds of 'enemy combatants' indefinitely at Guantanamo Bay without affording them recourse to court review; to disregard at his discretion legal prohibitions on torture of prisoners; to ignore laws passed by Congress or interpret them as he sees fit; and, contrary to the First Amendment as it has historically been interpreted, to prosecute the press for publishing government secrets.

The conclusion to this illogical tirade is appropriately snide:

although we can understand conservatives' desire to stamp out the last vestige of American liberalism by taking control of the universities, we can't help thinking that their time might be better spent reining in the gross overreaching of rightwing Washington. After all, someday a Democrat might get elected president again. As Norquist notes: 'These are all the powers you don't want Hillary Clinton to have.'"

ACTA has been covering the Dartmouth Alumni Association's attempts to impede the election of dark horse trustee candidates as well as its officers' arrogant decision to extend their own terms by deferring the date when they would either be re-elected or voted out of office. The implications of the Association's actions for Dartmouth governance are clear enough, and, if Dartmouth matters, it matters too to follow the activities of its associated alumni.

To suggest that autocratic reworkings of procedure--reworkings that interfere with genuinely democratic election practices at both the association and trustee level--are beneath notice because there are larger forces at work in the world is illogical. To suggest that only conservatives would be myopic enough to care about what is happening at Dartmouth is to suggest that liberals and centrists have no stake in democracy. To suggest that challenging the Association's actions is to assist the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy not only in ending liberalism but also in staging a coup over American higher education is to fail completely to grasp what liberalism is.

Let's hope the Concord Monitor does not speak for the people of Concord.

Posted by acta online at 08:27 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack