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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 July 15, 2006 03:47 AM
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Comments
I believe this wild conspiracy mongering springs, at least in part, from intense terror that people can find no other way of addressing with emotional equilibrium. Americans are perhaps the most decent, compassionate, and giving people on the planet. It is a hell of a lot easier to fantasize that the United States is the greatest threat to the world, as opposed to facing reality. The reality of religious fanatics killing thousands at a shot and hacking heads off regularly on tape is not something many people -- including Kevin Barrett -- have the courage or intellect to face.
There is also the added pleasure of attacking people they hate with equal intensity, especially those whose political views are different from their own. Hence, between venting political hatred and serving as a means of not facing the real threat to world peace, these wild conspiracy theories will not be going away -- certainly not in the academy.
Just one dog's two cents...
Posted by: Federal Dog at July 15, 2006 09:05 AM
I agree that colleges and universities should be more careful in their hiring of adjuncts (and in hiring and tenure decisions for tenure-track people). However, it's hard to see how they can devote as much care to the decision to hire an adjunct as to hiring a tenure-track person. There's simply not as much information, and there's not enough time. A tenure-track hiring decision probably involves hundreds of man-hours. A tenure decision involves many dozens of hours. At least, that's the way it should be -- and is, in my personal experience.
A better solution might be, in the case of someone like Barrett, where it becomes clear that a mistake was made, to honor the payment in the contract -- I don't see how they can get around that -- but not to let the person actually go through with teaching the course. Not an ideal solution, to be sure.
Posted by: Michael Kellman at July 15, 2006 11:26 AM
Here's an answer to Michael's problem: stop using adjuncts. Only hire people full time, and quit exploiting your workforce.
Working conditions in academia are far worse than at Wal-Mart or any of the other places academics spend all their time bitching about.
Posted by: Winston Smith at July 16, 2006 02:43 PM
Is it possible to stop using adjuncts, or desirable? I doubt that it's desirable to stop completely, but I agree that as they are being used now, they are being exploited (and allowing themselves to be exploited). I don't think it's good for education.
I should add that there's a big distinction in my mind between non-tenure track full time employees, decently paid with benefits, and part-time adjuncts who get paid minimal amounts per course on an ad-hoc, part-time, temporary basis.
Posted by: Michael Kellman at July 17, 2006 12:40 PM
Most adjuncts that I know are paid a per class rate, usually somewhere around the $2,000 mark, though it can be up to $3,000 on the West Coast.
If we postulate the usual 3-3 teaching load, that means that they are making about $12-$18,000 a year, without benefits of any kind, of course.
Compare this to the average starting pay of an assistant professor in the humanities, which is about $40K, perhaps a couple of thousand more.
That's hardly equal work for equal pay, and you can't tell me that advising and going to meetings are worth an addition $22-$28,000 a year.
Plus, the most labor-intensive courses are the ones foisted off on the adjuncts.
As for it being desirable to stop using them, why wouldn't it be? Beyond helping the university to artifically balance its budget, I'm not sure what good adjuncting does. It's bad for the students, it's bad for the adjuncts, and it's often bad for the departments, though they often don't realize this, because they are too busy holding on to their precious 3-3 teaching loads and their waivers from teaching the less-desirable courses.
I don't know many non-tenure track, full-time employees who are paid decently and given benefits. The university has no need to create such positions, when they can hire 2-3 adjuncts to do the work at a fraction of the cost.
Posted by: Winston Smith at July 17, 2006 04:34 PM
My statement about "non-tenure track full time employees, decently paid with benefits", comes from experience in the science departments at the university where I work. Some of the courses e.g. organizing and/or teaching the lab component of large courses is done by people exactly as I described, with full medical and retirement benefits, and salaries in the same ballpark, higher or lower, as an assistant professor. It's actually not easy to get people who will do a decent job, reliably, for less. As far as I know, none of the lecture courses in the department where I teach are handled by low-paid part-time adjuncts.
As for adjuncts sometimes being desirable? Sure, why not. Sometimes you want to have a course temporarily in some topical area without devoting a full tenure-track line.
On the whole, I don't think it's a good idea to have adjuncts teaching the regular survey courses. It leads to all kinds of problems, sooner or later.
To those who are actually working for $12 - $18K / yr without benefits, I would say, get out as fast as you can and get a life, unless this is just a hobby.
Posted by: Michael Kellman at July 18, 2006 05:53 PM
I think things are completely different in the sciences than they are in the humanities, both in terms of the use and pay of adjuncts and in terms of the need for people to teach perhaps one highly specialized course on a semi-regular basis. (And in terms of the rigor of your profession versus the almost ridiculous ease of mine, but that's another argument all together.)
In the humanities, adjuncts almost never teach a specialized course. There's no way the professors would stand for having an upper-division course given to a mere adjunct, particularly if it meant that the professor would have to teach--God forbid!--one of the lower-division courses typically relegated to the adjuncts.
In every school at which I've taught, composition, for example, is almost entirely taught by adjuncts. Adjuncts also teach many of the intro to lit and survey courses, but those are the "special" adjuncts, and those courses are viciously fought over, because they are such a welcome break from composition.
I've worked at many places--not major research universities, mind you--where the professors never even see freshmen.
It's really, really bad.
Posted by: Winston Smith at July 19, 2006 01:19 PM
Winston -- it sounds like we live in different worlds, and I'm pretty fortunate. (Except I've done my share of the freshmen -- as I said, none of the lecture courses are handled by low-paid adjuncts -- that might seem like a misfortune to some people, some of the students in fact! but I'm not complaining.)
I hope you're not stuck in the adjunct cycle, but if you are, please heed my advice and think about getting out! I've known others who've done it, and they don't have regrets.
Posted by: Michael Kellman at July 19, 2006 04:48 PM
Yeah, I often wish I'd gone into the sciences. If not for a high school chemistry course taught by a coach who knew nothing (to reference Erin's other blog), I might have gone that route.
But he killed science for me, and I've only just recently begun to branch out (I do a lot of cognitive stuff with literature).
I am, indeed, in the adjunct cycle, and looking for ways out. Problem is, the Ph.D. makes me overqualified for jobs that don't require years of experience doing something else, and I'm not qualified for the jobs that want years of experience.
But I keep applying to anything that looks hopeful . . .
Maybe I should create an Invisible Adjunct II blog. I certainly have enough stories to tell.
Posted by: Winston Smith at July 21, 2006 02:34 PM
I've known others who got out of the adjunct cycle.
Have you considered trying to get a job at a good private high school teaching advanced courses to good students? I know someone who got out of the adjunct cycle into business (via a degree in computer science, it must be said), who was offered such a job. With decent pay, benefits, the chance to teach bright motivated students (not the dregs), it sounded pretty appealing.
I'm sure there must be a way out, with time and effort. I've seen people who stick to the adjunct route no matter what, it's pretty sad, especially when they start to get older.
Good luck to you!
Posted by: Michael Kellman at July 22, 2006 01:15 PM
Prof. Barrett is a hero.He has the civic courage to voice his opinion...this is America and the last time I checked we still have our 1st Amendment rights to free speech. You should hold him in high regard for his courage to question authority of an administration who lied to take our country and our soldiers to war. Why haven't we caught Osama and why did we stop trying to find him? How did 19 passports magically appear in the rubble of the towers the next day? I believe Prof. Barrett is on to something and we must have the civic right to ask these questions without fear of retalliation.
Posted by: Trude at November 23, 2006 01:19 PM