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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 on July 10, 2006 at July 10, 2006 05:34 AM
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