ACTA's Must-Reads

« July 2006 | Main | September 2006 »

Baruch disses freshman academic freedom

Baruch College, like many colleges in this country, builds a mandatory reading assignment into its freshman orientation activities. The idea is that all incoming freshmen will read a particular book the summer before coming to college, and that discussion of the book will form a major part of orientation and even, at some schools, of the first-year collegiate experience. The rationale is one of intellectual community; such assignments are becoming ever more common because, in an era of high attrition on the one hand and intense competition for students on the other, schools imagine that staging students' inaugural academic encounter offers a way to establish a warm but rigorous intellectual tone for the coming four years.

Such reading assignments have come under fire in recent years; in 2002, the University of North Carolina assigned Michael Sells' Approaching the Qu'ran: The Early Revelations--and got sued for its trouble. The following year, UNC assigned Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed--and again found itself in the midst of a scandal about the overtly lefty choices it was making in its decisions about how to introduce freshmen to college-level discourse. The basic take-away lesson for observers of UNC's unhappy experiences with its freshman reading program was that schools should be aware that the choices they make in these programs really do send a strong message and set a strong tone, and that schools should therefore be wary of continually choosing books that present the same basic perspective from one year to the next; the more nuanced take-away lesson was that while schools should not shy away from assigning controversial and even polemical readings, they should work hard to ensure that the handling of those readings by discussion leaders is fair and balanced.

Baruch College appears not to have taken this particular message on board. Yesterday's press release from ACTA explains:

BARUCH COLLEGE FRESHMEN FIND INDOCTRINATION, NOT ORIENTATION

NEW YORK, (August 30, 2006)--As first-year students arrive this week at Baruch College, they are getting their first lesson--in indoctrination, not orientation. Baruch's mandatory freshman reading program leaves them little room to disagree with the views of an author who claims the United States is "addicted to war." Baruch's president has ignored the request of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni to address the problem.

"Freshmen at Baruch are not getting what they deserve," noted ACTA president Anne D. Neal. "In their very first assignment, instead of teaching them how to think, Baruch is telling them what to think."

This year, all freshmen at Baruch are required to read the book War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. The book's author, Chris Hedges, claims that the United States is "addicted to war." On an official website, Baruch supplies questions on which it encourages students and faculty to base their reading and discussion. Many include politicized statements and then call on students to explain why they agree--without giving them any chance to differ.

One weighted question, for example, asks students to describe what "distortions in our democracy have already taken place" since 9/11, requiring students to accept as settled truth that such "distortions" have occurred.

Another notes Hedges' discussion of humility and compassion. Students are then directed to list ways America has "moved away from these virtues in the past decade."

"It is standard procedure for professors to present a thought-provoking view in a question and then ask students to agree or disagree," Neal said. "But these questions leave students no room to disagree. The picture they paint of Baruch's freshman reading program is a troubling one indeed."

After receiving an inquiry from a concerned alumnus, ACTA wrote privately to Baruch president Kathleen M. Waldron on August 17, asking her to take immediate action to address these concerns. She has not responded, and the questions are still posted online.

As ACTA's letter points out, Baruch's use of such one-sided questions ignores its students' academic freedom. The American Association of University Professors' 1915 "Declaration of Principles" warns faculty against "taking unfair advantage of the student's immaturity by indoctrinating him with the teacher's own opinions before the student has had an opportunity fairly to examine other opinions upon the matters in question, and before he has sufficient knowledge and ripeness of judgment to be entitled to form any definitive opinion of his own."

"The AAUP's statement surely was written with college freshmen in mind," Neal concluded. "We hope Baruch will remember that academic freedom is not only a right, but also a responsibility."

Citing its report Intellectual Diversity: Time for Action, ACTA urged Baruch to live up to its academic obligations by taking a number of steps such as:

--A self-study of the political environment in the classroom;
--A public call for more balance in panels and lecture series;
--Review of hiring and promotion practices to ensure that quality of research and teaching--not ideological litmus tests--are the criteria for job security; and
--Inclusion of intellectual diversity concerns in faculty teaching guidelines and student course evaluation forms.

The American Council of Trustees and Alumni is a national education nonprofit dedicated to academic freedom, academic quality, and accountability. ACTA has a network of trustees and alumni around the country, including those from the City University of New York. ACTA has issued numerous reports on higher education including A Failure to Set High Standards: CUNY's General Education Requirements, 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.

Perhaps publicity will do what a polite, private appeal would not.

UPDATE: Baruch has silently altered its study questions. Sometimes victories are very quiet--but they are victories nonetheless.

Posted by acta online at 08:49 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Parsing the culture wars, contd.

InsideHigherEd.com's recent two-part series on the academic culture wars evinces two interlocking types of bad faith. As I noted in my last post, Colby College professor Joseph Reisart denies the existence of internal political problems in academe in order to outline a political gap between the academy and the public; he both admits the academy has become a bastion of leftist thought and denies that this poses any problem either for conservatives who wish to become academics or for the range and breadth of research conducted in the academy.

Donald Lazere, for his part, simply assumes a liberal academe whose duty it is to challenge the status quo of a conservative American culture. In pronouncements such as "we liberal scholars have on our side the central role in that tradition of dissent and resistance to the authority of governments, churches, the wealthy, and majority opinion," Lazere equates scholarship with liberalism and assumes that membership in the academy guarantees a particular politics; likewise, he equates both non-academic institutions and two of academic leftism's favorite straw men--the greedy rich and the misguided masses--with a conservative authority in need of questioning.

The AAUP associates academic freedom with the "search for truth," noting that "freedom in research is fundamental to the advancement of truth." It further notes that the rights of the teacher to teach must be balanced by obligations to respect students' freedom to learn. But in framing academia as a political pole whose members exert temporizing pressure on American institutions and on the American people, Lazere works from the assumption that academic freedom amounts to the duty to differ politically from the American majority.

David French explains the problem with this formulation in his own reflections on Lazere's essay:

It is fair enough to grant scholars a bit of deference in their chosen fields of study, but to go beyond that, to then grant the community of scholars a special place as a class of dissenters is just too much. What is it about 10 years of expertise in a particular field of the humanities that grants a person any greater knowledge or insight into such things as economics, religion, and war and peace? Does a community of "dissenters" really help us arrive at truth and justice, or do they simply reinforce each others existing biases and prejudices? And how is that such a community can be sure that its ideas have merit when they are rarely tested by dissenters within their own community? Enough students have sat through English classes where teachers rail against corporate business practices they know less about than the average CPA to know that the community of dissenters is often simply ignorant and ideological.

Lazere's essay masquerades as an even-handed attempt to unite (liberal) academics and their (conservative) critics in a common scholarly cause: "Cannot conservative and liberal scholars at least join in endorsing these general principles [of "academic expertise, autonomy, and the role of higher education as a Socratic gadfly"] to the body politic, while scrupulously addressing the difficulties in implementing them, through civil dialogue? And shouldn't some of the foundations, professional organizations, or government agencies that have channeled their resources into partisan battles in the culture wars be willing to sponsor a bipartisan task force pursuing such a dialogue in quest of resolutions to these problems?" But his refusal to admit that there are genuine, largely unacknowledged problems with ideological corruption within academe, combined with his contemptuous insistence that non-academic critics have no business holding academic practice or culture accountable, renders that masquerade transparent indeed.

Consider the first two paragraphs of Lazere's essay:

One obstacle to reasonable public and scholarly dialogue on the alleged political biases of liberal or leftist professors has been the tendency of David Horowitz, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, and many of their allies to fall into various versions of the ad populum fallacy, to the effect that there is something wrong with professors because they are out of step with the majority of the American people, who (at least in public institutions) pay their salary through taxes. Thus Larry Mumper, the Republican introducing Horowitz's "Academic Bill of Rights" in the Ohio legislature, asked in an interview with The Columbus Dispatch, "Why should we, as fairly moderate to conservative legislators, continue to support universities that turn out students who rail against the very policies that their parents voted us in for?" The implication is that professors and their students should tailor their political views to follow the latest public opinion polls or election results.

Politicians like Mumper, along with many media blowhards and members of the public who revile professors, appear to have little more familiarity with the nature of humanistic scholarship than they do with that of brain surgery -- though they would not presume to tell brain surgeons how they should operate, even in a tax-supported hospital. The former field is at the disadvantage that it addresses public issues on which everyone does and should have an opinion. There is a difference, however, between just any such opinions and those derived from standards of professional accreditation (upwards of 10 years graduate study for a Ph.D. and 7 more for tenure), systematic scholarship, and academic discourse. That discourse is based on the principles of reasoned argument, rules of evidence and research procedures, wide reading and experience, an historical perspective on current events, open-minded pursuit of complex, often-unpopular truths, and openness to diverse viewpoints. (For a fuller, excellent discussion of the differences between popular and academic discourse, see "From Ideology to Inquiry," by Anne Colby and Thomas Ehrlich). This also means that academic discourse should stand independent from government pressure and public opinion, in a similar manner to the ideal of a free, independent press. That is why taxpayers should be willing to support the autonomy of the academy, within reasonable limits, whether or not it agrees with their personal views.

Lazere's commenters do a thorough job of pointing out where logical fallacy, ad hominem attack, and wishful thinking undermine his vision of a "bipartisan task force" that will instruct the public in how to maintain a properly respectful distance from academe; the passage cited here exemplifies the tonal and perceptual problems with his unconvincing attempt to build bridges. What they don't note, however, is something even more damning: His misleading use of sources.

In the second paragraph cited above, Lazere cites Anne Colby and Thomas Ehrlich, both senior scholars at the Carnegie Endowment for the Advancement of Teaching, in support of his claim that academic discourse differs substantially from popular discourse, and should therefore be respected as an autonomous site of dissent by the taxpaying public. The impression he creates is that of an uncomplicated bolstering: Lazere is doubly right in his argument because Colby and Ehrlich have argued along similar lines; he is not alone in his foundational premises, and must therefore be correct in his conclusions. But clicking on the link InsideHigherEd.com has supplied to this piece reveals an entirely different picture.

Colby and Ehrlich do acknowledge that there are some differences to be found between academic styles of discourse and more colloquial ones--but their understanding of the nature of those differences, as well as their take on what those differences mean for the well-being of higher education, is quite far removed from Lazere's.

The authors begin their essay with an anecdote about how a question asked at a talk they delivered revealed to them their own unexamined ideological bias:

Two years ago--before David Horowitz, the Academic Bill of Rights, and other pressure points on political and ideological bias made the topic such a hot one--we were speaking at a national conference in Washington about a study that we are now just finishing. The study is called the Political Engagement Project and examines 21 undergraduate courses and programs that aim to strengthen the understanding, the skills, and the motivation needed to be politically engaged citizens.

As a way to make the work in these courses and programs come alive, we told what we thought was a compelling story about a Duke University student in one of the programs, called Service Opportunities in Leadership. The student interned in a New York City textile workers union, and subsequently helped organize Students Against Sweatshops at Duke, which led to a new code of conduct for Duke licensees, the first in the country.

We finished the talk at the national conference that included this tale, turned to questions, and were faced with this one at the outset. "What," the questioner asked, "does the Duke program do to ensure that conservative students have opportunities if they want to work in businesses or with conservative political or Christian organizations for their summer internships? Why," the questioner went on, "did you refer only to a liberal group and not a conservative one?"

The question was a good one, and it forced us to stop and think, not just on the podium, but for some time thereafter. Fortunately, the program leader was in the audience, and she was able to say that she did make special efforts to ensure a range of internship opportunities, including some with conservative organizations. The question caught us off guard, however, and caused us to reflect hard on issues of ideological and political bias. Without intending to do so, we had implied that working in a union and protesting sweatshops were ideological prototypes of the kinds of political engagement that we were promoting. We should have used some other examples as well, and we should have explicitly addressed the issues involved in encouraging student political engagement without promoting particular ideologies or political positions.

Colby and Ehrlich go on to reflect on the importance of balancing academic freedom against the obligation to ensure that one's biases and beliefs do not distort or damage one's ability to explore ideas or to teach students. While they acknowledge the individual and institutional autonomy built into the concept of academic freedom, they also note that professors have a moral and pedagogical obligation to expose students to a range of views that is wider then their own:

In good teaching, faculty members back up their claims and assertions and take seriously alternative points of view for which a credible case can be made. In a course on U.S. immigration policy, for example, a professor may offer evidence that undocumented workers in this country do not take jobs away from U.S. citizens and legal aliens, but he or she should also expose students to the views of economists who have a different view. The responsibility to teach in conformity with standards of academic discourse also means that students are free to put forward ideas that conflict with positions taken by the faculty member, and those ideas will be judged on their merits.

Far from sounding the separatist, superior note that Lazere sounds in his essay, Colby and Ehrlich reflect at length on the importance of reasoned, respectful debate both within and beyond the academy. Far from simply telling non-academic critics of academe to lay off, Colby and Ehrlich meditate on the manner in which unexamined professorial bias--which they recognize tends to be liberal bias--can shut down all kinds of necessary and fruitful dialogue among all kinds of people. They even make a range of valuable non-legislative recommendations for promoting dialogue on campus and for cultivating awareness of the importance of intellectual diversity. These include alerting incoming students to the educational value of debate and exposure to new ideas, holding discussion panels that feature speakers from a range of viewpoints, inviting speakers who are themselves exemplary models of communication and alliance-formation, and insisting that faculty anchor their teaching in "norms of open mindedness, intellectual pluralism, and civility." They are eloquent and resourceful in their discussion of how college teachers can do this.

Ehrlich and Colby sound, in short, a lot more like ACTA than they do like Lazere. Hence their conclusion: "It is absolutely essential that we not take the easy road and eliminate or even dampen discussion of political issues on our campuses. To the contrary, we need to promote thoughtful inquiry about those issues. We need to prepare our students to grapple with complex public-policy concerns. They will be the stewards of our democracy." It's too bad Lazere did not acknowledge the issues Colby and Ehrlich address; his misleading reference to them only makes his own argument ring more hollow.

To read about ACTA's efforts to promote intellectual diversity on campus, see ACTA's December 2005 report, Intellectual Diversity: Time for Action.

Posted by acta online at 01:15 PM | Comments (37) | TrackBack

Parsing the culture wars

Last week, Inside Higher Ed published two interlocking pieces on academic politics, "Rethinking the Culture Wars -- 1," by University of Tennessee English professor Donald Lazere, and "Rethinking the Culture Wars -- 2," by Colby College professor Joseph Reisart. Written by a staunch self-proclaimed liberal and an equally staunch self-proclaimed conservative, the articles appear at first to be offering a sort of "point / counterpoint" take on the present state of the endlessly involuted ongoing argument about the political climate of contemporary academe. First impressions in this case--as in so many cases--are misleading, however. Far from offering a rich clash of viewpoints, the articles actually operate in tandem to send the message that all is well with the academic status quo, and that the conservative critique of academe is the trumped-up issue of politically motivated whiners with an axe to grind.

Lazere's essay, which mentions ACTA, defends the notion that academics do not need to be accountable to the public because they are smarter and better educated than the public is: "academic discourse should stand independent from government pressure and public opinion, in a similar manner to the ideal of a free, independent press. That is why taxpayers should be willing to support the autonomy of the academy, within reasonable limits, whether or not it agrees with their personal views." Lazere's essay drips with condescension toward both non-academics and toward those who dare to criticize academic ways and means; it also drips with peculiar and telling leaps of logic that betray his underlying agenda. His commenters dismantle his argument quite handily, as does David French at Phi Beta Cons. I'll have more to say about Lazere's article in a subsequent post; for now, I'd like to look more closely at Reisart's essay.

Reisart is the sort of conservative liberal academics who wish to deny the problems faced by conservative students and faculty love to find. As far as he is concerned, he not only has never experienced any professional hardship or discrimination for being a conservative, but, with rare exeptions, neither has anyone else; because he has not had such experiences, he implies, the patterns of discrimination outlined by conservative critics must not exist:

Although some vocal conservatives complain that liberal faculty members use their classrooms to indoctrinate students and to punish dissenting students by giving them poor grades, my own experience suggests that such incidents are quite rare. In my 20-plus years as a conservative student and teacher at three strongly left-leaning institutions (Princeton, Harvard, and Colby), I have never felt discriminated against. I have only once witnessed an overtly propagandizing classroom presentation, and have I only once heard a student complain about being graded unfairly for not hewing to the professor's party line.

Overt discrimination against conservatives is not a widespread problem, I suspect, because the overwhelming majority of faculty and administrators at places like Colby are, in fact, deeply committed to the ideals of free inquiry and fair treatment for all. Like most other institutions of higher learning in the United States, Colby accepts the American Association of University Professors' Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure. That statement explicitly affirms the freedom of researchers and teachers to seek the truth and of students freely to pursue the truth. That statement explicitly warns that classroom teachers "should be careful not to introduce into their teaching controversial matter which has no relation to their subject."

In order to make his argument, Reisart ignores broad, established patterns of discrimination against campus conservatives--speech codes that are used to punish expression that falls afoul of campus orthodoxy, denial of funds to conservative and Christian student groups, administrators who censor such protected conservative expression as affirmative action bake sales and who tolerate the theft of conservative newspapers. He also ignores specific, documented cases of conservative students and faculty who were persecuted--threatened with expulsion, denied promotion, stripped of administrative positions, even fired--for their views (Steve Hinkle comes to mind, as do Stephen Kershnar, Laura Freberg, and KC Johnson).

Instead, Reisart cites the AAUP's admonition to faculty not to proselytize as proof that they don't (it's worth noting that by that logic, the fact that we have laws forbidding murder must mean that there are no murderers). He also suggests that conservative and religious students should bear the responsibility for changing the ideological composition of an academy that locks them out: "To those conservative and religious students who feel marginalized at college, I say: Stop complaining and start studying; become professors, and teach the classes you wish had been offered when you were in college."

Generalizing outward from his own experience, Reisart thus concludes that there really is no legitimate conservative critique of academe to be made. The resulting analysis is a thoroughly bizarre instance of egocentrically-rationalized doublethink in which Reisart can both recognize higher ed's institutionalization of liberal bias and pretend that it doesn't exist (or, at least, that it has no effects because it has not, in his opinion, affected him).

While acknowledging that academe has become disproportionately populated by liberals, and while acknowledging, too, that this has some measurable knock-on effects when it comes to hiring and teaching--liberals hire likeminded liberals, he notes; scholarship and teaching thus take on a distinctly liberal cast in choice of topics and treatment of issues; conservative-minded students are bored or discouraged by this and look elsewhere for career prospects--Reisart manages to argue that the real issue plaguing academe is its self-marginalization with respect to the American public.

Even as he concedes that the academy is leaning ever further leftward, he sees its principal problem as one of insularity:

The central problem with academe today is that we overwhelmingly speak professionally only to other academics, who share our sense of what questions are important and our wider range of values and commitments. Academe has continued to move ever further to the cultural and political left not through any overt discrimination against conservatives but through a decades-long process of self-selection.

The suggestion here is that the left-leaning academy needs to learn to speak to an implicitly conservative public that does not necessarily share the professoriate's politics. In other words, for Reisart, the academy's leftward tilt is not a problem of knowledge production, but of public relations. There is no sense in the article that academic knowledge production--and, by extension, transmission--is harmed when scholars all think alike, all want to work on the same problems, and all want to work on them in largely the same ways. Free inquiry, intellectual diversity, and vibrant debate are less important to Reisart, it seems, than an academy that can package its one-sided intellectual pursuits for public consumption.

Reisart's point about the academy's tendency to indulge in scholarly navel-gazing is apt and timely. But his attempt to hitch his argument about academic insularity to a callow denial of the very real problems posed by the academic institutionalization of leftist politics is misguided, to say the least. It's possible to urge academics to learn to speak to a wider, non-academic audience without dismissing problems within academe; it's even possible to urge leftist academics to learn to address a public that is, on the whole, more conservative than academe without denying that conservatives who wish to enter academe face some distinct challenges having to do with the way their interests and methods depart from those of the left-leaning academic status quo. In failing to build such simple but essential nuances into his argument, Reisart not only denies a very real problem, but also, in so doing, damages his argument about academic marginalization.

Posted by acta online at 04:49 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

Quote of the day

Eastern Kentucky University president Joanne Glasser recently delivered her fall convocation speech to launch the new school year. In it, Glasser describes what she sees as one of the most important "building blocks" of the university's future:

ANOTHER IMPORTANT BUILDING BLOCK, ONE THAT TOUCHES ON MANY OF THE OTHERS WE'VE DISCUSSED, IS DIVERSITY -- CULTURAL ... INTELLECTUAL ... AND IN OUR STUDENT BODY AND OUR FACULTY AND STAFF.

THIS, AS YOU KNOW, IS A SUBJECT NEAR AND DEAR TO MY HEART ... AND, AS I HAVE LEARNED, YOU SHARE THAT PASSION.

SO LET US CONTINUE WORKING HARD TO FOSTER A WARM AND WELCOMING CLIMATE FOR ALL OUR FACULTY, STAFF AND STUDENTS.

LET US STAND STRONG AS A UNIVERSITY COMMUNITY AGAINST ALL FORMS OF HATRED ... PREJUDICE ... AND DISRESPECT.

LET US, THOUGHTFULLY AND PURPOSEFULLY, WORK TO BREAK DOWN BARRIERS, BOTH REAL AND IMAGINED, AND OPEN HEARTS AND MINDS.

LET US BE A BASTION OF EQUAL OPPORTUNITY AND LOOK OUT, ESPECIALLY FOR THOSE WHO MIGHT BE MOST VULNERABLE TO DISCRIMINATION AND HARASSMENT.

AND LET US BE COMMITTED TO THE PRINCIPLES OF FAIRNESS AND FREE SPEECH, EVEN WHEN WE MIGHT DISAGREE WITH THE CONTENT.

It's commonplace to see university leaders praising the importance of diversity, of tolerance, of equal opportunity and respect. It is not at all commonplace to see those evocations coupled with praise for intellectual diversity and reminders of the importance of free speech. President Glasser's comments set an important tone for her campus--and they also set an example for other academic leaders to follow as they welcome students and faculty back to campus this fall.

A truly diverse campus is one that embraces all forms of diversity--not just demographic diversity. And a truly vibrant campus is one that recognizes that it is more important to guarantee students' right to free expression than it is to protect students' woundable sensibilities with speech codes. A free campus culture--which is the only sort of campus culture worth having--is one where debate can take place, where views can clash, where ideas can be freely tested and contested, and where no one is insulated from viewpoints that differ--sometimes radically, sometimes painfully--from their own. Kudos to President Glasser for getting it. Too many people in her position don't.

Unfortunately, however, Glasser's comments do not mesh with EKU policy, which does contain a speech code. Consider the overbroad sexual harassment policy, which forbids such expressive activities as "sexually explicit language or writings;" "Sexually suggestive leering or other offensive gestures of a sexual nature;" and, among other things, "displaying or distributing sexually offensive posters, pictures, words or messages; sexual or derogatory comments about men/women on coffee mugs, hats, clothing, etc." Hugely capacious and disturbingly vague, this policy places sexual harassment firmly in the eye of the beholder; it is, in effect, whatever the accuser wants it to be. Hence the clause forbidding not only "unwelcome advances, propositions ... or demands for sexual favors," but also unwelcome "invitations." It's not hard to see how just about anyone could fall afoul of this policy at just about any time, simply by exercising reasonable expressive rights and reasonable judgement about interacting with others. Perhaps President Glasser could demonstrate her commitment to free speech and intellectual diversity on campus by eliminating EKU's speech code.

Posted by acta online at 10:08 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Failed disposition

Earlier this summer, the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) voluntarily expunged the language of social justice from its grading guidelines. The decision was made in response to ongoing, serious criticism by ACTA and other organizations about the legal and ethical ramifications of assessing prospective teachers' "dispositions." As ACTA and others noted, dispositions-based assessment amounts to a political litmus test for teachers; as cases across the country have revealed, it has been used to sanction and even expel conservative students from ed schools.

NCATE's move was an important one, but, as ACTA president Anne Neal and others noted at the time, it was also largely symbolic. NCATE may have altered its language--but that does nothing to alter policies and practices already on the books at ed schools across the country.

If that sounds like a hair-splitting sort of criticism, consider the case of San Jose State ed school student Stephen Head, who not only appears to have failed a course because he refused to conform his views to those of his professor, but who has also failed to convince an extraordinarily misguided court that there is anything wrong with political litmus tests in academe. FIRE's Samantha Harris parses as follows:

On Monday, a federal court in California issued what I find to be a disturbing opinion addressing the freedom of conscience of an education student at San Jose State University (SJSU). Plaintiff Stephen M. Head is an education student at SJSU who self-identifies as "libertarian or conservative" and as a Christian. He filed a pro se lawsuit (that is, representing himself without an attorney) against the university alleging, among other things, that his professor had violated his free speech rights by telling him that he was "unfit to teach" because of comments he made about immigration policy and by forbidding him from citing critics of multiculturalism in any of his classwork. (In writing the opinion, the court took all of plaintiff's factual allegations as true and construed them in the light most favorable to the plaintiff. Therefore, for the purposes of criticizing the court's reasoning, I am also assuming that plaintiff's factual allegations are true.) Although plaintiff's lawsuit did not include a grade dispute, plaintiff did receive an "F" in said class, a grade he believes was due to his refusal to stop espousing unpopular views.

The court held that the professor's statement that plaintiff was "unfit to teach" did not infringe on his rights and, rather, was protected by the professor's free speech rights. What the court utterly failed to address is the fact that the professor's speech is evidence that the plaintiff was being evaluated on the basis of his political and ideological beliefs, in violation of his constitutionally protected (SJSU is a public university) right to freedom of conscience. The court also found no problem with the professor's "ban on the use of sources critical of multiculturalism"--a clear violation of plaintiff's right to academic freedom. SJSU's own policy on Academic Freedom and Professional Responsibility states that "as teachers, faculty members...allow students to take reasoned exception to or to reserve judgment about the data or views offered in a course of study." Similarly, SJSU's Statement on Student Rights and Responsibilities provides that "students are free to take reasoned exception to the data or views offered in courses of study" and that "the professor shall take no action to penalize students because of their opinions."

As the U.S. Supreme Court has so eloquently stated, "[i]f there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein." West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, 319 U.S. 624 (1943). This right of private conscience was just dealt a serious blow by a court seemingly unconcerned by the serious allegation that a public university is requiring ideological orthodoxy among its education students.

NCATE may have revised its wording--but as this case suggests, the impact of that wording is still intensely and damagingly felt by ed school students who fall afoul of institutional orthodoxy. The court's ruling is astonishingly cavalier about San Jose State's apparent imposition of a loyalty oath on aspiring teachers; it can and should be challenged. Meanwhile, SJSU could stand to take a long, hard look at the classroom environment on its campus. Is the problem there confined to one class? One teacher? One professional school? What exactly happened between Mr. Head and his professor, and what does it reveal--if anything--about the intellectual and political climate of the university? The court must handle the case as an isolated incident, but the university need not and should not assume that it is. If Head's allegations are true--and, as Samantha Harris notes, the court accepted them as true--they are egregious enough to raise questions about what sort of institutional environment fosters, tolerates, and ultimately accepts teachers who behave as his allegedly did.

Posted by acta online at 08:00 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

AAUP Watch

The Chronicle of Higher Education's recent feature on grade inflation notes the disappointing reluctance of the AAUP and ACE--two major higher education organizations--to address grade inflation head on. Written by Rutgers professor Michael Gordon, the article also praises the efforts of schools such as Princeton, NYU, and the University of Chicago for taking steps to curb grade inflation on their campuses, and noting that ACTA is one of the few higher ed organizations to openly and consistently take the problem of grade inflation seriously:

National organizations of faculty members and associations of colleges and universities are positioned to begin collective action but, disappointingly, have largely ignored the matter of grade inflation. Neither the American Council on Education nor the American Association of University Professors has taken a public stance on the problem, proposed solutions, or even set up a study of the issue. The National Education Association has likewise done little. That silence stands in sharp contrast to the policy discussions by elected officials on the quality of higher education, and the frequent criticism of existing grading practices by conservative groups such as the American Council of Trustees and Alumni and by commentators--many of whom are academics--in the op-ed pages of leading newspapers around the country.

Faculty members have responded to those critics by declaring that faculty autonomy provides the greatest assurance of academic quality. The AAUP vigorously defends the right of professors to evaluate students, and its various standing committees trumpet faculty teaching responsibilities. For example, its statement on professional ethics proclaims that professors "ensure that their evaluations of students reflect each student's true merit."

But faculty members have not fulfilled the responsibilities associated with their proclaimed right to be the final judges of student performance. In shirking that duty, they have also neglected their broader obligations to society: Teachers weaken rather than bolster the commonweal when they fail to award meaningful grades. Grading laxness at all levels of American education has contributed directly or indirectly to a variety of problems, including declining scores on the SAT, decreases in the ability of American undergraduate and graduate students to understand prose, and poor training in mathematics and science, which puts American students behind their peers in many European and Asian countries.

Gordon concludes that the misguided stances of organizations such as the AAUP, which regards grading as a matter of academic freedom and defends demonstrably irresponsible behavior when it comes to student assessment, make them part of a problem they ought to be working to end:

America risks severe economic and intellectual losses if academic standards continue to decline. American workers will find themselves ill prepared to compete in the global knowledge economy, further undermining confidence in our educational system. When the public becomes skeptical of the claims of colleges and universities about the competency of their graduates, governments intercede. The No Child Left Behind Act is an example of federal intervention in K-12 education; the new Commission on the Future of Higher Education is considering the introduction of standardized testing for students in college.

Predictably, the AAUP's general secretary, Roger W. Bowen, publicly supported the commission's proposals to make higher education better and more affordable, but he balked at suggestions to make it more accountable--suggestions that, according to those close to the commission's deliberations, were driven in large part by concerns about grade inflation. Nor did Mr. Bowen mention any intention on the part of the AAUP to try to solve the problem of rising grades.

We professors have long been identified as the source of grade inflation and its adverse impact on society, and it is time for our organizations to take actions that will rebuild public confidence in our profession. We need to show that we are part of the solution, not the problem.

Strong words, and necessary ones. Academic freedom is not freedom from accountability, and the professor's "right" to assign grades surely ends at the point where grades are assigned inappropriately, and grading itself is thereby rendered meaningless. Colleges and universities ought to be conducting self-studies to see whether they have a problem with grade inflation, and, if they do, they should determine a proper course of action for addressing it. Bad faith evocations of academic freedom in the face of a glaring and pressing problem dimininish the work of responsible professors, ignore students' academic freedom to learn (which includes the right to be assessed fairly and accurately), and demean the concept of academic freedom itself.

To find out more about ACTA's work on grade inflation, see its 2003 report, Degraded Currency: The Problem of Grade Inflation.

Posted by acta online at 07:20 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

AAUP Watch

The AAUP has yet to take a stand on the case of SUNY Fredonia philosophy professor Stephen Kershnar, who was denied promotion to full professor for criticizing the university in the local media. Kershnar's case is a strikingly clearcut example of how university administrators can violate academic freedom--not to mention First Amendment rights--by punishing a professor's free and protected expression ... but the AAUP is nowhere to be seen. The organization's silence on the matter of this conservative professor's expressive rights does not speak well for it. (This blog assumes that the "roger bowen" who commented so disturbingly about Kershnar's situation at InsideHigherEd is not the AAUP's Roger Bowen--though others have assumed differently.)

So what has the AAUP been up to lately? It's hard to say, though Roger Bowen's comments on the Kevin Barrett controversy are encouraging. Noting that faculty can express any opinion they want outside the classroom, Bowen observes that the classroom is very far from a stage for professorial opinion: "with academic freedom comes academic responsibility," he said. "And that requires them to teach the truth of their discipline, and the truth does not include conspiracy theories, or flat Earth theories, or Holocaust denial theories." Bowen sounds an awful lot like ACTA president Anne Neal there. And that's a good thing.

UPDATE: SUNY Fredonia has promoted Kershnar, after FIRE launched a media campaign defending Kershnar's rights. The AAUP's silence on this major academic freedom case now makes the organization look worse than flat-footed--it makes it look irrelevant.

Posted by acta online at 03:25 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Disappointing

The Commission on the Future of Higher Education has met for the last time--and all but one of the commissioners has signed its watered down and disappointing report. David Ward, president of the American Council of Education, did not sign; Richard Vedder did--though he was less than thrilled with what the Commission ultimately put forward. Here is what Vedder had to say about both Ward's abstention and his own decision to put his name on the report:

The big news, if there was any, from yesterday's final meeting of the Secretary of Education's National Commission on the Future of Higher Education was not the relatively bland nature of the recommendations, but rather the failure of David Ward, the President of the American Council of Education, to support it. Of the 19 commissioners, Ward was alone in his dissent.

As I said prior to voting, accepting the report was a tough decision for me --only because I thought it was not hard-hitting enough, not mentioning many key factors (e.g., grade inflation, curricular incoherence) at all, and also being only moderately strong on the issues closest to CCAP --- affordability, efficiency, and productivity. But in the final analysis, the report did make some important and useful recommendaitons, so I supported it.

David Ward, an amiable and thoughtful man who is truly the chief Mandarin of DuPont Circle and the titular head of HEE (the Higher Education Establishment) in his role as President of the American Council of Education, was in a tough position, since several organizations of colleges opposed the report, in some cases almost rabidly, while one or two showed cautious support. As head of the umbrella organization that covers the entire establishment, David was in a bind, and his vote was understandable.

Yet this points out the problem. A large part of the higher education community just doesn't get it: Americans are increasingly fed up with the indifference of universities to issues such as soaring tuition costs. The Ward vote is a sign that, on average, universities are going to fiercely support the status quo, fight innovation, oppose accountability and transparency --yet still demand our financial support. It is time to tie public support for higher education (which is increasingly indefensible, in my judgment, on the basis of any rational analysis) to performance --keeping costs down, showing signs of learning improvements, etc.

Earlier this month, Vedder announced his intention to sign, and outlined his reluctance to do so in ways that dovetail with ACTA's own strong reservations about the report. Among its other failings, Vedder notes,

It does not acknowledge that many students do not work hard, or even mention, much less condemn, grade inflation. Intellectual intolerance and a frequent scorn for diversity of opinions is not condemned. While some mention of inadequate learning occurs, the shameful state of student learning (or, better, lack of learning) about our own heritage is not discussed, nor is graduate education or research (except tangentially). No discussion exists about over-specialization, or a lack of a coherent core curriculum.

ACTA urged the Commission repeatedly to incorporate these issues into the report. It's hard to imagine how higher education can be substantively improved without addressing them--and it's beyond disappointing to witness the Commission's refusal to take up the problems that arguably lie at the core of America's problems with higher education.

Posted by acta online at 09:25 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Becoming an Educated Person

ACTA's report on what a core curriculum ought to be is now available online.

Posted by acta online at 04:57 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Correction in the Globe

Last week, the Boston Globe ran a review of a new book about academic freedom that doubled as something of a hit piece directed at ACTA. Neve Gordon's account of Academic Freedom After September 11, amounts to an uncritical endorsement of a book that elaborately develops the questionable truism that there is a "new assault on academic freedom" rivalling that of the McCarthy era, one that specifically targets left-of-center academics who dissent from an implicitly conservative status quo.

The review opens with a caricature of ACTA as an exemplary instance of the threat outside critics currently pose to academic freedom:

Immediately after Sept. 11, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA), founded by Lynne Cheney and Senator Joseph Lieberman, published a report accusing universities of being the weak link in the war against terror and a potential fifth column. As if the general hint at treason were not enough, an appendix to the report listed the names of more than 100 "un-American" professors, staff members, and students, and the offending statements they had made.

A few months after ACTA's study was disseminated, Daniel Pipes, the director of a think tank called Middle East Forum, launched an Internet site called Campus Watch, which publishes dossiers on scholars who criticize US policy in the Middle East or Israel's treatment of Palestinians. On the website, one finds a "Keep Us Informed" section, where Pipes encourages students to inform on any professor who deviates from "correct conduct."

As Beshara Doumani, a University of California at Berkeley history professor, points out in his compelling introduction to "Academic Freedom After September 11," Pipes and friends have cynically appropriated the liberal terminology of the New Deal and civil rights eras, employing code words such as balance, fairness, diversity, accountability, tolerance, and not least, academic freedom in order to justify the enforcement of a political orthodoxy that undermines these very values.

ACTA president Anne Neal responded to both Gordon's depiction of ACTA (which amounts to a caricature) and to her misguided assumptions about academic freedom (which facilitate her readiness to reduce ACTA's work to a cartoonish image of ideological thuggery). Neal's response ran in the Globe earlier this week:

ACADEMIC FREEDOM is not freedom from criticism or freedom from responsibility. That is what the American Council of Trustees and Alumni has been saying since well before Sept. 11 . But you wouldn't know that reading Globe correspondent Neve Gordon's misguided review (Living/Arts, Aug. 2) of the book "Academic Freedom After September 11," which accuses ACTA of attempting to impose a political orthodoxy on the academy.

In truth, ACTA is the true defender of academic freedom, calling the academy back to first principles. As we document in our latest report, "How Many Ward Churchills?", course catalogs and faculty websites nationwide indicate that professors are pushing a political agenda in their classrooms.

This flies in the face of seminal statements such as the American Association of University Professors' 1915 "Declaration of Principles," which condemns "taking unfair advantage of the student's immaturity by indoctrinating him with the teacher's own opinions."

Contrary to what Gordon suggests, the threat to academic freedom today actually comes from the continuing defense by so many in the academy -- in the name of "academic freedom" -- of classroom politicization and ideological homogeneity.

Such tactics are rapidly eroding the public's trust, without which the special autonomy granted to higher education will not long survive.

Gordon's review is self-discrediting in its willingness to pillory a group that works tirelessly to defend intellectual diversity and academic freedom on campus. ACTA's views may run counter to those held by many academics, but that does not make ACTA an enemy of academic freedom--it makes ACTA an important voice in an essential debate about what academic freedom is and what it is not. As Neal points out, it is not only academics themselves who have a stake in academic freedom; to suggest that outside critics such as ACTA are automatically attackers and assailants when they deliver unwelcome analysis is to reduce what should be a vital, useful debate to absurdity.

Posted by acta online at 04:09 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Teaching history: open thread

There has been a lot of back and forth on this site about what it means to require college students to study U.S. history. Debate has centered on such questions as whether dates and facts matter as much or more than a broader focus on patterns and processes, what responsibility the American school system has or does not have to ensure that Americans know something about their past, and whether a single college course can feasibly teach much that is meaningful in the way of historical knowledge at all. All are fascinating and important questions; all are worthy of debate. So thanks to the commenters who are debating them.

What I'd like to do in this thread is ask a more pointed question. Suppose you are yourself tasked with teaching a semester-long, college-level U.S. history requirement. How would you teach it? What issues, events, authors, and works would you be certain to include on the syllabus? What issues, events, authors and works would you leave out due to time constraints? How would you shape the syllabus? How would you use class time? How would you use out-of-class time? What would your goals be, and how would you set about meeting them? What would you want your students to know by the end of the term? How would you assess whether they know it?

Comments are open.

Posted by acta online at 03:31 AM | Comments (9) | TrackBack

UW digs a deeper hole

As University of Wisconsin provost Peter Farrell warns adjunct lecturer and conspiracy theorist Kevin Barrett to stop publicly associating himself with the university, UW law professor Ann Althouse parses the self-discrediting logic on display by UW higher-ups:

"Control your interest in publicity for your ideas," UW-Madison Provost Patrick Farrell told Kevin Barrett, the part-time instructor who believes the U.S. government is behind the 9/11 attacks. Barrett is planning to teach students about the factual truth of this theory in a course called "Islam: Religion and Culture." Citing our university's tradition of academic freedom, Farrell rejected demands that Barrett be fired. But the political uproar has continued, and Barrett -- unsurprisingly -- has gotten numerous invitations to appear in the media. And now, we see that 10 days after Farrell made his decision to retain Barrett, he warned him about all that media activity:

"[I]f you continue to identify yourself with UW-Madison in your personal political messages or illustrate an inability to control your interest in publicity for your ideas, I would lose confidence ... ,"...

Announcing his decision on July 10, Farrell declared, "We cannot allow political pressure from critics of unpopular ideas to inhibit the free exchange of ideas."

Farrell said he wanted Barrett to know that he could reconsider his decision if he did not meet expectations. He said Barrett has "modestly made some efforts" to cut down on publicity.

"I was trying to be fairly careful to not inhibit his privilege of speaking freely," he said. "My point was that he should be aware as he exercises those rights there may be a time when I have to rethink the assurances he has given me about his ability to separate his opinions from what happens in the classroom."...

Farrell scolded Barrett for identifying himself as a UW-Madison instructor in e-mails in which he challenged others to debate his theories. The provost said the challenges suggest "that you speak for the university -- precisely what I told you was inappropriate in that context."

Barrett, for his part, says that he isn't seeking this publicity. It's seeking him. And what, exactly, is wrong with his speaking publicly? His reprehensible conspiracy theory is fine to inflict on students, but please stop showing your face to the general public because it's making trouble for the university? That Barrett is teaching at the university is -- unlike his crazy theory -- a plain fact. It's an embarrassing fact, and we can easily understand Farrell's interest in suppressing it. But the public is entitled to know this fact and to react to it. This too is part of free speech. Why are we so keen on airing all sorts of ideas within the university but averse to letting the general public have access to those facts?

When I go on radio or TV, I am introduced as a professor at the University of Wisconsin, whether I'm talking about law or politics or culture or some other topic I presume to blab about. It's never even occurred to me that stating this true fact -- where I work -- means that I "speak for the university" or that listeners might be confused into thinking that I do. You'd have to think ordinary people are idiots to believe that they think Kevin Barrett is speaking for the university when he spews his offensive theory. The problem is not confusion about whom he speaks for, but the embarrassment to the university that he thinks what he thinks and he teaches here. How can you justify suppressing this factual information of great public interest?

And why should Barrett have to refrain from publicizing his ideas in order to keep his job? It's acceptable for him to teach here, but please, be very quiet about it? And this is held out as an attempt "to be fairly careful to not inhibit his privilege of speaking freely"? The letter makes a connection between speaking out publicly and being able to "separate his opinions from what happens in the classroom." But what is that connection? And would we use that reasoning on other teachers? Promoting a strong political position in the public arena raises a suspicion that you can't fairly present material in the classroom anymore? All politically active academics would feel threatened if we thought the university would apply that reasoning across the board. And if Farrell is not going to apply that reasoning across the board, why is he inflicting it on Barrett?

Althouse has caught UW on the horns of its own dilemma--not least because Farrell, with his warnings and his threats to fire Barrett after all if he continues to voice his views iin public, is coming perilously close to violating the academic freedom he claimed, in keeping Barrett on, to want to uphold.

The AAUP's statement on extramural utterances makes it clear that merely voicing one's views publicly does not disqualify a college teacher from teaching: "a faculty member's expression of opinion as a citizen cannot constitute grounds for dismissal unless it clearly demonstrates the faculty member's unfitness for his or her position. Extramural utterances rarely bear upon the faculty member's fitness for the position. Moreover, a final decision should take into account the faculty member's entire record as a teacher and scholar."

Farrell has already covered this ground, investigating Barrett's fitness to teach on the basis of his extramural utterances, and determining that he is indeed fit. To suggest now that continuing to make the same kinds of utterances that led to the initial investigation is itself potential grounds for dismissal is to tread very thin ice indeed.

Farrell's warning letter to Barrett is posted on a UW page archiving materials related to Barrett's case. Included on that page is ACTA's press release summarizing its letter to UW about how it can avoid future versions of the embarrassments it has invited by hiring Barrett. Provost Farrell might want to have a closer look at that. There are more constructive and less potentially scandalous ways for UW administrators to deal with the Kevin Barrett fallout right now, and ACTA outlines a number of them.

UPDATE 8/9: David French has a searing post on UW's extraordinary hypocrisy--while defending Kevin Barrett's so-called academic freedom (which French notes does not cover the right to teach crackpot theories as true), UW has also been hard at work serially violating the rights of religious students, despite a recent Seventh Circuit ruling clarifying exactly the points upon which US displays confusion:

At the exact same time that [UW is] enduring a public relations beating for the sake of protecting Barrett's non-existent right to teach his theories, it has been violating the actual rights of Christian students on a large scale basis. On July 10, the Seventh Circuit issued a hugely important decision holding that universities could not use their expansive nondiscrimination policies to prevent religious student groups from using religious principles when selecting members and leaders. In other words, Christian groups could take steps to ensure that they remain Christian. Wisconsin is in the Seventh Circuit and is bound by this decision.

So what does Wisconsin do? It immediately derecognizes the Knights of Columbus (a Catholic student group that has been a recognized student organization at the University of Wisconsin-Madison for 30 years), it refuses to recognize InterVarsity Christian Fellowship at the University of Wisconsin-Superior, and it continues to apply its expansive nondiscrimination policy to other Christian student groups at UW. We have written a letter to the UW system president (among others) demanding that the university protect the fundamental First Amendment rights of its students. He has until August 10 to respond.

How typical. Universities will go the extra mile to protect the non-existent "right" of radical professors to teach theories that are not germane to the subject of a course but then deny real rights to Christian students. Where is the marketplace of ideas?

Where, indeed?

Posted by acta online at 03:17 AM | Comments (16) | TrackBack

Strike three

Can American higher education be meaningfully reformed without consideration of what is actually taught at colleges and universities? From the looks of the Commission on the Future of Higher Education's third draft report, the answer is yes.

According to InsideHigherEd.com, the new draft further softens the uncompromisingn wording of earlier drafts and concentrates on questions of affordability, accessibility, and accountability; recommendations include expanding need-based financial aid, creating a federal database to allow institutions to be compared, encouraging technological innovation, and spending more on improving America's global competitiveness. Lip service appears to be paid to the need to assess "learning outcomes" and the report calls for public universities to find a way to measure what students learn--but at least from the summary provided by IHE (the draft itself is not publicly available), the curricular issues that give rise to the dismal "learning outcomes" of American college students, who can't reliably read, or calculate, or reason, or write, or even summarize a potted version of American history, seem to have been ignored.

This failure to take up curricular questions is especially disappointing given the first draft's gestures in that direction and given ACTA's urgent response to the manner in which draft two excluded them. In the second draft, the first version's concern with "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," ACTA president Anne Neal told IHE. "In a time of global competition and conflict, transparency and assessments don't matter if the product is not worthy. ... 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."

On July 19, ACTA issued a press release calling on the Commissioners to rethink their focus and to incorporate curricular issues into their report. Neal also outlined her thoughts on the report's content here and here.

Can there be accountability without attention to content? Can "learning outcomes" be meaningfully measured without analysis of how outcomes are tied to the shape--or shapelessness--of the curriculum? How much of the deplorable lackof knowledge and skills displayed by college students is due to the "hollow core" that ACTA has identified at the heart of undergraduate education? How, if we continue to pretend that the scattershot and superficial curriculum offered at most colleges is viable, will we ever know?

Posted by acta online at 04:45 AM | Comments (15) | TrackBack

RE: Repeating history

Readers who enjoyed Erin's post on Arizona might also like the most recent article on our proposal in the Arizona Republic, which has now gone out on the AP wire.

Posted by cmitchell at 02:02 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Repeating history

It is an accepted and shameful fact that the majority of American college students are historically illiterate. According to a 2001 study by the National Center of Education Statistics, 57% of U.S. high school seniors don't have a basic command of U.S. history; ACTA conducted a study that revealed even more depressing numbers for American undergraduates at elite colleges and universities: More than 75 percent did not recognize James Madison as the father of the Constitution, and 65 percent did not know that Harry Truman was president when the Korean War began. By contrast, 98 percent recognized Snoop Doggy Dogg as a rapper and 99 percent knew Beavis and Butthead are cartoon characters. But, as ACTA also discovered, America's colleges and universities are doing nothing to remedy the historical ignorance of their students--at the vast majority of schools, U.S. history is not a requirement.

The problem is as pressing as it is complex. American students already take several required U.S. history courses before they get to college; they don't want to do it again. History departments can't reliably staff a graduation requirement in U.S. history--at the University of Arizona, for example, history department chair Karen Anderson concedes the ignorance of undergraduates, but also notes that at the present moment, her six-professor department cannot undertake to teach U.S. history to each of UA's 28,000 students. Arguably, the problem lies with the K-12 system, which is failing in its obligation to ensure that American high school graduates possess a working knowledge of this country's history. But when the K-12 system fails, the responsibility falls to the colleges and universities to compensate. Remediation, as Mark Bauerlein notes, has become an expensive and time-consuming activity on campuses across the country, and while one might well argue that it's not higher ed's job to teach the basics, the practical truth is that if colleges don't teach them to students who haven't already mastered them, no one will.

The state of Arizona recently mandated that every public classroom from K-college fly an American flag, and that classrooms from Grade 7-college post copies of the Constitution and Bill of Rights. But this is ultimately more a symbolic gesture than an educational one, and it's a seriously expensive one at that: It is estimated that just buying flags for the community college classrooms in Arizona will cost in excess of $50,000.

On July 12, ACTA wrote to Arizona governor Janet Napolitano, the sponsors of HB 2583, and leading Democrats and Republicans in each chamber, outlining the depth of historical ignorance that plagues American students and surveying the sorts of superficial courses that satisfy the loosely defined historical requirements at Arizona's state colleges and universities (these include "Human and Animal Interrelationships from Domestication to the Present" [UA], "Fossil Hominids" [ASU], and "Hollywood & the Social Construction of Crime & Justice" [NAU]). Noting that not one of the state's three universities requires students to study U.S. history, ACTA urged Arizona lawmakers and leaders to call for curricular reform and to commence a serious effort to ensure that Arizona students receive proper historical training.

Should Arizona's universities adopt a U.S. history requirement, they would join a vanguard of universities--among them SUNY, Virginia Tech, and George Mason--that are reforming their curricula in response to the shameful fact of American students' ignorance of their own country's history. And while staffing is certainly an issue, logistical problems should not take precedence over matters of educational principle, not to mention need. If SUNY and others can figure out how to do it, Arizona's schools can, too.

For more, read ACTA's press release and letter.

Posted by acta online at 12:18 PM | Comments (24) | TrackBack