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ACTA condemns Gallaudet's decision

In a press release issued yesterday, ACTA condemned Gallaudet University's Board of Trustees for caving in to the excessive and inappropriate pressure put on it by students who opposed the appointment of Jane K. Fernandes to the post of university president:

ACTA CONDEMNS GALLAUDET BOARD'S FAILURE TO GOVERN

WASHINGTON, DC (October 30, 2006)--On Sunday, in the face of unlawful protests, the Gallaudet University Board of Trustees rescinded its appointment of Jane K. Fernandes as president. This mirrored the situation in 1988, when protests convinced the board to abandon its appointment of Elisabeth Zinser.

In response, Anne D. Neal, president of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, issued the following statement:

"The Gallaudet board undertook an inclusive search and selected the candidate it believed most capable of leading the institution forward. But rather than communicating its vision for the university and standing behind its selection, it then allowed itself--in the intervening months--to be whipsawed by various constituencies with a variety of agendas. Ultimately, the board allowed the institution to be governed by the heckler's veto.

"Gallaudet's governance has now proven dysfunctional not once--but twice. It's imperative that the board take time to learn from this pathetic episode, and reestablish credibility in and outside the institution--most particularly with Congress, which appropriates 70 percent of Gallaudet's budget. The board needs to remember that it is in charge, not the loudest students or faculty.

"Gallaudet is in need of a strong leader, but few would willingly subject themselves to a process where the board cuts and runs. By surrendering--yet again--their legal and fiduciary obligation to select the university president, the Gallaudet trustees have done their institution a tremendous disservice.

"Higher education is currently faced with substantial challenges generally--and Gallaudet is no exception. Going forward, the Gallaudet board must cast a wide net to identify innovative leaders who are not afraid to question the status quo. It must not confuse the value of shared governance--input of faculty, and sometimes students, on issues affecting academic life--with its own ultimate authority and accountability."

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

Meanwhile, a misguided op-ed in the New York Times argues that even though the protesters were never able to articulate a coherent rationale for their protesting, the Board was right to respond to them by terminating Fernandes' appointment because, in the opinion of the author, the search process was flawed. The Times op-ed conveniently skips over the problem posed by the extortionate and illegal manner in which Gallaudet protesters conducted themselves; as such, it sends exactly the wrong message about both how dissent and governance should work. The end does not justify the means when it comes to expressive freedom, and even if the protesters had been able to articulate a cogent and consistent set of reasons for objecting to Fernandes' appointment, they would not have been justified in behaving as manipulatively and destructively as they did when their actions became so extreme that the university was forced to shut down. A Board that honors that sort of behavior instead of punishing it is a Board that has lost its way.

UPDATE: ACTA's Charles Mitchell has more at Phi Beta Cons.

Posted by acta online at 05:31 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

Gallaudet board caves

Yesterday, in a special meeting scheduled to address students' relentless and disruptive protesting of president-elect Jane K. Fernandes, the Gallaudet Board of Trustees rescinded its offer of appointment to her. The decision follows months of anger, outrage, and intensive resistance to Fernandes' appointment, and amounts to a worrisome gesture of appeasement on the part of Gallaudet's Board. The Gallaudet website prominently displayed ACTA's press release advising the Board not to bend to the extortionate pressure placed on it by students and faculty who do not and should not control the decision about who will be the next president. But the heckler's veto has won at Gallaudet, despite strong support for Fernandes from the outgoing president I. King Jordan (that support cost Jordan his own popularity and earned him a "no confidence" vote from the Faculty Senate).

Not only has the Board shown itself unwilling to lead--or to insist that its chosen leader be given the opportunity to lead--but it has also reversed its original position on whether to punish those students who violated both university policy and the law with their excessive and disruptive protests. InsideHigherEd.com notes that while the Board's initial statement declared that students would be held accountable for their actions--"The Board of Trustees respects the right of people to express their views in a peaceful manner. ... However, individuals who violated the law and Gallaudet University's Code of Conduct will be held accountable. We expect the university to honor its long tradition of respect for each other and property and to return to normal"--a three-hour confab with Gallaudet students convinced the Board to reverse itself.

The Gallaudet Board may feel it has dodged a bullet with its decisions. But it has in fact set a dangerous precedent for the future. There's no better way to hobble university governance than by sending the strong message that the loudest, most unreasonable voices will be the ones trustees and administrators listen to.

Posted by acta online at 06:47 AM | Comments (10) | TrackBack

Governance at Gallaudet

As protestors continue to oppose the appointment of Jane K. Fernandes to the post of president of Gallaudet University, Gallaudet's Board of Trustees will convene a special meeting today to assess the fractious and rapidly deteriorating situation at the school. There is disagreement about whether opposition to Fernandes centers on her perceived "lack of leadership skills" (which appears to be a euphemistic way of criticizing her for not being as warm and fuzzy as some would like; one critic complained that Fernandes does not smile enough), or on her vexed position vis a vis deaf identity politics (Fernandes did not learn to sign until her twenties, and she is perceived by separatists as too accepting of "assimilationist" approaches to deafness such as cochlear implants, better hearing aids, and genetic research).

Whatever the reasons behind the anger that has led to over 100 arrests on the Gallaudet campus, has caused the campus to be shut down for several days, and has issued in a faculty vote in which professors overwhelmingly called for Fernandes' resignation or removal, the bottom line is that it is up to the Board to appoint the president. While students and faculty surely have the right to express their views regarding Fernandes' appointment, they do not have the right to make or unmake the appointment themselves, nor do they have the right to interfere so severely with the daily operations of the university that the place is compelled to shut down out of concern for people's safety.

On Friday, ACTA weighed in on the governance fiasco that is unfolding at Gallaudet:

GALLAUDET BOARD SHOULD STAND FIRM

WASHINGTON, DC (October 27, 2006)--As the Gallaudet University Board of Trustees prepares to meet this Sunday, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni urged the trustees to stand firmly behind their selection of Jane K. Fernandes as the next president. For months, Gallaudet has been engulfed in controversy over the selection of Fernandes, currently the provost, who is due to assume the position in January.

"Gallaudet's trustees engaged in an inclusive and thoughtful selection process and concluded Dr. Fernandes was the best candidate to lead Gallaudet into the future," said ACTA president Anne D. Neal. "They should not give in to unlawful protesters who have their own agendas--rather than the school's--in mind."

Fernandes' appointment was announced on May 1; protests began then and resumed this month. Earlier this week, protesters seized two buildings and blocked access to the campus. The faculty has also issued votes of no confidence in Fernandes, the current president, and the board. According to numerous media accounts, the protests began amid complaints that Fernandes is not "deaf enough" because she learned American Sign Language only in her twenties.

"Not everyone always agrees with the result of a presidential search," Neal noted. "But disagreement does not mean the board was wrong."

"At a time when higher education is facing many challenges, it is the board's obligation to identify a leader who can address the long-term goals of the school," she concluded. "The Gallaudet board has made its choice and is accountable for the results. The trustees should affirm their choice--and the protesters should allow Fernandes do her job."

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

Here's to the Gallaudet Board standing firm.

Posted by acta online at 04:09 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Hopeful developments at Hamilton

In recent years, Hamilton College has undergone the sort of serial embarrassment that can demoralize and even destroy institutions. In 2002, there was Annie Sprinkle, former prostitute turned performance artist who was paid to come to campus to demonstrate sex toy use and to show clips from her porn films. In 2004, there was Susan Rosenberg, former Weather Underground operative and convicted terrorist who was offered a visiting faculty position as "artist and activist in residence." There was the invitation to Ward Churchill--which resulted in the revival of his inflammatory post-9/11 essay, "On the Justice of Roosting Chickens," which in turn resulted in Colorado's investigation of Churchill for academic misconduct, which in turn resulted in Colorado's determination that Churchill should be fired by said misconduct. Along the way, there has also been a scandal surrounding Hamilton's less-than-democratic procedure for electing alumni to the board of trustees.

Now Hamilton is in the news again--but this time for a truly impressive and promising project, the Alexander Hamilton Center. Dedicated to promoting "excellence in scholarship through the study of freedom, democracy and capitalism as these ideas were developed and institutionalized in the United States and within the larger tradition of Western culture," the Center is a well-conceived counterpoint to the kinds of ideological extremism exemplified by the notorious Kirkland Project, and it looks like it bids fair to be well-funded and wel-leveraged as well. Following the lead of Princeton and Brown, which have both opened campus centers dedicated to a more traditional study of American institutions, the Center will focus on such topics as "The meaning and implications of capitalism, its genesis and impact; the role of markets, money and financial institutions in economic growth; the importance of the rule of law and property rights in wealth creation;" "The nature and paradox of civil liberty; the compatibility of freedom with equality and of virtue with efficiency; the role of merit, distinction, and hierarchy in the formation of civilization;" "The role of religion in American politics; the moral basis of democracy; separation of church and state;" "The significance of natural law and natural rights in shaping Western political and legal culture; the common law tradition in the United States and the principles on which it is based."

Hamilton acknowledges that the serial embarassments of recent years have fueled the creation of the center. History professor Robert Paquette, one of the center's founders, explained that "The idea for the Alexander Hamilton Center predated the Rosenberg and Churchill business, but to be sure those fiascos did energize us."

Posted by acta online at 05:09 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

NRO reviews Berube

Worth a read: Maximilian Pakaluk's NRO review of Michael Berube's What's Liberal About the Liberal Arts?. Pakaluk reads Berube with care and a sharp eye, noting that while Berube writes well, and while his tales of his own classroom conduct suggest that he is himself a sensitive and thoughtful teacher, Berube's larger argument ultimately amounts to a tissue of tautologies and contradictions.

An excerpt:

Berube writes in response to conservative attempts at showing why liberal dominance of higher education is objectionable. Along these lines, there have been two main reproaches: first, that, because of their liberal orthodoxies, universities are failing to educate students. This critique skewers postmodernism and relativism, warns of falling standards, and bemoans the neglect and butchering of classic texts. The second critique argues that professors are indoctrinating their students with liberal views and are punishing students for their conservative beliefs. It is a complaint much more provocative of public outrage and more likely to lead to political intervention.

The second critique is of the kind being executed by David Horowitz. Berube does not have much time for such things; he presents Horowitz's criticisms as vulgar and dishonest and belittles his complaints. The Ward Churchill-type, he argues, is something of an anomaly, hardly illustrative of the liberalism ascendant in academia; there is no compelling reason--no reason at all, in fact--to guard against such things with laws.

In this, Berube is partly correct (about the laws, probably entirely). While there certainly is a problem of professors' offering political commentary in their lectures, the worst offenders when it comes to indoctrination are the administrators. Yet there is a reason why one cannot find in academia Churchill's fascist analogue (at worst, there are certain professors who have not yet written off manliness); and criticisms of same-sex marriage, for instance, will not be met with such tolerance, reluctant or not, as has met Churchill's ravings. Berube would concede this point (he is not, by the way, tolerant of Churchill in his book), but he would present it as symptomatic of the underlying incompatibility of conservatism and academia: The problem facing conservatives in the liberal arts is not an abundance of Ward Churchills, but something that runs much deeper. The liberal arts are by their nature liberal.

A straightforward argument to that effect would take the following structure: specification of the essential characteristic of the liberal arts, followed by demonstration of how these characteristics lead to liberal political views. Berube is not quite so systematic, and he offers almost nothing by way of a developed explanation of what he takes the liberal arts to be--a curious omission, given the book's title. To the extent that he makes a clear argument, it is this: procedural liberalism--"ensuring that wide, vigorous, and meaningful discussion" about political and ethical questions of all sorts can take place--naturally gives rise to substantive liberalism--generally put, "that humans should be considered to have equal claim to basic human rights such as food, shelter, education, health care, and political representation." While this procedural liberalism may be a necessary condition for the liberal arts (it would certainly have to be further specified), it is hardly sufficient.

Instead of speaking more about what the liberal arts are, Berube presents to the reader an extended recounting of the discussions he has led in his class on postmodernism. The aim, apparently, is to accomplish through description what is not accomplished through argument. Though postmodernism is an enigmatic and ill-defined designation, as Berube himself points out, he does a fine job of getting across the general idea. The reader is left with a good sense of the sort of professor who is uninterested in reality, truth, and other such antiquated ideas. Yet it is never made quite clear why becoming entangled in such confusion should be taken as a prerequisite for studying the liberal arts.

Interjected occasionally into the classroom discussions are Berube's thoughts on why reality, etc., should be abandoned. They are revealing, but hardly convincing. Berube is an English professor, not a philosopher, and his arguments are less than rigorous. At one point, after quoting an author's description of what it means to be a realist, he offers the rebuttal: "This makes sense, I think, only if you don't consider things like gravity and slavery to be qualitatively different things." It is a coarse formulation of an argument that has been stated, and disputed, with far more refinement and insight. Berube is certainly entitled to arrive at his own conclusions about these questions, but it is absurd for him to posit them as essentially characteristic of the liberal arts, especially when they have been defended with the analytical rigor proper to an undergraduate seminar.

It is almost ridiculous that a book about liberalism in the liberal arts ends up being an apology for postmodernism. Yet, while a complete political platform does not flow necessarily from metaphysical positions, the roots of political views can often be found, however confusedly and contradictorily, in fundamental principles. As a personal concern, these fundamental principles are the domain of any human being. As a professional concern, they are the domain of philosophers.

It is a fascinating and difficult question, whether for certain professions, a person's ability to do his work well depends on his views about fundamental principles. It is usually thought that the so-called "radical conservatives" are the ones who claim that the atheistic relativist could never be a good professor. How odd, then, to find Berube suggesting a similar claim, except under the opposite conditions, when it comes to the liberal arts.

If the work of an English professor can be done equally well by the realist and the postmodernist, then Berube's explanation of liberal dominance in the universities falls flat. If it cannot, and one's understanding of what an English professor should do depends entirely on one's fundamental principles, then liberal dominance in the universities is arbitrary, a sort of intellectual Stalinism. Liberalism would be prevalent in the liberal arts because it is liberals who are deciding what the liberal arts are.

Pakaluk's review is as evenhanded as it is ultimately damning--indeed, it is damning because it is so evenhanded. He writes with a genuine curiosity about Berube's thesis, and seriously attempts to follow Berube's train of thought to see how it works and to understand its underpinnings. The result is a reviewer who finds himself confused--both by Berube's founding premises and by his roundabout and haphazard way of handling his more tendentious ideas.

Posted by acta online at 05:35 AM | Comments (48) | TrackBack

Sensitive expressions at DePaul

The DePaul student newspaper reports that the University Speech and Expression Policy Task Force is hard at work "drafting a policy that will create a safe and nurturing environment for the DePaul community to voice their concerns about different issues." DePaul's proposed speech code--which is what this is--is being framed with the "sole purpose" of ensuring "that members of the DePaul community are informed of issues and are able to have their opinions heard;" the policy's framers are reportedly striving "to maintain the core value of open communication among those affiliated with DePaul." The article notes that the task force was created last spring, and that the new policy will particularly affect campus activities, technology, and written communication.

As part of their research, the task force members are holding a campus-wide "listening tour" designed to allow different groups "to speak out about problems that have risen in the past, or what they feel are important issues that should be addressed." The particular questions the task force wishes to answer are: "Given DePaul's values and the university's commitment to free speech and academic freedom, how can we balance the complex needs of all members of our community in drafting a policy on Speech & Expression?" and "About what issues surrounding speech and expression do you want us to be informed?" DePaul is quite clear that free speech is not the ultimate goal here; rather, protecting the sensibilities of various campus constituencies is: "It is not imperative that the policy cautiously protect and preserve the expressional rights of all the members of the DePaul community. However, it is also important to keep other important values in mind ... including DePaul's commitment to tolerance and productive lively discourse, as well as the necessary practicalities of managing a large community."

DePaul is within its rights, as a private, Catholic institution, to restrict speech as it wishes. But it certainly has a moral obligation not to apply double standards when it does choose to restrict--and punish--expression.

Perhaps it is too much to hope that the task force will address--as one of the issues about which it should be informed--DePaul's mindbogglingly inconsistent treatment of various forms of political expression. Cases that come to mind include the university's decision to punish the College Republicans for protesting Ward Churchill's visit--by posting flyers that quoted his own words; adjunct professor Thomas Klocek's indefinite suspension for disagreeing with some pro-Palestinian students' views; and Holocaust denier and political science professor Norm Finkelstein's rabidly anti-semitic attacks on Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz.

Posted by acta online at 10:03 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Problems with protesters

The majority of colleges and universities in this country have policies on the books forbidding students to engage in activities that interfere with or disrupt the daily business of the institution--which includes offices, classes, job fairs, interviews, and scheduled events such as panels and talks. Those policies tend to be presented as adjuncts to the schools' policies on free expression, which typically state that the campus encourages debate and dissent and free intellectual inquiry, and which often note that protesting is an accepted and respected aspect of free expression. The policies work together to outline the reasonable, content-neutral restrictions on free speech that any well-managed institution of higher learning must maintain and enforce; in particular, they make it clear that protesting must not be conducted in such a way as to silence a speaker, shut down an event, or otherwise override the rights of others to listen, to learn, and to be heard. And yet, too often, students don't seem to realize that their expressive activities have limits; too often, protesters in particular seem to proceed as if their perception of their cause's nobility exempts them from legitimate time, place, and manner restrictions.

Building on the recent outrage at Columbia, in which leftist protesters mobbed and silenced a conservative speaker, David French takes up this pattern in today's New York Daily News:

Consider this: In the spring, anti-war protesters blocked access to a job fair at the University of California-Santa Cruz and caused Army and National Guard recruiters to be escorted off campus by university police. According to one recruiter, "the situation had degraded" to such an extent that the recruiters feared for the safety of students and law enforcement officers.

Prominent conservatives like David Horowitz, Ann Coulter, Bill Kristol and Pat Buchanan have been attacked with pies and salad dressing during on-campus speeches. At UC-San Francisco, a crowd of students blocked access to and scuffled with College Republicans whose crime was merely handing out flyers to students. At Washington State, protesters disrupted, shouted down and threatened actors in a satirical play.

After a period of relative calm in the 1990s, one must ask why we have seen a rise in violent acts of censorship and intimidation by the campus left.

French goes on to propose some interesting ideas about both the motivations of today's illiberal protesters and about the role technology plays in outing their methods to a public that is not at all inclined to applaud them:

The war in Iraq is to blame for some of the violence, but the violence and threats encompass broader topics and represent an expression of rage and impotence -- not the '60s expression of rage and power.

The protesters hide behind tactics of the '60s to lash out helplessly at a culture that seems (to them) to be inexorably moving right. With every branch of government in conservative hands, with the rise of conservative media and with the increasing influence of religious conservatives, the radical left feels under siege. To make matters worse, the conservative movement is now taking aim at the left's last cultural bastion -- the nation's colleges and universities -- in an effort to reopen the marketplace of ideas on campus.

In the '60s, the excesses of campus radicals eventually led to a cultural backlash that ushered in the Reagan era. These same excesses committed in an era of blogs, YouTube downloads and talk radio lead to a much more immediate response. So, rather than reveling in last week's momentary triumph, Columbia's leftist radicals find themselves on the defensive, blaming others for the violence and begging the administration not to search the Internet for clues about the protesters' identities.

In the battle for the hearts and minds of the public, they have already lost.

Readers are invited to reflect on the reasons behind this rash of excessive and censorious protesting. Is it really sour grapes and tantrums, as French suggests, or are there other explanations worth considering? Is the left/right distinction that underlies French's argument accurate, or are there cases of conservative protesters being equally censorious and disruptive? How much of what we are seeing on campuses these days is owing to the lamentable lack of understanding most students--left and right--have of basic civics? After all, those who attend public universities don't reliably grasp where free speech ends and where such things as hecklers' vetoes begin; those attending private universities often don't realize that these schools do not have to extend them free speech rights and frequently don't; neither group has a strong grasp of what the First Amendment is all about, and polls have shown that many believe, for example, that offensive speech should be regulated and punishable, and that protected expressions such as flag burning are illegal.

Comments are open; reflections are welcome.

Posted by acta online at 09:26 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

Mirror, mirror

In his published writing and on his blog, Penn State English professor Michael Berube campaigns tirelessly to discount the idea that the documented political skew of the American professoriate--particularly as found in humanities disciplines such as his own--means anything. Berube's is one of the louder voices in the chorus of academic denials that there is anything significant whatsoever to be gleaned from the knowledge that college and university professors tend overwhelmingly to be registered Democrats, to identify as liberal, and to support liberal causes and candidates for office; he's among that remarkable cadre of academic humanists whose will to interpret--a will that is driven to read and analyze any text, and any semblance of a text, any time, anywhere--stops abruptly with the data on faculty political affiliation.

Over the years, Berube has devoted quite a bit of ink to not being willing to interpret that data and related data--such as FIRE's case archive, or ACTA's study of students' experience in the classroom--as meaningful, and he does so most recently in his new book, What's Liberal About the Liberal Arts?. As if to assist him with his promotional work for that book, The New York Times recently granted him prime column space in its Sunday Magazine. Here's what Berube had to say about "The Academic Blues":

So far as I know, my department, like many university departments of English, consists of wall-to-wall Democrats. If my faculty colleagues have any good words to say about George Bush's fiscal or foreign policies, they're keeping them to themselves.

Every year around this time, you'll hear complaints about the liberal campus elite--usually from the political right, one wing of which has talked itself into believing that, as George Will phrased it in The Washington Post two years ago, "Many campuses are intellectual versions of one-party nations--except such nations usually have the merit, such as it is, of candor about their ideological monopolies." The political tilt of American college faculties is a fact well established, though the actual ratio of liberals to conservatives--just under 3 to 1, according to the most comprehensive survey, conducted by U.C.L.A. researchers--is routinely exaggerated (10 to 1! 20! 30!) by those who believe that we liberals are actively conspiring to keep dissenting voices off the faculty roster. But the truth is that no one knows what the applicant pool looks like. For all we know, in the arts and humanities (and even some of the biological sciences), the number of bright young conservative aspirants may be no greater than it is for your average Broadway production of "Torch Song Trilogy." But charges of pervasive "liberal bias" on campus tend to play better than demographic reports on how young conservatives go about choosing their career paths, so every year the preponderance of Democrats in English departments is trotted out as if it were a decisive refutation of everything for which liberalism claims to stand.

Last year, legislators in my home state, Pennsylvania, were so perturbed by reports of liberal bias that they created a House committee on academic freedom to determine whether conservative students were subject to discrimination at Pennsylvania's public universities. In one way, the very formation of the committee was a triumph for conservative culture warriors--in particular, the conservative culture warrior David Horowitz, who has spent the past three years promoting his "Academic Bill of Rights," which seeks to protect students from "biased" courses and lecturers. But the committee also dealt a blow to Horowitz's campaign: in his own testimony to the committee, Horowitz himself admitted that he had no evidence for his claim that a Penn State biology professor subjected his class to Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11" on the eve of the 2004 election, and Penn State revealed that it had received all of 13 student complaints about political "bias" over the past five years--on a campus with a student population of 40,000. Those 13 complaints didn't fit any clear red-blue pattern either: a Muslim student suggested that a professor was disrespectful to Islam; another student said that a professor was too conservative.

Last February, Horowitz also published "The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America," a book in which I was pleased to be included--until I learned that the dangerous were merely listed alphabetically, and that I was not assigned a rank or degree of dangerosity. And every so often, someone on the academic left does Horowitz and company the favor of saying something foolish or simply outrageous about 9/11 or Iraq, and the grist meets the mill once again.

Whenever that happens, people lose sight of two critical features of campus life. The first is that most cases of "politically correct" limits on student speech do not involve radical teachers in the classroom; rather, they tend to arise from clashes between students and university administrations, as when a Penn State art student was told by a campus gallery that he could not exhibit his paintings of various Palestinian leaders, which he'd titled "Portraits of Terror" (a decision later reversed). Sometimes, when college administrations and student-affairs offices ask that everyone treat everyone else with civility and respect (whether out of liberal convictions, or a simple desire to keep the boat from rocking), they do it incompetently or counterproductively. But those episodes are not the work of Dangerous Professors.

The second is that classroom dynamics are more dynamic than most accounts admit. In a discussion of Richard Powers’s novel "Prisoner’s Dilemma," I had a student who insisted that the wartime internment of Japanese-Americans was perfectly justified; in a class on bioethics, a colleague of mine had a student who complained that the class wasn't doing justice to all the benefits of experimenting on unwitting human subjects. There is no easy way for professors to handle these remarks, no matter what their political convictions; all we know is that we must try to treat our students fairly--and try to make sure their peers treat them fairly, a far more difficult task--even when they say things we might consider uninformed or obnoxious, no matter where on the ideological spectrum those remarks might fall.

Every responsible teacher should think of the classroom as a relatively safe space, free of intimidation or coercion. But in return, every responsible student should realize that the classroom is only relatively safe, because arguing about ideas isn't risk-free. Of course, students sometimes have qualms about taking classes with overtly partisan professors. "As conservatives," Julie Aud, a student at the University of Indiana and press secretary for her chapter of the College Republicans, told CBS News, "we should never have to feel uncomfortable in the classroom because of our beliefs." Perhaps so, but as students, you should expect to feel uncomfortable about your beliefs as a matter of course -- that is, if your professors are doing their job properly, and keeping the floor open for every reasonable form of debate and disagreement.

Berube is right that no student has the right not to feel uncomfortable in the classroom, and that a well-run class is one where any idea can be tested, no matter whose sensibilities might be pinched in the process. And he has a point that administrators are often responsible for the most obvious violations of conservative and religious students' rights of expression, association, and conscience. But he also cherry picks his examples in such a way as to reduce legitimate concerns about political bias on campus to an absurd straw man argument. David Horowitz is not the only critic of academic bias around, and his proposed corrective measures are not the only measures being promoted by those critics; to cite a moment when Horowitz could not back up a claim of classroom bias as proof that any such claim made by any critic is wrong is to engage in a sort of intellectual bad faith that Berube would not tolerate in one of his own critics.

To their credit, NYT readers saw through Berube's rhetorical smokescreen. Here's what they had to say:

Michael Berube and I share the same politics; so do the vast majority of our colleagues (Sept. 17). Berube doesn't think that's a problem, however, because our students continue to challenge us in the classroom. But that's hardly a fair match, and Berube knows he can win it every time. Wouldn't our intellectual lives be richer if we faced sustained and sophisticated challenges from other professors, rather than from 18-year-old neophytes? People like Berube and myself are fond of criticizing President Bush for surrounding himself with like-minded ideologues. Maybe it's time we looked in the mirror.

Jonathan Zimmerman
Professor of Education and History
New York University
New York

Michael Berube is certainly right to say that if professors are doing their jobs right, students of all stripes should be made '"to feel uncomfortable" about their beliefs. But I'm surprised that he does not see that that is just why the liberal bias in humanities departments is so damaging to education; students on the left seldom hear arguments from their teachers that might make them reconsider their positions.

Thomas Peyser
Associate Professor of English
Randolph-Macon College
Ashland, Va.

The Times did print one letter in support of Berube's piece, presumably for the sake of balance. They also declined to print the letter ACTA president Anne Neal wrote in response to Berube's article. Here it is:

Far from refuting the growing public perception that harmful faculty bias is common in the college classroom, Michael Berube's facile essay (Sept. 17) bears witness to it.

Claiming that the academy's liberal skew is exaggerated, Berube willfully ignores a veritable mountain of scientific data to the contrary. To pick just one example, Stanley Rothman, S. Robert Lichter, and Neil Nevitte have shown that liberals outnumber conservatives on faculties by a five to one ratio—and up to 30 to one in the humanities and social sciences. And this imbalance has consequences: Preaching often replaces teaching, as a 2004 poll conducted by the University of Connecticut documented. About half of the respondents--students at the top 50 colleges and universities--reported professors who frequently injected extraneous political comments into their courses and "used the classroom to present their personal political views," presentations on political issues that seemed "totally one-sided," and reading assignments that presented only one side of a controversial issue. Tellingly, a majority of the students polled described themselves as liberals or radicals.

Berube claims that most cases of political correctness are isolated and that the real problem is students who are "uninformed or obnoxious." But the data show that rather than lecturing students on examining their own biases, he--and other professors like him--would do well to turn the mirror on themselves.

It's time the academy ended its high-handed dismissals of legitimate criticisms and concerns about its practices, policies, and professional culture. ACTA has long recommended that one of the best things academe could do is to undertake institutional self-studies to assess those criticisms and concerns and to address whatever problems they find. It's a reasonable recommendation, one that respects the prerogatives of self-governance and academic freedom. Maybe there really is no problem with bias in academe; maybe Berube is right. But aggressive assertions and flat denials are not terribly credible methods of refutation, and over time they sound more and more hollow.

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ACTA holds annual conference

ACTA's annual ATHENA Roundtable convened last Friday at the Harvard Faculty Club, where panelists debated such issues as the role of the faculty in university governance, Harvard's move to introduce a more traditional general curriculum, intellectual diversity, and academic freedom. The event was praised by audience members and participants alike--George Washington University English professor and blogger Margaret Soltan pronounced the event "terrific" and offers a number of posts reflecting on the day, and former Harvard Corporation member Judith Richards Hope noted that "This has been a very optimistic day."

The Chronicle of Higher Education summarizes the day:

--One panel praised a review of the undergraduate curriculum at Harvard, conducted by a faculty committee and released last week, which emphasizes the study of science and language (The Chronicle, October 5). Panelists noted that the review also encouraged enhanced teaching of U.S. history and religion.

Harry R. Lewis, a professor of computer science at Harvard and former dean of Harvard College, said he was "just blown away" by the proposed review, which he said contained language that had been absent at the university for decades. The document, said Mr. Lewis, could help counteract a "race to the bottom by the university, which he said is treating students as consumers and neglecting core academic disciplines.

Mr. Lewis and the three other panelists also sympathetically addressed the struggles of Lawrence H. Summers, Harvard's president who resigned in February. Ross G. Douthat, a writer for The Atlantic Monthly and Harvard alumnus who wrote Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class (Hyperion, 2005), said Mr. Summers had been a "change agent." He said Harvard needs another aggressive leader to alter its culture.

"The impetus for change isn't going to come, ultimately, from outside," Mr. Douthat said.

--Stephen J. Trachtenberg, George Washington University's departing president, directed most of his comments at entrenched faculty members at his institution during a discussion titled "The Challenge of Strong Leadership." Mr. Trachtenberg, who has been president for 19 years, said leaders of the Faculty Assembly will have outlasted his tenure as president when he steps down to become a university professor later this year.

The lengthy terms of faculty leaders, Mr. Trachtenberg said, have contributed to making the assembly "completely risk averse." He said the body rejected his proposal for changes to the academic calendar, refusing to even discuss them.

To encourage more educated involvement among junior faculty members in university governance, Mr. Trachtenberg said he would suggest training for new faculty members when he addresses the assembly this week.

--A panel on academic freedom and intellectual diversity was the most freewheeling of the day's discussions, with speakers and audience members jostling over the value of restrictions on free speech.

Alan M. Dershowitz, a Harvard law professor and celebrity lawyer, said campus speech codes that are well-written and defined, as well as neutral and objective, can actually protect free speech. Without clear rules, administrators may arbitrarily punish students, he said.

"The reason we need the code is to prohibit the punishment of students," Mr. Dershowitz said. "I favor regulating things I disapprove of."

Regarding free speech at Harvard, Mr. Dershowitz announced plans to join Steven Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard and best-selling author, in teaching a course called "Taboo" in the Spring, in which the two professors will take on 15 controversial topics, including race, colonialism, and religion. Mr. Dershowitz promised that Mr. Summers would be the class's first guest speaker.

Also during the discussion, Mark Bauerlein, a professor of English at Emory University, offered a professor's perspective on why faculty members often use "group-think." Mr. Bauerlein said the fierce competition faced by less-established faculty members encourages them to shun controversial ideas and to instead mimic the thoughts of their more influential peers.

Orthodoxy in higher education is caused not by "overt acts of discrimination or intimidation," Mr. Bauerlein said, but by "conformity and timidity."

--A session on university governance featured differing approaches between past and present university trustees. Candace de Russy, a trustee of the State University of New York and a prominent advocate of intellectual diversity, described numerous aggressive reforms she said could improve universities' financial discipline and quality control, including performance reviews for board members, increased faculty teaching loads, and higher-education vouchers. She also encouraged publicly confronting leaders of universities that underperform.

"We should have an open mind to radical structural change," Ms. de Russy said.

However John P. Ackerly III, a former chairman of the Board of Visitors at the University of Virginia, argued for more cooperation and fewer public confrontations to resolve problems at universities.

"I don't see any advantage of seeing the headlines in the newspapers of Virginia," Mr. Ackerly said of challenges he faced while rector.

It's also worth noting that the day's discussions were kicked off by New Republic editor-in-chief, Martin Peretz, and that the panel on intellectual diversity included staunch ACTA critic John K. Wilson, author of The Myth of Political Correctness.

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Recovering the core

For years, Harvard has struggled to articulate a core undergraduate curriculum that is coherent and substantive. So complicated and conflicted have those struggles been that they led a dean to resign and contributed to the downfall of Lawrence Summers. But things may have begun to take a turn for the better.

On Wednesday, The Harvard Crimson broke the news that the committee tasked with designing a new curriculum had issued a striking new report that calls for students to receive a broad, general education in seven core areas--"Cultural Traditions and Cultural Change," "The Ethical Life," "The United States," "Societies of the World," "Reason and Faith," "Life Sciences," and "Physical Sciences." Acknowledging that the current core's emphasis on narrow, discipline-specific knowledges and methodologies does not properly serve an undergraduate population that is overwhelmingly not planning to pursue academic careers and that overwhelmingly does need solid educational preparation for twenty-first century citizenship, the report does not outline how a new curriculum should be implemented or detail exactly what it would be. But it does begin to carve out a distinctive and important path. In an era of what ACTA has called "hollow cores"--curricular distribution requirements that emphasize trendy, over-specialized, disconnected niche courses--Harvard is returning to basics in a manner that has the potential to set a positive, timely example for American colleges and universities. If the report's suggestion that the new Harvard core include courses on religion and American history is implemented, Harvard would stand alone among its peer institutions.

A staff editorial issued by The Crimson praises the spirit of the report while noting that all the fine conceptions and important innovations in the world will count for nothing if the new core is not designed and implemented with particular care:

Harvard students must graduate being able to understand the issues that they will spend their lives grappling with as citizens and leaders of the world. There is no doubt that over time the precise set of issues that are most relevant will change, but the framework for education advanced in this review--more than any previous one--accommodates our rapidly changing world. Moreover, it prescribes a curriculum that by definition must keep pace with that change. We hope that this proposal is implemented with a level of flexibility that matches the boldness of its vision and anticipates the need for continued and regular renewal of its animating ideas.

Harvard has the potential to do something very important here, not only for its own students, but for students at the many schools that look to Harvard to see what to do. But reports aren't policies, devils do lie in details, and bureaucracies tend to reproduce themselves in precisely the moment that they claim to be changing. If Harvard is to succeed here, the "how" will be as important as the "what."

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Military misses opportunity at Yale

Despite last spring's Supreme Court ruling in Rumsfeld v. FAIR, Yale Law School continues to protest "don't ask, don't tell" by banning military recruiters--and it does so without fear of loss of federal funds. Since 2004, Yale has had a federal injunction allowing it to ban JAG recruiters while its own independent lawsuit against the Solomon Amendment is pending, and after last spring's ruling, the Yale faculty voted to continue its suit despite the extreme likelihood that Yale now has no case whatsoever.

But opinion on military recruiters varies widely at Yale, and--to its credit--the law school is interested in fostering debate on the question of "don't ask, don't tell." It even issued invitations to JAG recruiters to participate in scheduled panel discussions tomorrow and Friday--but was turned down because, as one recruiter put it, "My purpose in coming ... as a United States Navy representative is to provide information about a career in the Navy JAG Corps to any interested students or faculty members" and not, by implication, to debate policy. A JAG spokesperson confirmed this position: "It's only appropriate for the recruiter to do recruiting duties, not express personal opinions on any of these things. We don't want it to get mixed up." The Army JAG has yet to respond to the invitation.

While Navy JAG's position is well-taken--military recruiters are not policy makers and their job on campus is not to debate policy but to provide information that allows students to decide if they want to pursue military careers--this is nevertheless a lost opportunity, one that the Army will, hopefully, decide it does not also want to lose.

As David French explains, "The Army should show up for the debate. Given the horribly one-sided nature of elite education, it is likely that a JAG officer would present the first opportunity that many students have ever had to hear a defense of military service and Army history. The military has to directly engage the cultural elite to help close the widening gap between that elite and the rest of American culture."

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Colgate courts bad publicity

Dartmouth has been in the news for months for its anti-democratic methods of trying to pre-determine alumni elections. First the Dartmouth alumni association proposed a new constitution that would effectively make it impossible for dark horse petition candidates to run in trustee elections. Then the association unilaterally decided to change the election date so as to prolong the fixed terms of incumbent officers. Then Dartmouth administrators--despite public pledges to institutional neutrality--began promoting the new constitution in decidedly non-neutral ways. When Dartmouth president James Wright ignored ACTA's request that he address the irregularities in the College's alumni governance, this blog observed that perhaps Dartmouth has decided that there is no such thing as bad publicity.

Apparently, Colgate University has been watching Dartmouth with care. As ACTA's Charles Mitchell points out at Phi Beta Cons, Colgate's alumni association has recently taken steps to make it harder than ever for petition candidates--who may be popular with alums but who are by definition not the chosen, inside candidates of the alumni association--to run for administrative positions (at Colgate, alumni cannot run directly for spots on the board of trustees, but can run for spots on the Alumni Corporation Board of Directors, a member of which then sits ex officio on the board of trustees).

As at Dartmouth, the focus at Colgate seems not to be on ensuring fair elections, but rather on ensuring that those candidates who are hand-picked by the alumni association have a special advantage in elections. It's hard not to conclude that Colgate--like Dartmouth--is ultimately more interested in stocking its alumni board with people whose ideas and agendas mesh with the established, institutional norm than it is in allowing Colgate alumni to choose the candidate whose platform they believe will best serve the institution.

It goes without saying that reform-oriented candidates are not going to fare well at either Dartmouth or Colgate. It also goes without saying that Colgate, like Dartmouth, deserves a little bad publicity. When institutional ethics fail, exposure is often the best way to compel institutions to get themselves back on track.

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