ACTA's Must-Reads

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Celebrating diversity at ASU

One of the many problem with diversity training as it is envisioned and practiced on campuses is that it has a tendency to enforce stereotypes rather than dissolve them. The training Arizona State University recently delivered to its dormitory employees is a case in point:

Arizona State University senior Ryan Visconti was told "his kind" wasn't welcome--that he was an abomination and an unforgiveable sinner. He pleaded to join the "church," which was set up Jan. 10 as part of diversity training for ASU dormitory employees.

The role-play training took place Jan. 11, one week before the start of the spring semester.

Assigned the identity of a gay Hispanic, Visconti's persistence during the training got him nowhere. A woman with a Southern accent told him there was nothing he could do. She said he was going to hell, and that even Jesus said so in the Bible.

Visconti, a 22-year-old political science major from Mesa, called the role-play an "ultra-clear example" of the victim mentality and liberal bias that permeate ASU.

"It crossed the line," Visconti said. "All it did was reinforce the most disgusting, hateful and ugly stereotypes in our society."

The training was mandatory--and as such may have amounted to a violation of the First Amendment rights of the students required to take part in it. Constitutionally guaranteed rights of association and conscience went out the window with this exercise, which compelled participants to accept rigid stereotypes of race, class, belief, and sexuality:

Visconti said the students who designed the roleplay overlooked their own stereotypes, such as the notion that white men don't have to work for wealth because society gives them a free ride. Or the idea that Christian churches are filled with bigots, and people who support traditional family values such as heterosexual marriage are hateful and narrow-minded.

"They were basically saying that if you don't feel the same way, you're wrong," Visconti said. "It got to the point that if you weren't a minority or gay, you were supposed to feel guilty and that everything was given to you in life."

To start the role-play, participants were handed coded index cards that indicated their race, ethnicity and sexual orientation. Participants were then told to visit different "life stations" and create their "perfect life."

The stations included booths for housing, banking, church, jail, transportation and employment.

At each stop, Visconti said he was given scripted responses based on his gay Hispanic identity. He was told he could be a landscaper and live in a ghetto apartment or be unemployed and homeless. Meanwhile, students assigned white identities were encouraged to be business executives.

According to Visconti, the exercise didn't focus on any of the positive aspects of diversity.

Visconti was especially annoyed by the training's portrayal of Christianity as homophobic and intolerant: "I am Christian," he said. "And I don't think like that."

Some ASU faculty and staff are acknowledging that the training might have been less than perfectly managed. But none seem to be questioning whether such training ought to exist.

"It's good they are incorporating this training," said one faculty member. "But exercises like this can't just focus on the negative. They need to highlight the differences and advantages too. It all needs to be part of a longer process. If it's not constructed carefully, it exacerbates the problem."

ASU residential life spokesperson Diana Medina defended the program, saying it "was modeled after those at national leadership conferences. She said ASU students designed the exercise, which was approved by Residential Life staff as a way to increase awareness and sensitivity."

If that's true, then the problem documented here extends far beyond ASU's residential life program.

Thank to Mike McKeown for the link.

Posted by acta online on January 30, 2007 at 08:59 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

Common knowledge

E.D. Hirsch's The Knowledge Deficit receives a thoughtful appraisal from Albert Fernandez in the current issue of Common Review. Hirsch's book argues that declining literacy rates in this country are not going to be effectively reversed until schools stop regarding reading as an isolated skill and begin realizing that readers must bring a substantial amount of core knowledge with them if they are to make sense of what they read.

In The Knowledge Deficit, E. D. Hirsch Jr. recounts this experiment and draws on the work of reading researchers and theorists to argue that "background knowledge," knowledge not explicitly presented in a text, is essential to reading comprehension. Hirsch advances his case at a time when there is growing concern about the poor reading proficiency of American students compared to their international peers. What is worse, Hirsch points out, is that the longer these students are in school, the lower they drop--to a depressing 15th out of 27 countries by the tenth grade. The scores get worse after the early grades when students are increasingly tested for comprehension and not just for "decoding," the ability to translate written marks into words.

"We need to see the reading comprehension problem," Hirsch writes, "for what it primarily is--a knowledge problem." Schooling, according to Hirsch, must supply our students with the broad knowledge--much less of baseball than of history, literature, science, and other traditional subjects--that is requisite for reading. This broad knowledge of words and of the world is also what standardized reading tests in fact test for, Hirsch says. These typically consist of passages on a variety of topics, undisclosed until testing time, for which only a good general education can prepare the student. In or out of the exam room or the research lab, there is no such thing as reading comprehension without prior knowledge of a text's vocabulary (90 percent of it is the estimated minimum) and its references, and no such thing as effective education without imparting to students a wide range of specific knowledge.

For Hirsch, literacy is always also cultural literacy. The path to a better educated public is thus one that is paved not simply with skills, but also with information. Our schools have essentially abandoned content, he argues -- and so have our attempts to get students back on track: "NCLB has led states to mandate at least 90 minutes of reading instruction every school day, but, as Hirsch explains, the additional time spent on reading techniques has been at the expense of classes in geography, history and the like. Thus a major consequence of the law has been to minimize school time spent on subject matter." The solution, for Hirsch, is a core curriculum that complements the existing emphasis on skills with a new (or recovered) emphasis on knowledge.

Fernandez parses how we came to be so hostile to the concept of imparting knowledge in schools, tracing both Hirsch's attribution of the problem to John Dewey's progressive ideas about education (in which rote and drill and authoritative teaching are anathema to the ideal classroom) and Hirsch's own occasional misattributions (if American classrooms are overly indebted to Dewey--or to a watered-down version of Dewey--they also too often treat reading very much as a rote skill disconnected from the contexts that make it meaningful).

And Fernandez also dismantles the usual ways of dismissing arguments such as Hirsch's, which tend to be discounted on the basis of their putative ethnocentricity and insensitivity to "different ways of knowing." Hirsch's core knowledge sequence, Fernandez notes, is resolutely and necessarily multicultural:

Hirsch's multicultural curriculum follows logically from his educational principles. Cultural literacy, in contemporary culture at least, requires that readers know about groups and persons traditionally confined to history's marginalia. But this rationale is different from the more political one that has informed multicultural studies over the past few decades: that we have an obligation to bolster the standing and self-perception of various suppressed or marginalized "identitites." For Hirsch, the way to really help minority students is not through identity politics but rather through greater integration into the existing culture. Teaching that is focused on correcting the knowledge deficit, Hirsch argues, would be especially beneficial to disadvantaged children

That claim has been backed up by studies of minority French students, whose achievement gap narrowed substantially when they were taught according to the principles of knowledge-intensive education.

Work such as Hirsch's is not only of terrific importance for our understanding of how American K-12 education should be reformed; it also has serious implications for debates about higher education. Margaret Spellings' Commission on the Future of Higher Education sidestepped the pressing problem of what is being taught in our colleges and universities--as if it is possible to talk meaningfully about improving higher education in this country without talking about what undergraduates do and do not learn. But we can't sidestep that question. We need to look hard at the way so many schools in this country have excised a coherent concept of content from their general requirements and even, in many cases, from their major requirements. And we need to take seriously the idea that a core curriculum may be just as crucial for college students as it is for younger ones.

To read more, see ACTA's reports, The Hollow Core, Becoming an Educated Person, and Losing America's Memory.

Posted by acta online on January 28, 2007 at 09:16 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

The core of liberal education

Writing for Policy Review, Peter Berkowitz has penned a masterful analysis of what liberal education is, how far American higher education has strayed from it, and what can be done to reform our colleges and universities so that they fulfill their duty--not only to individual students, but to the democracy of which they are a pivotal part.

An excerpt:

An auto repair shop in which mechanics and owners could not distinguish a wreck from a finely tuned car would soon go out of business. A hospital where doctors, nurses, and administrators were unable to recognize a healthy human being would present a grave menace to the public health. A ship whose captain and crew lacked navigation skills and were ignorant of their destination would spell doom for the cargo and passengers entrusted to their care.

Yet at universities and colleges throughout the land, parents and students pay large sums of money for--and federal and state governments contribute sizeable tax exemptions to support--liberal education, despite administrators and faculty lacking a coherent idea about what constitutes an educated human being. To be sure, American higher education, or rather a part of it, is today the envy of the world, producing and maintaining research scientists of the highest caliber. But liberal education is another matter. Indeed, many professors in the humanities and social sciences proudly promulgate in their scholarship and courses doctrines that mock the very idea of a standard or measure defining an educated person and so legitimate the compassless curriculum over which they preside. In these circumstances, why should we not conclude that universities are betraying their mission?

To be sure, universities and colleges put out plenty of glossy pamphlets containing high-minded statements touting the benefits of higher education. Aimed at prospective students, parents, and wealthy alumni, these publications celebrate a commitment to fostering diversity, developing an ethic of community service, and enhancing appreciation of cultures around the world. University publications also proclaim that graduates will have gained skills for success in an increasingly complex and globalized marketplace. Seldom, however, do institutions of higher education boast about how the curriculum cultivates the mind and refines judgment. This is not because universities are shy about the hard work they have put into curriculum design or because they have made a calculated decision to lure students and alumni dollars by focusing on the sexier side of the benefits conferred by higher education. It's because university curricula explicitly and effectively aimed at producing an educated person rarely exist.

Berkowitz touches on many of the issues that surround liberal education in America today--the shapelessness of college education in the absence of a core curriculum, the enormous price tag placed on a college degree, the dangerous complacency of parents and citizens about what students actually learn in college, the destructive inability of faculties to discuss content in a meaningful way, the similiarly destructive manner in which many institutions have forgotten that the "liberal" in liberal education stands not for a political position, but for an openmindedness that fosters thorough examination of ideas from all angles. He goes on to offer his own definition of a core curriculum--which he understands as essential for a proper liberal education--and to suggest ways academic leaders can work to implement the major but necessary change a core represents.

Well worth a careful read.

Posted by acta online on January 26, 2007 at 09:14 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

"It is really not a question of liberal versus conservative."

In an article in the Southeast Missourian, ACTA president Anne Neal supplied this pitch-perfect description of HB 213:

"This is really an issue of professional standards," said Anne Neal, president of the group.

"This a question of higher education accountability, making sure students are guaranteed a quality education in the classroom."

Said Neal, "It is really not a question of liberal versus conservative."

She said a recent study, commissioned by her group, found that nearly half of the students at the nation's top 50 universities found politics was frequently interjected into classes, even when it had nothing to do with the subject.

A third of the students surveyed said they felt they would receive lower grades if they disagreed with their professors, Neal said.

Posted by cmitchell on January 25, 2007 at 10:38 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Those who have to, teach

A panel of tenured Harvard professors has issued a report calling for systemwide measures that will improve the overall quality of teaching at Harvard. The report proposes that the university should:

--Foster a more collegial teaching culture, where faculty share course materials and discuss teaching goals and practices.

--Gain more support for academic innovation, including grants, administrative assistance, and a review of course-scheduling practices.

--Improve systems of accounting, so faculty achievements in teaching and advising can be recorded and used by others.

--Link good teaching to salary adjustments, faculty appointments, and career advancement.

--Increase visibility for excellent teaching methods and achievements, as an educational tool and as an incentive to teach well.

Current Harvard president Derek Bok praised the report, saying that "For decades, universities have been criticized for paying too little attention to the quality of teaching," and noting that the report "represents an important opportunity for Harvard to address and assess the way we conduct our core academic business -- teaching our students."

On the face of it, this all sounds like a worthy and much-needed undertaking--Harvard has no business not taking teaching seriously, and owes its students pedagogical excellence. But the report ignores a crucial fact--that much of the teaching at Harvard is done by people who are not on the tenure track. As an AAUP report issued last month showed, 56.6 percent of all Harvard faculty and 45.4 percent of all full-time faculty are not on the tenure track.

By its own admission, the Harvard report

does not analyze the extensive instructional contributions of preceptors, teaching assistants, lecturers, and other off-ladder teachers in FAS. In the short space of time available to us, we could not accurately map the activities of these teachers, nor do justice to important questions about how to better define their roles, support their efforts, and foster their careers. These questions remain for others to consider, and we hope this will happen soon. Our Task Force has focused on ladder faculty and PhD students, because they are the FAS scholars expected to develop teaching and advanced research in tandem -- and because ladder faculty provide the core of institutional leadership in FAS.

In other words, the report Harvard has issued on teaching does not actually take into account who is doing the teaching at Harvard, and as such issues recommendations that apply only to a small percentage of Harvard teachers. Those recommendations are good ones, for what they are--mechanisms for encouraging tenure-track faculty to devote more time and attention to the teaching side of their jobs. But it's hard to imagine exactly how the quality of instruction at Harvard is going to improve if Harvard is not willing to address the fact that a large proportion of its pedagogical work is not done by tenure-track faculty members. To echo the report itself, "we hope this will happen soon."

Posted by acta online on January 25, 2007 at 08:40 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

A word on facts

Earlier this week, the American Federation of Teachers made news with a report purporting to debunk publications such as ACTA's Intellectual Diversity: Time for Action. As we have pointed out in public numerous times, this report badly mangled the facts. For one thing, many of its critiques of Intellectual Diversity were not about Intellectual Diversity at all--they were about our 2004 student poll, "Politics in the Classroom," conducted by the University of Connecticut Center for Survey Research and Analysis--parts of which are included as an appendix to 2005's Intellectual Diversity. In its rush to attack ACTA, the AFT seemingly could not even be bothered to read our reports long enough to get them straight.

However, it seems the AFT did indeed read our recent press release on HB 1643, state legislation in pursuit of higher education accountability in Virginia. Yesterday, the folks at "Free Exchange on Campus," a consortium of which the AFT is part, posted a blog entry attempting (unsuccessfully) to debunk our press release. Let's quickly peruse some of its factually challenged assertions.

First, the blog post alleges as follows:

Most egregiously, they [ACTA] suggest[s] that the Virginia bill is similar to recommendations passed by the Pennsylvania Select Committee on Academic Freedom late last year...

It is indeed similar, as can be quickly verified. The Virginia bill (and the Missouri bill announced the next day) would require public universities to file reports explaining what they have done to further intellectual diversity. It goes on to suggest--but not require--several areas of possible action.

Where's the similarity? Well, consult page 14 of the Pennsylvania committee's report, to which we link in our press release. It plainly reads, after spelling out numerous areas of possible study for the state's public campuses, "All public institutions of higher education shall make a report of actions taken regarding the recommendations of this Select Committee to the Chairman and Minority Chairman of the Subcommittee on Higher Education of the House Education Committee no later than November 1, 2008." Any way you look at it, the Pennsylvania committee requires a report.

Next, Free Exchange has this to say:

[T]he ACTA press release stated that "Penn State professor Michael Berube, author of What's Liberal About the Liberal Arts? told the media, 'I have no quarrel with the [Pennsylvania] committee's recommendations [and therefore the Virginia bill].'"

In fact, our release never insinuated anything about Professor Berube and Virginia. We simply said that he "supported the action in Pennsylvania," which he did. Then, Free Exchange reprints an e-mail from Berube.

It is indisputable that Berube told Inside Higher Ed that he had "no quarrel with the [Pennsylvania] committee's recommendations." Those recommendations included a report to the legislature. Further, if Berube reads Neal's testimony in Pennsylvania (also linked in the press release on which he was so eager to comment), he will see that in it she endorsed no bill, though he alleged otherwise in his e-mail. The most specific thing she advocated was a reporting requirement, but there was no bill of that kind before the legislature.

Free Exchange further claims that we "attempt[ed] to portray Free Exchange as supporters of the type of legislative mischief the Virginia bill represents." Again, we simply noted that Free Exchange supported the action in Pennsylvania--linking to a detailed blog post explaining how much better the committee's final report was than a previous draft--and noting that the very same report, which Free Exchange presumably reviewed thoroughly, includes a reporting requirement.

What we said was simple: The principles behind the legislation in Missouri and Virginia are similar to what happened in Pennsylvania, and both Free Exchange and Michael Berube said they supported the Pennsylvania result. Pennsylvania is requiring one report in 2008; Missouri and Virginia are looking at annual reports. By any fair reading, that's similar. Now Free Exchange and Berube are crying foul. But is that because of what ACTA said--or because they let their glee over some of the verbiage in the Pennsylvania report obscure the very real reporting requirement?

Justice Louis Brandeis is famous for his statement that "Sunlight is the best disinfectant." Hopefully this post will shed some much-needed sunlight on this debate--and the reports in Pennsylvania, Missouri, and Virginia will do the same for those state's publicly funded universities.

Posted by cmitchell on January 24, 2007 at 05:06 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

A legislative approach

Just over a year ago, ACTA issued its report Intellectual Diversity: Time for Action. As the title suggests, that report called upon the higher education community--trustees in particular--to take some concrete action in response to the clear national problem of a lack of intellectual diversity. And this was not to be just any action--the report suggested several possible responses that were consistent with academic freedom and earned the plaudits of trustees nationwide.

Some institutions have responded to this call for action. For example, the South Dakota Board of Regents now requires all public university professors to include an "Academic Freedom Statement" on their course syllabi. It reminds students that their "academic performance may be evaluated solely on an academic basis, not on opinions or conduct in matters unrelated to academic standards." It also tells students that they "should be free to take reasoned exception to the data or views offered in any course of study and to reserve judgment about matters of opinion" and names the administrator who is to help them if their rights are denied.

However, many institutions have not taken any action on their own, notable examples being the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of New Hampshire, who have been asked to do so in the wake of stories featuring faculty members who have included 9/11 conspiracy theories in their classroom teaching.

To address this problem, legislation based on the principles of Intellectual Diversity: Time for Action has been introduced in two states--Missouri and Virginia. As ACTA's press releases on the bills note, they are consistent not just with the principles in our report, but also with measures adopted in Pennsylvania that have been endorsed by members of both the academic and legal communities:

Provisions of the bills are similar to recommendations adopted by a bipartisan committee of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives late last year, following testimony by ACTA. That committee recommended that the state's public campuses take a number of steps similar to those in ACTA's 2005 report Intellectual Diversity: Time for Action. The institutions are required to report to the legislature on actions taken to encourage a mix of ideas on campus by November 1, 2008.

Faculty members and civil libertarians supported the action in Pennsylvania. Penn State professor Michael Berube, author of What's Liberal About the Liberal Arts?, told the media, "I have no quarrel with the committee's recommendations." And "Free Exchange on Campus"—a consortium of the American Association of University Professors, the ACLU, the American Federation of Teachers, and others—greeted the report with the comment, "Well done to all."

A similar bill was introduced in South Dakota last year, providing the catalyst for the Regents' actions there.

Clearly, legislatures want accountability but in a way that is sensitive to academic freedom and institutional autonomy. By asking boards of trustees and their institutions to report on how they ensure the free exchange of ideas, these legislators have got it right. Stay tuned for future developments.

Posted by cmitchell on January 23, 2007 at 06:08 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Virginia considers intellectual diversity bill

ACTA's latest press release details an important new development in Virginia:

VIRGINIA LEGISLATURE TO TACKLE INTELLECTUAL DIVERSITY

Bill Filed to Ensure Free Exchange of Ideas on Public Campuses

RICHMOND (January 22, 2007)--A bill has been introduced in Virginia to ensure the free exchange of ideas on the state's public university campuses. It is likely to receive subcommittee consideration tomorrow.

House Bill 1643--introduced by Delegate Steve Landes--would require Virginia's public institutions of higher education to report annually on specific steps taken to "to ensure and promote intellectual diversity and academic freedom." It suggests a variety of measures institutions can report, but leaves the contents of the report--which will be made public--entirely up to each institution.

Anne D. Neal, president of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, hailed the introduction of the bill. "This bill is common sense," she said. "It is obvious that universities should encourage a mix of ideas on campus. All this bill asks is that they explain to the public how they are doing that."

"I am delighted by the introduction of HB 1643," declared Phil Booth, a resident of Weems, Va. "I want to make certain my grandchildren will receive the education they deserve. And as a Virginia taxpayer, I have a right to know what the public colleges here are doing."

Provisions of the bill are similar to recommendations adopted by a bipartisan committee of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives late last year, following testimony by ACTA. That committee recommended that the state's public campuses take a number of steps similar to those in ACTA's 2005 report Intellectual Diversity: Time for Action. The institutions are required to report to the legislature on actions taken to encourage a mix of ideas on campus by November 1, 2008.

Faculty members and civil libertarians supported the action in Pennsylvania. Penn State professor Michael Berube, author of What's Liberal About the Liberal Arts?, told the media, "I have no quarrel with the committee's recommendations." And "Free Exchange on Campus"--a consortium of the American Association of University Professors, the ACLU, the American Federation of Teachers, and others--greeted the report with the comment, "Well done to all."

Like Pennsylvania, South Dakota has already taken action on intellectual diversity. After an intellectual diversity bill based on ACTA principles was introduced last year, the South Dakota Board of Regents required all public university professors to include an "Academic Freedom Statement" on their course syllabi. It reminds students that their "academic performance may be evaluated solely on an academic basis, not on opinions or conduct in matters unrelated to academic standards."

"I hope Virginia will be the next state to ensure public university students receive the quality education they deserve," Neal concluded. "Delegate Landes deserves much credit for trying to ensure accountability in higher education--while fully protecting academic freedom and institutional autonomy."

The American Council of Trustees and Alumni--dubbed "a force to be reckoned with" by The Chronicle of Higher Education--is a bipartisan, national nonprofit dedicated to academic freedom, academic quality, and accountability in higher education. ACTA has a network of trustees and alumni around the country and has issued numerous reports including 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 or visit www.goacta.org.

More to come.

Posted by acta online on January 23, 2007 at 09:20 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

The core scores

Last week, ACTA brought its ideas about how to restore a core curriculum to undergraduate education to the annual meeting of the American Association of Colleges and Universities. Lots of people came to the panel, and the discussion period was substantive and useful. InsideHigherEd.com summarizes the panel here--but equally worthy of note are the comments from students and faculty about how valuable they have found their own experiences with a core curriculum.

Here is Matthew:

I was an undergraduate at Columbia, which has a core curriculum that is noted as a potential model for other schools in the above article. I found Columbia's "Core," as it is affectionately known, to be easily the best and most rewarding part of my undergraduate schooling. Most of my peers agreed with me--the Core was recently cited by its students as the major reason they would recommend their school to others in a book published on Columbia. And one can certainly think "critically" about and offer "diverse viewpoints" on these books. There was no political indoctrination. Well--I suppose someone will argue that being exposed to some of the greater literary achievements of humankind is a form of indoctrination. But I don't want to be educated by someone like that.

And here is Robert Hollander, emeritus professor of European history at Princeton:

Like Matthew, I had experience of the Columbia "core," or a part of it, the "great books" two-semester sequence, when I began teaching college students many years ago. Not only is he correct about the value of such courses for students, he might very well have sensed their value for us who teach them. My four years at Columbia were some of the happiest in my teaching life, and I will always be grateful to Marjorie Hope Nicolson, the Chairman (she would have been offended to have been referred to as "Chair" [some things DO change]) of my graduate department, for recommending me to the College in the first place. When I moved to Princeton, after a dozen years of frustration, I was able to persuade my colleagues to allow the creation of a version of that sequence, which is still being offered today (Humanistic Studies 205-206), and which I was fortunate to be involved in for some twenty-five years.What some proponents and detractors of such "traditional" courses fail to appreciate is the radical, at times intransigent, and surely varied positions that are found among such gatherings as include the philosophical views of Plato, Aristotle, Lucretius, the authors read in the Old and New Testaments, Erasmus, Montaigne, Spinoza, Rousseau, and Nietzsche; or among the vastly differing epic worlds of Homer, Vergil, Dante, and Milton; or among the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Shakespeare, and Goethe; or among the fictions of Boccaccio, Rabelais, Cervantes, Diderot, Tolstoy, and Dostoevski. Not only are these texts compellingly interesting, relevant to concerns of most intelligent human beings, they do NOT, counter to the view of both opponents and champions of such courses (one suspects that many of these, on both sides of the issue, have not read many of these works), present a monolith of "Western values." Rather, their authors are among the sharpest critics of those values, and place their readers in the crucible of necessarily difficult thought. I can think of no better introduction to the world we live in than those texts, which will outlive us all, which will be relevant when we no longer are. And, as a bonus that is perhaps at the very core of their value, all of them are beautiful.

Of note, too, are the several commentators who deplore the polarized manner in which discussion about the curriculum has taken place, and who urge dialogue, compromise, and meeting in the middle.

Meanwhile, Harvard students are arguing for a core with a faculty that looks like it might not have the will to implement one:

The effort to revamp the core curriculum "will not amount to any meaningful change" unless the final General Education report includes more stringent guidelines about which courses will count under the new requirements, three undergraduate focus groups concluded yesterday.

In a letter sent to the Task Force on General Education, the students expressed broad support for the task force's philosophy of general education as preparation for life after Harvard.

In contrast, the current core emphasizes exposure to different academic approaches to knowledge.

But the students expressed concern that the proposed categories could become little more than a renamed core.

Without concrete guidelines, "many professors will continue to teach a disproportionate number of overly specialized, specific classes that speak to their particular research interests rather than the more broadly stated goals of General Education," the letter reads.

It's good to see students take a stand on an issue that concerns them so directly--and it's good, too, to see the clarity with which they advocate for a curriculum that would be more challenging, more focussed, and more coherent than the one they currently have.

Posted by acta online on January 23, 2007 at 08:44 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Bias is as bias does

A new study from the AFT attempts to discredit studies arguing that there is a pervasive political bias among America's college and universities professors--and is accused of being biased in its own right. InsideHigherEd.com summarizes the study, which devotes significant space to ACTA's recent "How Many Ward Churchills?" report. That report, which surveyed online course descriptions and syllabi at the country's top colleges, universities, and state systems, is flawed, the report claims, because course descriptions don't tell us what actually happens in classrooms, and because the sample size was too small to make useful generalizations.

The IHE article also outlines some of the more salient criticisms of the new AFT study, including some pointed words from ACTA president Anne Neal:

Anne Neal, president of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (which issued two of the reports reviewed), criticized the AFT for commissioning the study. Via e-mail, she said: "Faced with mountains of evidence from ACTA and others documenting a troubling lack of professionalism in the academy, AFT chooses, instead, to shoot the messenger. In doing so, far from undermining ACTA, it discredits itself. AFT's study is severely flawed. It is filled with inaccurate and tendentious interpretations--for instance, framing the debate in terms of politics rather than professional standards outlined by ACTA; applying irrelevant 'scientific' standards to textual analysis; and offering such shoddy research that the sections on ACTA totally confuse and conflate two different reports, rendering the critique invalid, even laughable."

She added: "In the face of troubling evidence of a politicized classroom, has AFT conducted any studies of its own to see if there is problem? Taken concrete steps to explore the atmosphere in the classroom? The answer, of course, is no. AFT's report is not science--it's propaganda."

Neal's response to this study is reminiscent of her comments on last summer's AAUP study on the American public's view of the academy, which revealed a similar eagerness to discount rather to engage the criticisms of groups such as ACTA.

As Neal noted then, the academy does not do itself any favors when it discounts evidence of a problem instead of taking that problem seriously. It comes across in such moments as irresponsible and arrogant--not as credible, earnest, and reliable. The AFT's money would have been better spent trying to fairly and honestly assess what is happening in classrooms. Publishing studies that encourage an academic circling of the wagons does nothing to foster constructive debate, to honor the imperative of accountability, or to improve our collective understanding of higher education.

Posted by acta online on January 22, 2007 at 08:48 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Not in Hamilton's footsteps

When the Southern Methodist University faculty balked recently at the prospect of SMU becoming the home of President Bush's presidential library, the situation seemed eerily reminiscent of that at Hamilton College, where plans for a new campus center were scuppered last fall.

The Alexander Hamilton Center was a casualty of faculty concerns that it would bring a new viewpoint to campus; intended to be devoted to the study of Western civilization, the center threatened and offended those faculty members who do not welcome intellectual diversity--and the debate it brings-on campus. Likewise, when word got out that SMU was bidding to become the host campus for the George W. Bush presidential library, some SMU faculty protested vociferously, writing op-eds in the student paper and to the university's president, R. Gerald Turner. The piece that appeared in the student paper makes the nature of faculty concerns quite clear: "We are concerned with deep ethical issues which transcend politics," wrote the professorial authors. "Do we want SMU to benefit financially from a legacy of massive violence, destruction, and death brought about by the Bush presidency in dismissal of broad international opinion?" The more recent letter to President Turner is more tempered, but still clear about the political dimension of faculty objections: It describes President Bush as engaging in "environmental predation" and accuses him of "disrespect of international treaties."

Luckily, the ideological objections to the Bush library are not the only comments SMU faculty are making about it. There is a range of views on SMU's campus (only 65 of SMU's 609 full-time faculty members signed the letter to President Turner), and there is, as a consequence, healthy debate.

Hence the reasoned and sensible op-ed in the New York Times by SMU political science professor James Hollifield. Noting that in 1981 Duke turned down the opportunity to house the papers of Richard Nixon, a Duke law school alum, Hollifield rejects the notion that institutional political posturing should trump the chance to develop important scholarly archives:

At Duke more than 20 years ago and at Southern Methodist today, opponents of such libraries have said that by building a presidential library and creating schools or institutes, a university compromises its values and endorses the policies of the president whose papers it accepts. I do not think this is the case. It is legitimate for anyone to criticize the president and his policies, but it is presumptuous for us as scholars to say that we know in advance and with certainty what the legacy of a sitting president will be.

Campuses are good places to situate presidential libraries because universities are vital to the American marketplace of ideas, and they are bulwarks of our free society. They can serve as repositories of archives from which we will learn and grow as a nation. But the faculty is a university’s heart and soul, and faculty members are not disconnected from the politics of the moment.

As bad as the situation may seem today, back in 1971, when the University of Texas dedicated a library and school named for Lyndon Johnson, the country was in even greater turmoil. A storm of controversy raged over the Johnson papers. But I think the University of Texas made the right decision to accept the papers and build the library and school.

Southern Methodist University should do the same. Yes, former presidents are interested in polishing their legacies, and universities must be careful to remain nonpartisan and protect freedom of inquiry. But we must also take the long view, and that means building institutions that will serve generations to come, giving historians the chance to do their work.

Duke lost out in 1981. Hamilton shot itself in the foot last fall. SMU has a chance to do things differently--and to set a strong example of institutional wisdom and vision along the way.

Posted by acta online on January 20, 2007 at 02:58 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Meet Stephen Smith

As dedicated readers of this blog know, ACTA has long been involved in supporting concerned alumni at Dartmouth College. Of course, we were deeply involved in the 2006 debate over a new constitution for alumni governance, and we were delighted to see the election of T.J. Rodgers (in 2004) and Peter Robinson and Todd Zywicki (in 2005) as trustees. But our involvement extends well beyond 2004: William K. Tell, Jr., a valued member of our National Council, spearheaded the creation of Dartmouth Alumni for Open Governance in the 1990s; ACTA has worked with Mr. Tell and other reformers for more than a decade.

With this backdrop, one can understand our happiness to see the new website of Stephen Smith, who is running in this year's trustee election. Smith, a law professor at the University of Virginia, comments sagely on many of the critical issues facing Dartmouth, and readers are urged to review his site. Any of our many Dartmouth friends can, if they are so inclined, find petitions to guarantee Professor Smith a slot on the ballot here.

One administrative note: Our main blogger, Erin O'Connor, is currently on her way back from New Orleans, where she, ACTA president Anne Neal, and State University of New York trustee (and ACTA advisor) Candace de Russy were on a panel at the Association of American Colleges and Universities meeting. Erin and her excellent commentary will rejoin us shortly.

Posted by cmitchell on January 19, 2007 at 05:45 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Announcement

As the ACTA homepage attests, legislation based on the principles in ACTA's 2005 report Intellectual Diversity: Time for Action has been introduced in the Missouri and Virginia legislatures. Stay tuned for more on these important new developments next week.

Posted by cmitchell on January 19, 2007 at 02:54 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Addendum

In October of last year, Erin O'Connor posted and commented on a Daily Pennsylvanian article on online editing services. Subsequently, China Osaki, proprietor of one such service, Penn & Paper, contacted ACTA to advise that the facts asserted in the Daily Pennsylvanian article are in dispute. ACTA withdrew the post and comment and takes no position on the accuracy of the Daily Pennsylvanian's piece.

Posted by cmitchell on January 19, 2007 at 02:45 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

The ultimate heckler's veto

For the past two years, anti-military protesters at the University of California at Santa Cruz have succeeded in shutting down job fairs that included military recruiters. Last year's protest was especially striking, coming as it did not only as a repeat of the previous year's performance, but hard on the heels of the Supreme Court's ruling that the Solomon Amendment is binding on all colleges and universities accepting federal funds, and that schools receiving such funds must therefore make sure that military recruiters have equal access to recruit students on campus.

Santa Cruz has thus positioned itself as an interesting test case in the wake of the ruling. On the one hand, the university is known for its politically active students, and it prizes them; on the other hand, the law is the law. Knowing that all eyes would be on them this year, Santa Cruz administrators had a tough decision to make--reign in student protesters, or avoid the problem altogether by shutting down the job fair in advance.

Although the latter option is clearly inferior to the former--students should have to stay within the law, and the university should be able to ensure that they do; all students should be able to explore as many career options as possible at campus-based job fairs--the scions of Santa Cruz have opted to cancel the upcoming January 31 job fair.

From the university's official statement:

Our campus has a strong tradition of supporting free speech, the right to demonstrate peacefully, and fundamental respect for the opinions of others. ... However, during the last two years, nearly every quarter has included events in which a few individuals chose to push their protests beyond civility and safety, challenging our Principles of Community and disrupting events to the detriment of others in the campus community.

The campus takes seriously its responsibility to protect the safety of the entire campus community, and we will continue our policy of using law enforcement to deal with all actions that threaten public safety.

This is the heckler's veto at work. Though the protesters aimed simply to scare off military recruiters, they have succeeded in depriving the entire study body of the right to participate in career recruitment that is potentially crucial to their futures. And they have done so because the administration, by its own admission, cannot maintain order on campus, and cannot ensure that students will respect the law.

Posted by acta online on January 15, 2007 at 08:17 AM | Comments (18) | TrackBack

The hollow core

In an interview with Gene Expression, Manhattan Institute fellow Heather MacDonald had a few choice comments to make about her college education:

How exactly did you find yourself on the political Right? I recall that you were a liberal while in college, what happened that resulted in your political shift? Was in a "Eureka!" moment, or a gradual affair?

First I realized that I had wasted my college education on the literary theory known as deconstruction, being as I was then too stupid to grasp that nearly everything deconstruction had to say about language was lunatic and fictional. When multiculturalism hit the academy (several years after I had graduated), I was appalled that barely literate students were allowed to trash the most astounding creations of Western civilization before which we should all be on our knees. I came to New York in 1987, in the midst of a particularly craven period of capitulation to racial extortionists. Taking up journalism in the early 1990s exposed me to the total disconnect between liberal dogma about the underclass poor and the reality of their self-defeating behavior. I still have no idea how New York Times reporters can visit the same homeless shelters and welfare offices that I have and remain confident that the "clients" of those facilities are the victims of racism, rather than their own bad decisions. So I would say that reporting on social problems provided the coup de grace for liberal pieties. (I write about my political evolution at greater length in a forthcoming book of essays by various journalists called Why I Turned Right)

[...]

8) If you are 18 and figuring out what course of study to pursue for the next 4 years what changes would you make to your educational path now that you have some hindsight?

I would study a lot more history. Thanks to my college's refusal to tell its ignorant students what an educated person should know-heaven forbid that it actually exercise intellectual authority!-I was required to study no history and didn't know enough to do so on my own.

MacDonald has a lot more to say--about faith and conservatism (she is an atheist), about the Bush administration, and about current educational fads (she deplores, for example, the "entire foolishness of progressive pedagogy: the insanity of having students "teach" each other [translation: sit around in class talking about the latest sneakers while the teacher-oops, I mean, 'facilitator'--looks on benignly]; the dismissal of knowledge as an essential legacy that a teacher must convey to his students; and the rejection of memorization and drilling as necessary to learning").

But especially noteworthy are her comments about being an aimless college student whose wasteful approach to higher education was scripted by the absence of a core curriculum that would guide her to useful courses and compel her to ground herself in essential fields. MacDonald was an English major at Yale back in the 1980s; she earned a Mellon fellowship to pay for her MA at Cambridge; she went on to earn a law degree from Stanford. Educated at some of the finest universities in the world, not to mention in the country, her principle complaint, looking backward, was the irresponsibly laissez-faire attitude Yale took toward undergraduate education.

This is something ACTA has been working to change for years. In ACTA's 2004 report, The Hollow Core, ACTA explains how the vast majority of colleges and universities in this country no longer have a core curriculum, and no longer exert themselves to ensure that they guide undergraduates to courses that will prepare them for life after graduation. The hollowing out of a strong core--the replacement of a set of foundational courses in history, science, mathematics, economics, literature, and writing with a smorgasbord of offerings that allows students to fulfull "distribution requirements" by choosing among hundreds of narrow, trendy, niche-type classes--has thoroughly eroded the quality of higher education in this country, and bodes poorly for both our economy and our democracy.

MacDonald is justly angry at Yale's "refusal to tell its ignorant students what an educated person should know." As she recounts, she has had to fill in the gaps in her education on her own, and the whole inefficient process strikes her as a waste. ACTA has worked to help schools make necessary reforms along these lines; its 2003 report, Becoming an Educated Person, outlines what college students should know and offers examples of schools that have implemented successful cores.

All that's needed now is for colleges and universities to find the will to change in ways that are long overdue.

Posted by acta online on January 14, 2007 at 08:18 AM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

The professorial personality

In an IHE column about his first tenure-track job, blogger and University of Hawaii anthropologist Alex Golub makes some revealing remarks about the professorial personality:

People give professors respect. It's amazing. As a graduate student you get no respect. People consider you locked in a state of arrested development, a sort of career limbo. There are many reasons for this, the foremost being, of course, that graduate students are locked in a state of arrested development that forms a sort of career limbo. Moving from this lowly state to that of a professor can be mind-blowing.

Professors are respected and--most amazingly--believed. They can opine on topics about which they know absolutely nothing and people will believe it hook, line, or sinker. Or at least they will appear to, since the other feelings associated with professors are fear and boredom. The first inclines students to please professors who have control of their grades, while the second leads everyone to avoid disagreement that may force them to extend a conversation they would prefer to skip.

The intoxicating feeling of being taken seriously is something that the new professor has to take into account. It takes a lot of self-discipline to be modest in one's claims after years and years of not being taken seriously. Are we ever successful? Probably not. And yet it seems to me that we can't do anything else but try.

Golub is writing with his tongue slightly in cheek--but he's also pointing to some of the defining aspects of how the professorial personality is formed and why it's such a problematic formation for so many people.

Academe is intensely hierarchical at the same time that it is populated by enormously self-involved individuals (Golub mentions elsewhere in his article that the dissertation, the means by which graduate students prove that they are worthy of the doctorate degree, is "an intensely narcissistic document"). Academic egos are tortuously dependent on status--either crushed by the "lowly state" of being a graduate student or inflated by the "mind-blowing," "intoxicating" experience of being a professor. Golub identifies assistant professorship almost as a kind of egoistic expansion period, a time during which new professors are immensely tempted to bloviate on anything and everything, and when they must try--and must, it seems, inevitably fail--to keep their egos in check.

Golub is kidding, sort of. But only insofar as he is jokingly describing a real pattern that isn't very funny at all when you stop to think about it. It's a problem--for academe, and for public discourse in this country--that so many academics do think they are qualified to pontificate on issues far beyond their areas of expertise. It's a problem, too, that entire academic organizations encourage and promote a sort of arrogance that is ultimately as disrespectful to scholarly professionalism as it is to the public it condescends to "inform."

The recent meeting of the American Historical Association, which featured a misguided resolution against the Iraq war, is a case in point. The professionalism and scholarly integrity of historians who think it is their work to attempt to dictate foreign policy are on the line--and judging by Tim Burke's description of the debate surrounding the resolution, most historians don't seem to realize that.

But overweening pride does not become intellectuals any more than it does anyone else. And scholars are not exempt from the truth contained within the old adage, "Pride goeth before a fall."

Posted by acta online on January 12, 2007 at 07:48 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Quote for the Day

The American Historical Association's recent resolution against the Iraq war is raising real--and deserved--questions about the ability of history professors to differentiate their politic leanings from their pedagogical practices.

When asked to comment on the AHA's resolution, University of Pennsylvania history chair Walter Licht told the Daily Pennsylvanian that while the AHA had the right to pass such a resolution, professors should not bring their politics into their teaching. The history department, Licht stated, "does not use the classroom as a pulpit."

Amen to that.

Posted by acta online on January 11, 2007 at 03:42 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

Two Takes

Writing at Phi Beta Cons, David French deplores the American Historical Association's activities at its annual convention. The business meeting, French notes, focussed in part on two proposed resolutions: one calling for an end to campus speech codes (which did not pass) and one calling for a speedy conclusion to the Iraq War, which did. Noting the "absurdity of historians opposing the war without dissent then opposing a resolution that protects the right of dissent itself," French goes on to parse the illogic of the anti-war resolution:

...the Iraq War resolution was drafted by Historians Against the War, which called the war's practices "inimical to the values of the historical profession." Which values are those? Are American soldiers plagiarizing or writing unoriginal theses in the Anbar province? Are they ignoring primary documents in favor of secondary sources? Are they advocating against tenure and reduced teaching loads? Not really.

Writing at Easily Distracted about his own frustrated experience at the very meeting where these resolutions passed, Timothy Burke offers thoughts that dovetail nicely with French's. Burke notes that he attended the meeting largely because he hoped to help forward the resolution against speech codes; he notes, too, that he tried--and failed--to make his colleagues see that their wish to issue a statement about the Iraq War was way out of bounds:

The end was a resolution against the Iraq war. James Sheehan offered the objection that I ended up echoing, namely, that an organization like the AHA has a limited amount of political capital to expend (Sheehan said "moral capital", I said "political capital") and that this is best expended on matters directly proximate to the professional interests of the organization.

Let's get real here: the attempt to make the resolution relevant to the direct professional interests of historians was pretty thin once we got to the part that urged members to support a speedy end to the Iraq war. If that's directly relevant to an umbrella organization of historians, then next year we ought to consider a full battery of resolutions on global warming, urban poverty, globalization, CEO salaries, abortion rights, the minimum wage and so on. I could construct very similar and sincere arguments about how these are urgent and important matters for historians to take a position on as a profession.

I added that it seems to me that the AHA ought to be a very "big tent" in political terms, which means not committing it to political positions that are not directly relevant to professionalism that even a small proportion of its membership might find objectionable.

Burke is dead right here. But he was talking to the wrong crowd. What follows is his description of how academics sandbag one another, or, as he puts it, how the "left-wing circular firing squad" goes about its business. It's a revealing account of how routinized the mechanisms for imposing intellectual conformity--or, perhaps, for denying or discrediting moments of dissent--are in academic circles:

... the one moment where I went from being basically bemused by the meeting to engaged irritation was when two defenders of the Iraq war resolution spoke against what Sheehan had said and I had seconded.

The first scholar's rambling objections included, as I understood it, a blanket objection to the entire concept of limits in terms of available time, institutional resources and labor to moral or political energies. That's a fantastically efficient route to ceaseless political defeat, if so.

The second objection annoyed me more: it was a classic assembling of the left-wing circular firing squad. Here you've got a room where every single person is an opponent of the war, and endorses the specific complaints in the preamble of the resolution, where probably everybody sitting there would come to a protest, and many would support an organization like Historians Against the War. So what do you do? Misrepresent the modest objections of the few who question the specific form of a resolution based on a specific understanding of the specific institution of the AHA. In this case, what the scholar defending the resolution said (I think it was Warren Goldstein, but I'm not sure) was that those of us opposed to the resolution were claiming that all professional activities must be completely divorced from any expression of citizen activism. Look, you want to march at a demonstration under a banner that says, "Historians Against the War", that's completely and utterly ok. I'm writing here at this blog as a historian and scholar against the war: my professionalism and my arguments against the war are intertwined in all sorts of ways.

I'm just saying that if an umbrella organization intended to speak for everyone in a given discipline takes this position, then I don't see why it should not take a hundred similar positions on matters of urgent public concern. Except, of course, that the AHA really doesn't have any influence to speak of on such matters (a specific organization like Historians Against the War has far more, in my view, precisely because it is focused around a particular issue), and becomes all the more irrelevant for every such position it takes. It seems to me that this is just a reprise of where academic activism went wrong in the 1970s and 1980s: when the real targets of politics become too remote and well-protected from the relatively comfortable precincts that academic intellectuals inhabit, then turn to the institutions most closely at hand (universities and professional institutions) as proxy targets. It's easy enough to mobilize them as a paper army, particularly through a meeting that only the perverse and the committed attend, but the only real consequence of said mobilization is a bleeding out of any professional particularity to such an organization and a loss of the ability to credibly claim to be a big tent that welcomes all possible configurations of practice and principle.

Burke writes in another post of the temptations to give up blogging--of the frustrations involved in maintaining a genuinely vibrant, intellectually expansive site, as opposed to allowing the site to devolve into a set of endlessly repeated position statements on a stock set of pet issues. He's right about those difficulties. But his post on the AHA is also a strong argument for why academic blogging like his is important. Until the establishment behaves itself better, and responds more honestly to debate and critique both from within and beyond its ranks, blogs such as Burke's pose a crucial and important counterpoint.

Posted by acta online on January 09, 2007 at 08:32 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack