ACTA's Must-Reads
« February 2007 | Main | April 2007 »
Common cause, contd.
Quote for the day:
It is hard to disagree with the argument that colleges should be held publicly accountable for the quality of education they provide and that careful assessment of what our students learn is a reasonable means of demonstrating such accountability. If these principles are applied in an intelligent fashion and with full cooperation by American colleges and universities, the report of the Spellings commission can usefully spur them in their continuing effort to improve the education they offer.
That could be ACTA talking. But it's not--it's the Modern Language Association, which has just issued a response to last year's report from the Commission on the Future of Higher Education. InsideHIgherEd.com has the details. Essentially, the MLA criticizes the Commission for ignoring the importance of the humanities to liberal education, and qualifies its support for outcomes assessment by registering opposition to testing.
ACTA shares the MLA's concern about ensuring strong humanities-based education, as shown by its reports on what English majors study, what constitutes a proper education, and what graduating seniors know about American history. And as far as testing goes, no one is arguing that this method of assessment is ideal. But at the moment, it appears to be the best we've got, and it sure beats nothing.
The IHE coverage of the MLA report stresses quibbling, argument, and general divisiveness among higher ed constituencies. But it's crucial to register the MLA's willingness to concede major points to the Commission's report, as well as to note how its concerns dovetail with those of ACTA. Higher ed reform will happen more efficiently, effectively, and peaceably if it can proceed with an awareness that the polarized culture of academic debate is getting in the way of addressing genuinely shared concerns.
Posted by acta online on March 30, 2007 at 08:53 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
One step forward, two steps back at Columbia
Last fall, student activists at Columbia University shut down a speech by Minutemen-founder Jim Gilchrist when they stormed the stage. After months of media pressure and public outrage, Columbia has censured several of the students involved--who in turn are claiming that Columbia's disciplinary process did not proceed in a fair or reasonable manner.
In a statement released Tuesday afternoon, Bollinger defended the proceedings. "Under the published 'Rules of University Conduct,' Columbia University has a long-standing and very specific process for disciplinary actions involving students," he wrote. "Those independent procedures have been followed in cases arising out of the events of last October 4. If the rule of law is to mean anything, it is vital that we respect the results of the system of rules we live under."Many of the disciplined students have criticized the school for what they described as an arbitrary and drawn-out disciplinary process.
David Judd, CC '08 and president of the International Socialist Organization, said yesterday that Bollinger's comment missed the mark in addressing complaints about the disciplinary process. Judd, who received a disciplinary warning on Monday, said that the rules were ambiguous and did not force the University to clarify the charges to students or reveal evidence in advance of the hearing.
"They didn't disclose the evidence until the day of the hearing," Judd said.
This is not the first time that Columbia has come under fire for failing to respect students' due process rights. Columbia is right to pursue disciplinary action against the students who violated both university policy and the law when they shut down Gilchrist's speech. But the university really should be working hard to ensure that its disciplinary procedures respect students' rights. Anything less is irresponsible and, in this case, hypocritical. If the students' accusations in this instance are correct, Columbia has some explaining to do.
UPDATE: John K. Wilson agrees that there are some due process issues with Columbia's handling of the case.
Posted by acta online on March 29, 2007 at 08:44 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
Casual academic labor
It's all well and good to debate the merits--and demerits--of the academic tenure system, and it's right and proper, too, to reform that system, as the University of Colorado is doing, to ensure that it operates as smoothly and ethically as it can.
But it's also crucial to remember that tenure track faculty members make up an increasingly small percentage of college teachers, and it's crucial, too, not to allow debates about the tenure system to mask the more fundamental problems--for teachers and for students--posed by the casualization of academic labor in this country.
The Education Department is reporting that nearly 50% of faculty teaching at colleges that award federal financial aid are part-time workers, and that the percentage of faculty who are on the tenure track is shrinking accordingly.
No discussion about tenure, academic firing and hiring, and academic freedom is complete without a recognition of this reality, which radically alters the premises upon which the ideals embodied--however imperfectly--in tenure and academic freedom exist.
Posted by acta online on March 28, 2007 at 08:05 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
Common cause, contd.
The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that the Israel on Campus Coalition has published a report on academic freedom that lays out the procedural fundamentals for maintaining free inquiry and vibrant exchange on campus. The report is not going to be online until later today, but the Chronicle's summary makes it sound as though it dovetails in important ways with ACTA's own Intellectual Diversity: Time for Change report:
The goal of the 58-page report, "Academic Rights, Academic Responsibilities: A New Approach," is to "help ensure an academic climate that is conducive to studying charged, sensitive topics -- including the study of Israel -- free of bias and intimidation in the classroom," said David A. Harris, the coalition's executive director.The report, though, has relatively little to say about those topics. Instead it speaks broadly about the rights, rules, and responsibilities required for civil academic exchange -- a notion that, it freely admits, is "not a new idea" -- and quotes approvingly from several campus handbooks that espouse those principles. It also suggests that a vigorous adherence to the philosophy it lays out is academe's best defense against outside pressure groups.
In order to uphold those rights and responsibilities, and to "create a culture of proactive campus cooperation," the report offers a series of recommendations. Among other suggestions, it says that colleges should create academic-freedom task forces, reward faculty members who uphold those principles "in exemplary fashion," expose would-be professors to the ethical issues of the profession, set up clear grievance systems, and make use of employee handbooks or codes of conduct or both.
One page of the report even offers a handy table listing the rights and responsibilities expected of campus "stakeholders," as it refers to students, faculty members, and administrators. All of the table's provisions could readily be endorsed by people across the ideological spectrum.
It will be worth comparing this report to ACTA's once the former is available. The more organizations and individuals that are willing to endorse the idea that campuses must take strong procedural steps to ensure genuine academic freedom (which is essentially the same thing as ensuring intellectual diversity), and the more it is recognized that such steps are proactive means of protecting academe from outside interference, the better.
Posted by acta online on March 28, 2007 at 07:55 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Hank Brown on accountability
University of Colorado president Hank Brown says the magic words:
It is imperative that we in higher education take the initiative to examine ourselves. There are many lawmakers at the state and federal level willing to intervene if we do not do so. Much of the scrutiny we are under is of our own creation. Colleges and universities have been less than forthcoming with the public and legislators about tenure, leading to the suspicion that higher education's primary focus is protecting its own rather than guaranteeing the highly effective and productive teachers and researchers that students and taxpayers deserve.
This is what ACTA has been saying for years. When academics respond to this simple truth with denial, hostility, and ad hominem attack directed at the messenger, they only compound their problems.
Colorado is tightening its tenure system in the wake of the Ward Churchill scandal. And Brown is glad to have been pressed to do so: "Public confidence in academic tenure, much less its understanding of the concept, is dropping," he writes. "To reduce this downward trend, we must be transparent in our processes and straightforward in our explanations of why tenure is necessary and how it works. These steps are crucial to tenure's future, just as tenure is crucial to the academy's and America's long-term well being and international competitiveness."
Brown consistently emphasizes the need to combine streamlined and tightened internal procedures with public accountability. Where many academics scoff at the idea that they are ultimately answerable to the public, Brown gets it right: Without public confidence, America's higher education system is going to fail--badly and fast. His colleagues at other colleges and universities should sit up and take notice.
Posted by acta online on March 26, 2007 at 08:35 AM | Comments (6) | TrackBack
Quote of the day
From Federal Dog, who commented on this post:
By far, the most important education reform possible would concern the faculty hiring process. I cannot tell you the level of filth I have witnessed over the past decades in this regard, and it directly accounts for the abysmal quality of people appointed to teaching positions. Were the public to see exactly who gets hired and who gets canned (even at the first screening stage of the process), there would first be shock, then termination of public funding for the disaster. Just put these people through a battery of professional tests -- like the bar or medical boards -- and watch them drop like flies. Yet, they are the ones locking up faculty positions and graduating fully illiterate and uneducated students. People should give a damn about their children and the hatchet job that academic hacks have been doing on them for at least twenty years.
If more academics would attest to what they have witnessed in the way of corrupt hiring and firing procedures, things would change. As things stand now, most academics seem more interested in protecting the sanctity of their shop--however ruinously destructive it is--than in standing up for what's right. The hostility to transparency that is revealed when, for example, an organization such as ACTA issues studies or supports legislation that encourages it, is a sign of how deeply and instinctively academics grasp the untenability of their working practices. If these things could survive the light of day, they wouldn't be so defensively and furtively concealed.
Speaking of which, Margaret Soltan reports that the University of Colorado has just established a new, more efficient time line for firing tenured professors. CU's difficulty getting rid of Ward Churchill once it was definitively shown that he had no business being on the payroll has inspired these new measures, which promise to serve as models for other universities.
Posted by acta online on March 25, 2007 at 08:32 AM | Comments (12) | TrackBack
Admissions from the inside
At Slaves of Academe, Oso Raro meditates on the corruption inherent in the academic system of hiring and promotion:
I recently had a long talk with an old mentor, someone who was incredibly important to my success at Prestigious Eastern U. and remains embedded in my life. Mentor had recently served on a search committee at their institution, and we spoke about the excruciating nature of the conference interview, in their words, "from the other side of the bed," a metaphor I liked because of its associations with the intimacy of the academic hiring process. We are not only hiring co-workers, we are also hiring lovers, confidantes, children, parents, and the whole realm of messy, subjective, personal relationships we associate with collegiality in the academy. Mentor spoke of the parade of lackeys, flunkies, and the qualified that passed through the hotel suite, and how it was not the latter category that got invited for campus visits. All in all, not terribly surprising. But Mentor's commentary on the nature of the academic hiring process, and the academy in general, I found compelling. Mentor observed that the system was rotten to the core, with little or no oversight or accountability. It was a completely unexamined process, rife with ridiculousness and illegality. Mentor observed that not even in the ziggurats of Mammon was so much entrusted into the incapable hands of so few, with no repercussions for bad behaviour or a job badly done.I had never thought of it in this particular way, and I found the idea shocking as well as depressing. This infrastructure of incompetence is dependent on secrecy. Search committees are riddles wrapped in enigmas entombed in lies, secrets, and silence. There is no accountability of their process, no public measurement of fairness and success (if you discount the beauty pageant that is a series of job talks, that is). In fact, the whole process is so shrouded in secrecy that candidates have no idea about basic things in many searches, like for instance who eventually got the job, never mind more important information like where the candidate may have flubbed, or if one of their letters of recommendation is suspect. Nowadays, some committees don't even bother with a formal rejection letter, even for candidates on the short list. Those of us who have done our time on search committees know the messy internal functions and petty compromises one must make with infantile senior faculty or sensitive constituencies. But from the outside, the academic search committee is the very definition of the Star Chamber, inscrutable and random.
Talk about extraordinary rendition! Every year, thousands of hopeful candidates send out reams of paper in a process relatively similar to tossing pennies in fountains, or wishing on a star. And this process, random and inchoate and opaque, has been naturalised for us, normalised as the way it is. But why should it be this way? The story of how our profession came to this stage is more a story of the banality of evil than meritocracy, a corruption and misapprehension of market forces and the constant, drum beat raising of the bar, illusions and delusions of the professoriate, as well as a total collapse of the guild structure that ironically follows the end of formal white supremacy in the academy and society. Brutal economic conditions masked as the socio-cultural are not unique to the academy, but are perhaps most pronounced in the abuses of the academic hiring process, a cesspool under the basement floorboards that at any given moment threatens to bubble over into scandal or legal action. When this happens, ever so rarely of course, the mess is cleaned up by paid professionals, settlement checks are issued (if you're lucky), confidentiality agreements are signed, and everyone goes back to business as usual, maintaining the secret.
There is much more, including some smart comment on how blogs encourage the secrets upon which so much academic procedure is based to be leaked ... and hence critiqued.
The trouble is that this leaking is itself shrouded in additional layers of secrecy. Oso Raro, like many, if not most, academics who comment about their professions on blogs, writes anonymously, as do many of her commenters (including the one who notes that "In my time at one institution I heard all of the following from people involved in different searches: 1) Questioning a candidate's religion 2) Questioning a candidate's ethnic background 3)Questioning a candidate's marital status 4) Speculating on a candidate's desire to have children 5) Discounting a candidate because 'Don't we already have enough people of color/women/gays and lesbians in the department?'" and who wonders aloud: "Why universities and departments are not sued more often is a mystery to me. Perhaps it is that silence, though, which prevents an otherwise litigious society from wreaking havoc on higher education").
Shrouded in pseudonyms and steeped in the sidelong accusations of virtual people talking about virtual places, the criticisms these bloggers make somehow get lost in the echo chamber of an academic blogosphere that is, on the whole, quite delighted with itself, and quite unwilling to entertain criticism that comes from an identifiable, actual outsider--even when that criticism is virtually identical to that which is purveyed by anonymous insiders.
The criticisms enumerated in this post--and hurrahed by Oso Raro's academic commenters--are quite similar to those ACTA and other nonacademic critics have been making for some time. That's worth noting. There are bridges to be built -- there is already common cause.
Posted by acta online on March 24, 2007 at 08:38 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
Focus on Duke
Over the past year, Duke has become better known for its sex scandals than for its academics. Its faculty has likewise earned a reputation not for intellectual excellence, but for a rabid readiness to use certain students (privileged, white, male athletes) to promote a political agenda in the absence of facts (the Group of 88 readily declared the accused lacrosse players--and, by extension, the entire team--guilty of charges that have since failed to stand up to examination).
But there are some very good things happening at Duke, and they deserve due notice. John Locke Foundation president John Hood summarizes some of the innovative and immensely constructive curricular moves that Duke has undertaken in recent years. Hood's article reviews a new Pope Center study centered on how Duke has approached what are commonly seen as the "two great failings" of American higher education: the lack of a strong core curriculum, and the lack of intellectual diversity.
Duke is addressing the first problem through its Focus program, and the second through its Gerst program.
Focus brings together professors from a variety of disciplines to teach a theme of academic content. The 30 participating freshmen take two of four classes in the Focus theme, plus a special writing seminar. The students also live together in a common dormitory and meet weekly with the faculty and a guest speaker to share a meal and thought-provoking conversation. For example, 30 Duke freshmen recently formed a Focus group on the theme of "Global Islam."At big universities, undergraduates are often given a sprawling course guide, an elastic set of curriculum requirements, and a reclusive or incompetent faculty adviser. Then they are urged to "go get an education." For many, the result is a mess. They don't have the shared experience of studying a core curriculum in the arts and sciences. In choosing classes, many gravitate towards the trivial and the easy. The Focus program offers an orderly, rigorous alternative to the chaos -- a popular alternative, with nearly a third of all Duke students now participating in some form.
The second great failing in American higher education ... is a "lack of viewpoint diversity." Based on survey research, it's fair to say that in most departments faculty members who would identify themselves as left of center outnumber right-of-center faculty by nine to one. In certain departments, usually social sciences, the ratio is as high as 16 to 1. In others -- usually hard sciences, professional schools or economics -- the ratio is sometimes lower.
If the political predilections of the faculty stayed outside the classroom, this wouldn't be a major problem. Unfortunately, that's not what happens. Ideas and works from conservative, free-market, or conventionally religious scholars receive less attention, and are often openly mocked by teachers. Sometimes, these teachers use the classroom to lecture students on political or social topics far afield from the course. Although the propaganda doesn't stick as much as the tenured radicals would like -- in part because of general student inattention, I'm afraid -- it still provides a warped picture of politics and intellectual life. For students looking just to make a grade on their way to a degree and a career, the prospect of disagreeing can be scary.
Duke's Gerst program is a promising corrective. Named after Gary Gerst, a philanthropist and Duke alumnus, it doesn't simply try to set up a conservative echo chamber in a corner of a liberal concert hall. It seeks to ensure a true diversity of opinions in its faculty, coursework, readings and public lectures. For example, a Focus theme conducted by the Gerst program on "Recent Visions of Freedom" included a course on the Locke-Mill-Jefferson tradition of classical liberalism and a course on criticism of this tradition by Marxists, fascists, poststructuralists, and other radicals.
Duke's Focus and Gerst programs are wonderful illustrations of how one university has arrived at a responsible definition of what constitutes a meaningful undergraduate experience. If more colleges and universities would act in similarly proactive ways--undertaking essential curricular reform in a manner that suits institutional individuality and respects academic freedom--there would be a lot less danger of lawmakers getting involved in regulating higher education.
ACTA has long encouraged universities to undertake just the sorts of independent, creative measures that Duke is taking. More schools ought to follow suit.
Posted by acta online on March 21, 2007 at 11:02 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
How not to do it
At Boise State, a College Republicans group crossed the line when it sought to raise awareness about illegal immigration--and managed to defame the proprietors of a local Mexican restaurant in the process. After the student group advertised a "speech about immigration with a 'food stamp drawing' that requires climbing through a hole in a fence and offering fake identification for a shot at winning dinner at a local Mexican restaurant," the restaurant owners found themselves the targets of angry customers and even vandalism.
"The College Republicans are not racist and do not wish to offend anyone," the revised flyer says. "We simply want to bring attention to the problem of illegal immigration in America, and have chosen a humorous approach to draw interest and student involvement. While the drawing for dinner is all in good fun, the topic is serious."
Like the "Catch the Illegal Immigrant" contests that other student groups are hosting on campuses across the country, the "humorous" approach adopted by the Boise State group is not so funny as it is tasteless and crude. The students at Boise State should think about what they want to accomplish when they publicize their events. If what they want is to further polarize people on an already divisive issue, then they should continue their current publicity strategy. But if what they want is to attract a wide and inquisitive audience, to inform people about issues, and to encourage them to consider alternative perspectives on controversial topics, they are going to need to adopt a different approach.
Posted by acta online on March 20, 2007 at 09:51 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
To learn more about Indoctrinate U
Keep an eye on the official website, and watch this site for news of director Evan Coyne Maloney's public appearances.
Also of note: Maloney's interview with Sean Hannity. Click to view.
Posted by acta online on March 20, 2007 at 09:41 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Accountability, Mediocrity, Snobbery
Montana state legislator Roger Koopman has some uncompromising thoughts on the recent defeat of HB525, a bill that would have required Montana state universities to report on the measures they are taking to ensure intellectual diversity on campus:
If you want to see members of the university community have a total meltdown, start asking questions about their toleration of differing points of view, and their safeguards against political and ideological indoctrination.My House Bill 525 posed those questions, based on the Legislature's legitimate interest in encouraging a learning environment that is open, unbiased and intellectually diverse. You would have thought I set off the world's largest stink bomb, from the reactions I got!
In a free society, two over-arching principles apply to public life: transparency and accountability.These are democracy's insurance policies, nourishing and protecting the people's right to know, insisting that our public servants and governmental institutions operate in the light of day, their actions open to healthy public scrutiny.
Accountability is grounded in the belief that democratic governments do not write their own performance reviews. They are employed by the people, and their work must be judged by the people they serve.
Public institutions -- all public institutions -- are ultimately accountable to the taxpayers who underwrite them. I would submit that if a person working in the public sector has a "problem" with this principle, they are probably in the wrong line of work.
But recently, I made a startling discovery while attempting to introduce more transparency into our state university system. Apparently the virtues of an open and free government do not apply to public higher education.
Reacting like a roomful of scorched cats, tenured educators protested as unthinkable, any effort to track the fairness and professionalism of university policies and instruction.
Koopman explains how mild the bill really is -- it does not attempt to tell individual schools what they should be doing to encourage intellectual diversity, and it does not even tell them how to define it. All it requires is that they do attend to the matter, and that they do devise some means of making themselves publicly accountable for enacting those means. The bill would not have intruded in any way on the autonomy of Montana's state institutions -- it simply stipulated that, however individual schools run themselves, they should make their procedures transparent and they should show themselves to be responsive to the public on an issue of genuine concern.
"Throughout America, the overwhelming leftward tilt of university faculties is well documented," Koopman writes. "This imbalance not only runs the risk of ideological indoctrination, but even more concerning, it can effectively suppress competing points of view -- as evidenced in the books never read, the ideas never discussed, the courses never offered, the speakers never heard and the professors never hired." Koopman goes on to summarize the speech code at the University of Montana: "Outlawed at UM, for example, are (1) comments about women's bodies, (2) sexist jokes, (3) inappropriate gifts, (4) hooting, whistling or lip-smacking noises, (5) statements like 'hey, baby, give me a smile,' (6) 'exaggerated courtesy,' and so forth." Montana State is no better. It outlaws all verbal and nonverbal activity that might cause e a member of the opposite sex "embarrassment or discomfort."
Summarizing the intransigent and unreasonable resistance of a host of university administrators, Koopman concludes on a chilling note:
Reasonable people will recognize that daylight and accountability do not destroy academic freedom — they strengthen it.That public universities are not sacred cows, removed from all public scrutiny, simply because their calling is educational. But the most disconcerting aspect of this is the anger and paranoia that radiates from the Ivory Tower when someone suggests turning the flashlight on.
Why the fear of public exposure? Why the indignation over the slightest hint of public accountability? Why the obsessive claims to privileged secrecy? Is the truth so incriminating that it must stay hidden?
Lest we forget, this is America, where governmental openness, transparency and accountability walk hand in hand with liberty itself.
They are the hallmarks of all our public institutions.
Once we accept the elitist notion that state universities are governments unto themselves, freed from any linkage between public funding and public accountability, on that day we will have sentenced those institutions to the static, mushy mediocrity that protectionism and arrogance always produce.
He's right. But at least in Montana, it seems, no one's listening.
Posted by acta online on March 19, 2007 at 08:52 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack
Comments are back
Apologies to readers who have tried unsuccessfully to post comments in recent weeks. The spam coming in to this site became overwhelming, and in tightenting the spam filter, legitimate comments were screened out as well. We've made some adjustments that should allow commenters to post once again. Please do contribute -- your thoughts are valued and welcome!
Posted by acta online on March 19, 2007 at 08:47 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
Study up
Indoctrinate U's website and trailer are now live at www.IndoctrinateU.com. Visit -- and sign up for a screening in your area!
Posted by acta online on March 18, 2007 at 09:15 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Accountability pays off
ACTA has long recommended that, as a basic measure of accountability, colleges and universities actually look into the scholarly background of those they are considering hiring. It's amazing how often that doesn't happen--and the results, as evidenced in the case of Ward Churchill, can be devastating to institutional reputations.
Ohio University, recently the scene of a plagiarism scandal in its engineering school, has tightened its standards. And it's paying off. While checking into the publication record of Thelma Wills Foote, a Harvard-educated scholar who had accepted an offer to chair OU's African-American Studies department, a dean discovered that Professor Foote's vitae was not all it appeared to be:
Thelma Wills Foote had accepted the job March 1, pending approval from a rank-and-tenure committee, as well as several top administrators.A day later, the university announced her hire, citing she had written two books, including one on Sally Hemings, a slave who was reputed to have been the mistress of Thomas Jefferson.
The history chairman noticed the reference to the Hemings book on Foote's curriculum vitae and searched online sources because he didn't recognize the publisher.
The chairman had been asked to nominate history professors to serve on a committee to review Foote's potential tenure as a full professor. Tenured professors at OU are required to have written at least two scholarly books.
In a cover letter to the university, Foote said she coauthored the Hemings book with television actress Tina Andrews.
But university officials found only a five-paragraph introduction by Foote, with Andrews, a former Days of Our Lives star, credited as the sole author.
Ogles wrote to Foote, asking for a clarification of her role. She responded that her contributions had been substantial but unacknowledged, which she described as common practice in the film and television industry.
The book, Sally Hemings: An American Scandal: The Struggle to Tell the Controversial True Story, was later made into a CBS mini-series. Ogles tried to reach Andrews through her agent to verify Foote's role but was unsuccessful.
"She may very well have been a behind-the-scenes consultant and editor, but she should have told us so instead of leading us to believe she was a co-author," Ogles said.
Foote, who most recently worked at the University of Southern Denmark and now lives in Rome, couldn't be reached for comment last night.
In an e-mail to Ogles, she wrote, "My reasoning in listing myself as co-author within my CV and letter of introduction is that my scholarly work done for the book publication merits that distinction."
She later told the student newspaper The Post: "It may turn out that things don't work out. You know how people are; they tend to seize on people's mistakes and make the worst of them."
Hours later, she sent Ogles a one-sentence e-mail message withdrawing her acceptance of the job offer.
OU ought to have discovered Foote's fabrication before it offered her the position--but, as they say, better late than never. What's remarkable about this story is not the behavior of Foote, which was calculated to game the slack academic hiring system, but the behavior of OU, which was conscientious and aboveboard, if slightly belatedly so.
For more on the need for better administrative review, see ACTA president Anne Neal's recent comments at Phi Beta Cons.
And for more on the Foote scandal, see Margaret Soltan and Cliopatria.
Posted by acta online on March 17, 2007 at 09:12 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Get a taste of "Indoctrinate U" on Sunday
ACTA has long worked with filmmaker Evan Coyne Maloney, the director of Indoctrinate U, the forthcoming documentary on campus political correctness. Evan spoke at ACTA's 2005 ATHENA Roundtable, where he showed Brainwashing 201, a documentary short he developed while collecting the footage for Indoctrinate U, and just last summer, he showed a preview of Indoctrinate U to a standing-room-only crowd on Capitol Hill. The feature-length film will be released shortly, and it features ACTA.
Given this long and fruitful relationship, we are especially pleased to see that the world will get its first taste of Indoctrinate U this weekend. Evan will be interviewed, and parts of the film will be shown, this Sunday on Hannity's America, which airs at 9 p.m. on the East Coast. We are sure that the TV audience will love what it sees--and to understand why, simply read this account by Evan of the event we held last summer:
On July 26th, a subcommittee room in the Rayburn House Office Building on Capitol Hill overflowed with people. The seats went quickly, so some sat on the floor, others stood tip-toe to get a peek, and the rest jammed the entrance, craning their necks through the doorway to look inside. The invitees all work at the House of Representatives, and the event was ACTA's screening of select clips from my upcoming film, Indoctrinate U, which looks at the political environment that prevails on many college campuses.The attendees who already knew ACTA saw a familiar face in the film: that of Anne Neal, the president of ACTA, who was kind enough to travel to New York for an interview last fall. In the interview, Anne discussed the prevalence of politics in the classroom--even classes where politics has nothing to do with the course material--and the pressure that students feel to parrot back professors' political views, lest any dissent cause their grades to suffer.
To say the event was a success would be to redefine that word into mediocrity. I've done my share of events like this, but I was astounded and supremely grateful for the reception that ACTA was able to put together. Getting people away from work in the middle of the day is not an easy task, especially when the workplace is Congress. Nevertheless, ACTA pulled in an eager and enthusiastic crowd who watched the 37-minute preview, ate pizza, and stuck around afterwards to ask questions.
I've been working on this film for nearly three years, and in that time have become very familiar with the players in the academic reform movement. Quite simply, no other group is doing the work ACTA's doing. The research is meticulous and reasoned, and without it, I would not have been able to put together the film I did.
Students and recent graduates can tell you all about the troubled state of academia, but without the work that ACTA has done to document it, my film would be comprised of little more than anecdotes. In the marketplace of ideas, data matters, and ACTA has been instrumental in collecting the evidence that proves the stories covered in Indoctrinate U really are part of a larger pattern that repeats itself all across academia.
Thanks, Evan--and congratulations.
Posted by cmitchell on March 16, 2007 at 03:01 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Overstepping
In December, the annual meeting of the American Historical Association debated whether to pass a resolution opposing the war in Iraq. While there was much support for a resolution, a few clear-headed historians opposed it on the grounds that it would overstep the bounds of professionalism and would be inappropriately political. Timothy Burke was one of those who spoke out against the resolution, and this blog applauded him for standing up and stating his opinion at a moment when the organizing body of his discipline was clearly toying with the idea of creating one of those moments of compulsory consensus that are so definitive in academic culture.
The protests of Burke and others notwithstanding, the AHA put the resolution to a vote, and it has now passed. Although only 15% of its membership bothered to vote, this was enough for a quorum, and 75% of respondents voted in favor of the resolution. The AHA is now officially in the business of taking stands on U.S. foreign policy. Those stands, in turn, represent intentions: Rowan University history professor David Applebaum was delighted, noting that "It will help us translate thought into action."
InsideHigherEd.com has the details -- along with some choice comments from readers.
From Jonathan Cohen, professor of mathematics at DePaul:
One can debate the merits of the Iraq war and I think clearly it has proven to be a lot more problematic for the US than any of its supporters anticipated. But that is not really the issue raised by the resolution. The question is whether the war is so clearly morally reprehensible that the professional organization representing American professional historians should commit itself to one sided proselytizing against it.Politics is very different from education. Its goal is to convert people and enlist them in support of a particular cause or candidate. It is not about intellectual inquiry. The purpose of speeches, pamphlets, demonstrations, rallies, petitions, resolutions and the like is to convince people of a particular set of positions. It is not to present an objective set of views and allow the individuals to make up their mind. That is fine for politics but it is not so great for education.
... for a group of professional historians to declare a correct political position on as controversial topic as the Iraq War is very problematic and calls into question their commitment to education. ... here is a big difference between indoctrination and education. Propaganda is not scholarship. But by passing a one sided resolution on the war in Iraq, the historical society suggests that they are unclear about the distinction.
From Rice professor Martin Wiener:
Perhaps most offensive in the "Resolution on United States Government Practices Inimical to the Values of the Historical Profession" is its dishonesty -- the pretense that American involvement in Iraq is specifically "inimical to the values of the historical profession." The examples cited in the article show how far its authors have to stretch logic to justify their effort to get the AHA to go on record on their side in a political quarrel: exclusion of foreign scholars, reclassification of previously unclassified documents -- are these part of the war in Iraq? Of course not. They can be -- and have been -- objected to on their own. Nor do military interrogation techniques, which are part of the war, have any clear bearing on the historical profession. The level of argument aimed at linking the two would surely be given a failing grade if submitted by an undergraduate.
And from a reader named Jack Olson:
Has the historical profession so perfected its research and teaching of history that it should turn to political issues like supporting or opposing the Iraq War? It doesn't seem so. There is considerable evidence that college students today do not learn as much history as a college graduate should be expected to know. The AHA hasn't offered any good solutions to problems in higher education such as grade inflation, the escalating cost of higher education, or the continuing replacement of faculty by low-paid adjuncts.So, why a resolution on what is undoubtedly a national issue but not particularly one of historical scholarship? Because digressing into minor issues is what organizations do when they recognize their failure at their main mission. Thus, the American Bar Association, having failed to improve either justice for the average citizen or the reputation of their profession, takes official stands on tax funding for the arts, the nuclear freeze movement, and AIDS (they're against it). Voting an official resolution against the Iraq War is a damn sight easier than finding good jobs for all the underemployed historians to whom they've given PhD's, so the AHA understandably prefers to concentrate on the former.
Worth noting: The AHA also considered a resolution opposing campus speech codes at its annual meeting. That one did not pass.
Posted by acta online on March 16, 2007 at 09:10 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Lewis and Summers speak out
What will it take to turn higher education around--to return structure and rigor and integrity to a college education?
In two speeches scarcely a day apart, Harvard professors Harry Lewis and Larry Summers had some answers--and they are worth noting.
At a conference sponsored by ACTA and the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, Lewis--a former dean of Harvard College--placed the blame for curricular incoherence at the feet of faculty unwilling to put student needs ahead of faculty self-interest. "[U]niversities have to realize that they have a social contract with American society and they are not holding up their end of the deal," he said. "We owe it to the country to teach students how democracy works--why we have the freedoms we happily enjoy." And in the absence of faculty willingness to take the lead, Lewis said it was imperative that alumni and trustees put pressure on the universities to do the right thing: "That's where your alumni and trustee voices have to come into play," he told the audience.
And in a speech at Tufts University, Summers--who needs no introduction--in turn pointed to the need to motivate change.
"If there is no incentive to change curriculums, if there is no reward for educational innovation...then change will come very, very slowly," he said. "When university faculties are unwilling to take a stand on what constitutes the undergraduate experience for students, on what, if anything, somebody needs to function in today's world, they license a position that all ideas are equally valid."
Lewis and Summers make it clear: Without strong incentives, higher education cannot be expected to "improve itself." Non-academics--alumni, trustees, parents, students, and the public--can and must help address these problems, in appropriate ways. That is why ACTA exists, and these high-level endorsements lend urgency to our efforts.
Posted by aneal on March 15, 2007 at 04:09 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
A debatable feast
Last fall, the Chronicle of Higher Education staged a meeting of two of academe's most vocal--and opposed--critics: David Horowitz and Michael Berube. This blog greeted that meeting as a truly positive step in the right direction for a higher ed debate so polarized that people on opposite sides often neither know one another nor truly know what the other stands for. Berube and Horowitz found some common ground as they ate--good food being fine social grease for culture warriors as for others--and they seemed to emerge from their discussion with a bit of mutual understanding and the prospect of constructive future engagement of the issues.
The Chronicle liked the format so much that it staged a repeat recently, this time with ACTA president Anne Neal and AAUP general secretary Roger Bowen as the principal diners. Some excerpts from the edited transcript of their discussion:
Ms. Neal: As you know, we undertook, through the University of Connecticut's Center for Survey Research and Analysis, a poll of students and what was happening in the classroom. Around 49 percent of those students said that in their classroom, professors were frequently introducing material unrelated to the topic at hand.[ACTA's survey, conducted in 2004, questioned 658 undergraduates at 50 top colleges and universities. The survey asked students about their perceptions of the political climate on campus and about whether professors introduced political commentary in course lectures and material.]
Mr. Bowen: Fifty-one percent said otherwise.
Ms. Neal: But nevertheless.
Mr. Bowen: I read the survey.
Ms. Neal: A third of them said that they feared for their grade if they didn't agree with --
Mr. Bowen: And two-thirds said otherwise.
Ms. Neal: The professor. Well, let me finish. It seems to me these are rather significant figures. So our question is: When you have a significant percentage of students who are raising these concerns about the robust exchange of ideas, isn't it important to listen to them? All we're asking is the academy pay attention to itself and reflect upon itself as much as it asks others to reflect upon themselves. If you had 49 percent in the classroom saying there was sexual harassment going on or racial discrimination, it seems to me that's a percentage that requires some self-reflection and some self-scrutiny.
Mr. Bowen and Ms. Neal argued over the role that each of their organizations should play in trying to ensure that campuses make room for a variety of viewpoints.
Mr. Bowen: With all due respect, ACTA is entitled to its opinions, but you're not part of the academy, and to pretend that you are and serving in the role of policeman, or watchdog or whatever, is a conceit, is it not?
Ms. Neal: I'm not saying we're policemen, Roger. Are you suggesting the academy is free from accountability? Certainly not.
Mr. Bowen: No, the accountability is decided by the standards the professoriate sets for itself.
Ms. Neal: And I'm just saying that's what we want the professoriate to do. Our fear is that the piece that is missing is the obligation of the faculty to police itself and ensure that it is abiding by scholarly standards. Why not a self-study? Why not post-tenure review? Why not ensure that hiring is done according to scholarly merit and not a political litmus test? These are reasonable questions to ask of the academy.
Mr. Bowen: We would agree
This exchange, and the longer discussion surrounding it, crystallizes both the obstructionism that academics tend to direct at ACTA when it criticizes the academy for its lack of accountability and ACTA's answer to those criticisms. It also exemplifies--insofar as Bowen is a spokesman for the AAUP and, by extension, for normative academic attitudes--the manner in which academics are currently hoisting themselves on the petard of academic freedom. On the one hand, they evoke academic freedom to assert that "outsiders" have no business intruding on academic affairs; on the other hand, they don't reliably hold themselves accountable, and often allow egregious misbehavior to go unchecked because their conception of academic freedom is far too broad and indiscriminate. To Bowen's credit, he did sit down with Neal and he did talk seriously with her about both the problems marring academe today and the problem of figuring out how to address those problems from within a framework that honors traditions of institutional autonomy and individual professors' freedom to teach and research as they see fit.
Their own verdicts on the meal are recorded by the Chronicle:
Mr. Bowen believes Ms. Neal tried to turn the lunch into a formal debate, as evidenced by her use of notecards. "I thought it would be an honest-to-God kind of conversation, rather than trying to score points," he said. Ms. Neal described most of what Mr. Bowen had to say as "deny and misstate, deny and misstate." She adds: "I really wanted to engage the issues: academic responsibility and academic freedom. It's two-sided. But when all you get is a denial, that there's not a problem, it's pretty hard to argue the substance."
Still, talking is a beginning. This is not about winning and losing, after all, but about people who genuinely care about the future of higher education in this country finding ways to work together to ensure the best future possible.
Posted by acta online on March 11, 2007 at 01:29 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Missouri in the media
On Sunday, March 11, Fox News Channel's The Fox Report will report on Missouri House Bill 213. Tune in!
Posted by cmitchell on March 10, 2007 at 06:34 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Victory at William & Mary
In the wake of embarrassing national publicity, strong criticism from ACTA and others, and devastating losses imposed by angry donors, the College of William & Mary has announced that it will return the Wren Cross to the Wren Chapel. In a statement issued yesterday, the College announced that
THE WREN CHAPEL CROSS SHALL BE RETURNED FOR PERMANENT DISPLAY IN THE CHAPEL IN A GLASS CASE. THE CASE SHALL BE LOCATED IN A PROMINENT, READILY VISIBLE PLACE, ACCOMPANIED BY A PLAQUE EXPLAINING THE COLLEGE'S ANGLICAN ROOTS AND ITS HISTORIC CONNECTION TO BRUTON PARISH CHURCH. THE WREN SACRISTY SHALL BE AVAILABLE TO HOUSE SACRED OBJECTS OF ANY RELIGIOUS TRADITION FOR USE IN WORSHIP AND DEVOTION BY MEMBERS OF THE COLLEGE COMMUNITY.
The cross was removed last fall by William & Mary president Gene Nichol without consulting students, alumni, or the board, and was done so in order to demonstrate the College's putative sensitivity to those who do not share the beliefs the cross stands for. Time has since shown that Nichol's act was found by many to be extraordinarily offensive in its own right.
Posted by acta online on March 07, 2007 at 05:22 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Case studies in accountability
Academic insiders often meet ACTA's calls for accountability with strong resistance, arguing that academe can mind itself, that it should not have to answer to the public, and that accountability of the sort ACTA urges in Intellectual Diversity: Time for Action threatens academic freedom. But those arguments are straw men, and disregard the facts while distorting ACTA's intentions.
This case at USC shows what can happen when accountability is not a priority:
A professor's absence for a day might spell relief and a few extra hours of relaxation for students, but for some communication management graduate students, their instructor's absence has worn out its novelty.Aram Sinreich, professor of CMGT 599 - Communication, Culture and Commerce in the Videogame Industry - has not showed up to his class for more than a month, leaving some students frustrated and lost.
Andrea Hollingshead, chair of the communication management program, said Sinreich originally missed class because he caught the flu.
Sinreich stopped showing up for the Wednesday night class after the second week of the semester, said Matt Rosenzweig, a master's candidate in communication management.
Rosenzweig said the situation grew worse after Sinreich failed to respond to e-mails.
Sinreich's condition worsened, preventing him from communicating by phone or e-mail, Hollingshead said.
Two of Sinreich's colleagues and professional friends have tried to fill in for his absence, but Rosenzweig said they came to class unprepared.
"They were not informed what they would be covering in the class until a few hours beforehand," he said. "They did not have enough time to digest the material."
Rosenzweig said the lectures given by both substitutes did not meet his expectations for the course and what it was supposed to teach.
"The transition up until this point has not been handled very well," Rosenzweig said.
"This is a $4,000 class. That's a lot of money to spend for not getting anything. It's going to compromise the integrity of the communication management program," he said.
Turns out the individual who was supposed to be teaching the orphaned grad course is himself a grad student at USC. This, too, should be a matter of concern.
Margaret Soltan has more, complete with a comments thread in which some seem willing to suggest that even though such failures of responsibility can easily happen anywhere in academe, that does not in itself signal a problem.
Posted by acta online on March 06, 2007 at 05:36 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Still more on Missouri
Here is an editorial from yesterday's Columbia Daily Tribune:
Intellectual diversity on campusSurely a good thing, but does the General Assembly have any business demanding it?
Such a bill currently is on the floor of the House of Representatives, pushed by conservative Republicans who worry about allegations students have been harassed by liberal professors.
Rep. Jane Cunningham, R-Chesterfield, introduced the bill after a student sued Missouri State University when a professor dropped her grade because she would not sign a letter to state legislators opposing homosexual adoption. The university quickly settled. Another grad from MSU said professors told her she could not be a good social worker unless she votes Democratic.
David Wasinger, a member of the University of Missouri Board of Curators, said he has received similar complaints from "university administrators, students, alumni and even fellow board members" reluctant to speak out, fearing retribution.
These are serious allegations, to be sure. The new legislation urges colleges to diversify faculties and bring in speakers of varied viewpoints but does not actually mandate any particular action, only an annual report, an exercise right down the alley for members of the academic community. Each campus will be able to appoint another committee. The bill does not say campuses should become more conservative, avoiding its most inappropriate potential pitfall.
Thus, the bill, which is likely to pass, will be a fair-enough expression of support for diversity of campus culture. Despite the legitimate suspicions of moderate-to-liberal observers, the bill is harmless and might do some good if it discourages abuses of the type cited, which of course might affect abusers on either end of the spectrum.
Posted by cmitchell on March 05, 2007 at 07:08 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
More on Missouri
Last week, ACTA released a poll on the classroom environment in Missouri. A national polling firm contacted 652 undergraduates at the state's two largest public campuses in February. The results included the following:
--58.7 percent reported that "some professors use the classroom to present their personal political views";
--56.8 percent reported courses that "have readings which present only one side of a controversial issue"; and
--51 percent reported "courses in which students feel they have to agree with the professor's political or social views in order to get a good grade."
These results ought to be of deep concern to anyone who cares about higher education. As we noted in a press release, they should have been zero.
Of course--as some have pointed out--these were not the only numbers in the poll, and ACTA has made the entire document available for public inspection. However, it should be of little comfort that in some cases, less than a majority of students responded in a way that might be troubling. Again, generally speaking, the numbers should be zero. If 25 percent of students are receiving preaching instead of teaching, that is not exactly a record of success.
Think of it this way: Every ten percent who reported problems in this poll translates into about 2,000 undergraduates at the University of Missouri-Columbia alone. Elsewhere, defenders of the status quo have claimed that thirteen complaints are not enough to warrant any concern. Are we now to the point that even a couple thousand students do not matter?
One final note: When the complete poll document was initially posted, via a link from a press release, an incorrect version of the file was used. The differences were extremely minor (a section on weighting, for instance, had been inadvertently deleted) and the currently available file is the same one that was handed out to legislators and members of the media in Missouri. ACTA regrets the error.
Posted by cmitchell on March 05, 2007 at 11:27 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Missouri Higher Ed Committee approves bill
On Thursday, Missouri's House Higher Education Committee approved a bill that would require state colleges and universities to report on the measures they are taking to ensure intellectual diversity. The bill, which is based on recommendations made in ACTA's 2005 report, Intellectual Diversity: Time for Change, defines intellectual diversity as "the foundation of a learning environment that exposes students to a variety of political, ideological, religious, and other perspectives, when such perspectives relate to the subject matter being taught or issues being discussed." It leaves the specifics of how to report and what to report to institutions themselves. The Missouri House could vote on the bill as early as this week.
Posted by acta online on March 05, 2007 at 06:36 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
High price for pandering
William & Mary's president Gene Nichol may have thought he was catering to an important constituency when he removed the cross from the Wren Chapel last fall -- but he neglected to calculate the cost of that catering. The price tag has now been set at $12 million, as a donor has rescinded his contribution to protest Nichol's decision.
Nichol has, in the wake of vociferous criticism, national media coverage, and appeals from ACTA, backed down somewhat from his original autocratic decision to remove the cross. Acknowledging that he was wrong to remove the cross without consulting the William & Mary community, he has, with the approval of the Board, convened a committee to assess the legal issues involved in a public univerisity displaying a religious symbol. And perhaps in the spring, the committee will determine that the cross should be returned to its old spot. But the odds are that it won't.
In the meantime, a decision that was originally meant to appease the complaints of certain campus special interest groups has caused more outrage and division than arguably existed before. One wonders whether Nichol would have taken up the question of the cross if he had understood that he could not pander for free.
Meanwhile, Hamilton College continues to pay--in the form of dollars, expertise, and leadership--for its politicized decision to kill plans for the Alexander Hamilton Center. Trustee Carl Menges had pledged to donate over $3 million to the center -- but now that Hamilton has proved unwilling to pursue a project that would have brought some genuine intellectual diversity to that campus, he has resigned from the board.
Posted by acta online on March 01, 2007 at 06:16 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack