ACTA's Must-Reads
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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 at March 11, 2007 01:29 PM
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