ACTA's Must-Reads

« April 2007 | Main | June 2007 »

Academic freedom wins in Colorado

Two years ago, the public learned about University of Colorado ethnic studies professor Ward Churchill's essay comparing the World Trade Center victims to "little Eichmanns"--and the University of Colorado found itself at the center of a national scandal. After a lengthy investigation that found Churchill guilty of research misconduct, this revealing chapter of academic history is finally drawing to a close. In an eloquently worded letter, University of Colorado president Hank Brown has called for Churchill to be fired--and debate rages about what it all means.

The debate centers on what the Churchill affair says about academic freedom. Some say that Churchill was only investigated because the university wanted to punish him for expressing his views--and that therefore his academic freedom was violated. Some generalize outward from that premise, arguing that Churchill's case marks a broader attack on academic freedom itself. Others argue the opposite: that Churchill's academic freedom was honored, and that, in holding Churchill accountable for his breach of scholarly ethics, the University of Colorado has effected a necessary clarification of what academic freedom really is.

Crucially, Inside Higher Ed's coverage documents a split within the AAUP--traditionally the caretaker of academic freedom--on this matter. The local University of Colorado chapter argues that Churchill's academic freedom was violated (its president, education professor Margaret LeCompte, says that the investigation marked "an opening wedge in the concerted effort to curb academic freedom and tenure"). Meanwhile, Jonathan Knight, head of the national AAUP's academic freedom program, defended a university's right to sanction a professor for academic misconduct regardless of his notoriety in the public sphere.

But while Inside Higher Ed notes the division within the AAUP, it ignores the noteworthy convergence of the national AAUP's position with that of ACTA.

ACTA has for years argued, in numerous contexts, that academic freedom does not mean "anything goes." Noting that accountability is a central tenet of academic freedom as the AAUP originally conceived it, ACTA has long argued that universities have an obligation to ensure that faculty members are living up to the ethical compact that academic freedom represents.

ACTA has maintained just this position throughout the Churchill affair, and has, as a result, been an important figure throughout the Churchill debate.

When the Churchill scandal first broke, many elected officials and public figures called for Churchill to be fired. But ACTA loudly and decisively rejected those demands. ACTA defended Churchill's academic freedom, reminding the University that it cannot punish professors for their views, and urging the University to ensure that Churchill receive due process in any investigation that it might subsequently undertake. In the wake of those recommendations, Churchill was not fired, his free speech rights have been acknowledged, and his due process rights have been meticulously respected.

When the University of Colorado subsequently investigated allegations that Churchill had committed research misconduct, ACTA kept a close eye on the process to ensure that the university struck a proper balance between competing prerogatives: Churchill’s academic freedom and First Amendment rights had to be honored even as the University assessed the charges against him. When CU issued its report in June 2006, ACTA applauded the university for the care, restraint, and thoroughness with which it had studied Churchill's alleged research misconduct and scrutinized its own procedures for hiring, reviewing, and promoting faculty members. The report, with its recommendations for tightened personnel practices, was a model of institutional tact and an encouraging sign of CU's commitment to accountability.

To its great credit, CU has welcomed the opportunity to engage in some crucial self-examination. As CU president Hank Brown put it last March,

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.

A champion of streamlined internal procedures and public accountability, Brown has led CU during a period of crucial transition.

Brown's announcement that he believes Churchill should be fired does not conclude the disciplinary process. But it does mark an important and necessary move on CU's part: It not only brings the lengthy Churchill investigation one step closer to closure, but also signifies the dawn of a new era at CU.

Two years ago, the University of Colorado was to many a symbol of all that is wrong with academia. Today, it is becoming a model for how universities can responsibly ensure educational quality and scholarly integrity--while still, as ACTA and the AAUP apparently agree--respecting academic freedom.

Posted by acta online at 05:18 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

The Shakespeare buzz, contd.

The Vanishing Shakespeare continues to receive favorable notice from the press and from scholars who understand that English departments are remiss when they leave the study of Shakespeare up to chance. But there are critics of the study, and it's worth looking closely at their arguments.

At Dartblog, Joe Malchow has posted a response to the Shakespeare report written by self-described English professor Daniel Green.

ACTA's report defined a department as requiring Shakespeare if it either required a majority of English majors to take a dedicated Shakespeare course or if it required majors to take two out of three single-author courses on Shakespeare, Chaucer, or Milton. Taking issue with these criteria, Green complains that ACTA was remiss in excluding survey courses because--these are ACTA's words--they "do not guarantee that [they] will include Shakespeare or will provide exposure of any significant depth."

He then dismisses ACTA's determination because there may be some exceptions to the rule. "Maybe the authors are right--maybe the survey course doesn't require a study of the Bard in any depth. But what if it does?" And he offers his own undergraduate experience as evidence that some survey courses do indeed cover Shakespeare in depth. When Green was in college, he says, he took a required survey on the Elizabethan period that, while not a dedicated Shakespeare course, did cover Shakespeare intensively. Such a course, he complains, would not have been counted as a Shakespeare course according to ACTA's rubric, when, in fact, it ought to have been. On the basis of this example, Green concludes that ACTA's report "does not support its own conclusion."

There is a lot wrong with this logic.

First, Green seeks to topple ACTA's argument about institutional trends with a single anecdote--one that relates to events that occurred some time ago. ACTA's report acknowledges that English major requirements were once far more substantive than they are now; the whole point of the study is to chart declining standards. As an English professor, Green has been out of college for some time. More to the point, Green does not tell us if his alma mater still requires such a course. He also does not name his alma mater--an omission that makes it impossible to find out what its past and current requirements are.

Second, Green wrongly assumes that ACTA did not consider the question of surveys. "They could have tried to solve this problem [regarding survey courses]," he writes. "They could have looked into the course descriptions or the syllabi of the survey courses." In fact, ACTA did examine survey courses--as the study notes in the preface to Appendix A (p. 23).

Here's what ACTA found.

A very small number of schools--among them Carleton, Davidson, Ohio State, and Penn State--requires a survey course that explicitly includes Shakespeare in its official description. These courses were not counted as Shakespeare courses because they cannot, by definition, offer in-depth coverage of Shakespeare. Carleton's required survey extends from the medieval period through the seventeenth century, and covers Chaucer, Milton, and sixteenth- and seventeenth-century lyric poets in addition to Shakespeare. Davidson's extends from the medieval period through the eighteenth century, and covers Chaucer, Milton, and Donne as well as Shakespeare. Ohio State's routinely covers Beowulf, the Canterbury Tales, Spenser's Faerie Queene, Milton's Paradise Lost, poetry by Donne, Shakespeare, Dryden and Pope, and prose selections from Swift and Johnson. As these examples show, a survey by definition is devoted to broad coverage. While surveys prepare students for in-depth study of particular writers, genres, and periods, they are not and cannot be in-depth studies of Shakespeare or any other writer.

A slightly larger number of schools--Claremont McKenna, Princeton, UC San Diego, the University of Virginia, Vassar, and Notre Dame--requires surveys that do not stipulate that Shakespeare will be covered. Princeton's survey actually excludes Shakespeare: It centers on Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, Pope, and Swift. UC San Diego's survey also excludes Shakespeare. The expectation in these instances seems to be that Shakespeare will be studied elsewhere, but in the absence of a requirement, it is not at all certain that students will do so.

As these examples indicate, the required British literature survey is dying out alongside Shakespeare requirements. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that almost half the departments that still require Shakespeare also still require surveys of earlier English literature. They are: Harvard, UC Berkeley, UCLA, University of the District of Columbia, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, University of Minnesota, and University of Wisconsin at Madison. At these schools, the survey is not seen as a substitute for studying Shakespeare, but as a supplement to it.

And what about schools that require a dedicated "Elizabethan" course of the sort Green recalls taking? There are only two that even come close to meeting such a description: Barnard requires juniors to take a "Renaissance colloquium," while Duke requires students to take a course on "literary and cultural study 1500-1660." At Barnard, the colloquium is offered in multiple varieties, each centered around an opposition: "Imitation and Creation," "Skepticism and Affirmation," "Reason and Imagination," and so on. There are no specific course descriptions or syllabi published online. Students can take two Renaissance courses instead of the colloquium, but only one can be a Shakespeare course; Milton counts toward this requirement, even though he is not a Renaissance writer. Currently, Duke does use its requirement to drive students to Shakespeare courses, but it is significant that the structure of the requirement--which encompasses cultural as well as literary study and which covers the entire Tudor and Jacobean periods, the Cromwell era, and the Restoration--allows for a decidedly non-Shakespearean set of offerings. A course on Ben Jonson would fulfill it, as would a course on metaphysical poetry.

Green's defense of the academic status quo is spirited. But it does not stand up to scrutiny.

Posted by acta online at 08:45 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Good for GWU

College and university trustees are often reluctant to take an assertive role when it comes to ensuring educational excellence. The conventional wisdom in governance circles is that questions of academic quality are best left up to academics themselves. But the fact is that trustees are duty-bound to make sure that the schools entrusted to them are offering the best education they can: After all, if they don't do it, who will?

This is a point ACTA has been making for years. In Becoming an Educated Person, ACTA noted that "at many schools, the task will fall to college and university trustees--who are responsible for the academic as well as financial health of their institutions--to make sure that their students receive the kind of education they will need for thoughtful, productive, and satisfying lives." In Intellectual Diversity: Time for Action, ACTA argued that "any board that fails to guarantee the free exchange of ideas and the student's right to learn on its campus is simply not doing its job." Most recently, in The Vanishing Shakespeare, ACTA urged trustees to "insist that departments articulate with far greater clarity what students should know upon graduating and ensure that major requirements are substantive." ACTA has long argued that when it comes to monitoring educational quality, trustees have a right to call for an institutional self-study, internal accountability mechanisms, and regular curricular reviews.

To their great credit, the trustees at George Washington University understand this.

Last week, GWU's student newspaper reported that the board was inquiring into the university's freshman writing program. In place since 2004, the program requires each course to assign students 25-30 pages of writing. But in practice, individual writing classes vary widely in their requirements; the program is thus neither meeting its stated goals nor amenable to meaningful evaluation. A faculty committee is currently reviewing the syllabi of GWU's writing courses; committee members reported to the board that they were working to ensure consistency of student experience by holding teachers responsible for meeting the page requirements.

Some might say that boards have better things to do than worry about how many pages freshmen produce in their required writing courses. But these are the kinds of issues boards must concern themselves with if they care about educational excellence. The mechanism at GWU is simple and straightforward--a committee charged with maintaining a particular academic program reports on that program, and informed discussion about what should be done ensues. Subsequent board meetings will involve subsequent reports, and additional discussion about what, if anything, must be done.

That's accountability in action.

Posted by acta online at 11:15 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Indoctrinate U on the air

Last Saturday, Evan Coyne Maloney appeared on C-Span to discuss his new film, Indoctrinate U. The segment is 32 minutes long, and features some very sharp commentary--from Maloney and callers alike--on the state of free speech and free inquiry on American campuses. It's well worth a listen, not least because Maloney is such an exceptional spokesman for the importance of intellectual diversity in academia.

Indoctrinate U documents case after case of students and faculty members whose academic careers were damaged when they expressed views that differed from institutional orthodoxy. In Maloney's words, "Basically we want to try to show the American public that there is really an attack on free speech and free thought on campus." Usually, Maloney notes, it's the conservative or libertarian professor or student who runs into trouble for "expressing political views that in the rest of society are fairly mainstream." But the point, he stresses repeatedly, is not that one view is right and one view wrong, nor is it that one view deserves to replace the other. The point, he observes, "goes far beyond any sort of ideological bias and it goes toward one of the founding principles of this country. Should people have the right to express their ideas freely? One would think that on a college campus that would be the prime value. But it turns out that that's oftentimes one of the last values under consideration."

Throughout the show, Maloney was consistent in his message, which transcends partisan politics to focus on what kind of environment higher education should be for everyone: "Academia wouldn't be better off if everyone agreed with me," he stated. "My issue is: Are the people in the ideological minority on campus able to express their views without having their academic careers ended? I think that if everyone did agree with me on campus the problem would be the same, just with another set of victims. I'm not interested in making academia look like me ideologically. I am just hoping academia will recognize that there is a value to multiple perspectives."

Despite more than 200 attempts to contact higher education administrators at schools where students' or faculty members' expressive freedoms had been curtailed, not one agreed to appear on camera. "That's appalling," Maloney said. "A lot of these schools are public schools and they should be accountable to the taxpayers. But I think in a lot of cases they are accountable to nobody so they refused to speak to us. If taxpayers are going to be forcibly required to fund these universities then these universities should be accountable to the taxpayers. As far as I can tell, the university is the only institution that receives that amount of public money that feels like they have absolutely zero accountability to anyone."

When asked whether Indoctrinate U poses any solutions to the problem it outlines, Maloney indicated that this is a job for others: "I don't get into how to effect change on campus," he said. "My point is that in helping people understand the problem, other people might come up with solutions for how to deal with it."

But while Maloney does not offer solutions, his film features organizations that do. ACTA is one of them. ACTA president Anne D. Neal appears in the film, where she discusses how a recent ACTA-sponsored student survey found that nearly half the students polled felt considerable political pressure in the classroom. It's also worth nothing that ACTA's 2005 study, Intellectual Diversity: A Time for Action, amounts to a blueprint for addressing many of the issues Maloney raises in his film. The booklet charts the problems posed by speech codes, one-sided speaker schedules, politicized hiring and promotion practices, and a classroom culture often indifferent to scholarly standards. It also offers recommendations for change that are cost-effective and that respect the academic freedom of faculties as well as the institutional autonomy of individual schools. ACTA has also been a strong advocate of accountability, urging colleges and universities to report annually on the steps they are taking to ensure intellectual diversity on campus.

Maloney's message thus dovetails with ACTA's. Both see a pressing problem on our campuses, and both take a nonpartisan, temperate approach to ensuring that the problem is properly understood and effectively addressed.

Indeed, Maloney's concluding words might well be ACTA's own: "I think we all have to recognize as humans that we have these frailties, and one of the frailties is groupthink and the fact that when we get into large communities we tend not to like when people come in and challenge the dominant views. That's why I think it is important to respect free speech because that happens regardless of ideology. The problem would be just the same on campus if the roles on campus were reversed. ... I hope we can look beyond the ideological battles that go on and really embrace the notion of free speech and free thought because on a college campus that's what it should be all about."

Posted by acta online at 12:04 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Victory for accountability at Dartmouth

Accountability is the wave of higher education's future. And alumni have a pivotal role to play in shaping that future. Dartmouth is a hot spot in this regard: Recent years have seen several dark-horse alumni petition candidates win places on Dartmouth's board, as well as a great deal of ensuing debate about who runs Dartmouth, how board members are elected, and what it means that alumni are increasingly inclined to elect independent reform-minded petition candidates rather than those put forward on the Alumni Association slate.

ACTA has been closely involved with concerned Dartmouth alumni since the 1990s, when William K. Tell, Jr., a valued member of ACTA's National Council, helped found Dartmouth Alumni for Open Governance. And ACTA has been outspoken in its support of alumni who offer independent perspectives and seek to ensure meaningful alumni participation in the governance process.

Now, for the fourth time since 2004, a reform-minded petition candidate has been elected to Dartmouth's board--and ACTA is delighted.

University of Virginia law professor and Dartmouth alum Stephen Smith ran on a platform that declared his desire to "stop bureaucratic bloat and to invest in excellence" as well as protect the quality of undergraduate education at Dartmouth; he is the fourth independent-minded petition candidate to win a spot on Dartmouth's board in the last three elections.

"Stephen Smith's election underscores that today's alumni are concerned about what's going on at their institutions," ACTA president Anne D. Neal said in a press release issued last Thursday. "For years, Dartmouth alumni have been rightfully demanding input on critical issues facing their college. ... It's time for the academy to realize that alumni will no longer 'put up and shut up.' Indeed, the academy ignores alumni voices at its own peril."

But Smith's election is not the only victory for the preservation of alumni rights. Reform-minded candidates seeking leadership positions in the Dartmouth Alumni Association have also scored a great victory. Seven of the eleven seats on the Executive Committee of the Alumni Association were won by petition candidates.

Those elected to the Executive Committee represent all 65,000 Dartmouth alumni--and have considerable ability to influence Dartmouth's future, including selecting the official slate of alumni candidates to run for open seats on the Dartmouth board.

This marked the first time Dartmouth alumni were permitted to vote for Association representatives without being required to go to Hanover, and the results speak for themselves.

Posted by acta online at 02:06 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

The Shakespeare buzz, contd.

Today's Chicago Sun-Times features an op-ed by ACTA president Anne Neal:

The world loves Shakespeare. But American universities don't.

That is the conclusion of a new study released by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni. The report, "The Vanishing Shakespeare," surveyed English curricula at 70 major American colleges and universities. Only 15 require their English majors to take a course on Shakespeare. The rest allow the English teachers of tomorrow to graduate without studying the language's greatest writer in depth.

Only one institution requires Shakespeare in the Ivy League -- Harvard. And a mere three others of U.S. News' top 25 liberal arts colleges -- Middlebury, Smith and Wellesley -- require the study of the Bard.

At most of America's top colleges, Shakespeare is simply an elective -- one among many. That puts him on a par with literature courses on "Nags, Bitches and Shrews" at Dartmouth; Los Angeles, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Baywatch at Northwestern; baseball at Emory, and "Cool Theory," at Duke, where students devote themselves to the study of a single word of American slang.

It used to be that our colleges and universities could be counted on to introduce students to the central works, events and figures who have shaped our world as part of a shared conversation. But not anymore.

Students can now graduate from most of the top-ranked colleges in America without having much meaningful exposure to anything. Indeed, in today's academy, there has been a breakdown in the belief that a shared core of learning is important, or that some subjects are more worthy than others. As former Harvard Dean Harry Lewis explains in Excellence without a Soul: "Universities are having a hard time making the case that the education they offer is about anything in particular. 'Breadth' and 'choice' have become goals in themselves."

Mind you, most colleges claim otherwise. Haverford College's English department, for example, claims to "maintain a working balance between an enduring commitment to the traditional canon of English and American literature and an expanding horizon of fresh concerns." And yet, there the Bard is not even an option. In 2006-2007, Haverford College's English department did not offer a single Shakespeare course.

And it's not just Shakespeare who's in trouble. When ACTA surveyed the general education requirements of 50 colleges in 2004, 88 percent did not require a broad literature survey and 86 percent did not require a basic American history or civics course. That's why institutions like UCLA -- which requires its English majors to take Shakespeare, Chaucer and Milton -- are rare, but Hamilton College, which recently scuttled plans for a new scholarly center to study its namesake, Alexander Hamilton, is nothing unusual.

The idea that the Bard and the Founders are unworthy of special attention, of course, does not have much currency in the outside world. That's surely the case in the Windy City, where the Web site for the Chicago Shakespeare Theater highlights "acclaimed productions of William Shakespeare's canon." Why is it, then, that our colleges have such different values?

A college curriculum should not be a do-it-yourself kit. But that is, in fact, what it has become. Instead of directing the next generation of Americans to the most important authors and ideas that ensure an educated person, our universities have abdicated their professional responsibility in favor of "anything goes."

In our global world, it is surely more important than ever for college graduates to understand the civilization that produced them. But if our colleges don't insist that even their English majors study Shakespeare, who will pass on that knowledge to future generations?

Trustees, alumni, parents and students should not sit idly by while the attack on academic values goes unchallenged. It is imperative that all of us demand change and essential that our colleges and universities refocus their efforts on academic quality and academic value. Restoring Shakespeare to his proper place would be a good place to start.

Read the full Vanishing Shakespeare report here. And listen to the Folger's radio documentary on Shakespeare here. ACTA plays a significant role in it.

Posted by acta online at 12:13 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Northern exposure

Where is the line between education and indoctrination? Can professors reliably tell when they have crossed that line? And what should be done when students sense that their classrooms are becoming politicized? These are some of the questions that were raised last November in an astute editorial published by the University of Alaska at Anchorage's student paper:

Last week, our Seawolf Snapshot question was, "Do you vote?" Shortly after one of the interviews, one of the students came into the office and asked that we not publish her comment. Her reasoning: She knows that her professor has a differing opinion and thinks her grade would suffer because of it.

A November 2004 report, "Politics in the Classroom," reveals that nearly a third of students at 50 top U.S. universities thought their grades were affected by political bias on the part of professors, according to the American Council of Trustees and Alumni.

The report found that 29 percent of respondents agreed with the statement, "On my campus, there are courses in which students feel they have to agree with the professor's political or social views in order to get a good grade."

While research of this sort has not been conducted at UAA, the situation has the potential to become a problem.

In politically focused classes, it is understandable for students to have varying views and opinions. In fact, good debate is a necessary component for learning in these classes. But what about English, history or even math classes where politics get brought into the picture?

Some of The Northern Light's staff members have seen what could be considered political discrimination on campus, such as a liberal arts professor who made his political views perfectly clear, explicitly saying that conservative students don't really belong in his class. Or a history professor who continually went off on tangents ridiculing a political party, and if a student who identified with that party tried to make a reply, that student would get a sarcastic rebuttal, a criticizing speech and a quick return to the actual lecture. Or an A student who suddenly got a C after writing something against the professor's political view.

The editorial goes on to note that "Even if professors' personal views don't influence their grading of students, it is easy to see how students could get the impression that their political views may affect their grades." In other words, professors aren't always the best judge of their own classroom conduct, and may at times, in the moment of trying to encourage debate, shut it down. "Even though most professors will say they don't let personal views interfere with students' grades," the editorial continues, "continually bringing up one's political views in class will certainly give the appearance of political bias, which can only have a stifling effect on students' self-expression."

To its great credit, UAA followed up on the concerns raised by this editorial, convening a panel of students and faculty to discuss the problems that arise when politics enters the classroom. While all agreed that it is wrong for professors to impose their politics on students, the students on the panel found themselves in the interesting position of educating professors about how they come across when they either introduce irrelevant political material or mishandle controversial issues germane to the class.

Ben Cheeseman, a justice major at UAA, said he thinks many students regurgitate their professors' political views in order to get good grades.

"Half the people that are taking the 300-level class are taking it because they have to, not because they want to," said Cheeseman.

Steven Amundsen, also a justice major, said that while many professors acknowledge they are in a position of power, they don't seem to realize how easy it is to coerce their students into withdrawing from discussion or even to drive students away from a classroom when their biases become apparent.

John Whitlocke, a UAA graduate, said he witnessed many students during his time as an economics major writing papers consistent to what they thought the professor's views were, and they were uncomfortable because of that.

Amundsen said he feels best when his professors' political views are not known to him because it is less of a cause for concern.

"If they are willing to set (political views) aside from class and not make the jokes and not make the comments, then it's easier to trust what they are going to say," Amundsen said.

Professors on the panel responded by encouraging students to stick their necks out. "If you want to just get the A, fine, we've all done that. But to say that faculty shouldn't do something because you know it's going to be biased, I disagree with that," an English professor said. "The only way to test that is to take the risk of potentially screwing up, offending somebody, saying what you think and taking responsibility for a different perspective."

Kudos to UAA for sponsoring such an open discussion about such an important issue. And kudos, too, to UAA's dean of students, Bruce Schultz, who upholds the original AAUP standard for academic freedom: "there are two parts to academic freedom," he says; "the right to teach and the right to learn." The better communication is between faculty and students, the more clear everyone will be about what their educational mission is and about how best to foster an intellectual environment that is friendly to free inquiry, debate, and diversity of opinion.

Posted by acta online at 11:46 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

Reading bias

Debates about bias in the classroom follow a predictable pattern, notes Reason's Cathy Young. Someone issues a study showing that America's faculties are strikingly politically homogeneous, and argues on the basis of that study that higher education is suffering from lack of intellectual diversity. America's faculties respond by either dismissing the study as methodologically flawed or by arguing that professorial political preferences have nothing to do with what happens in the classroom. The debate then stalls--until it starts up again somewhere else, with another study that argues much the same thing, and with more resistance from an academy that is not receptive to critique.

Young notes that the most recent round of this familiar cycle was initiated by the American Federation of Teachers, which issued a study last January entitled, "The Faculty Bias Studies: Science or Propaganda?" The report, which focussed in part on three of ACTA's studies (confusedly conflating two of them), was riddled with errors, Young notes; it mischaracterized some of the studies it criticized, and in its zeal to argue that studies of faculty political affiliation are methodologically flawed and therefore meaningless, it ignored the Higher Education Research Institute's 2001 survey, which corroborated the findings of the studies Lee sought to dismiss on methodological grounds. "Lee's attempt to challenge findings that most college professors are politically left of center seems pointless," Young notes. "The studies may be flawed, but their conclusion falls into the realm of the obvious."

What's not obvious, Young notes, is what the onesidedness of the professoriate means for undergraduate education. She's not convinced that faculty are "brainwashing" students, who, studies show, tend to leave college with many of the same beliefs they began with. But that doesn't mean there isn't a problem, she argues.

What is difficult either to deny or to quantify is that, especially at the more prestigious colleges and universities, the social climate fosters a strong presumption of liberal like-mindedness and a marginalization of dissent. Being left of center is the norm, and it is freely assumed that other people around you, be they students or faculty members, will share in your joy at the Democratic victories in Congress or your dismay at the passage of a ballot initiative prohibiting racial preferences in college admissions. This can translate into not only a chilly climate for conservatives but in some cases outright hostility.

If a student doesn't subscribe to the campus orthodoxy, the likely effect is not to convert her but to alienate her from intellectual life. Others learn only about a narrow range of ideas. One woman, a Ph.D. student in the social sciences at a Midwestern university, told me recently that when she started reading conservative, libertarian, or otherwise heretical blogs, "it was a whole perspective I had never been exposed to before in anything other than caricature."

When that's the norm, the harm is less to dissenters than to the life of the mind. It's not good for any group of people to spend a lot of time listening only to like-minded others. It is especially bad for a profession whose lifeblood is the exchange of ideas.

This is what ACTA has been arguing for years. Intellectual diversity is the essence of the university. Our lack of it is a pressing problem--one that is made worse by the academy's inability to recognize that problem for what it is. Everyone suffers when higher education operates as a monoculture--no matter what their views.

Posted by acta online at 10:38 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

That was then, this is now

Every year around this time, high school seniors decide where to enroll for the fall--and their choices shape the next four years of their lives. But how are they making those choices? And what are they really choosing? Even our top-ranked colleges and universities leave a lot to be desired these days, and a stellar reputation doesn't guarantee quality of education. That's the point Herb London made in a recent op-ed for the New York Sun.

We tend to assume that our higher educational system has only gotten better over time. And in many respects--such as increased opportunity and improved access--this is true. But there is another side to this coin, and London uncovers it through a simple, eye-opening exercise: He compares Yale's curriculum today to what it was a little more than a century ago:

I was intrigued when perusing library stacks recently, I came across the 1894 Yale College prospectus of elective courses. The find also brought to mind a meeting I had with a group of Yale students last spring, who were extolling their university's range of courses. So, I undertook to compare the old prospectus with the 2006-7 Yale College program of study.

In doing so, I couldn't help but be struck by the dramatic change that has occurred in 113 years. Moreover, if evolution infers progress, there is something fundamentally wrong with this comparison.

The 1894 catalog is 50 pages long. Each course is described succinctly, e.g., "The History of Europe since 1789" or "The Phaedo of Plato." Literature courses are simply named after a playwright, author, or poet such as "Shakespeare" and "Browning."

The introduction merely indicates how many courses must be selected. A statement of aims doesn't appear. Course descriptions when they exist are brief and very much to the point. For example, in "Latin Philology" "such features of the language are studied as its historical development and decay, relations to other languages, forms and syntax, pronunciation, adaptation to literature, etc."

Courses associated with biblical literature are prominently mentioned, but all of what we now call the liberal arts and science are included.

By contrast the present catalog is 620 pages. Some of that additional content can be attributed to relatively recent developments in the sciences such as neurolinguistics and computer science. While many traditional courses are retained, the college has clearly embraced the concerns of the Zeitgeist. For example, in the women's gender and sexuality program, one can find courses such as "U.S. Lesbian and Gay History," "White Masculinity and Sexuality in U.S. Popular Culture," "Queer Ethnographics," and "Introduction to Queer Cinema."

At the beginning of the catalog, Yale officials state their purpose: "Yale College offers a liberal arts education, one that aims to train a broadly based, highly disciplined intellect without specifying in advance how that intellect will be used." The goal is "exploration," stimulating curiosity, and discovering new interests.

These platitudinous claims stand in stark contrast to the simple educational goals implied in the 1894 catalog. Presumably the 620 pages in the modern catalog, 12 times the size of the 1894 document,
are needed to enhance the exploration. The good, the bad, and the ugly must be explored along with the trivial, the fashionable, and the puerile.

In a real sense, the college education of fewer course offerings had a more solid foundation than its modern counterpart. After all, 620 pages of courses can only confuse the teenage mind. How does one separate the wheat from the chaff? The modern catalog also suggests that the faculty has either lost a sense of what a liberal education ought to be or it has been coerced into the "Chinese menu" of educational selection, i.e., so many from column A and column B.

For me, less is more. A course simply devoted to Plato has more to offer than one called "Plato's Philosophical Psychology." In an effort to satisfy the yearning of professors who seek courses in areas narrowly defined, e.g., "Music, Law and Sexual Desire in Medieval Europe," the administration has lost control of the curriculum.

Rather than promote a vision of the academy, professors have abdicated responsibility through choices of every variety, a veritable bouquet of experiences. If you cannot find what you are looking for in the extraordinary course list, you can always engage in that old standby, independent study. You can determine what you want to learn without paying much attention to the guidance of an instructor.

Six hundred and twenty pages of courses reduce to fatuity the notion of a central "core" or what it is a student ought to know. At the moment, a student decides what he should know from a vast reservoir
of courses.

Is this the way to manage a university? My guess is that Cardinal Newman, author of the classic "The Idea of a University," wouldn't countenance the present curriculum, nor, for that matter, would those
who attended Yale University more than 100 years ago.

The modern tendency to overwhelm undergraduates with choices at the expense of strong intellectual guidance is one of ACTA's core issues. In The Hollow Core: Failure of the General Education Curriculum, ACTA showed that fewer and fewer schools are offering strong core curricula, and that schools are instead catering to student whim and faculty convenience by turning general education requirements into the academic equivalent of impulse shopping. The result is a degraded education that lacks both substance and coherence, and that, as a result, arguably fails students in serious and lasting ways.

Herb London is a longtime advocate of curricular reform in higher education. Formerly the John M. Olin Professor of Humanities at NYU, London is a prolific author and commentator with a proven commitment to academic excellence. His words matter. And, as parents and their children debate what college is best for them, they would do well to take those words into account. Choosing a good school is not the same thing as choosing a prestigious school, and choosing a good education involves choosing a strong curriculum.

Posted by acta online at 10:58 AM | Comments (12) | TrackBack

Curricular confusion at UCSD

At the University of California at San Diego, a debate about the curriculum has raised a host of questions. From ACTA's vantage point, the most notable ones revolve around professional standards and the difference between education and indoctrination.

UCSD's Thurgood Marshall College is one of its six undergraduate colleges; each college has a distinct identity and mission, and the mission of this one is to introduce students to issues of diversity and social justice. Toward that end, every student in the College must take a year-long social science course that satisfies the university writing requirement. The Dimensions of Culture sequence consists of three quarter-long courses that together focus on the College's unique theme; that focus in turn forms the backbone for the freshman composition curriculum that anchors and justifies the program. Thurgood Marshall College attracts students who wish to study issues of social justice and diversity; it then requires those students to do so in part by taking a year-long composition course devoted to those themes.

It all sounds great in theory. But in practice, the program has run into snags. In 1999, UCSD's Committee on Educational Policy recommended that the Dimensions of Culture program "add a greater range of viewpoints in course readings." In 2003, as Inside Higher Ed has noted, students complained that the course was ideologically one-sided, that it perpetuated "the ideology that the United States is nothing beyond a despicable and hypocritical country that continues to oppress minorities and the disadvantaged," and that students with dissenting views did not feel comfortable articulating them. These last complaints tally with the findings of a nationwide scientific poll of students that ACTA commissioned in 2004.

Since then, program administrators have tried to diversify the readings by incorporating alternative views. This year, for example, Allan Bloom and Milton Friedman were assigned and read right alongside Audre Lorde and Jonathan Kozol. As a result, the program is now being attacked for promoting an "uncritical patriotic education that fails to interrogate the injustice integral to the founding of the U.S. and the current state of U.S. society." Led by two graduate students who teach in the program, a coalition of graduate and undergraduate students is demanding change. At the same time, the program's administrator is resisting what he sees as an attempt to "turn this into a program of political indoctrination." He decided not to bring the two graduate students back to teach in the program next year, arguing that their campaign has damaged the program.

And now the story is making headlines.

Amid all the uproar, it is worth noting that UCSD has found it challenging, to say the least, to reconcile the program's viewpoint with the prerogatives of responsible teaching. The university is to be commended for trying to address the criticisms leveled at the program by students and administrators, and its director is correct when he distinguishes between educating students about issues and pushing them to take specific actions:

The T.A.s who have been so critical of the program have argued that this should be a program in political indoctrination; that it's supposed to lead our students to political and social action. That's not the purpose and it never was: This is social sciences, humanities, writing, with social justice as the backbone of the readings.

The director is right: the program should present issues in a rounded, scholarly way so that students can learn about them and decide for themselves what they think. Discussion about the future of the program should bear this in mind. The syllabus should be designed with this goal, and all teachers within the program should have a clear understanding of the program's mission as well as of their obligations as teachers to present material fairly, without ideological bias or political agenda.

Posted by acta online at 02:15 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

ACTA in USA Today -- Again

Are trustees up to the job? That's the question the Chronicle of Higher Education's new report on academic governance tries to answer. Centered on assessing governing board preparedness, the report summarizes the results of a survey of trustees and compares them to a similar 2005 survey of college and university presidents. Recognizing the far-reaching implications of such a study, USA Today found the survey worthy of notice--and also made a point of asking ACTA president Anne Neal to weigh in:

College and university trustees often don't see eye to eye, and one reason may be that many members of college governing boards feel ill-prepared for the job, says a report being published this week by The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Four in 10 trustees surveyed described themselves as "slightly" or "not at all" prepared, and fewer than 15% said they were very well prepared when they joined the board, the report says.

Meanwhile, 73% of those who felt very well prepared said they had an excellent relationship with the institution's president, compared with 56% of those who felt slightly prepared or unprepared.

"Trust between those two groups is very important," says Chronicle assistant managing editor Jeffrey Selingo. "If they don't feel like they're getting along with the president, they are less likely to participate in a valuable way."

The report, which also found that trustees are mostly white, wealthy and male, is based on a survey of 1,478 trustees at 1,082 institutions or university systems nationwide. When compared with responses to a 2005 Chronicle survey of college presidents of those same 1,082 institutions, the findings revealed a number of differences between presidents and trustees.

For example, trustees were "considerably" more likely to rate U.S. News & World Report rankings as important than did presidents. Trustees also placed a lower value on the role of race and ethnicity in admissions than did presidents. Trustees also tended to place a higher value on academic measures such as the quality of educational programs and the faculty, while presidents gave higher ratings to benchmarks such as balancing the budget and meeting fundraising goals.

The report is being released during "a period of very poor relations between presidents and trustees," Selingo says. In 2005, for example, trustees at American University in Washington, D.C., fired its president after learning of his lavish lifestyle. The Chronicle reported a case last year at Oberlin (Ohio) College in which a trustee said he was ousted after a dispute over how a faculty evaluation of its president was handled.

Anne Neal, president of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, a Washington non-profit, says the survey is "problematic" because it was distributed to trustees through the presidents.

But, she says, in offering "a picture of trustees who are often unprepared, dependent upon the administration for information, and in many ways divorced from central concerns of the university," the survey underscores her group's call for "some dramatic changes in the way our universities are governed."

Read more about the Chronicle survey here.

Posted by acta online at 11:01 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

The Shakespeare buzz, contd.

Writing for The New Republic's blog, Open University, Robert Brustein has favorable words for ACTA's Vanishing Shakespeare study:

A recent report isued by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni documents what we already know: Shakespeare is no longer valued in our educational system. Of course, the beleaguered bard has never had a very strong foothold in secondary schools where many English teachers, if they teach Shakespeare at all, introduce him to students through rote memorization of a few soliloquies--hardly a recipe for lifelong devotion to blank verse. Sixty years years after completing his senior year in highschool, my brother can still quote "Is this a dagger which I see before me" without understanding a single word of it.

But the ACTA report is not about the torments of secondary school education. It concerns the fate of Shakespeare courses in colleges and universities. Entitled "The Vanishing Shakespeare," the report asserts that at three-quarters of the institutions surveyed, which is to say 15 [sic] out of 70 of our leading colleges and universities, English majors are no longer asked to take a single course in Shakespeare's plays. And if you think this omission only applies to huge state institutions, look at the Ivy League universities where Harvard alone still considers Shakespeare a requirement. "Thus," the report mournfully concludes, "55 of 70 schools we surveyed allow English majors--including future English teachers--to graduate without studying the language's greatest writer in depth."

In 1996, that number was 47 out of 70, which suggests that, at the present rate of attrition, in twenty years you won't find a Shakespeare course anywhere in the country. "I am dying, Egypt, dying," says Antony to Cleopatra. "I am dying, America, dying," Shakespeare could be saying to us. I suppose we shouldn't get too exercised by this. It is just another example of the precipitous decline in literacy America has been experiencing in recent times where, according to a 2004 National Endowment for the Arts survey quoted in the report, less than half of the adult population in the United States has read a single work of literature, of any kind, during a full year. Indeed, this kind of statistic has greatly distressed our "No Child Left Behind" President, a self-proclaimed omnivorous reader, who recently wondered aloud, "Is our children learning?" (We might ask the same of our worried Chief Executive: Is you?)

The report takes note that abandoning Shakespeare does not mean that our higher education system is abandoning requirements. No, it's just that there are now more urgent things to include on the reading list. "While Shakespeare and other traditionally acclaimed authors such as Chaucer and Milton are no longer required, many institutions such as Rice, Oberlin, and Vanderbilt require students to study 'non-canonical traditions,' 'under-represented cultures,' and 'ethnic or non-Western literature.'"

"And at the University of Virginia," the report continues, "English majors can avoid reading Othello in favor of studying 'Critical Race Theory' which explores why race 'continues to have vital significance in politics, education, culture, arts, and everyday social realities,' including 'sexuality, class, disability, multiculturalism, nationality, and globalism.'"

A recent newspaper cartoon shows two young girls walking out of a school. One turns to the other and says, "I have two mommies." The other replies, "How much is two?"

Brustein is founding director of the Yale Repertory Theater and Harvard's American Repertory Theater. Formerly dean of the Yale School of Drama, he is a senior research fellow at Harvard. He is The New Republic's theater critic.

Posted by acta online at 03:50 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

Et tu, Brute?

Since its publication last month, The Vanishing Shakespeare has received favorable notices from USA Today, the San Francisco Chronicle the Weekly Standard, and the Rocky Mountain News, as well as individual endorsements from, among others, Emory English professor Mark Bauerlein, NRO's Stanley Kurtz, New York Observer critic Ron Rosenbaum (The Shakespeare Wars), and Robert Brustein, who is the founding director of both the Yale Repertory Theatre and Harvard's American Repertory Theater. The Shakespeare report does have its critics, though, as all significant challenges to the academic status quo do.

Perhaps the most common criticism of ACTA's Shakespeare report is that there is no cause for alarm because students still voluntarily take Shakespeare classes. Because courses on Shakespeare are popular, the argument goes, Shakespeare need not be required.

This point was made by a commenter on ACTA's blog, a recently graduated Yale English major who argued that since many people voluntarily take Shakespeare at Yale, and since Shakespeare seemed to show up a lot in the courses she took, that a requirement was not needed. The logic has been echoed by a UVa English major: "I was told a couple of years ago by the undergraduate chair that, even though the department stopped requiring Shakespeare, the level of attendance in Shakespeare classes has hardly gone down since we stopped requiring it," she writes. "In other words, we probably stopped requiring Shakespeare because there wasn't much of a need to make it mandatory. Not only are most English majors taking it, but a lot of non-English majors take Shakespeare as an elective, as well." Others have made similar points.

It's worth looking closely at the logic offered here, because it's just not very substantial. It's wonderful that Shakespeare is popular among college students, and English majors who voluntarily choose to study his works are to be commended. But a subject's popularity should have nothing whatever to do with whether it is required for majors in a given discipline. Major requirements are not punishments; they do not exist simply to force students to study what they normally would not study, and they do not cease to be necessary when student interest happens to align with them.

The purpose of major requirements is to outline a coherent, integrated course of study for students who, it goes without saying, cannot be expected to know instinctively what courses they ought to take. All academic departments should clearly outline what their undergraduate majors should know; major requirements are a huge part of that. When an English department requires Shakespeare, as Harvard, Berkeley, and UCLA do, for example, it is saying that knowledge of Shakespeare is essential for a degree in the field. When an English department does not require Shakespeare, it is saying that knowledge of Shakespeare is not essential for a degree in the field. The fact that students can take Shakespeare electives that count toward the major, and that these courses attract plenty of students, is really beside the point.

It may be the case that, to return to an example above, Yale English majors often choose to take Shakespeare. But, as another commenter on this blog noted, "In Fall 2007 one can satisfy Yale's three pre-1800 requirements with courses on Romantic poetry, women writers from the Restoration to Romanticism, and colonial literatures of America. In other words, students can get an English literature degree from Yale without reading anything written before the seventeenth century, and without reading a single canonical author before the Romantic poets. Never mind Shakespeare -- students can avoid the entire medieval/Renaissance era if they choose."

English majors deserve stronger guidance. And college and university administrators, including English department chairs, should require English departments to provide it. If Shakespeare is a pivotal author for anyone studying English literature--and even the critics of ACTA's study acknowledge that he is--then English departments should say so, and should revise their major requirements to reflect that.

ACTA's report concludes with a noteworthy quote from Columbia humanities professor Andew Delbanco, whose words sum up the problem perfectly: "Colleges will fulfill their responsibilities only when they confront the question of what students should learn--a question that most administrators, compilers of rank lists, and authors of books on higher education prefer to avoid."

Posted by acta online at 03:31 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Victory for free speech at NKU

Northern Kentucky University has repealed its restrictive policy on protests, demonstrations, postings, and displays, and has issued a new policy affirming the expressive rights of students.

Protesters were at a stand still as the newly proposed Free Expression Policy went before the Board of Regents, who passed the policy at its meeting May 2.

The policy includes changes such as designating the campus as a limited public forum and emphasizing "content neutral" practices. Other adjustments included eliminating "prior restraint" language, eliminating "Free Speech Areas" concept and clarifying posting and handbill practices.

Other accommodations included creating a "Temporary Display" policy, which permits the practice of chalking on campus walkways and establishes a "reasonable person" standard for policy interpretation.

"I'm glad it finally passed in a form conducted for free expression," said Eric Cranley, former president of College Republicans.

President James Votruba also expressed his support for the new policy at the meeting.

"I think the process is exactly what it should be," he said. "Students found a problem and fixed it, rather than adversarialy fixing it."

NKU has come a long way since last spring, when a professor made headlines after she led a group of students in destroying a student group's anti-abortion display on a campus lawn. That event drew attention to NKU's policies on speech, which, it turned out, included not only the restrictive practices noted above, but also a passage in the Code of Student Rights and Responsibilities that seemed to justify exactly the sort of censorious outlook that led the professor to conclude that she and her students had a "right" to destroy a display they found offensive. At that time, the Code prohibited "harassing, annoying, or alarming another person" and "making an offensive coarse utterance, gesture or display, addressing abusive language to any person." These broadly defined behaviors constituted "misconduct" that is "subject to disciplinary action."

ACTA wrote to NKU officials, urging the Board of Regents to bring the school's policies into line with the principles of free inquiry and open debate. Since that time, the Code of Student Rights and Responsibilities has been quietly amended, and no longer contains the troublesome passages ACTA brought to NKU's attention. And, as NKU president James Votruba notes, NKU's students have done a great job of spearheading the campaign to secure their expressive rights on campus.

While NKU has other policies that still raise concerns, there is no question that this is one university that is moving in the right direction.

Posted by acta online at 08:47 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

The Shakespeare buzz, contd.

Ron Rosenbaum, author of the critically acclaimed The Shakespeare Wars, is weighing in on the disappearance of Shakespeare from English major requirements:

... students are being denied something powerful and beautiful, when for one reason or the other they refuse or are not required to read Shakespeare in college. One reason or another: I came across one reason recently.

An encounter I had recently with a contemporary English professor at a major university who was ostensibly teaching Shakespeare to at least one class, made Shakespeare aversion by students explicable considering what's on offer by whom.

I'll call him The Relic. It's not about him, but about a sadly obsolete, discredited vision of literature he shares with all too many in academia who committed to it without much skepticism when they were graduate students and lack the intellectual independence to question it now.

The Relic was the embodiment of two generations of pseudo-scientific sophistry that gave itself the shorthand name Theory in literary studies. It was based on the work of a French theorists, notably Foucault, Derrida and Lacan, whose transmittal by gullible relics continues. Continues even despite the recent revelation that Foucault had, in his recently translated late works, repudiated the sophistry upon which most academic literary criticism is founded ....

The Relic had been left behind by the smarter of one-time theory devotees, who have awoken in horror to see the clone army of jargon-parroting cultists they have helped spawn. Sad because, although the gullible relics of the clone army may not evince much intellectual sophistication in their undeviating devotion to discredited Theory, they do have one thing on their side: tenure. They will be there spreading their literature-averse nonsense and hiring pathetic suck-up acolytes to clone their theory theses and impose them on vulnerable students for generations to come. Let's face it, it’s a form of abuse.

... I encountered one of these relics recently after giving a lecture at University of Chicago. The lecture was entitled "Shakespeare and the Terror of Pleasure" and sought, among other things to describe the origin of these relics, the origins of the post-modernist theory bubble that still clings to life among the intellectually gullible in academia.

And yet like the proverbial Japanese soldiers who used to be said to be "holding out" on isolated Pacific islands unaware the war had been lost, you still run into them even in good universities, clinging like barnacles there with their tenure, still clutching to their antiquated post-modern icons for dear life, pathetically convinced that the "truth" they’d adopted as naive grad students was a truth for all time.

In any case I encountered one of these relics recently after giving a lecture at University of Chicago. The lecture was entitled "Shakespeare and the Terror of Pleasure" and sought, among other things to describe the origin of these relics, the origins of the post-modernist theory bubble that still clings to life among the intellectually gullible in academia.

It is my Theory of Theory which I adumbrate in The Shakespeare Wars: that the so called New Critical revolution in reading, "close reading", attentiveness to Empsonian ambiguity, had brought those who embraced its attentiveness to poetry such as Shakespeare's to an almost dangerously disturbing closeness to the generative power of the language, to the virtually radioactive beauty of the words.

And had caused an abreaction in certain of those exposed to it: the terror of pleasure. A terror that had led them to flee to, to fabricate, elaborate scaffoldings of French literary theory to shield themselves from having to stare into the abyss of pleasure close reading opened up, to give themselves an illusion of control over, indeed superiority to the literature. (They know what's really going on, although never in a million years could they replicate the beauty of a single iambic pentameter line. Which is why they like to imagine the "author" didn't exist because it allows them to believe it isn't their lack of talent that is responsible for their failure to create anything other than opaque jargon-clotted journal articles. No human beings actually "author" great works, they are the product of the historical "power relations", alternatively of the culture of the time, not of any single human being. And besides they are unable to mean anything because language itself is inherently incoherent.

It allowed them to disbelieve in the notion of individual literary genius (who could be smarter than they were?) Or indeed even of literary value itself. (Just because it's hard to define it doesn't mean it doesn't exist--but their Theory gives them no reason to "privilege" a Shakespearean sonnet over the prose on the back of a cereal box).

.... there was The Relic, who at the close of the lecture both in bombastic and misguided questions, and in post-lecture badgering, made it clear that he believed he knew The Truth.

And The Truth for this particular relic, the true source of the truest Truth that ever was writ was--I'm not making this up--to be found in the works of Paul de Man, the literary theorist whose most well know legacy was his cover up of his pro Nazi propogandist past. Yes, de Man, the former champion of Hitler's rule, who hid his past collaboration with the Nazi regime in wartime Belgium from everyone in America and managed to mesmerize a particularly gullible segment of now-antiquated post-modernists with his version of deconstruction. Talk about a pathetic discredited relic for our poor befuddled Relic to cling to for The Truth.

... one has to imagine that the Shakespeare taught by The Relic could not help but be infused by his slavish uncritical devotion to de Man. Poor Shakespeare, poor students.

And there, in abridged form, is one independent scholar's take on the curricular crisis faced by the modern English department.

Posted by acta online at 04:08 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

The Shakespeare buzz, contd.

From the Huntington News:

The 60-page report by the nonprofit American Council of Trustees and Alumni says that only three schools in the Big Ten require a Shakespeare course, with the University of Wisconsin-Madison one of them. UW-Madison has always had a strong English department, so I'm not surprised. In Milwaukee, Marquette University also requires English majors to study the Bard.

I majored in English at Northern Illinois University in De Kalb (Class of 1961) and a one-semester course in Shakespeare was required. Also required was a course in English grammar. I wonder how many English majors are required to take a grammar course these days?

The J-S reporter, Mark Johnson, goes to the heart of the matter much as I did when I reviewed Elizabeth Kantor's "The Politically Incorrect Guide to English and American Literature" (Regnery) last winter:

"The debate over Shakespeare goes to the heart of a much larger struggle for identity and mission at colleges and universities," Johnson says in his excellent story (maybe he was an English major!).

"On one side are those who believe that institutions have so fully embraced pop culture, diversity and social/political issues of every flavor that they are watering down what's truly important and failing to stress the classics. On the other side stand those who believe universities must broaden their offerings to remain relevant, and that such efforts pose no threat to the Big Three: Shakespeare, Chaucer and Milton."

I'm happy to report that Marshall University requires English majors to take a course Shakespeare, arguably the greatest writer in our language.

...

"Our university English departments are no longer acting as trustees of our cultural heritage," says Kantor. "Culture is not genetic; it's learned. There was a time not very long ago when Americans didn't consider themselves educated if they didn't know Shakespeare's plays. If our colleges quit teaching Shakespeare, are they still turning our educated Americans and citizens of the West?

...

"That's why I wrote The Politically Incorrect Guide to English and American Literature--so people who wanted help learning the great literature in English could start teaching themselves.

"I've heard really good things from several students in the Catholic U. English department in Washington, D.C. There's Hillsdale College, [Hillsdale, Mich.] of course.

"And certainly, anyone who wants to study English in college would be well advised to take a look at university English department course descriptions--they're mostly available online now.

"The problem, though, is that most students can't afford to pick the college they go to strictly on the basis of whether it has an English department in which the chief subject of study is the great literature itself, rather than a mish-mash of various kinds of 'literary theory'--ranging from radical feminism to Marx and back around to 'studies' and 'queer theory'--or else not-so-great works, including even comic books and The Da Vinci Code. Students have to consider location, price, and where they can get a degree that might help make them employable.

"English literature used to be something students, whatever subject they were majoring in, were getting at least a decent dose of in college. You could trust that almost anywhere you studied as an undergraduate, you'd stand a chance of being introduced to Chaucer or Shakespeare or Milton. Now, you can trust that pretty much wherever you study as an undergraduate, you'll be introduced to the various strains of postmodernism: through 'postcolonial' literature, or feminist readings of Shakespeare, or Marxist literary theory. And while Shakespeare's poetry is the kind of thing all college students can benefit from, I don't think the same is true of the content of the typical 'English' education going on at American college campuses today.'

Read The Vanishing Shakespeare here.

Posted by acta online at 03:45 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

The Shakespeare buzz, contd.

From USA Today:

The number of colleges requiring English majors to study Shakespeare is in decline, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports (jsonline.com).

... The newspaper cites a report from the American Council of Trustees and Alumni that says 15 of the 70 colleges and universities it examined require English majors to take a Shakespeare course.

"The tone of the new report is nothing if not dramatic," the paper says. The report's authors say that "a degree in English without Shakespeare is like an M.D. without a course in anatomy."

The Journal Sentinel says others dismiss the claim as "a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury / Signifying nothing."

"I really do think we're at a crossroads in academia," Marquette University associate professor John Curran told the newspaper. "We want to be welcoming to new areas, but we do want to be held accountable and produce English majors who are really English majors."

Again, it's good to see acknowledgement of the problem coming from inside English departments.

Posted by acta online at 03:33 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

The Shakespeare buzz, contd.

From Wisconsin's Badger Herald:

Michael Shapiro, English professor at the University of Illinois, said Shakespeare is essential to a liberal arts education and agrees with department policies of requiring it for English majors. He said lessons in Shakespeare carry over into discussions of the modern-day world.

"In the teaching of Shakespeare, there are ideas that are relevant to our own historical moment," Shapiro said. "There are things in his plays that bar quite specifically in life to issues of diversity such as in 'The Merchant of Venice' or how racial tensions look a little different--not being related to slavery."

Shapiro said there is no question universities have to make choices because it is impossible to expect everyone to read everything, but he added that it should be included in a humanities survey course or in a theatre course for other students.

"If we stop teaching [Shakespeare], we are cutting ourselves from the tradition of English literature," Shapiro said. "if we don't know Shakespeare, we tune ourselves out from those dialogues."

In addition, the report found with Shakespeare requirements declining, universities are offering more courses on popular culture, children's literature, sociology and politics.

At Dartmouth College, for example, one course titled "Of Nags, Bitches and Shrews: Women and Animals in Western Literature," discusses topics on how women's rights correspond with advances toward the treatment of animals and why women choose to work for these advances.

Similarly, at the University of Pennsylvania, a class is devoted to the "cult of a celebrity," examining pop idols and famous people such as Greta Garbo and Madonna.

"In most of today's English departments, Shakespeare is no longer required reading," Ann Neal, president of ACTA, said in a release. "Instead, [Shakespeare] is an elective--no more important than a course on Madonna and ‘bodies studies.’ What are these colleges thinking?"

Shapiro said students can get plenty of popular culture on their own and they do not need professors to teach it.

"Unless there is some special kind of analysis, students would have a much better grasp of popular culture than people of my generation," Shapiro said. "Students rely on professors to assist them in analyzing Shakespeare."

It's good to see support for ACTA's argument coming from within English departments. The University of Wisconsin requires English majors to take a Shakespeare course.

Posted by acta online at 10:27 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

The Shakespeare buzz, contd.

From the Rocky Mountain News:

The 60-page report, called "The Vanishing Shakespeare," was released to coincide with the Bard's 443rd birthday.

"A degree in English without Shakespeare is like an M.D. without a course in anatomy," the authors said. "It is tantamount to fraud."

That's "bunk," said CU professor RL Widmann. She got hooked on Shakespeare when she was a high school sophomore studying Julius Caesar. Widmann, as an assistant professor, first started teaching Shakespeare 40 years ago.

The books that Widmann said she studied as an undergraduate were dominated by white men.

She said her generation took note and started teaching more diverse courses, such as women in literature.

Skeptics of the council's report criticize it for being a shallow survey of college course offerings.

The council said alumni should be concerned about the deflated value of their college degrees because of declining college standards. Because some English professors endorse the shift away from curriculum centered on major authors, the report says, trustees and administrators should insist that departments clearly articulate what students should know when they graduate.

Carol Trujillo, who graduated from CU with a bachelor's degree in English, said she took one Shakespeare course while she was an undergraduate - but if she had it to do over, she would have taken more.

Trujillo, 23, is now a graduate student at Colorado Christian University."When you're reading, a lot of themes come from Shakespeare," she said.

Sounds like recent alums don't agree that requiring Shakespeare is--to borrow Professor Widmann's term--"bunk." The University of Colorado does not require Shakespeare, but students can satisfy the "British Literature to 1660" requirement with a Shakespeare course.

Posted by acta online at 10:20 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack