ACTA's Must-Reads
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A revealing debate
For several months, Evan Coyne Maloney's scorching film about how American colleges and universities stifle free expression has been garnering close attention from the media and from higher education leaders. The New York Post calls Indoctrinate U "alarming and funny." The Rocky Mountain News pronounces it "excellent." University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Reynolds calls it "a gripping hour and a half." And ACTA president Anne D. Neal, who appears in the film, has said that Indoctrinate U "has the potential to motivate and activate the younger generation on behalf of the free exchange of ideas."
Even the New York Times is paying attention. In a review published earlier this week, the paper of record devoted over 1,000 words to the film--and has sparked quite a remarkable response from readers across the political spectrum.
The Times article assesses Indoctrinate U in light of a recent case of censorship at Vassar:
The fact that the Times is covering Indoctrinate U at all shows how seriously people are taking Maloney's important contribution to our national dialogue about higher education. But Berger's take on the film as well as on the issue of campus speech leaves much to be desired. Having cast the Vassar incident as an example of free speech on campus, Berger goes on to suggest that Indoctrinate U overstates its case by focusing on isolated, atypical incidents. These gestures in turn drew swift and strong criticism from knowledgeable commentators.Does the film offer a fair picture of campus life in 2007, or is it just a pastiche of notorious events? One answer might be found here at Vassar, which faced its own dispute over what some called hate speech and others "political correctness," and emerged with its integrity more or less intact.
The Imperialist, a publication of the school's Moderate, Independent and Conservative Student Alliance, published a contributor's article in 2005 that criticized social centers for minority and gay students. The article called such centers "ghettos" and said they turned Vassar into a "zoological preserve."
Students complained that the language was insulting and called for banning The Imperialist. For weeks, the issue was debated by the student association, which finances the publication. Ultimately, the group withheld its money for one year and publication was suspended.
Students like Victor Monterrosa, a son of Salvadoran immigrants who recently graduated, still thinks that the question of whether students should be clustered by race or sexual orientation does not deserve a forum since Vassar "is supposed to protect diversity" and "these discussions ended up making us more polarized."
"There are students who feel comfortable putting us on the back burner who ended up fighting for free speech on campus," he said.
Others, like Randall Stuebner, a senior who describes himself as a Republican who votes Democratic, feel speech should be unfettered. "It's my duty to be as provocative as possible," he said.
What was notable was that Vassar, a college of 2,360 students founded in the 19th century on progressive ideals--and a place where conservatives remain a distinct minority--hashed out the matter without violence and did not trash or burn newspapers as has happened at other campuses.
The Imperialist is publishing once again. Vassar seems to have made a distinction between forbidding publication of an idea and not allowing gratuitous racial insults to be hurled while examining that idea.
"Ultimately, free speech was respected," said Mark Goreczny, 20, a student. "There was a dialogue, polarized as it may have been."
Foundation for Individual Rights in Education president Greg Lukianoff, who is quoted in the article, criticizes Berger for misrepresenting the facts. Noting that he spent hours with Berger explaining the issues involved in campus speech, outlining the law for him, and supplying him with numerous examples of schools that have violated students' rights, Lukianoff expresses absolute shock at the article's bad faith:
... any journalist should recognize that suspending a newspaper is a drastic step. Nonetheless, Berger overlooks the disturbing ramifications of The Imperialist's punishment, content instead to praise Vassar's student body for responding "without violence" ... While I can think of few things more chilling than employing violence, theft and destruction to suppress unpopular opinions, lauding students--as Berger does here--simply for not resorting to such illegal, illiberal and immoral tactics is stunning. The bottom line is that a student newspaper criticized the polarization of students by race and orientation--and, for doing so, the newspaper lost funding and was suspended for a year. Exactly how is that an acceptable outcome at an American liberal arts university?
At Volokh.com, Dartmouth trustee and George Mason University law professor Todd Zywicki agrees with Lukianoff that Berger is confused about what free speech is. "What struck me about the article," he notes, "was the utter confusion by the reporter... about the central point of the article--the distinction between controversial ideas on one hand and abusive or derogatory language on the other." Making it clear that he is not himself endorsing the content of the students' censored speech, Zywicki explains how Berger's attempt to distinguish between offensive ideas and offensive language is nonsensical--not only according to the law, but also according to the parameters Berger himself lays out. Finally, Zywicki praises Maloney's work: "It is a good movie and Maloney lets the students and faculty involved in these incidents simply tell their story."
Maloney himself takes issue with the article's cavalier treatment of facts:
Most of the article was spent addressing cases that weren't in the film, rather than addressing what was in the film. The author also claims that "professors, administrators and students say the national picture is far more complicated than that pictured in 'Indoctrinate U,'" although I don't know how they could know that, because none of those people actually saw the film.
One of the examples cited in the article (but not the film) was the case of a student paper published by Vassar's Moderate, Independent and Conservative Student Alliance. It was an odd selection of cases if the point was to argue that there's more "nuance" to reality than what is shown in Indoctrinate U, because a close inspection of this case shows that it actually backs up the thesis of my film.
The paper was de-funded and shut down for a year after publishing a piece criticizing the school's funding of special "social centers" for minority and gay students. But because the paper was eventually allowed to start publishing again--the following year--the Vassar case is presented as one in which "[u]ltimately, free speech was respected."
Sorry, but shutting down a paper for a year is not a benign event, and it is certainly not one in which we can say "free speech was respected." If Homeland Security shut down the Times for a year after exposing ways that we track terrorist financing, I'm sure they'd understand my position on this.
Rather than address the multiple cases in the film where people were told to see school psychologists because they had the wrong set of views, rather than address the fact that people's academic careers were put in jeopardy for things like being registered in the "wrong" political party, this piece ignores the evidence presented in the film to set up an alternative straw man to knock down.
And when the author finally gets around to discussing cases that are actually in the film, he minimizes them by leaving out the most vital information.
One student, he says, "underwent a daylong disciplinary hearing for posting a flier." Actually, that student had the police called on him, he was ordered to see a psychologist, he was questioned by an attorney without being allowed to have one of his own, he was threatened with expulsion, and he was "convicted" by the university for an offense that they couldn't even define when asked.
The student's crime? Posting a flyer which promoted an upcoming speech by an author named Mason Weaver. It merely had a picture of him, the title of his book, and the date, time and location of the event. Yet university regarded the flyers as "literature of an offensive racial nature," and used it to railroad a student whose views they didn't like. This case lasted 18 months and ended up in federal court before the student finally prevailed.
I think all that amounts to a tad more than "a daylong disciplinary hearing."
These reasoned correctives to a problematic article supply a strong contrast to the disappointment expressed by Craig Smith of the American Federation of Teachers at the "Free Exchange on Campus" blog. Where Lukianoff, Zywicki, and Maloney criticize Berger's article for downplaying the widespread problem Maloney documents, Smith thinks Berger both misunderstands the Vassar case and gives Maloney's critique too much credit. "Vassar isn't an exception," he writes; "it is the rule (whether you agree with how they handled the situation or not). They involved students, faculty, and administrators and collectively made a decision. The whole process from students trying to find a voice to express a position, to outrage at what they said, to the resolution, is all educational and the reason to protect the free exchange of ideas and to let college communities handle these situations as a community rather than having trustees or legislators policing campuses."
Smith wants to deny the existence of the problems documented in Indoctrinate U. But his attempt to do so unwittingly corroborates the film's argument. If it's true that Vassar is "not an exception" and that it "is the rule"--and organizations such as ACTA and FIRE have found that the censorious and intolerant behavior of Vassar's administration is indeed quite typical--then Smith is not actually disagreeing with the claims of either organization or with those of Indoctrinate U. Rather, he is defending schools that censor by defining their punitive failure to respect free speech as acceptable, reasonable, and good--even as the essence of free exchange. But few would accept the argument that a college's year-long inability to allow students to engage in unfettered exchange represents a triumph of intellectual vitality. And few would seriously argue that colleges and universities are serving the ideal of free inquiry when they punish protected speech.
Posted by acta online at 04:17 PM | Comments (12) | TrackBack
Bridging the gap
It's not a matter of debate that American higher education is challenged. Tuition costs are skyrocketing while quality is, by a range of objective measures, declining. According to the American Institutes for Research, over half of graduating seniors at four-year colleges cannot summarize a newspaper editorial, and one in five cannot estimate whether a car has enough gasoline to reach the next filling station. ACTA's own research has shown that over 80% of elite college seniors can't pass a basic high school-level history test.
But while the fact that there are problems is widely acknowledged, the nature of those problems is hotly debated, as is--it follows logically--the question of how to address them. And too often, those debates are shaped along adversarial lines that prevent them from reaching constructive resolutions. This is particularly true in debates about assessment and accountability, where academic insiders tend to view external input and inquiry as intrusive and unwarranted.
Writing in Inside Higher Ed, Jeremy Penn, an assessment associate for the University of Nebraska at Lincoln's Program Excellence through Assessment, Research, and Learning (PEARL), captures the unfortunately territorial quality of so much of our national discussion about accountability and assessment in higher education:
This expectation for assessment as accountability has forced many faculty members and administrators to seek out ways to balance assessment for 'us', or assessment for 'improvement,' with assessment for 'them,' or assessment for 'accountability.' We do assessment for 'us' in our classrooms, to provide feedback to students on their progress, in our programs to provide direction for improvement efforts, for each other when we provide reviews of articles and of ourselves when we evaluate our own performance.
Conversely, assessment for 'them' is done in response to an external demand to prove 'how much students learn in colleges and whether they learn more at one college than another,' as the Spellings Commission put it in its final report.
When we perform assessment for 'us' we are not afraid to discover bad news. In fact, when we assess for 'us,' it is more stimulating to discover bad news about our students' performance because it provides clear direction for our improvement efforts. In contrast, when we perform assessment for 'them,' we try our best to hide bad news and often put a positive face on the bad news that we can't hide.
When we perform assessment for 'us' we do our best to create valid and reliable assessments but don't let the technical details, particularly when they are not up to exacting research standards, derail our efforts. When we perform assessment for 'them,' if there is any deviation from strict standards for validity, reliability, norming group selection, sampling approach, testing procedures or scoring techniques, we are quick to dismiss the results, particularly when they are unfavorable.
We know the 'us'--faculty members, students, department chairs, deans--and we know how to talk about what goes on at our institution with each other. Even amid the great diversity of institutions we often find a common core of experience and discover that we speak each other's language.
But the 'them' is largely a mystery. We may have some guesses about the groups that make up 'them'--parents, boards of regents, taxpayers, legislatures--but we cannot be sure because accountability is usually described generically, not specifying any particular group, and because our interaction with any of these groups is limited or nonexistent.
When we perform assessment for 'us,' we operate under a known set of possible consequences. Some of these consequences could be severe, such as a budget reduction or a reprimand from our superior, but in general the possible consequences are a known and acceptable risk.
When we perform assessment for 'them,' the consequences are much more terrifying because we do not control who uses these data or the purposes of their use. One of the uses of assessment for 'them' is for accreditation, which can bring particularly negative consequences. We wake up in the middle of the night with visions of newspaper headlines publicly disclosing our poor performance.
The us/them dynamic that Penn describes captures the manner in which discussions about students' educational needs have, at times, turned into territorial arguments. Feeling that their autonomy is threatened, academics have adopted an adversarial attitude towards parents, taxpayers, and others who wish to take part in those discussions. Our national dialogue about higher education has at times resembled a turf war centered on who does and does not have the right to ensure that colleges and universities are doing their jobs.
Penn's op-ed did not draw any commentary from Inside Higher Ed's usually vocal readers, a silence that is striking--and perhaps telling--given how readily IHE's readers tend to fall into exactly the sort of us/them debate Penn describes. But he does offer some excellent examples of schools that have tried to bridge the gap between 'us' and 'them' in useful and workable ways.
First, there is SUNY:
The State University of New York (SUNY) Assessment Initiative seeks to strike a balance between assessment for 'us,' or assessment for 'improvement,' with assessment for 'them,' or assessment for 'accountability'. The SUNY Assessment Initiative can be divided into two parts: assessment of general education and assessment within academic majors.
For assessment of general education, SUNY first developed a set of learning outcomes for general education programs at undergraduate degree-granting institutions. All SUNY institutions are required to use 'externally referenced measures' to determine whether or not their students are achieving in the areas of Critical Thinking, Basic Communication and Mathematics. However, to keep this approach in balance, the Assessment Initiative does not require all institutions to use the same measure. Rather, institutions can select from nationally-normed exams or rubrics developed by a panel that best represent their mission in the state. This holds institutions accountable for demonstrating student achievement in foundational areas but will not be used to 'punish, publicly compare, or embarrass students, faculty, courses, programs, departments or institutions either individually or collectively,' according to a description of the program.
Institutions are also required to perform local assessment of their general education programs. Institutions are held accountable for attending to the process of assessment--examining student learning on specific objectives through assessment and making decisions about ways to improve based on those data--by an external group called the General Education Assessment Review group (GEAR). GEAR, composed of primarily faculty members from SUNY institutions, reviews and approves campus assessment plans but not the actual assessment outcomes. In this way, SUNY documents say, 'emphasis is placed on assessment best practice without introducing an element of possible defensiveness campuses might feel if their assessment program does not yield evidence to support optimal student learning.'
Then there are Colorado State and the University of Nebraska at Lincoln:
At the institutional level, Colorado State University and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln partnered together to implement within their institutions the Plan for Researching Improvement and Supporting Mission (PRISM) and Program Excellence through Assessment, Research and Learning (PEARL), respectively. PRISM and PEARL engage faculty members in assessment of the academic major--assessment for 'us.' Faculty members select learning outcomes that are important for students in that major, perform assessment of student learning on those outcomes and then make improvements to their program based on those data. A panel of faculty members from each institution holds the academic majors accountable by reviewing assessment plans and encouraging the use of higher quality assessment practices.
To balance assessment for 'us' with assessment for 'them,' PRISM and PEARL utilize an online software system that allows for the classification of the academic major assessment activity for aggregation at higher levels. In this way the institutions can describe the kind of learning that is going on within the institution, the assessment instruments that are being used to examine that learning and the improvement activities that were performed in response to the assessment data.
For Penn, what makes these programs successful is their focus on student learning and the premise that assessment as a process must continually evolve.
The result in each case is a system of assessment that attends to outcomes as well as processes. Although there is debate about how successful these models are in practice (some have argued, for example, that the SUNY system is too self-referential to be a viable mechanism of assessment), they do make progress toward holding schools and departments accountable. As such, they represent the kinds of measures that ACTA has long been urging colleges and universities to devise and implement. Finally, they exemplify how, to return to Penn's formulation, accountability for 'us' can also be accountability for 'them'--and offer hope that all concerned can transcend an adversarial outlook that only interferes with our collective ability to realize the goal of improving higher education for all students.
Posted by acta online at 12:25 PM | Comments (13) | TrackBack
Wall Street Journal gets it right
ACTA has long urged alumni to take an active interest in their alma maters, arguing that those who care deeply about a particular college or university, who have themselves benefited enormously from their former schools, are vital stakeholders in their schools' ongoing excellence.
Alumni can often make a difference when things go wrong on campus. When a school loses its sense of mission, or when policy decisions run afoul of an institution's commitment to intellectual pluralism and free expression, alumni can play a crucial role in refocusing institutional attention.
The Wall Street Journal agrees:
Any number of colleges and universities seem to be having PR travails these days, but this may be a case where the turmoil is healthy. The school year that is now ending has turned out to be something of a banner year for academic reform.
Consider the recent unrest at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. When the school's tour guides were informed in an email last winter that a century-old cross was to be expelled from the school's chapel, alumni and students mounted a "Save the Wren Cross" campaign. Press releases, a Web site, and a petition that collected 18,000 signatures led to a restoration.
This experience has emboldened what might be called the William and Mary electorate. A new organization is now asking if the governing Board of Visitors should renew the college president's contract. That's normally a rubber-stamp affair, but now college executives are being forced to defend themselves against charges of poor financial stewardship.
The merits of these disputes seem less important than the fact that there is now earnest and public discussion about the performance of college administrators, who, like career government bureaucrats, are usually adept at avoiding accountability. Stakeholders are suddenly feeling empowered.
That's certainly true at Dartmouth College, in New Hampshire, where alumni have used a petition process for the board of trustees to elect four independent candidates in recent years. These "petition candidates" have run against disciplinary procedures that lack due process rights, speech codes, and an increased budget emphasis on administrative bureaucracy at the expense of academics.
The Dartmouth administration responded last fall by proposing a new set of trustee election rules that would have made these outsider candidacies more difficult. The measure needed support from two-thirds of voting alumni to pass but failed to get even a majority. The year ended with the election of a fourth reformist, University of Virginia law professor Stephen Smith.
ACTA was involved on behalf of alumni in both the William & Mary controversy and the Dartmouth election. And we appreciate the WSJ's eloquent acknowledgment of the critical role alumni can play in ensuring that their former schools maintain both excellence and accountability--things that are ACTA's raison d'etre. Echoing the sentiments of University of Colorado president Hank Brown, who notes that "much of the scrutiny we are under is of our own creation," the Journal concludes that "Colleges and universities have largely brought this stakeholder activism on themselves--when they decided to become instruments of fashionable politics instead of repositories of knowledge."
Posted by acta online at 01:35 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
ACTA in IHE
The debate about the future of University of Colorado ethnic studies professor Ward Churchill has become a debate about the meaning of academic freedom. In today's Inside Higher Ed, ACTA president Anne D. Neal explains what's at stake in the Churchill decision, arguing that even the AAUP, which has defined and preserved academic freedom in this country for nearly a century, cannot agree any longer about what academic freedom actually is:
Historically the custodian of academic freedom, the AAUP is struggling to clarify, for itself and others, what academic freedom is. And that struggle centers on accountability--which, unfortunately, explains much of why the AAUP is encountering such difficulty. Roger Bowen, the outgoing general secretary, has vocally defended the notion that academics should not have to answer to anyone but themselves. "It should be evident," he has written, "that the sufficient condition for securing the academic freedom of our profession is the profession itself."
This is a far cry from Brown's conception of academic freedom as part of a public trust. It's also a far cry from the AAUP's own foundational 1940 statement on academic freedom, which defines it as a set of "duties correlative with rights" and which sees academic freedom as the means by which colleges and universities serve the public trust: "Institutions of higher education are conducted for the common good and not to further the interest of either the individual teacher...or the institution as a whole."
Colorado has acknowledged that its system of peer review and professional assessment failed in Churchill's case. It has taken steps to repair that system. And it has urged academics across the country to learn from its example. As Brown observed 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."
Noting that "much of the scrutiny we are under is of our own creation," Brown urged academics to recognize how their reluctance to be accountable to the public has produced "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."
The arguments of Churchill and his misguided defenders do--regrettably--arise from a basic conviction that academics should be free from accountability. They involve manipulating the term "academic freedom" in ways that undermine a concept of foundational importance to the academic enterprise. They amount to an attempt to turn the concept inside out--morphing what was originally a cluster of interlocking privileges and responsibilities centered on the public good into a justification for the false idea that academics have no obligation to the public at all. Finally, they stem from the profoundly mistaken premise--which Brown rebuts in his letter to the Board of Regents--that input from the public, from constituencies such as alumni and trustees, violates academic freedom as well.
Why else would Churchill and his defenders absurdly claim that Brown's advisory role with the American Council of Trustees and Alumni--which ended a decade ago--invalidates his opinion?
Far from being an "attack" on academic freedom, Colorado's handling of the Churchill affair is, in fact, in defense of academic freedom.
Neal concludes by noting that Churchill's future is not the only thing that hangs in the balance of Colorado's decision--the integrity of academia does, too.
Posted by acta online at 01:12 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Gladly wolde he lerne and gladly teche
Richard Nokes, a professor of medieval literature at Alabama's Troy University, expresses appreciation for the work ACTA is doing to expose how English departments are abandoning their commitment to older literature. "I just finished a column-style article on the state of Anglo-Saxon studies," he writes;
Part of my argument revolves around the lack of Old English in typical undergraduate curricula (and, indeed, grad school curricula), and lo, here comes an article on Shakespeare to make my argument newsworthy. The Gainsville Sun, in an article entitled "Abandoning the Bard" finds that "of the [University of Florida's English] department's 2006 graduates, about 70 percent had taken courses in pre-1800 literature, and most of those had taken a course in Shakespeare." From the medieval perspective, then that means that at least 30% of graduates from the UF English Department have no medieval literature at all. I'd be willing to bet a bottle of mead that most of the remaining 70% have nothing but Shakespeare.
The article quotes R. Allen Shoaf (a well-respected Chaucerian for those not familiar with academic culture) as saying: "Students regularly come to my office lamenting the fact that they cannot take courses in poetry and early literature." From the Old English perspective, I'd also like to point out that the only two medievalists I noticed on the UF department webpage were Shoaf and James Paxon, making the department far more focused on Middle English. Of course, if they aren't even really offering the classes in Middle English either, I suppose it is irrelevant what sort of resources they have for classes they aren't going to teach anyway.
The American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) has been one of the groups keeping the Shakespeare issue in the spotlight, and I can only hope that their recognition that the problem only starts with Shakespeare will lead them to shine the light on medieval studies as well. It would be nice if some groups on the Left took up the cause, too.
Interestingly, the first comment on the ACTA blog seems to be trying to defend the situation, but unintentionally makes the point that UF not only offers an abundance of classes in non-medieval fields, but has entire programs within the Department dedicated to these other subfields.
In any case, I'd be willing to bet that the situation for medieval literature at University of Florida is common; it certainly mirrors the situation at every school with which I've associated.
As Professor Nokes notes, the problem is not just that Shakespeare is disappearing from the English curriculum. The problem is that the disappearance of Shakespeare requirements signals a much broader, more sweeping disappearance of older literatures, languages, and the specialists who teach them. To mix a metaphor, the vanishing Shakespeare is just the tip of the iceberg.
Posted by acta online at 10:25 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack
Setting an example
At the end of the month, ACTA friend Dr. Candace de Russy will conclude her term on the Board of Trustees of the State University of New York (SUNY) after a distinguished 12-year tenure.
Dr. de Russy, a prominent national commentator and advocate for excellence in higher education, has long been an articulate voice for reform. As a former college teacher, Dr. de Russy well understood how the excesses of political correctness can undermine academic integrity, and she was singularly outspoken in calling much-needed attention to the problem.
Dr. de Russy also admirably reclaimed the proper role of trustees in guiding academic policy. As a trustee of SUNY, she advocated a strong general education, courageously criticized departments that pushed, in her words, "predetermined political conclusions," and asserted that stewardship entails oversight, not merely a rubber stamp.
Dr. de Russy set an example of engaged trusteeship. And she understood and adhered to the principle eloquently articulated by Henry Clay: "Government is a trust and the officers of the government are trustees; and both the trust and trustees are created for the benefit of the people."
The people are in her debt.
Posted by aneal at 07:29 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Bergman on academic freedom
Central Connecticut State history professor Jay Bergman has some sharp words for college professors who take uninformed or ill-timed stands on contemporary issues. His criticisms are double-edged, directed both at professors who use their academic credentials to make extracurricular comments on matters far removed from their areas of expertise and at professors who turn their classrooms into ideological soapboxes, preaching their political beliefs to captive audiences of students.
On the first type: Last spring, eighty-eight Duke professors signed a letter prematurely condemning the lacrosse team, and one went even further:
Three Duke lacrosse players were accused, falsely and in flagrant disregard of their constitutional rights, of raping a black woman.
Before their culpability had been determined legally, and even before the public had information on the facts of the case, Houston Baker, the George D. and Susan Fox Beischer Professor of English at the university, wondered "how many more people of color must fall victim to violent, white, male, athletic privilege" before Duke will finally be a place "where minds, souls, and bodies can feel safe from agents, perpetrators, and abettors of white privilege, irresponsibility, debauchery and violence." Baker assumed that the players had raped a woman because they were white, male, and athletic--and according to Baker that is what males who are white and athletic do, or secretly wish they could do.
On the second: One of Bergman's colleagues at CCSU provides a classic instance of using the classroom to proselytize:
Last fall a professor sent the students in one of her courses more than 100 e-mails containing articles advocating the professor's opinions on matters entirely extraneous to the course--for example, that Israel committed war crimes while fighting Hamas in Gaza last summer, and that comparisons between the Bush administration and Nazi Germany are not unreasonable. She also invited students to join her in attending seminars, such as Workshops on Peace, that were designed to advance the professor's political agenda.
What is even worse, during one class, as a way of demonstrating how the American colonists stole Indian land, the same professor took a student's backpack without permission and in front of all the students emptied its contents onto the floor, naming each item one by one. It is hard to imagine a more egregious violation of a student's privacy, or a more flagrant abuse of the power professors have over students by virtue of their grading them and writing recommendations for them for jobs after they graduate.
Bergman observes that while academic freedom protects professors' rights to make public comments--even when their comments are ill-advised and wrong--it does not protect professors who abuse their pedagogical responsibility to stay on topic and to introduce students to the applicable range of scholarly opinions so that they may make up their own mind on the issues at hand. Academic freedom, he notes, citing the AAUP's 1940 statement on that topic, is the freedom to teach, not to preach. But, Bergman goes on to argue, this distinction is often lost in the day-to-day operations of university life.
Bergman claims that during his 17 years at CCSU, about half his students have told him "that one or more of their professors not only interjected personal political opinions in class on a regular basis, but that they did so in an effort to convert their students to their political point of view." This figure, he notes, corresponds to the results of a survey the student paper conducted in 2004: 54 percent agreed that "some professors use the classroom to present their personal political views," while 53 percent agreed that "there are courses in which students feel they have to agree with their professor's political or social views in order to get a good grade." The survey paralleled ACTA's own study of politics in the classroom, which found that 46% of students said professors "use the classroom to present their personal political views" and 29% felt they had "to agree with the professor's political views to get a good grade."
The solution, Bergman observes, is simple: "The remedy for these abuses is oversight, followed by appropriate action where it is necessary, by university administrators and trustees. In the case of state institutions, legislators and other government officials whose responsibilities include the supervision of public education can make clear their disapproval without dictating the content of the courses professors teach, or how they teach them."
He's right. Oversight that respects both students' and professors' academic freedom can be implemented--all that's needed is the will to do it.
Posted by acta online at 07:59 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
The Shakespeare buzz, contd.
Prompted by ACTA's recent study, The Vanishing Shakespeare, Florida's Gainesville Sun reports on the state of the English major at the University of Florida. The result is an intriguing case study of a department that is gradually but decisively abandoning its commitment to teaching older literature.
UF has an "open curriculum," and does not require majors to take Shakespeare. Majors choose a "model" concentration and follow its recommendations and requirements. None of the models requires Shakespeare, though the drama model "expects" that students will take Shakespeare and the medieval/early modern and British literature models allow Shakespeare to count toward their distribution requirements.
An informal survey recently revealed that about 70% of UF English majors had taken a course in literature written before 1800, and that most of those had taken a Shakespeare course. But trouble is brewing. By UF's own accounting, about a third of English majors not only do not take Shakespeare, but do not take any courses in older literature. And the era of healthy Shakespeare enrollments may also be drawing to a close. Currently, UF has six faculty members who teach Shakespeare. But two are retiring, and the department does not know if it has the resources to fill their places. Shakespeare offerings may well be cut as a result.
The shrinking of the pool of faculty able to teach Shakespeare points, in turn, to a broader problem at UF:
R. Allen Shoaf, who specializes in the medieval period but also teaches Shakespeare at UF, says he definitely believes there's a dearth of courses for students who want to learn about early writers like Shakespeare.
"Students regularly come to my office lamenting the fact that they cannot take courses in poetry and early literature," said Shoaf, 59. "I'll stand by that because it's a fact."
Of the 159 upper division courses offered in the English department in the 2006-2007 academic year, UF offered nine courses that named Shakespeare in their titles.
Shoaf describes faculty who teach "early" literature--from Old English to, say, 1775--as an increasingly rare species in UF's English department. Faculty teaching early literature are "outnumbered four to one" by those in film and American literature, and the plurality of faculty in the department garners the greatest influence when the department decides which areas to grow through hiring, he said.
[...]
According to Gilbert, the department's chair, English faculty agree that a hire needs to be made in early modern literature, which would encompass the Renaissance period and Shakespeare. But that ranks third on the list of expected hires, and the department only has assurances that one hire will be made next year, she said.
Critics charge that in an effort to chase what's hip in the English field--the study of comic books, for instance--the department has neglected core areas of literature, including Shakespeare. The departmen''s most recent hires have been in composition, African-American studies, children's literature and early American literature, which is a major growth area at UF.
"The danger of valuing only what's new is it gets old very quickly," said Peter Rudnytsky, an English professor who teaches Shakespeare.
The department has hired "what's new" with such fervor, Rudnytsky added, that it will be difficult to get back on track and form a solid base of faculty qualified to teach early writers like Shakespeare.
"I think we may have passed the tipping point," said Rudnytsky, 55.
In this article, UF's own English faculty members paint a self-portrait that mirrors ACTA's broad characterization of English departments nationwide. Students may still flock to Shakespeare courses, but the department itself is devaluing older literature in favor of more contemporary trends; hiring patterns centered on fashionable new niches are reflected in course offerings disproportionately devoted to those niches; retirement patterns correlate strongly with the narrowing of course offerings in earlier literature; the major "models" lean heavily toward contemporary literature and cultural theory. And students eager for a more balanced and comprehensive literary education are caught in the breach.
Shakespeare may be the one early author who has weathered UF's curricular revisions fairly well. But it looks as though lack of departmental commitment--evidenced in major requirements and hiring patterns--may soon affect students' ability to study his work.
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On monoculture
In the current issue of Academic Questions, UC Santa Cruz emeritus professor John Ellis revisits the issue of academia's political one-sidedness, arguing that the problem is not one-sidedness itself, but what imbalance means for the quality of higher education in this country. Those who defend the status quo by arguing that faculties have always been one-sided, that professors are responsible professionals who approach their jobs conscientiously, and that cases demonstrating otherwise are isolated exceptions to the rule, Ellis notes, are not demonstrating "disciplined thinking." He goes on to observe that the one-sidedness of faculties has intensified in recent years, and that the campus culture has shifted substantially to accommodate a new norm of politicized teaching and scholarship.
"It is in the nature of a political monoculture that it will automatically lead to extremism and thus to a degradation of academic competence and responsibility," Ellis argues. The trouble, as he sees it, lies not in ideological imbalance itself, but in what happens when political homogeneity of any sort is the rule in an intellectual setting. "We can still miss the point here if we focus too much on those absent right-of-center professors. The problem lies not in those who are not there, but in those who are."
Citing John Stuart Mill, Ellis rehearses the foundational premises of free inquiry. "He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that." "They do not, in any proper sense of the word, know the doctrine which they themselves profess." "Both teachers and learners go to sleep at their post as soon as there is no enemy in the field." Students must "be able to hear [the arguments] from people who actually believe them, who defend them in earnest, and do their very utmost for them. He must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form." If they don't, "All that part of the truth which turns the scale, and decides the judgment of a completely informed mind, they are strangers to."
For Ellis, academia's pervasive failure to recognize and nurture the need for genuine intellectual diversity marks a profound loss of individual and institutional competence. As advocacy has become a guiding purpose for a growing number of academics, the genuinely academic temperament has been lost. In a political and intellectual monoculture, he writes, "The academic's focus on careful analysis of and abstraction from all relevant evidence gradually gives way to the zealot's selective use of partial evidence to bolster trains of thought fathered by political wishes and even fantasies, not by fact." As proof that this degeneration into zealotry is happening, Ellis cites the growing archive of campus horror stories that have appeared in the news in recent years. Cases abound of speakers getting shouted down for their views, print runs of alternative student newspapers being stolen, students feeling pressed to parrot their professors' views, course descriptions that presuppose specific political positions, students and faculty being harassed and punished for expressing dissenting views. Together, Ellis says, they mark the "symptoms" of the "systemic … sickness" that is academe's political monoculture.
Ellis' analysis is particularly strong when he discusses what administrations do when confronted with evidence of a problem. In case after case, they rationalize it away--or even redefine the problem as a positive asset. This, he notes, is what the University of California did when a graduate instructor offered a pro-Palestinian course and advised prospective students that "Conservative thinkers are encouraged to seek other sections." Instead of "reaffirming" UCs rule forbidding teachers to allow passion, rather than intellect, to shape their teaching and "abolishing the course," UC responded by "reaffirming the course and abolishing the rule." Such decisions, he argues, demonstrate a systemic inability on the part of academics to understand and uphold an essentially academic ideal of inquiry: "University administrators used to be quality-control agents, but as is evident from the example of UC's capitulation, they are that no longer. Most have been intimidated into silence."
Ellis' conclusion? In his own words:
Remediation is urgent, and this must not be thought of as action against a political group, but rather as a return to enforcing genuinely academic standards of competence once more. Campus administrative quality control has long since broken down, and so the ball now seems to be in the court of governing boards. They have the responsibility of appointing and supervising senior campus administrators, and their task now is to appoint and support presidents who will do their traditional job of quality control by appointing deans who will make it their business to weed out teachers and courses that are academically incompetent. The first thing they would need to do would be to tackle absurdities like political monocultures in subject areas that deal directly with politics. But to make that possible, they would need to make the case publicly for an end to incompetent one-party politics and sociology departments, incompetent anti-academic courses, and anti-academic behavior in public meetings or in classrooms. A governing board that explains very carefully what it is doing to a general public that ultimately pays the academy's bills both as taxpayers and parents will find that it has more than enough support for its actions.
ACTA has been making similar arguments for years. In the absence of faculty-based or administrative will to acknowledge a problem--let alone to address it--trustees have an obligation to step up
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In Memoriam: Martin Meyerson
ACTA mourns the passing of Dr. Martin Meyerson, whose passion for excellence, thoughtful leadership and rigorous scholarship set a sterling example for all of us in higher education. An expert in urban planning, Dr. Meyerson's professional stature and leadership skills propelled him to the head of three major research universities during his half-century career in academia.
Of particular note was his tenure as acting chancellor at the University of California, Berkeley. During a period of student unrest, Dr. Meyerson offered a steady hand, reestablishing order on campus while reaffirming the value and importance of academic freedom.
Apart from his distinguished career as an administator, Dr. Meyerson also showed an admirable commitment to public service, serving as a member of several government boards and White House task forces.
Dr. Meyerson set the gold standard for present and future leaders of our nation's colleges and universities. He will be sorely missed.
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Core distinctions
Concepts such as taste and judgment get a bad rap in our increasingly relativistic society. And nowhere are the consequences of that bad rap more visible than in higher education. As ACTA showed in The Hollow Core, the core curriculum is out. It is simply no longer a given that colleges and universities should guide students in their studies, ensuring that they acquire a strong, solid grounding in foundational subjects as well as that they develop a coherent, in-depth knowledge of their concentration.
In place of the core has come almost endless choice. At most schools, students still must satisfy broad distribution requirements--but the range of courses that will fulfill those requirements is so huge, and so undifferentiated, that students are almost certain to have a scattered, fragmented educational experience. The core is associated with an old-fashioned, stodgy way of doing things; it is associated with value judgments and discriminating distinctions that assume some subjects matter more than others. In the post-modern university, such distinctions are regarded as morally suspect. Consequently a course on hip hop may be valued the same as a course on Shakespeare, American history, or classical philosophy. This "anything goes" atmosphere certainly caters to students' personal preferences (something colleges are wont to do in an era of skyrocketing tuition costs). But it practically guarantees that students will not approach their studies systematically, and as such does little to help them acquire knowledge and develop tastes that will benefit them throughout their lives.
This is the point made by Education Sector's Kevin Carey at the Quick and the Ed. Carey recently went music shopping in Montreal, where his visit to a selective CD store provided a powerful analogy for how colleges and universities disserve students when they offer all the choices in the world but do nothing to help students choose well.
Carey begins by explaining how a music store that deliberately does not carry as much music as possible can stay in business:
... the challenge of the information age isn't in gaining access to information, it's making sense of it. It's not figuring out how to buy CDs, it's figuring out which CDs to buy--and which not to. Those are issue of judgment and taste, which only people can provide. The value of the Montreal CD store was as much in the albums that weren't on sale as in those that were. In that context, only using 20% of your floor space makes a lot of sense.
[...]
The store also had a single wall rack that took this principle to even further extremes. While the rack was built to hold CDs about 10 deep, only the first three rows were in use. They were devoted exclusively to the gods and giants--Hendrix, Bowie, Neil Young, the Stones, Iggy Pop, Johnny Cash, Leonard Cohen (this being Canada), the New York Dolls, etc. ...
Moreover, the CD store wasn't just selling the standard "essentials" catalogue for each artist. Instead, there was a carefully selected combination of iconic works, under-appreciated studio albums (i.e. Axis: Bold as Love), obscure concerts, BBC session outtakes, etc. It was pretty cool.
Carey then moves on to explain that the business plan of the discriminating music shop can tell us a lot about how what higher education is doing wrong:
Thanks to Kevin Carey for his inspired--and hip--explanation.What, you may ask, does this have to do with higher education?
Beyond the obvious point that Hendrix appreciation is a higher education in and of itself, this CD store embodied the promise--and in many cases, the failure--of the undergraduate curriculum at the contemporary American university.
In some ways, universities went through all this a long time ago. While recorded music wasn't widely available until the mid-20th century, recorded words have been in circulation since Guttenberg. But even until recently, universities were judged by their prowess in storing and providing access to information, embodied in statistics like the number of books and journal subscriptions held by the library. They're still judged by the percentage of professors with PhDs--information stored in human form.
But these assets are--and really, always were--essentially irrelevant to the needs of your average undergraduate. Those students don't need access--they need taste. In other words, they need the university to apprehend the vast array of human knowledge and make some very smart, considered judgments about where to start and where to focus in building an education. They need the equivalent of the CD rack of gods and giants for the realm of ideas instead of music.
Unfortunately, most big universities moved away from this kind of core curriculum a long time ago. Instead they set students loose in the equivalent of Tower Records, with instructions that amount to "Buy at least one CD from Rock/Pop, Jazz, Classical, Soul / R&B, Folk, and Country. Then pick one of those categories and buy 10 more CDs from that section, plus another 10 from that section or any others."
In fact, it's worse than that, because universities are more limited than Tower in terms of what they can offer, and their offerings tend to skew toward what the faculty want to teach, not what students need to learn. It's like the above scenario, except there are only 50 CDs in each section, selected by a socially maladjusted record store clerk who looks down on the clerks in charge of the other sections (who feel the same way about him) and who has decided that the 50 albums in Rock/Pop will include the complete Yngvie Malmsteen catalogue, but not Exile on Main Street.
This doesn't mean every student needs exactly the same core curriculum, like some kind of rote march from Revolver to Never Mind the Bollocks to Nevermind. But it does mean that universities need to do a better job of applying some degree of judgment in working with their students to decide what they need to learn. Otherwise, they may end up like Tower Records, while the little CD store up the street thrives in selling the intellectual taste that, more than anything, students really need.
In the information age, access is not an end in itself. And choice is very far from the self-evident virtue that it often is taken to be. Students drown in options if they don't get proper guidance--and their educations suffer as a result. Information management is a skill we all need today--and colleges and universities have an obligation to structure undergraduate education to help students differentiate between courses they need and those they don't.
As Bruce Springsteen would say, sometimes we learn "more from a three-minute record ... than we ever learned in school."
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