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Hank Brown on Ward Churchill

At the Wall Street Journal, University of Colorado president Hank Brown explains the logic behind the decision to fire Ward Churchill, as well as the larger implications the Churchill case has for academic process:

While no action was taken by the university with regard to his views on 9/11, many complaints surfaced at the time about his scholarship from faculty around the country. The university had an obligation to investigate. The complaints led to the formation of three separate investigative panels -- which included more than 20 of his faculty peers and which worked for over two years -- to unanimously find a pattern of serious, deliberate and repeated research misconduct that fell below minimum standards of professional integrity.

The panels found that Mr. Churchill rewrote history to fit his own theories. When confronted, he asserted he was not responsible. According to one report, "Professor Churchill has, on more than one occasion, claimed that certain acts that appear to have been his were instead the responsibility of some other actor: his editor or publisher, his assistant, or his former wife and collaborator." The report goes on to note that "we have come to see these claims as emblems of a recurrent refusal to take responsibility for errors ... and a willingness to blame others for his troubles."

But his case is about far more than academic misconduct. It is about the accountability that public universities must demonstrate. Mr. Churchill's difficulties in facing up to his academic responsibilities are in many ways emblematic of higher education's trouble with accountability. Too often, colleges and universities tend to insulate themselves in ivy-covered buildings and have not been as diligent as necessary to ensure that the academic enterprise is conducted rigorously and honestly. This elitist attitude is simply outdated, and our university has made tenure reforms -- precipitated by the Churchill case -- that will ensure academic integrity.

Universities, particularly public research universities, are accountable to those who have a stake in their success and efficient operation. At the University of Colorado, this includes the people of Colorado who contribute $200 million in taxes annually, the federal agencies that provide some $640 million annually in research funding, the alumni who want to maintain the value of their degrees, the faculty who expect their colleagues to act with integrity and the students who trust that faculty who teach them meet high professional standards.

And just as the public has high expectations for us, we expect our faculty members to be accountable for maintaining high standards of scholarship. A public research university such as ours requires public faith that each faculty member's professional activities and search for truth are conducted according to the academic standards on which an institution's reputation rests.

The University of Colorado's reputation was called into question in the matter of Ward Churchill. His claim that he was singled out for his free speech is a smokescreen.

Controversy -- especially self-sought controversy -- doesn't immunize a faculty member from adhering to professional standards. If you are a responsible faculty member, you don't falsify research, you don't plagiarize the work of others, you don't fabricate historical events and you don't thumb your nose at the standards of the profession. More than 20 of Mr. Churchill's faculty peers from Colorado and other universities found that he committed those acts. That's what got him fired.

Even great universities have problems. Places with thousands of faculty and tens of thousands of mostly young students are not immune to trouble. But a university's reputation will only be strengthened when it works to ensure that it remains accountable to those it serves.

Brown's reasoning here amounts to a call to action--and as such, his logic dovetails with that of ACTA. As ACTA president Anne D. Neal noted at Inside Higher Ed earlier this summer,
"Far from being an 'attack' on academic freedom, Colorado's handling of the Churchill affair is, in fact, in defense of academic freedom. And if Churchill and his defenders win the day, their perverse redefinition of academic freedom will result in an immeasurable setback for that concept--not to mention the academy itself."

Colleges and universities across the country should be taking steps to ensure that their faculties are adhering to the highest scholarly standards. And as they do so, they can emphasize the bedrock principle that academic freedom is grounded in academic responsibility--just as CU did.

Posted by acta online on July 27, 2007 at 02:46 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Reforming accreditation

ACTA's new policy paper on accreditation, Why Accreditation Doesn't Work and What Policymakers Can Do About It, is causing quite a stir--and is prompting the accreditation establishment to acknowledge some of the real and pressing problems with the current system. At Inside Accreditation, the Council for Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA) has issued a response to ACTA's report that recognizes the importance of both its criticisms and recommendations. Though CHEA and ACTA do have their differences, this is one instance where their perspectives converge:

... the ACTA paper does raise questions and issues that are important to the enterprise. Some of these topics have been raised by the higher education and accreditation communities themselves. These include whether the gatekeeping role that accreditation was asked to take on by the federal government in 1952 continues to make sense for all parties involved - the government, higher education and accreditation. There is discussion of the importance of enhanced rigor in higher education, especially through additional attention to student achievement. The paper urges that the diversity of higher education institutions be maintained. It addresses the role of the market and increased competition as perhaps strengthening accreditation practice. It speaks to benefit [sic] that could accrue to accreditation through providing more sustained and reliable information to the public about quality.

... Of the issues that the paper raises, two are fundamental to the future of accreditation and how it operates. Accreditation needs a frank reappraisal of its relationship to the federal government and the gatekeeping function. How, going forward, should this be configured? Can the current gatekeeping arrangement continue to be effective and, if so, how? Would the end of gatekeeping mean the end of accreditation as some fear? Accreditors need to carefully consider the importance of greater public accountability to the future credibility of accreditation. Specifically, how, going forward, will accreditation intensify and accelerate its responsiveness to the insistent calls for greater accountability, especially as this relates to student achievement and public information? There is much work to be done.

Recognizing that "the ACTA paper does provide a service," CHEA finds plenty of common ground between ACTA's perception of the problems with accreditation and accreditors' own assessment of how the present system needs to be revised for greater effectiveness, integrity, and accountability. CHEA specifically notes how crucial it is for the accreditation system to respond more swiftly and meaningfully to demands for accountability--and in this respect, ACTA and CHEA might be said, quite literally, to be on the same page. As ACTA has long noted, accountability is a crucial but neglected aspect of academic freedom; the lifeblood of higher education--free inquiry and the robust exchange of ideas--depends upon colleges and universities being accountable for the intellectual vitality of their campuses and for their educational outcomes.

Posted by acta online on July 26, 2007 at 11:48 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Colorado gets it right

Yesterday, the University of Colorado Board of Regents voted 8 to 1 to fire ethnic studies professor Ward Churchill. The event marks a key moment in the history of academic freedom and accountability, as ACTA president Anne D. Neal noted at InsideHigherEd.com: "Academic freedom has to be based on integrity," Neal said; and "that's what this case was about."

Posted by acta online on July 25, 2007 at 01:08 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Academic freedom and the ACLU

Today, after an investigation lasting more than two years, the University of Colorado Board of Regents is meeting to decide whether to fire ethnic studies professor Ward Churchill. Churchill's notoriety stems from an article he wrote comparing the victims of the 9/11 attacks to Nazis; when the public learned of this article in early 2005, many called for Churchill to be fired for his speech. ACTA defended Churchill's free speech and academic freedom, and urged CU to provide Churchill with due process. CU listened, and when allegations of research misconduct on Churchill's part surfaced--not for the first time--CU launched an investigation. After a lengthy, scrupulous process, the University determined that Churchill had indeed "committed several forms of academic misconduct"; this spring, CU's Privilege and Tenure committee concluded that Churchill had "committed multiple acts of plagiarism, fabrication and falsification" and that the case requires "severe sanctions." CU president Hank Brown followed up with a letter to the Board of Regents recommending that Churchill be fired.

The Churchill case should be a no-brainer, a straightforward instance of a university terminating a faculty member who has engaged in multiple, documented acts of scholarly malfeasance. But not everyone agrees. The ACLU, for example, has come out in Churchill's defense, arguing that to fire him would be to violate his academic freedom and his First Amendment rights. But in so arguing, the ACLU only proves a point ACTA president Anne Neal made at InsideHigherEd.com last month:

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.

The ACLU's stance on the Churchill case represents a palpable danger to the very concept the ACLU is purporting to defend: academic freedom. Colorado's treatment of the Churchill case is very far from an attack on academic freedom; indeed, if anyone is attacking the concept of academic freedom, it is those who are using the Churchill case to to promote the dangerous and anti-intellectual notion that accountability is somehow anathema to free inquiry, and that in academe, anything goes.

"Ward Churchill is a poster boy for academic malfeasance, not academic freedom," said Neal in a press release issued today. "While claiming to protect academic freedom, the ACLU is making a mockery of it."

Here's to Colorado's Board standing firm on principle. It's up to governing boards to defend the honor of a concept that is at once foundational to the academic enterprise, and, as we have seen, terribly fragile and open to abuse.

Posted by acta online on July 24, 2007 at 05:40 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Trouble brewing at Dartmouth

In recent years, Dartmouth has offered a fascinating window into some of the modern academy's defining issues. On the one hand, widespread desire for change has led alumni to elect four reform-minded petition candidates to Dartmouth's board since 2004; on the other hand, institutional resistance to change has led Dartmouth to erect barriers to prevent future petition candidates from becoming trustees.

At Dartmouth, alumni elect half the trustees--and any alum who collects 500 alumni signatures can add himself to the ballot as a petition candidate. In 2004, Cypress Semiconductor CEO T.J. Rodgers ran as a petition candidate--and was elected. In 2005, Hoover Institution fellow Peter Robinson and George Mason University law professor Todd Zywicki followed suit. Responding to growing alumni concern about the direction of the college, their platforms were staunchly committed to educational rigor, academic freedom, the free exchange of ideas, and improved fiscal oversight. In response, Dartmouth tried--and failed--to change the rules to make it harder for dark horse candidates to run.

The most recent episode in this instructive clash between alumni and institutional wills centers on University of Virginia law professor and Dartmouth alum Stephen Smith, a petition candidate who was elected to the Dartmouth board last spring. Citing a 79 percent increase in administrative spending and unbalanced hiring (117 new administrators, as compared to only 50 new faculty), Smith ran on a platform declaring his intention to "stop bureaucratic bloat and to invest in excellence" as well as to protect the quality of undergraduate education at Dartmouth.

"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 at the time. "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."

Neal's words are proving to be prophetic. Unhappy with the outcomes of recent trustee elections, Dartmouth is again working to poison the pot and change the rules. Rather than welcome fresh voices who represent one of Dartmouth's most important constituencies--its 65,000 alumni--Dartmouth seems to want to prevent future petition candidates from finding influential places on its board, and to ensure that its own insider candidates are elected.

In an op-ed published in the Dartmouth, Smith explains:

Before the ink was dry on the press release announcing my election to the Board of Trustees last month, we were let in on a secret: a Board committee from which petition trustees have been excluded is exploring alternative methods of selecting Trustees--a euphemism, really, for stripping Dartmouth alumni of their longstanding right to elect half of the Board.

The basis for this unprecedented assault on alumni rights is a series of false charges made by those who have again found themselves on the losing side of an election.

The leading charge is that I essentially "bought" the election. The amount I purportedly spent keeps going up, but the current claim is that I spent "as much as $200,000."

With all due respect, claims that I "bought" the election are not only absurd but insulting to alumni. As I told the Associated Press last month, I spent approximately $75,000--the same amount Sandy Alderson reported spending. Almost half of what I spent went to gathering signatures because, unlike my opponents, my place on the ballot was not guaranteed.

[...]

Truth be told, I was badly outspent because the administration spent lavishly to defeat me.

Smith goes on to detail the elaborate, costly, and questionable lengths to which the Dartmouth administration went to oppose his candidacy. He also dismantles Dartmouth's spurious claim that petition candidates are "divisive":

It is not "divisive" for candidates to discuss the issues facing Dartmouth. It is democracy, pure and simple. All I did was tell voters where I stand on the issues. The only attacks and invective came from the other side.

Nevertheless, it is true that elections with petition candidates differ from contests between nominated candidates alone. Petition candidates are not anointed to run by a committee of insiders; they have to earn their place on the ballot by appealing to broad segments of alumni. The presence of petition candidates forces nominated candidates to talk about real issues--eek!--and thereby allows alumni to make an informed choice about who should represent them as trustees.

That, presumably, is why alumni turned out in droves in last year's constitution vote to reject efforts, strongly supported by the administration and the Board, to weaken the petition process. Alumni know that the petition process is an essential mechanism for achieving accountability and transparency in the governance of the College--and, evidently, that is the last thing the administration and its allies want.

The current effort to disenfranchise alumni, though carefully masked behind talk of "best practices" and remedying deficient election procedures, is merely a brazen power play by insiders who resent alumni involvement in College affairs. It will be a sad day indeed if the Board of Trustees joins in that unprecedented assault on our alumni.

Dartmouth is making governance history. In the face of administrative laxness, alumni have begun to play a crucial role in determining the future of the institution. And, in the face of active alumni participation in governance, the administration is betraying its own stated commitment to welcoming input from all those who care about Dartmouth. What happens next will tell us much--not only about the direction Dartmouth is moving in, but also about the kind of history this time-honored institution is going to make.

Posted by acta online on July 19, 2007 at 06:05 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

The public eye

The American public is uneasy, to say the least, about our higher education system.

In June 2006, the AAUP found that 58.4% of the American public has only some or no confidence in American colleges and universities, that 60.2% believes higher ed is suffering from low educational standards, that 45.7% says political bias is either a very serious problem or the biggest problem facing higher ed, and that 82% wants to modify or eliminate tenure altogether.

In May, Public Agenda for the National Center for Public Policy in Higher Education reported an "erosion of confidence" in our higher education system. Documenting increasing public anxiety about costs, access, and educational quality, the poll revealed that nearly 80% of Americans believe students have to incur too much debt for college, and only 44% believe students get their money's worth.

Most recently, a Zogby poll revealed that 58% of the public believes political bias among professors is a somewhat serious or very serious problem. Zogby breaks down the numbers by political affiliation, gender, religion, ethnicity, and, most strikingly, by age. Among 18-29 year olds, 46.6% say bias in the classroom is either a very serious or somewhat serious problem. And among 18-24 year olds, the number is even higher, at 50.7%.

These are telling figures from a demographic that includes current college students and recent graduates--those best positioned to comment on whether political bias is a problem on campus. And, not surprisingly, Zogby's figures tally with those ACTA gathered in a 2004 survey of students at the top fifty schools in the country. 49% said professors frequently inject political comments into their courses, even if they have nothing to do with the subject. Nearly a third (29%) felt compelled to agree with professors' political views to get good grades.

ACTA president Anne D. Neal has long noted the academy's telling failure to follow up on such disturbing figures. "It's all talk and no action," Neal has said; "higher education simply can't have it both ways. College and university presidents say they, alone, are able to correct the situation in the classroom, but then they refuse to do anything but offer lip service to the idea of intellectual diversity. If the academy were faced with just one study showing racism or sexism in the classroom, they would take immediate actions to address the problem. Here we see study after study pointing out a breathtaking lack of intellectual diversity on campus and nothing is done about it. The double standard is outrageous."

Taken together, the Zogby, ACTA, AAUP, and Public Agenda polls eloquently indicate growing public skepticism about the integrity and quality of American higher education. As Neal told Inside Higher Ed, they are a "wake up call" for academe: "Clearly, studies by ACTA and others--indicating declining academic quality and pervasive politics--have made their way into the public consciousness," she notes. "Yet the higher ed establishment seems to think that if it invokes 'Academic freedom! Give us your money and leave us alone,' nothing will come of it." Instead, Neal observed, colleges and universities should take "immediate steps to be publicly accountable."

Neal's recommendation arises from ACTA's longstanding belief that colleges and universities can best protect their autonomy by voluntarily making themselves more accountable and more transparent to an increasingly critical and concerned public. Responding to the poll's finding that 65.3% of the public believes those without tenure are more motivated to do a good job than those with it, Neal drew a logical inference and asked a pointed question: The "numbers suggest that going after the special protection that higher education most treasures, tenure, would be broadly popular," she said. "Is that what the academy wants?"

Surely it's not what the academy wants. But, as University of Colorado president Hank Brown has noted, it may be what the academy gets if it continues to ignore calls for greater accountability.

Posted by acta online on July 16, 2007 at 03:31 PM | Comments (16) | TrackBack

Revisiting Harvard ROTC

On June 6, eleven Harvard seniors were honored at Harvard's annual ROTC commissioning ceremony. Taking their oaths and receiving their first salutes as officers, Harvard's latest group of ROTC graduates listened to stirring words from Kaneb Professor of National Security and Military Affairs Stephen Rosen.

"Four years ago, Harvard chose you, and four years ago you chose military service," Rosen said. "You chose military service in 2003, in a time of war. You chose military service, knowing that you could be sent by your country in harm's way. You did not choose the peacetime military, but, rather, the life of a warrior. Harvard honors public service, but is uneasy with national military service, because Harvard is uneasy with war, and with warriors, and increasingly sees itself as an international university, not simply an American university."

"We all wish to avoid war, with all our hearts," Rosen continued. "And we welcome students and faculty from around the world. But the United States is our country. Without the United States, there would be no Harvard, and we should never forget that. And our country is still at war, and so I salute your courage, your commitment to national service, and the...sacrifices you have made and will make."

Rosen's words, excerpted in the Harvard Magazine and the New York Sun, are an apt and concise outline of why ROTC matters, and of this country's long tradition of working with universities to train an educated class of citizen-soldiers. But Rosen's words were not heard by either Derek Bok or Drew Faust, Harvard's outgoing and incoming presidents. Though former Harvard president Lawrence Summers showed his support for ROTC by attending the commissioning ceremony during each year of his presidency, neither Bok nor Faust chose to do so.

ROTC was once a thriving program at Harvard. But, as Rosen notes, Harvard no longer sees itself as a primarily American entity, nor does it offer strong support for students who wish to serve their country. Harvard's ROTC students do not train on campus; they must commute to MIT (an arrangement made in 1976, under Bok's first presidency). They do not receive course credit for the military science courses they take, nor does Harvard pay the six-figure annual fee required to make that training at MIT possible. That fee is paid instead by anonymous alumni who stepped in during the 1990s after the Harvard faculty voted to stop paying as a protest against "don't ask, don't tell." Over the years, alumni and student efforts to return ROTC to Harvard's campus have met with strong faculty resistance.

It's regrettable that Presidents Bok and Faust failed to attend Harvard's commissioning ceremony for reasons laid out in the Wall Street Journal and the Sun. It's also regrettable, as Rosen notes, that Harvard faculty appear to believe their personal preferences and politics supersede a greater obligation to enable students to undertake national service at their own university.

But it's also possible to reverse that course. Last February, Faust declared that she has "enormous respect for these students who commit themselves to this effort and to the service of their country" and indicated her sense that "It might be a time to look at [the issue of ROTC on campus] again and see what the right positions on these issues are." What a message it would send for Faust to weigh in this fall on the side of civic responsibility. And what a remarkable thing it would be for Harvard's new President to explore ROTC's restoration--not as a sop to conservatives, and not, by any means, as an endorsement of the war in Iraq--but in support of students' rights and the fundamentally liberal purpose of ROTC: to infuse the military with college graduates who embrace the robust exchange of ideas and who can help prevent the rise of what scholar Michael Neiberg has called a narrow "military caste."

Perhaps Faust will reflect, therefore, on what her absence says to Harvard students, faculty, alumni--not to mention the American people. And perhaps she'll choose a different path.

Posted by acta online on July 13, 2007 at 01:40 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Film flunks the test

Going to college increasingly means going to the movies. Students can study film qua film--which is reasonable enough, given film's enormous artistic power and impact. But students can take courses that use film to deliver other material as well. As ACTA has shown, literature courses frequently rely on film to dramatize works that--presumably--are now deemed less accessible than they once were. "Shakespeare in Film" courses are a common instance of this trend: Rice, Wesleyan, Bryn Mawr, and Purdue, among others, all offer such courses. And, as Ohio University history professor Kevin Mattson has found, film is increasingly being used to bring history to life.

In the current issue of the Common Review, Mattson describes how he found himself teaching a large upper-level course entitled "History Through Film." Initially reluctant ("Too often when someone says they're showing a film in class," he writes, "what they really mean is, I have a conference to attend that day"), Mattson eventually agrees to the assignment because he feels it is his duty to help teach one of his department's major service courses; a flexible course, History Through Film varies in content from term to term, and is geared toward, as Mattson puts it, getting "butts in seats." After accepting the assignment, Mattson must talk himself into believing that a history course based on movies is a viable idea.

First, he convinces himself that showing movies in class is not necessarily a hallmark of pedagogical laziness, that it might instead be a timely and useful teaching technique. Saturday Night Fever (1977) strikes him as a memorable way to introduce students to some of the defining aspects of the 1970s, while Casablanca (1942) amounts to an important historical document in itself.

Mattson then asks his colleagues how they approach teaching film. Some treat film, with all its inaccuracies and creative license, as a foil for historical analysis: "you use film to tell a story about the past--sometimes even a myth--so that you can then unmask it and expose its ideology." Others use film to set the tone for a historical lesson plan--one of Mattson's colleagues uses The Patriot, a 2000 Mel Gibson flick, to introduce the American Revolution. Still others use film to illustrate historically specific national moods: "Films can offer the same sort of insights as novels, speeches, and essays," Mattson writes; "This was the approach that most appealed to me as a historian of twentieth-century America."

Thus does Mattson develop a theory about how one might teach history through teaching film. But, in teaching as in other applied arts, theory is not practice. Mattson's account of actually teaching History Through Film is a devastating indictment of what he terms "the postmodern academy," which he defines as

... a place where consumerism and entertainment seep in. It's a place demanding--and these are real cases--that universities build Jacuzzis and water parks for students. It's a place summed up by the omnipresent student center that looks like a megamall replete with food courts .... It's a place where the term democracy is not about self-knowledge or citizenship but rather about impulsive consumer ratings about what you like and dislike in the classroom. It's a place where a course like History Through Film makes perfect sense.

One reason History Through Film makes sense in the postmodern academy, Mattson observes, is that students have a tendency to treat every course as a course in film. Regardless of the class, discussion frequently takes the form of students volunteering comparisons between the assigned reading and movies they have seen: "I remember very well a student trying to use The Matrix to explain to his fellow students Platonic theories of knowledge." Popular culture is today's students' frame of reference; films are the lingua franca of a generation reared in front of the screen, so much so that students are sometimes unable to understand the material they are studying except as footnotes to their favorite films.

And that's the good news. Too often, Mattson finds, films fail to stimulate even the kinds of solipsistic reflections described above, in which everything may ultimately be explained in terms of individual students' personal viewing experiences. Mattson describes what it was like to show movies to the 150 students enrolled in History Through Film:

... students were having a difficult time extricating themselves from the silky power of entertainment. Over and over I saw this played out: once the film started to roll in class, the pens went down, and the students' eyes glazed over. I could almost hear the critical circuits in the brains snapping off. One time, I could swear seeing, even though the lights were turned down, a student literally drooling.

This repeated response should tell us something: Entertainment doesn't teach. It entertains. It shuts down analytical skills and makes us feel warm inside. Watching a movie is comforting, as is the conversation that typically follows a movie screening--which inevitably concerns little more than a person's likes or dislikes. And opinions comfort us in a way that arguments--supported by evidence and logic and resulting in conflict--seldom do.

In teaching the course, Mattson learns that film cannot spark intellectual insight if it is not seen in reference to something else--and students, he realizes, typically bring with them neither historical knowledge nor even knowledge of historical myths. Second, Mattson learns that students' lack of knowledge ensures a lack of analytical distance; because they cannot think critically about what they are seeing, they tend to become passive consumers looking for entertainment. Faced with a screen, they zone. Faced with a screen showing material that does not enable them to zone (because the film is older, or subtitled, or both), they simply snicker and dismiss.

Finally, Mattson learns something about himself: that, despite his misgivings, he'll agree to teach History Through Film again if asked--not because he thinks it works, but because he feels an obligation to teach his share of large departmental service courses. History Through Film, he notes, is a "butts in seats" course of pivotal importance to his department's overall enrollment figures. The conflict he describes is a classic one: when student needs and departmental desires do not align, students lose out.

Sharp, insightful, and frequently funny, Mattson's essay is a rueful look at how the academy can perpetuate practices that are substantially at odds with its educational mission. Courses that use film to feed students watered down versions of knowledge, Mattson notes, are, along with megamall student centers and elite athletic facilities, part and parcel of how the postmodern academy attempts to attract and keep students. It all amounts to a form of "slumming," a word Mattson uses to evoke the academy's collective, unspoken assumption that students will not rise to the occasion of higher education, and that, therefore, colleges and universities must lower their expectations while pretending that students are smarter and savvier than ever.

Posted by acta online on July 11, 2007 at 06:22 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

The global challenge for college curricula

Over the next few weeks, we will be featuring the writing of ACTA's intrepid class of summer interns. The below comes from Christopher B. Lacaria, a Robert Lewit Fellow in Education Policy at ACTA and a member of the class of 2009 at Harvard College, where he is studying early modern and medieval European history.--Charles Mitchell

In a recent interview with Inside Higher Ed, American Association of University Professors president Cary Nelson explained how the diverse and culturally eclectic curricula offered by many universities today yield practical benefit in the real world:

American business would in the end be better served by more culturally aware and culturally articulate graduates, graduates who could understand the dynamics of globalization, graduates who could understand the benefits and risks of globalization, graduates who could relate business opportunities to political realities here and elsewhere around the world would in fact be valuable graduates.

Prof. Nelson's admirable appreciation for such a multicultural and global education notwithstanding, he misses a crucial point: how can American college students aspire to international citizenship, when they apparently are ignorant of their civic responsibilities at home?

Despite AAUP's ostensible representation of the American professoriate, not all in the academy view their duty likewise. At an American Enterprise Institute conference co-sponsored by ACTA and the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, Former Dean of Harvard College Harry R. Lewis, described a much more fundamental obligation for him and his fellow educators. American civic literacy, he forwards, should rank high among curricular priorities properly ordered:

In research universities, professors are selected and rewarded on the basis of their creativity and imagination, the novelty of their insights and of their approaches to knowledge. Universities need to be reminded that they have another role as well, to teach some of the things that are so important that they can too easily be taken for granted. And in fact, whenever a course on the United States presidency, or on constitutional law, is offered to undergraduates at Harvard, the enrollments are enormous.

Before launching into the international arena, American college students deserve a thorough rearing in their own institutions, history, and values--as Polonius admonishes his son Laertes in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, "to thine own self be true."

Perhaps this reminder would be superfluous to today’s academy had it had not long busied itself with cleansing the college canon of such authors, all in the name of "globalizing" education.

Posted by cmitchell on July 09, 2007 at 12:01 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

The leaning tower

In the current issue of Montana Professor, University of Montana English professor Paul Trout reflects on academic freedom, intellectual diversity, and accountability. The occasion for his reflections is a conference held at Montana State University in March of 2006. Entitled "'Without Interference'?: Academic Freedom in the 21st Century," the conference brought together higher education leaders, among them David Hollinger, a University of California history professor and chair of the AAUP's Committee on Academic Freedom; and ACTA president Anne D. Neal (an expanded version of Neal's presentation appeared as an article in the Fall 2006 issue of Montana Professor).

For Trout, the conference was an exemplary moment in our national dialogue about higher education--a window into a building controversy about academic accountability that offered special insight into how academics can discount mounting evidence that higher education is losing its intellectual vitality and scholarly integrity.

Summarizing several recent studies documenting the political one-sidedness of faculties across the country, Trout notes that Hollinger devoted his keynote address to the notion that "concern about the alleged political imbalance of state-supported colleges and universities is baseless." According to Trout, Hollinger dismissed the data demonstrating faculty one-sidedness, arguing on the one hand that it does not exist, and, on the other, that even if it did, "it would not matter since educators today are professionals who do not let their personal politics affect either their research or their teaching." Claiming that concerns about faculty one-sidedness are the tactics of "outsiders" who wish to interfere with academic governance, Hollinger additionally argued that only academics have the "cognitive authority" to--in Trout's words--"determine the standards and processes used to decide what is good, right, and true within the disciplines." (Hollinger's speech is not available online, but he provides a detailed outline of his concept of cognitive authority in the spring 2006 issue of Liberal Education.)

Trout's piece skillfully penetrates this rhetoric.

For Hollinger, the documented political uniformity of faculty members is not a problem because it has nothing to do with whether individual faculty members behave professionally; academic standards are an adequate ethical system in and of themselves, regardless of whether academics are ideologically diverse. But for Trout, political affiliation has a great deal to do with how one interprets and understands the world; in academia, where interpreting and understanding the world is one's work, ideological one-sidedness is intrinsically anathema to a properly functioning intellectual environment.

Drawing on John Stuart Mill, Trout explains how indispensable multiple viewpoints are to the academy; there is no substitute, he argues, for debate--even "antagonism" and "conflict"--when it comes to protecting the academy against a poisonous groupthink. He gives examples of how academia's intellectual monoculture has skewed scholarly research, and he also shows how it licenses scholarly organizations to behave like advocacy groups. Finally, he explains what faculty groupthink means for students. Citing ACTA's 2004 survey of student experience in the classroom--in which 49 percent said their professors "frequently injected political comments into their courses, even if they had nothing to do with the subject" and 29 percent felt they had to agree with their professors' political views to get a good grade--Trout observes academics' chilling refusal to respond to such figures by conducting self-studies to get a better sense of what they mean, what the problem is, and what can be done to remedy it.

In June 2005, the American Council on Education released a statement on intellectual diversity that pledged support for "intellectual pluralism and academic freedom," sounded the value of debate, and charged colleges and universities with ensuring that "neither students nor faculty should be disadvantaged or evaluated on the basis of their political opinions." The statement also observed that the independence of colleges and universities obligates them "to ensure that academic freedom is protected for all members of the campus community and that academic decisions are based on intellectual standards consistent with the mission of each institution."

Many higher education groups endorsed the statement--but when ACTA wrote to one hundred of the nation's top colleges and universities later that year asking them to document any actions they had taken in response to the ACE statement, not one was able to report doing anything to address the issues the ACE statement had defined.

"It's all talk and no action," ACTA president Anne D. Neal said at the time; "higher education simply can't have it both ways. College and university presidents say they, alone, are able to correct the situation in the classroom, but then they refuse to do anything but offer lip service to the idea of intellectual diversity. If the academy were faced with just one study showing racism or sexism in the classroom, they would take immediate actions to address the problem. Here we see study after study pointing out a breathtaking lack of intellectual diversity on campus and nothing is done about it. The double standard is outrageous."

Trout's analysis of Hollinger's comments about the "cognitive authority" of academics is instructive here:

This concept of cognitive authority assumes a process of knowledge-making that entails unconstrained debate between multiple points of view, and honest, unbiased assessment of claims and evidence. It is the integrity of this process that enables professional researchers and educators to arrive at the best provisional knowledge achievable at any given time. If this process is not working properly, if it does not enable the honest vetting of various and conflicting claims, then the claim of cognitive authority is merely an assertion of right and power--the faculty has the cognitive authority to declare that it has cognitive authority. According to Hollinger, it is this cognitive authority that immunizes the faculty from assaults by those "outsiders" who do not have cognitive authority. As Hollinger put it, "when outsiders try to pressure us, we need to tell them straight out--our only client is the truth." [...]

Hollinger's "us" versus "them" formulation raises the question of who is "them." If only faculty members have cognitive authority, then he is suggesting that the university is not accountable to other social institutions, including governing boards and legislatures. But, if the members of governing boards also have cognitive authority, then so would legislators, who have oversight responsibilities in respect to tax-supported educational institutions. Where is the line that demarcates those with cognitive authority from those "outsiders" who don't?

Hollinger's attempt to shield the status quo of higher education from unwanted and inconvenient oversight is understandable, but it is scarcely justified in the face of growing evidence that the vetting processes that bestow cognitive authority indeed have been affected by political values and passions, and play a part in the promoting the growing political imbalance of college faculties ....

At the Montana conference, Neal offered an important corrective to Hollinger's claims about academics' "cognitive authority" to decide their own institutional affairs. "When universities fail to abide by professional standards, when faculty members put personal, social, and political agendas ahead of a fundamental commitment to the objective search for truth, then outside input is salutary," she noted. "Outside input in such instances offers not interference but a means of protecting and defending the freedom to seek the truth."

Trout's article continues the important work of debunking defenses of the academic status quo that rely more on rhetoric and assertion than reasoned response to facts. The imagery of his title,"The Lopsided Ivory Tower," says it all: leaning towers are not upright institutions; by definition, they need help recovering their ability to stand on principle.

Posted by acta online on July 06, 2007 at 12:25 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

The view from beyond the tower

The National Association of Scholars is marking its twentieth anniversary--and its president, Stephen Balch, is taking stock of all that has changed since 1987, as well as challenges that remain. "After twenty years of struggle for higher education reform," he asks at MindingtheCampus.com, "how do things stand, and, more significantly, what has been learned about feasible routes to remedy?"

Balch--who deserves great credit for his significant role in launching the movement whose work he surveys--begins with the good: "First, we have a genuine academic reform movement where twenty years ago there was none. A sizeable community of organizations, with distinct missions and partially distinct if overlapping bases of support, now act in concert." Balch goes on to note the heartening creation of academic programs such as Princeton's James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions, which give crucial scholarly space to topics that have been marginalized by the postmodern university.

But progress has been limited, Balch concludes, by a waning institutional commitment to the ideals of free inquiry. It is not enough for critics and reformers merely to outline problems. In addition, it is important to define constructive ways to bring about accountability. And empowering engaged and thoughtful boards of trustees is one of them:

The academic oversight powers of governing boards, now virtually a nullity, might be substantially strengthened. Perhaps this could be prudently done by allowing boards to rely for independent advice on committees of intellectual visitors--outside scholars reporting to them on the integrity and openness of academic discourse.

Balch's suggestion that outside input may well be what's needed to help the academy recover its proper course dovetails closely with ACTA's own recommendations. ACTA's 2005 report, Intellectual Diversity: Time for Action, outlined steps colleges and universities can take to guarantee intellectual vitality on campus, and noted that trustees would have to take the lead in ensuring that their own campuses are indeed taking such steps. The report also noted the value of public hearings--which can alert concerned citizens to what's happening on campus--as well as the role governors, taxpayers, and alumni can take in demanding that colleges and universities live up to their educational missions.

Balch's survey offers an instructive perspective on historic successes and continuing challenges in higher ed reform. It also offers an inspired vision for greater accountability in the future.

Posted by acta online on July 03, 2007 at 12:51 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack