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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 at July 6, 2007 12:25 PM
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