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AAUP Watch
The AAUP's recent statement on "Freedom in the Classroom" deserves extended comment--and that's forthcoming. In the meantime, it's worth noting a few things about it.
1) As the Chronicle of Higher Education's Robin Wilson notes, the statement "is billed as a tool to help professors decide what they can and cannot safely say in the classroom -- particularly when it comes to hot-button cultural and political issues," but it reads "more like a defense of the professoriate in the face of heavy criticism" from outside the academy.
2) AAUP president Cary Nelson has been quite blunt about the fact that the real aim of the statement is "to give faculty members arguments that are really clear and that they can use with administrations" when they are questioned about their classroom conduct; in the face of repeated, documented instances of faculty members who use their classrooms in less than professional ways, Nelson has said the AAUP statement will allow professors to say (the words are Nelson's), "Don't mess with me."
3) Because it is framed defensively rather than as an impartial consideration of real issues, the AAUP statement misses its mark. Though it purports to be a set of guidelines for faculty classroom conduct, it is so dismissive of the criticisms that have been leveled against college teachers that it manages neither to state the problem clearly nor to offer clear, substantive advice. The result is a skewed and distorted image of academic freedom that, to quote ACTA president Anne D. Neal, evinces a "bald unwillingness to acknowledge academic responsibility as well as academic rights" and that thus downplays the academy's documented "failure to regulate itself."
4) The AAUP's stubborn refusal to acknowledge outside criticism--which goes so far as to suggest that misconduct in the classroom exists only as a statistical possibility ("sometime, somewhere," the statement concludes, "some instructor will step over the line")--ignores important concessions in their own ranks. Indeed, one of the statement's strongest endorsers, Penn State English professor Michael Berube, makes just such an acknowledgement in an Inside Higher Ed op-ed that ran on the same day IHE reported the statement's publication:
... sometimes these critics have a point: there are indeed college professors who think that the principle of academic freedom covers everything they do and say in the classroom, regardless of whether it has any bearing on the course material. (Those professors need to read the AAUP statement, as well.) Certainly, no professor of analytic number theory has any business subjecting his students to a soliloquy about the war in Iraq, and no professor of introductory cosmology has any business fulminating about illegal immigrants. And no professor of anything has any business haranguing or intimidating students--for any reason. ... The 1940 AAUP Statement of Principles notes that professors 'should be careful not to introduce into their teaching controversial matter which has no relation to their subject.' In 1970, the AAUP clarified this guideline, explaining that 'controversial' matter, in and of itself, is not a problem; rather, irrelevant material is the problem. ... The intent of this statement is not to discourage what is 'controversial.' Controversy is at the heart of the free academic inquiry which the entire statement is designed to foster. The passage serves to underscore the need for teachers to avoid persistently intruding material which has no relation to their subject.
5) Berube sounds a lot like ACTA when he writes in this vein--and that's all to the good. There is merit in moving beyond the slipperiness of the AAUP statement, and finding solid common ground with the very reasonable concerns that ACTA has for years been raising about politics in the classroom. In a 2004 study, for example, ACTA learned that 49 percent of students 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. That's not a sign of a healthy intellectual environment--and it's why the academy has been getting charged with doctrinaire classroom antics. It's also one of the many reasons why the AAUP should have worked a little bit harder to take those charges seriously.
More to come.
Posted by acta online at September 18, 2007 12:34 PM
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Comments
A REAL AAUP *&^%$%^
Cary Nelson is one thing. This *&^%$%^, in this --
http://insidehighered.com/views/2007/09/18/lazere
viciously attacked a deceased pioneer of "back to basics," Allen Bloom.
Toward the bottom, the reader notices that others have begun to ask for documentation by the *&^%$%^.
I asked IHE to demand the *&^%$%^ post his documentation -- or apologize publicly and not return to the public square until he learns how to write accurately.
I ask all others to do the same.
Posted by: RP at September 18, 2007 10:51 PM