ACTA's Must-Reads

« September 2007 | Main | November 2007 »

Watching "Dispositions"

In a victory for those opposed to politicized college classrooms, the primary accreditor of education schools confirmed last week that it has removed all mention of "social justice" from its "professional dispositions" standards. Coming over a year after the president of NCATE--the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education--told the NACIQI board that NCATE would do so, the board's formal action acknowledges criticism from the American Council of Trustees and Alumni and others who have opposed such assessments as unconstitutional political litmus tests.

However, what NCATE has done with one hand, it may have undone with the other. In a press release issued on October 24, 2007, NCATE said that while it was "clarifying" its dispositions standard, individual schools remain free to impose their own: "Based on their mission and conceptual framework, professional education units can identify, define, and operationalize additional professional dispositions." As John Leo notes, "the phrase 'additional professional dispositions' keeps the door open for more politicization."

NCATE's new language is open-ended, to say the least, and leaves much room for mischief. Indeed, it enables education schools to reproduce the problem NCATE claims to want to eradicate--the manipulation of "dispositions" assessments to create political litmus tests. Many education schools already have on their books objectionable "social justice dispositions" criteria adopted in compliance with the wording NCATE has now removed. And there is evidence that other disciplines--including applied psychology and social work--have also widely adopted "social justice" and other politicized criteria.

So while some things change, one matter remains the same: We must keep a close eye on "dispositions."

--by Anne D. Neal

Posted by acta online at 04:57 PM | Comments (11) | TrackBack

Princeton on trial

Should higher ed donors have a say in how their dollars are spent? And should they have legal recourse when schools don't keep their promises about how they will use a donor's money? The answer is surely yes--and the landmark lawsuit, Robertson v. Princeton, is addressing the issue of "donor intent" head on.

You may have heard about the Robertson family, the A&P heirs who tried to share their largesse in 1961, with a $35 million donation to Princeton. The money was intended to support the education of students planning to work for the federal government, particularly those preparing for careers in international affairs. But the Robertsons claim Princeton used the money for other ends, and after a costly, lengthy pre-trial process, they have finally gained a judicial green light to go forward with a trial. If the Robertsons win at trial, Princeton may be forced to return not only the original gift, but also the sizeable dividends it has earned over the years--today the donation is worth about $880 million. All told, Princeton may have upwards of $1.5 billion at stake, if the courts determine that money from the donation was diverted to the University's general fund.

ACTA president Anne D. Neal called the recent ruling a "resounding victory for all who believe that colleges must be accountable to the people on whose dollars they rely"--a statement quoted today in both the New York Times and the New York Sun. The Sun rightly notes that alumni are a powerful force in higher education, and that they account for a substantial proportion of higher ed giving. A slight correction is warranted, however: The Sun says that "alumni giving accounts for about 30% of all funding for institutions of higher education." In fact alumni are responsible for 30% of all private giving to colleges and universities, a number reported in the Chronicle of Higher Education earlier this year. It's a huge number--in the billions each year--no matter how you count it.

Now, as alumni awareness increases and donors demand accountability, those billions underscore alumni's meaningful stake in the continuing excellence and integrity of their alma maters.

Posted by acta online at 06:12 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Ad Hoc propter hoc

In September, the AAUP issued a statement on "Freedom in the Classroom" that has been roundly criticized for its substantial ideological blind spots--particularly for its working assumption that professors' academic freedom is synonymous with "anything goes." But that hasn't deterred those who wish to transform academic freedom from a public-oriented system of "duties correlative with rights" to one that attempts to ensure that academics are not accountable to one another or to the public.

This week, five prominent academics have followed the AAUP's wagon-circling example (recall how AAUP president Cary Nelson hoped the AAUP statement would encourage professors to say, "You shouldn't mess with me" to their critics), announcing the formation of an Ad Hoc Committee to Defend the University. Aimed at ending the "aggressive incursion of partisan politics into universities' hiring and tenure practices," the group sees itself as a mobilization of oppressed academic forces against hostile, outside attacks.

"In recent years, universities across the country have been targeted by outside groups seeking to influence what is taught and who can teach. To achieve their political agendas, these groups have defamed scholars, pressured administrators, and tried to bypass or subvert established procedures of academic governance," the Committee's petition says. "As a consequence, faculty have been denied jobs or tenure, and scholars have been denied public platforms from which to share their viewpoints. This violates an important principle of scholarship, the free exchange of ideas, subjecting them to ideological and political tests. These attacks threaten academic freedom and the core mission of institutions of higher education in a democratic society."

The language here is worth looking at. It's vague, with unsubstantiated claims and imprecise quantifications. And where specifics should be, we find rhetorical extremism. That extremism, characterized by an inflammatory language of aggression and threat, of armed defense against intruders' attacks, vastly overstates the case in ways that go right to the heart of the real problem here, which is not that academics are being threatened by outsiders, but that academics are being legitimately criticized and scrutinized in ways that challenge their fundamental assumptions about themselves.

Spirited commentary and robust debate are not violations of academic freedom, but are its essence. And when academics complain that their livelihood is at risk because they are being challenged to defend what they do and to be accountable to the people on whose dime they do it--well, then we know we have a serious problem, and we can see, too, how the problem is reflected in academics' distorted presentation of it. I italicize above to make the point that what is happening to academics now is a version of what many academics themselves seek, as a matter of political principle and proper pedagogical procedure, to do in the classroom. Massive amounts of peer-reviewed ink have been devoted to the vaunted pedagogical value of "challenging students' assumptions." The working assumption, of course, is that students have some foundational knowledge to begin with, and that--in any event--the challenging can only properly go one way.

Hence women's studies professor Julie Kilmer, who recently wrote about how threatened she is by students who "resist" her "feminist theories and ideas": "[S]hould I ask if he or she has been placed in my class to question my teaching? How is my teaching affected if I enter the classroom each day asking, 'Is today the day I will be called to the president's office?'" As Mark Bauerlein has observed, "In her class, any student who contests feminist notions falls under a cloud of suspicion. The ordinary run of skeptics, obstructionists, gadflies, wiseacres, and sulkers that show up in almost every undergraduate classroom is recast as an ideological cadre." If students who ask legitimate questions are this unsettling to professors, it's no wonder that they read a questioning public as a terrible threat. But the thing to focus on here is the fear, not the threat--for the fear is real, while the threat isn't.

Academics aren't responding well when they are challenged to practice what they preach. As Campus Watch director Winfield Myers told Inside Higher Ed, professors believe that "academics, uniquely among all professionals, are beyond criticism--that they make up a sacrosanct, privileged group that demands protection from opinions with which they disagree." Myers went on to note the double standard at work, in which "ivory tower intellectuals who regularly render harsh judgments against the practitioners of other professions, from businessmen to clergy, and from politicians to the members of the military--claim immunity from criticism when it is directed toward themselves."

For the first time in history, academics are encountering a public that is well-informed about what goes on in the ivory tower, that grasps the central cultural importance of what professors do in their research and their teaching, and is legitimately and vocally concerned about mounting evidence that colleges and universities are not living up to the compact they have made with the American people. In exchange for exceptional autonomy, academics are charged with teaching and researching in a manner that is consistent with the disinterested pursuit of truth. They are also charged with maintaining a responsible system of self-governance that guarantees the integrity of the curriculum as well as decisions about hiring and promotion. They have failed, repeatedly and publicly, to keep their end of the bargain implicit in academic freedom--and the public is now doing what publics do in democracies. It is crying foul, demanding better accountability, seeking to understand how the problem arose, and debating how it can best be fixed.

In doing so, Americans are also, crucially, exercising their expressive and associative rights. They are speaking out about the need for higher education reform (which they have the right to do, and which is hardly a violation of anyone's rights). That means that they are interested in, and talking about, things like hiring and tenure--something that academics need to recognize is not in itself a violation of those processes. People are also becoming much more savvy about whether and how to donate money to their alma maters. Alumni give billions of dollars ever year. They are powerful, a force to be reckoned with. And it's simply wishful thinking--and dangerously confrontational strategy--for academics to believe that a hostile, isolationist stance, ratified with a transparently self-serving manipulation of "academic freedom," can make it all go away.

Already, nearly two hundred people have signed the petition--and are thus on record as endorsers of an attempt to discount and dismiss the very calls for dialogue and accountability that, if they care about free inquiry, they should be welcoming. Among the signatories is former AAUP general secretary Roger Bowen, who worked tirelessly to defend the idea that academics should not have to answer to anyone but themselves.

Informed people understand the value and importance of academic freedom, and know that it needs to be upheld for the sake of educational and scholarly excellence. They know that knowledge is a fragile thing, and has to be given room to grow, change, and spread. They are concerned about what's happening on campus not because they want to "target" anyone or "impose" an "agenda," but because they want to see academia be all it can and should be. Certainly there are uninformed folks who have urged interventions that would not be wise. But these are a minority, and their suggestions are swiftly dismantled and dispatched as the wrongheaded recommendations that they are. Academics who lump all their critics together--so that reasoned commentary is cast as procedural interference, and legitimate criticism is cast as an assault on foundational institutional norms--betray their own enterprise, which should be based on careful thought and judicious reasoning, not heated rhetoric geared to recruit unthinking followers.

The petition concludes with a rousing statement: "The future of higher education in America, its role in our country's democracy, and its contribution to world affairs is at stake. Join us in defending academic freedom!" These things are at stake--and academic freedom does need to be defended. But with its polarizing language and "noli me tangere" defensiveness, the Ad Hoc Committee is doing more to deepen the problem than to address it.

Posted by acta online at 03:14 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Setting a tone

Harvard's new president, Drew Faust, gave her inaugural address last Friday--and was accompanied during the closing recessional by none other than seven members of Harvard's ROTC corps. The flag-bearing color guard included students from Harvard's Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine squads, and bears tremendous symbolic significance.

Harvard has not hosted an on-campus ROTC program since 1969, when anti-Vietnam fervor resulted in the program being banned. Since then, Harvard cadets have commuted to MIT to train--and since the mid-90s, when the faculty voted to protest "don't ask, don't tell" by withdrawing financial support for ROTC, Harvard has not paid the annual fee required to maintain its cadets in MIT's program. Now anonymous alumni pay the six-figure dues that enable Harvard undergraduates to combine their studies with preparation for national service.

When Lawrence Summers was president of Harvard, he made a point of expressing his support for ROTC, speaking at the annual officer commissioning ceremony and even allowing that ceremony to be held in Harvard Yard. When Summers left, many worried that ROTC would lose the respect and acceptance it had gained during his presidency; those worries gained traction when both interim president Derek Bok and incoming president Faust failed to attend this year's commissioning ceremony.

But Faust was receptive when ROTC members proposed the color guard. Last February, Faust stated that she has "enormous respect for these students who commit themselves to this effort and to the service of their country" and observed 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." Now, Faust's willingness to include ROTC in such an important defining moment for her presidency suggests there is reason to hope for continued improving relations between the Harvard administration and the small but dedicated group of students who have committed themselves not only to their education, but to their country.

"We see it as an honor to represent both Harvard and the military at such an event as both institutions are very important in all our lives," said Marine midshipman Shawna Sinnot ('10). Army cadet Daniel Bilotti ('09) agrees: "We were very pleasantly surprised, and we hope that it is a new beginning for the relationship between ROTC and Harvard," he said.

Also encouraging: Faust recently attended a lecture delivered by Phyllis Schlafly. Twelve of the 70 audience members walked out to protest Schlafly's views--but to her great credit, Faust stayed.

For more, see Anthony Paletta's post at Minding the Campus.

Posted by acta online at 06:55 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Great minds

Now that the New York Times has taken down its subscription wall, it's possible to read all kinds of interesting things on the op-ed page and on the paper's blogs. And one of the best parts of that is being able to see what Stanley Fish has to say about things academic.

Fish knows whereof he speaks when he writes about academic politics. He chaired Duke's English department during its massive transformation from a fairly traditional, second-tier entity to the top-tier home of some of the most politically radical, methodologically hip literary scholars around. And his career has shown him things that have seasoned him into one of our most credible and knowledgeable critics of academic politicization. Today, Fish reviews Evan Coyne Maloney's new film, Indoctrinate U, and he has good things to say about both the film and the broader effort to which it belongs. "As an on-camera presence, Maloney is polite, unflappable and relentless," Fish notes.

He borrows some techniques from Michael Moore, but rather than resembling a giant donut, Maloney has the lean boyish looks that could earn him a role in "Oceans 14" alongside Brad Pitt and Matt Damon. So when he ambles into a university office in search of an administrator who will explain why there is no Men's Resource Center at a university where The Women's Resource Center flourishes, a viewer is likely to ask, Why won't they even talk to that nice young man? (Of course it's a set-up; Maloney knows in advance that no one who works for a large institution is going to start talking to a film crew that just wanders in, and he's counting on it.)

"Indoctrinate U"'s thesis is contained in its title. You may think that universities are places where ideas are explored and evaluated in a spirit of objective inquiry. But in fact, Maloney tells us, they are places of indoctrination where a left-leaning faculty teaches every subject, including chemistry and horticulture, through the prism of race, class and gender; where minorities and women are taught that they are victims of oppression; where admissions policies are racially gerrymandered; where identity-based programs reproduce the patterns of segregation that the left supposedly abhors; where students and faculty who speak against the prevailing orthodoxy are ostracized, disciplined and subjected to sensitivity training; where conservative speakers like Ward Connerly are shouted down; where radical speakers like Ward Churchill are welcomed; where speech codes mandate speech that offends no one; where the faculty preaches diversity but is itself starkly homogeneous with respect to political affiliation; where professors regularly use the classroom as a platform for their political views; where students parrot back the views they know their instructors to hold; where course reading lists are heavy on radical texts and light on texts celebrating the Western tradition; where the American flag is held in suspicion; where military recruiting personnel are either treated rudely or barred from campus; where the default assumption is that anything the United States and Israel do is evil.

Fish knows well where many of Maloney's points come from; he cites Anne Neal's work at ACTA alongside others. And, after temporizing a bit, he acknowledges that there is a lot to the points these reformers have long been making.

"Some of these programs forget who's paying the bills and continue to think of themselves as extensions of a political agenda," Fish admits. "And students who take courses in those programs may well feel the pressure of that agenda. When that happens, an administration should step in and stop it. And if it doesn't, it deserves every criticism this documentary levels." Citing ACTA's finding--which Neal discussed in the film--that a survey uncovered a significant percentage of students who complained that their professors were bringing politics into the classroom, Fish focuses on faculty abuse of their pedagogical prerogatives as a highly serious issue. Though he temporizes again about how frequent such abuse is, countering the film's claims not with facts but with a divergent opinion, Fish frames a bottom line that too often gets lost in debates about such matters: Even if only one in ten thousand professors "use the classroom as a stage for their political views," that would be "one too many." That's a point ACTA has made many times, and it's a point more administrations and boards of trustees should consider carefully.

ACTA regularly exhorts academics to monitor themselves, noting that the AAUP originally framed academic freedom as a set of correlative rights and responsibilities, and noting, too, that failure to live up to the "responsibility" side of the equation is likely to result in outside interference. Fish sounds a similar note at the end of his column:

Academics often bridle at the picture of their activities presented by Maloney and other conservative critics, and accuse them of grossly caricaturing and exaggerating what goes on in the classroom. Maybe so, but so long as there are those who confuse advocacy with teaching, and so long as faculty colleagues and university administrators look the other way, the academy invites the criticism it receives in this documentary. In 1915, the American Association of University Professors warned that if we didn't clean up our own shop, external constituencies, with motives more political than educational, would step in and do it for us. Now they're doing it in the movies and it's our own fault.

The comment would be stronger if Fish did not label critics of the academic status quo as conservatives, as these are nonpartisan issues that affect us all, and they are also issues taken up by academics across the spectrum, including CUNY historian KC Johnson and Yale professor Anthony Kronman. Still, his words here are well chosen, and, if things don't change soon, they might also be prophetic.

Posted by acta online at 04:22 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

James Billington on Merrill Award winner Gertrude Himmelfarb: "the anchor of a great family and of the broader human family"

At a gala dinner on Friday, ACTA awarded the 2007 Philip Merrill Award for Outstanding Contributions to Liberal Arts Education to Dr. Gertrude Himmelfarb. Just prior to the event, we received a message from James H. Billington, the Librarian of Congress, who was planning to attend the award dinner but had to cancel at the last minute. We are pleased to reprint the following:

To my great regret I will not be able to attend the dinner and presentation of the Merrill Award to Dr. Gertrude Himmelfarb. I am truly sorry, but I have to leave for Moscow earlier than expected tomorrow. I really wanted to pay tribute to this remarkable scholar. She has been a perceptive humanistic commentator on Western civilization for as long as I can remember--and is herself an exemplar of the best in it.

I hope that you could convey to her and any others that might be interested tonight my admiration for the remarkable record she has had--not only as an author and spokesperson for Western civilization in the academy, but also for the generous amount of time and wisdom she has given to many institutions to keep alive deep humanistic studies rooted in the Western cultural heritage.

She was a valuable advisor to me when I was running the Wilson Center and to the Scholars Council of our new Kluge Center at the Library of Congress. The late Charles Blitzer enormously valued her counsel when he was running the National Humanities Center and later the Wilson Center. All of these scholarly enterprises benefited in their early formative period from wisdom she shared as well as the example she set. I am confident that the late Pat Moynihan is rejoicing along with many others past, present (and indeed future) in paying tribute to this great lady. Please extend to her congratulations for being the anchor of a great family and of the broader human family. I am sure Phil Merrill would also be among those singing her praises on this occasion. The American Council of Trustees and Alumni does important work and deserves special credit for honoring Bea.

Sincerely,

James H. Billington
The Librarian of Congress

Posted by cmitchell at 05:29 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Truth in advertising

ACTA's 2005 report Intellectual Diversity: Time for Action makes a number of common-sense, easy-to-implement suggestions for how colleges and universities can guarantee the free exchange of ideas on campus. Praised for how it balances respect for academic freedom against institutional responsibility to cultivate a genuinely open intellectual climate where a range of ideas can be aired and explored, ACTA's report is beginning to have a decisively positive impact.

Professors at South Dakota's public institutions, for example, must now notify students on syllabi that their "academic performance may be evaluated solely on an academic basis, not on opinions or conduct in matters unrelated to academic standards." This is in line with the suggestion in ACTA's report that universities "[i]nclude intellectual diversity concerns in university guidelines on teaching." Also of note, the Pennsylvania House of Representatives has asked the state's public universities to provide a report next year on the actions they have taken to guarantee the free exchange of ideas. This is precisely the idea behind the "sunlight" bills on intellectual diversity that legislators have introduced in states across the country. Both these positive developments occurred in late 2006.

Fast forward to the present, and there's even more good news to report. First, the City University of New York is taking ACTA's suggestion that schools should "seek a commitment to intellectual diversity" when hiring. Currently looking for a dean of science, CUNY notes that applicants "should be responsive to the needs of faculty and the diverse student body, and committed to cultural and intellectual diversity" (emphasis added). It's just a little change in wording--many academic job descriptions already contain language about how candidates should demonstrate a commitment to diversity, and this one simply adds a short phrase to that. But that little change in wording is also a huge philosophical and professional gesture. It marks an institutional recognition that diversity is not simply or even most importantly something that emerges from one's background. It's also something that transcends those categories, that rests in the realm of ideas, that recognizes the freedom of individuals to think for themselves, and that is essential for a healthy educational environment.

And there's more. One of the states in which an intellectual diversity bill was introduced--asking, once again, merely for a simple annual report on what the public universities are doing to ensure a vibrant marketplace of ideas--is seeing some positive results. This state is Missouri, where the University of Missouri system administrators have just announced a series of reforms. The folks who deserve the credit make up the University of Missouri Board of Curators--which has insisted that the campuses it oversees do what's right whether the legislature mandates it or not. And they've taken this step for good reason: In a poll commissioned by ACTA, 51 percent of the students surveyed at the state's two largest public campuses said they felt pressure to agree with professors' political or social views in order to get a good grade.

Missouri is doing South Dakota one better, putting statements on course syllabi and also establishing a new Web-based database where students can express concerns. The campuses have each designated an ombudsman to handle the complaints, and an annual report will also be compiled. As curator David Wasinger told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, this is a "great start"--one that meshes with several of the suggestions in ACTA's report.

Posted by acta online at 01:02 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack