ACTA's Must-Reads
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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 on October 15, 2007 at October 15, 2007 04:22 PM
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