ACTA's Must-Reads

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Compare and contrast

"Five students drinking Gatorade and water for a week are apparently all it takes to bring a major university to its knees." That's how John Leo summed up affairs at Columbia University, where a small band of student activists recently staged a remarkable and disturbing coup. The tiny group ended its fasting vigil--one that was closely monitored by campus physicians--after Columbia administrators met most of its demands.

"New faculty will now have to endure diversity indoctrination as part of their hiring," Leo explained. "Columbia's core curriculum, much too 'Eurocentric' for the strikers, will now feature more required courses on Asia, Africa, and Latin America. More money and staff will be added for ethnic studies. The Office of Multicultural Affairs will be expanded and another high-ranking diversicrat will be named to the administration. The collapse will cost Columbia at least $50 million."

In the wake of widespread media coverage and criticism, Columbia is now denying that it has done anything of the kind. In a letter to the New York Post, Columbia's media relations director, Robert Hornsby, states that curricular changes have been in the works for some time, and that "There is not, and never was, a commitment to raise $50 million in response to student demands."

The implication of the statement is very strange indeed: Columbia's administration would have us believe that it hoodwinked the triumphant protesters, appearing to yield to their demands by agreeing to reforms that were already in the works. We are left with an unsavory sense that Columbia has either pandered to the manipulative tactics of a vocal campus minority, or that it has cynically manipulated those students, or both. The suggestion becomes all the more disturbing in light of President Bollinger's cryptic recent statement that negotiations with the strikers "is a major, University-wide initiative, and the trustees are involved, so I am not going to comment."

The events raise real questions about academic freedom and procedural seriousness at Columbia.

Meanwhile, the protesters are delighted with the results of their antics, and promise that there is more to come. And why shouldn't they? As Anthony Paletta observes, "it's clearly now not a question of whether more stunts will happen, but when."

It is worth comparing the murky behavior of the Columbia administration to the principled actions of the Texas A&M Chancellor and Board of Regents. A&M needs to hire a new president, and an advisory committee composed of faculty, staff, students, two regents, and the president of the local Chamber of Commerce recently submitted to the Board a short list of three candidates. But upon examination, the Board determined that it needed to expand its search to ensure that it finds the person who best meets A&M's needs; while the Board is still considering the candidates on the short list, the Houston Chronicle reports, it is also expanding its search to include candidates that the search committee eliminated.

The Regents are facing sharp criticism from faculty, who claim that the Board's actions disregard the values of shared governance and could harm faculty morale. But the Board is taking a reasoned, firm stand when it comes to its fiduciary rights and responsibilities.

"While shared governance has its place, the ultimate responsibility and charge for governance in the selection of presidents for universities in the system lies solely and completely in the Board of Regents," wrote board chair Bill Jones in response to criticism. Noting that the Regents would try to be "inclusive" during the selection process, he stated that if the process does indeed affect faculty morale, "we will accept those unfortunate consequences."

Mike McKinney, chancellor of the A&M system, echoes Jones' sentiments. "You need some shared governance, but that doesn't mean shared responsibility," he told the Houston Chronicle. "It means that faculty get to express their opinion. But with all due respect, they're not on the board."

Shame on Columbia. Bravo to A&M's Board.

Posted by acta online on November 28, 2007 at 11:04 AM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

Quote for the day

Words worth noting from a group of Columbia faculty, regarding the rights of non-academics to attend to and comment on academic affairs:

... the university has responsibilities to its students, alumni, donors, and outside community. When nonacademics and outsiders encounter or hear about what they consider inappropriate forms of
teaching, allegations of intimidation or harassment, or the distortion of basic historical or scientific facts, they are justified in expressing, and entitled by the First Amendment to express, their objections. No university administration has the power to prevent such expression.

Too often, such expression is cast by academics as interference -- when, in fact, is is nothing of the kind. People should be interested in what is happening within the academy--that's a sign that higher ed holds a respected, important place in our society. And people are always free to express their views about what's happening in academia, just as they are free to express their views about anything else. That's part of what it means to live in a free country.

Read the full statement and see the signatories here.

Posted by acta online on November 26, 2007 at 11:11 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

Getting a grip on groupthink

Several years ago, Emory English professor Mark Bauerlein published what remains one of our sharpest commentaries on how academic groupthink narrows the scope of scholarship and teaching--and, by extension, the kinds of knowledge that are valued and produced within our higher education system. Responding to recent studies documenting the political uniformity of four-year college and university faculties (especially those in the humanities and social sciences), Bauerlein sought to deepen our understanding of how pervasive and yet subtle intellectual conformity is in the academy; his essay focused on how, among scholars, intellectual choices are closely tied to political leanings and, crucially, on how both intellectual choices and political leanings are assumed by the broader culture of the academy in everything from its dinner parties to its personnel decisions. Academics may be quite honest when they say they do not consider a job candidate's politics--but they are not being honest at all when they refuse to admit that in crucial ways, those politics have already been carefully selected for, and are most likely embodied within the candidate's research, teaching, conversation, and general demeanor. As Bauerlein put it, "Political orientation has been embedded into the disciplines, and so what is indeed a political judgment may be expressed in disciplinary terms."

These ideas were taken up last week at a conference hosted by the American Enterprise Institute. Entitled "Reforming the Politically Correct University," the conference featured presentations by ACTA president Anne Neal, the Manhattan Institute's John McWhorter, National Association of Scholars executive director Peter Wood, and FIRE president Greg Lukianoff. Neal spoke about what alumni and trustees can do to help ensure free inquiry, fair personnel decisions, and curricular integrity at the institutions where they are stakeholders and fiduciary overseers.

Another key participant was National Journal's Stuart Taylor, co-author with KC Johnson of the remarkable Until Proven Innocent: Political Correctness and the Shameful Injustices of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case. The book outlined the institutional obsession with race, class, and gender at Duke and beyond--a theme Taylor revisits in his recent commentary on the University of Delaware's doctrinaire residential life curriculum (see "Academia's Pervasive PC Rot").

Of particular interest was the research presented on the pressure academics face to conform themselves to the academy's forceful intellectual status quo. Building on Bauerlein's observations about academic groupthink, social science researchers presented evidence that faculties are overwhelmingly one-sided, that ideology plays a substantial role in academics' career prospects, and that majoritarian groupthink is alive and well in departmental self-governance.

In research papers to be published next year in a book from AEI press, authors offered anecdotal evidence from their own careers. Peter Wood said that an "informal blacklist" of dissenting scholars does exist, and that he has watched it scupper the careers of many aspiring academics. He added that while it would be wrong to institute any sort of viewpoint-based affirmative action, he hoped that the growing body of research on academic groupthink would spark a "shiver of recognition" among faculties and administrators.

Similarly, University of Virginia English professor Paul Cantor described steering students away from the academy when their viewpoints don't reflect those of the academic status quo. "They have no future--they will not get jobs," he stated. "If they want to teach traditional works in a traditional matter, they have no future in an English department today." Cantor noted that English departments were more intellectually diverse fifty years ago than they are now. "English departments have been homogenized in the name of diversity," he said, explaining that while reading lists may have broadened, analytical variety has narrowed dramatically as race, class, and gender have become the primary lenses through which literary works are interpreted.

Cantor's comments tally with ACTA's own research on English departments, which shows them to be particularly vulnerable to politically correct trends and intellectual fads. So pronounced is the tendency of English departments to embrace superficial novelty--Cantor calls them the "Wal-Marts of the academy"--that they are distressingly willing to sacrifice vital areas of study to them. As ACTA revealed in a report published earlier this year, only fifteen of the nation's top 70 English departments require majors to take a course in Shakespeare. The number reflects the fact that English departments are increasingly ready to drop Shakespeare requirements to make room for students to take courses on more ephemeral topics.

The end result? A situation in which alumni and trustees simply must act. "It has become commonplace for boards and presidents to exercise little or no oversight of academic hiring," Neal said. "If we are to reform the politically correct university, alumni and trustees must take notice and take action."

The draft papers supporting the AEI conference are available online.

Posted by acta online on November 19, 2007 at 03:14 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

Why trustees need to be involved

People are asking what went wrong at the University of Delaware, where a doctrinaire residential "curriculum" was recently nixed in the face of harsh national criticism. And while those who follow higher ed can easily summarize the nature of the problem--institutional agendas that violated students' freedom of conscience, association, and expression--it's important to dig deeper, to the how of the problem, if we want to find a viable solution.

University of Wisconsin professor Donald Downs offers some crucial insights on this front. In an essay at Minding the Campus, Downs highlights something that tends to be overlooked in discussions about political correctness and academic accountability: "the role of non-faculty members in promoting the politicization of higher education."

Noting that "most of the literature on the ideological politicization of higher education has focused on faculty members," Downs explains how disasters such as the Delaware residential life program are instituted by non-instructional staff who implement their "educational" programs entirely outside the zone of curricular review. At Delaware, for example, the woman who masterminded the program is a residential life administrator unaffiliated with the faculty: Her professional position is not strictly academic--and the work she does is independent of Delaware's academic system. As a consequence, neither the Delaware faculty nor the academic administration is likely to have known about the University's residential program; they would not have been in a position to review it, to oversee it, or to prevent it.

And that's typical. As a rule, Downs explains, faculties have little, if anything, to do with the areas of the university concerned with administering student life. People who are concerned about the manner in which free inquiry and intellectual diversity are threatened on campus need to understand that there are entire segments of the campus that are conducted outside the confines of peer review.

Downs doesn't spell it out, but the implications of his important insight are clear. Top administrators--and the trustees who hire them--need to be keeping a close and watchful eye on all aspects of the institutions in their care. And their obligation to ensure that students' learning experiences are not narrowed or harmed by institutional agendas extends beyond an obligation to ensure a strong, robust curriculum and fair faculty personnel practices. It includes an awareness of what's going on outside the classroom, in residences where students eat, sleep, study, socialize, and, as at Delaware, contend with unconscionable residence-based sensitivity training.

Delaware's faculty was not in a position to ensure the integrity of the University's residential life programming. But the administration and, by extension, the trustees were. They should have been paying more attention.

Posted by acta online on November 15, 2007 at 05:50 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Let the debate begin

Lately, we've seen a flurry of activity around the idea of academic freedom. The AAUP published a statement on "Freedom in the Classroom" in September, and last month a group of prominent academics formed the "Ad Hoc Committee to Defend the University," while the AFT issued its own statement on academic freedom. All are premised on inaccurate and exaggerated claims about an "assault" on academic freedom that they allege is coming from outside the university--and none acknowledges the very real threats to academic freedom that are coming from within the academy in the form of speech codes, doctrinaire teaching, and ideologically one-sided personnel practices. The result is a set of statements that distort, deepen, and exemplify the problem they claim to address.

We've been pointing this out (see here and here). And we're in very good company. Stanley Fish, for instance, took the "Freedom in the Classroom" statement apart at the New York Times--and did so in ways that dovetail very much with ACTA's objections. Last week, the Chronicle of Higher Education made particular note of ACTA's commentary on the AFT statement--which could be summarized, ACTA president Anne Neal said, as "Give us more money and leave us alone." The Chronicle also highlighted ACTA's response to the Ad Hoc Committee, which it placed alongside the parallel assessments of FIRE founder and civil liberties lawyer Harvey Silverglate and the New York Sun editorial board.

All of this is to say that the statements released by the AAUP, the AFT, and the Ad Hoc Committee should not be taken as authoritative or as immune from criticism. Each, in its own way, claims to adhere to traditional definitions of academic freedom, and presents itself as the uncontroversial and unequivocal defender of that definition. But each, also in its own way, uses that presentation to advance some distinctly controversial revisions of academic freedom as the AAUP originally framed it. We should view them not as definitive documents--but as starting points for a debate that is long overdue.

Posted by acta online on November 12, 2007 at 07:28 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack