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July 10, 2006
The Selective Critique
One of the first things a graduate student in the humanities and “softer” social sciences learns is that communication is rarely simple. Words carry latent values and vestigial biases, they are told, and over time the consequences of a word’s usage exceed its ostensible meaning. Post-bac training begins with that distinction, and students advance by attuning themselves to the tacit and the subtextual. “Language is not transparent,” announces the favorite T-shirt of a colleague, and to interpret statements accordingly isn’t just common wisdom. It’s a professional duty.
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- ‘Death of a Department Chair’, Nov. 7, 2006
I’ve felt its pull many times, once while watching a debate on television around 1991 when the campus had become a central theater of the culture wars. Catharine Stimpson, Stanley Fish, and two others took on John Silber, William Buckley, Dinesh D’Souza, and Glenn Loury, with the canon, speech codes, and political correctness the topics. At one point, when Silber asserted the silliness of substituting the title “chair” for “chairman” — women “calling themselves furniture,” he put it — Fish replied with a point about the “deep culture of the language.” Often, he argued, “linguistic assumptions can be so deeply assumed that the society that uses them is not aware of them,” and when scholars and teachers unveil them, people feel threatened and confused. It’s a common premise, and it makes it easy to cast the academics as tenured meddlers going against common sense. The academics, in turn, feel that the more figures such as D’Souza resist, the more they know they’re on to something. That some of these expressions carry discriminatory baggage sharpens the analytic radar and adds a moral imperative to the labor. Indeed, no mandate has granted literary scholars so strong sense of mission in the last 25 years.
It certainly touched me, and I recall judging Buckley et al as obtuse anti-intellectuals and cheap-shot artists pitiably ignorant of advanced arguments. With a fresh Ph.D. in hand, and infused with Heidegger and Derrida, I believed fervently in the interpretative calling, disdaining what phenomenologists called the “natural attitude,” the outlook that takes things at face value. Added to that, I claimed language and literature as a professional subject, which meant that my livelihood depended upon the under- or other side of words, and that it took a special acumen to access it.
Fifteen years later, though, after countless written and spoken readings that lifted the political sediment out of ordinary and extraordinary language, the practice sounds pedestrian and predictable. In some cases, the search for “linguistic assumptions” exposed sexist and racist attitudes underlying different discourses, invisible but operative — for instance, Gilbert and Gubar’s analysis in The Madwoman in the Attic of patriarchal motifs in critical discussions of creativity — and it also reflected handily upon the institutional circumstances of them. But when it ascended into a theoretical premise, and soon after settled into a professional habit, the conclusions it drew lapsed into routine. Indeed, much queer theory has involved the extraction of queer subtexts from canonical texts and popular culture, influentially enough that assertions such as that of a lesbian undercurrent in “Laverne and Shirley,” as one book offered several years ago, produces the effect of either whimsical curiosity or a rolling of the eyes.
The theory provided no guidelines as to where it did and did not apply, and so it was stretched too thin. It provided no means for distinguishing between content that was invisible from content that actually wasn’t there. The professors saw implicit meaning everywhere, much of it political or identity-oriented. Persons outside the academy looked at the whole of their exchanges and found most of them uncomplicated and transitory. The surface was all. To that audience, conservatives such as Silber had a better grasp of the nature of “linguistic assumptions” than the professors did. And it didn’t help that so many professors shared Theodor Adorno’s belief in “the stupidity of common sense.” That, indeed, may explain why conservative intellectuals routed the professors in public settings over the years — not because they lacked nuance, played on irrational fears, or traded in simplistic, but telegenic gibes. Rather, they understood better when to analyze and when to assert, when to dismantle and when to affirm.
Both camps would agree, however, that the disclosure of assumptions and biases in language does apply to certain contexts, especially those in which an institution weighs heavily upon the utterances. When the protocols of communication are strict, when a statement reflects a speaker’s knowledge and legitimacy, when misstatements violate a group’s sense of mission, when entry into the discourse requires a long and regulated preparation by the entrant — such settings are “overdetermined,” and they need detailed analysis and thick description. The terms are loaded and the topics authorized. Statements impart norms as well as ideas, mores as well as referents. The expressions licensed there reinforce the institution and echo its rationale. The subtext is dynamic, and if we don’t analyze it, then we do, indeed, break our promise to critique.
For this reason, it has been astonishing to watch the professors respond to indictments leveled recently by conservative, libertarian, and First Amendment figures against academic practice and politics. These figures cited voter registrations, campaign contributions, and occasional acts of oppression, but most of the time the first exhibit of bias and illiberalism was a sample of institutional language. Scholarly articles such as a 2003 study of the “conservative personality” that found fear and aggression at the heart of conservatism (“Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition,” Psychological Bulletin. May 2003); course descriptions such as those gathered by American Council of Alumni and Trustees in a report issued last month; speech codes targeted by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education; paper titles culled by Frederick Hess and Laura LoGerfo from the last meeting of the American Educational Research Association ... these formed the evidence. They served well because of their patent absurdity, or because of their offense to public taste, or their adversarial dogma (anti-American, anti-capitalist, etc.).
But while the manifest content had an immediate impact, sometimes entering national circulation as a reviled token (e.g., “little Eichmanns”), many claimed a deeper meaning for them. In a word, they were offered as symptomatic expressions, an index of the values, norms, biases, and interests of academics. Conservatives and others presented them as precisely the kind of language packed with “linguistic assumptions,” performing subtextual feats, and ripe for socio-political analysis.
And yet, how have the professors responded? Not by taking up the critical challenge and carrying out the analysis. Not by bouncing the samples off of the institution in which they appeared. Instead, they shot the messenger. They declared the samples isolated and un-representative, or they denied to them the symptoms alleged by the critics. The course description wasn’t a fair stand-in for the course itself, they protested. Ward Churchill’s post-9/11 rant was an aberration. The conference paper title was just a way to garner an audience, so let’s not confuse it with the real substance of the paper. In sum, they put the most benign construction on the samples. That turned the allegations back upon the people who cited them, David Horowitz, Anne Neal, and the rest, who were cast as sinister crazies pushing a vile political agenda.
One can understand the professors’ defensiveness, but to let it squelch the exercise of a practice that they have at other times wielded so boldly is a breach of their own ideals. Have they lived so long and so closely to “social justice,” “social change,” “queer,” “whiteness,” and “gender equality” that they do not recognize them as loaded terms? Have they imbibed the political currents of the campus so thoroughly that they regard a polemical phrasing in a course description as merely a lively description? By their own instruction, we should regard the widespread attention to race, gender, and their social construction as emanating from a world view and signaling an ideological commitment. When Ward Churchill’s notorious speech made headlines, the professors were correct to cite his First Amendment rights and reprove those calling for his job. But as more information came to light, and his political attitudes seemed to bear a closer relation to his scholarship, academic doctrine demanded that the institution that rewarded him be reviewed. Roger Bowen, general secretary of the American Association of University Professors, has assured the Commission on the Future of Higher Education that “Faculty members are accountable for their work in many ways,” including peer review of scholarship and grant applications and annual departmental review for salary and promotion. What, then, is the relationship between Churchill’s high ascent in the profession and his discredited writings? Humanities and social science professors work backward from institutional statements to the culture of the institution itself all the time. Why exempt academic language from the process?
The academic defense comes down to this: conservatives and libertarians read too much into bits and pieces of language — an ironic turnabout, given that they used to make the same charge against literary theorists 20 years ago. Tim Burke, responding to the ACTA report, chooses the term “Eurocentric” as a case in point. While ACTA’s report selected a course description containing the term as an instance of bias, Burke replied, “I’ll let them in on a little secret: it can also be just a plain-old technical term for historiographical models that argue that modern world history has primarily been determined by factors that are endogamous to Europe itself.” So it can, but even if we accept that as one meaning of Eurocentric, it doesn’t erase the occasions when, as Burke concedes, “the term is also used as a fairly dumb epithet by nitwitted activists.” That is precisely one of the dangers of loaded terms. They can function neutrally or tendentiously, and when pressed the users can always fall back upon claims of innocence.
The question rests upon the frequency of biased meanings, “the existence of telling linguistic patterns,” as Erin O’Connor puts it while commenting on the issue. When a call for papers foregrounds anti-union corporatist practices, is that a tendentious usage, or are the libertarian commentators who cite it being oversensitive? The answer largely depends upon one’s relation to the institutional setting. When a libertarian delivers a talk at a symposium sponsored by Reason Magazine, the mention of government will have over- and undertones different from those issuing from government at a meeting of social justice advocates. From my perspective in 1991, I regarded Eurocentric, theory, patriarchy, and even the blank terms race and gender as descriptive ones. Yes, they had a political thrust, but essentially they were justified because they were accurate names for real phenomena in history and society. Indeed, it was the other discourse that was politicized, the one from which race etc. were absent. Now, having watched those terms in action, I see them as more often tendentious than not. In the majority of cases, their “institutional meaning” overshadows their denotative meaning.
That’s my experience, and maybe it’s too partial to count. But we can’t know for certain so long as leading academics remain as quick to deny the possibility that a narrow political agenda underlies academic discourse. Apart from the wall it erects against further inquiry, the reflex draws them into a vulnerable position. First of all, it results in overt intellectual blunders. For example, in the article cited above on the conservative personality, the authors define “conservatism” as, at heart, “opposition to change,” a simplistic and sweeping characterization that allows them to conclude, “One is justified in referring to Hitler, Mussolini, Reagan, and Limbaugh as right-wing conservatives ... because they all preached a return to an idealized past.” (They also add Stalin, Khrushchev, and Castro to the list of political conservatives.)
A second and more damaging problem in neutralizing their own terminology is the double standard it represents. Academics recognize the tension in terms such as race and sexuality, but they attribute its source to the resistances of others, persons who can’t give up their own biases and anxieties. That tactic will only work behind the campus walls. Try it in an outside setting and the arrogance comes across immediately. The hypocrisy shows, too, as academics fail their own standard. They present themselves as hard-headed, clear-sighted analysts, but in this case they prove selective in their labor. People outside the campus recognize that academia is just the kind of Establishment that calls out for ideological and social criticism, and its language is one place to begin. Academics already have a credibility problem when discussing their own practices, and if they wish to face down their many critics, they need to start extending those criticisms by themselves. Public observers realize, however reluctantly, that the best people to conduct that examination are the professors themselves, if only they will stop acting so proprietary. If academics don’t assume the lead, then they will find their credibility falling still further, having revised one of their favorite dicta to their own advantage — “a ruthless criticism of everything existing,” everything, that is, but their own.
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Comments
By All Means, Interpret
Mark, I’m continuing to find your attempts to work through this debate frustrating, because you make valid points and then apply them in what seems to me to be a bafflingly one-sided manner.
One of my complaints about the ACTA report (and some similar criticisms) was and remains that it does none of the work of interpretation that you rightfully suggest is the obligation of scholars in the humanities. You observe here that words can carry many meanings. Indeed so. But unless we make interpretation out to be a kind of will-to-analysis, or a Derridean sort of permanent indeterminancy, the meaning of words is established by readings of context, by a sensitivity to the nature and history of texts, authors and audiences, by holding many possible meanings in play at once.
That’s not at all what the ACTA report did, nor is it what many similar critiques do. When I observe that the word Eurocentrism has a scholarly meaning that is separate from (though in some ways the parent or root) of its polemical, political meaning, I don’t do so in a vacuum. I’m making a reading of a course description that uses the word in the context of a reference to J.M. Blaut’s scholarship that is assigned in the course—a work of scholarship which, though it has political and polemical content, is largely using the concept of Eurocentrism in its more technical and scholarly sense.
My point about the ACTA report is that it doesn’t acknowledge this meaning, and more importantly, doesn’t even seem to know it exists. What it does instead is the equivalent of a keyword search, fixating on particular terms as if their meaning is always and inevitably the most “political” (and superficially so) when they appear in course descriptions.
Nor does the report take up any of the other interpretative questions you point to here, such as, “What is the relationship between course descriptions and course content? Between course descriptions and pedagogy? Between course descriptions and scholarship?” As you treat them here, those sound like complex questions, rather than ones whose answers are self-evident. Yes, of course, there’s a relationship of some kind—but it’s a complex one, and requires the evidentiary work that good interpretation turns on.
The best critiques of language or speech acts that came out of the academic left in the 1980s that you point to required pretty detailed work on history, hermeneutics, and so on, in order to deliver their critical appraisal. I would be the first to agree that such careful work very often gave way to the casual, careless, and destructive claims of “political correctness". But that comparison should alarm you more than comfort you: the report you’re defending strikes me as intellectual kin to the worst kinds of interpretative sloth that have been rightfully criticized by many intellectuals since (including yourself).
If you’re worried about a double standard, I think you need to look at bit at your own arguments here.
Timothy Burke, Associate Professor at Swarthmore College, at 8:35 am EDT on July 10, 2006
Double Standards
As in most of his commentaries about higher education, Mark Bauerlein is on target here, as well.
I disagree with my Cliopatria colleague Tim Burke’s comments above: my sense is that this article was less defending the ACTA report than expressing wonderment at the general academic response to that report. With the exception of Tim and a few others (who offered detailed, intellectually rich critiques of the contents of the report), the far more common response, as Mark suggests, was to dismiss the report on technical grounds. Claims that course descriptions, course syllabi, and the like can’t be understood by outsiders, and aren’t really representative of course content are the sorts of arguments, as Mark’s piece points out, that few in the academy would accept of any other organization.
This response, it seems to me, forms part of a broader and disturbing trend in which academic freedom has been reinterpreted to mean that as academics should be free from criticism emanating from outside the academy, such criticism is in and of itself a threat to academic freedom, regardless of the criticism’s merit.
In the long term, as Mark’s concluding paragraph points out, this approach is likely to be self-defeating, and will only increasingly isolate the academy from society at large.
KC Johnson, Professor at Brooklyn College, at 9:35 am EDT on July 10, 2006
The notion that the “best” of post-structural thinking about language and its failed or interrupted transparency comes down to a muckraker’s-like expose of the underside of language does little more than invert the metaphysical tyranny of a “here and now” nostalgically missing going topside into the light. Right off it would seem important to clarify that post-structuralism’s influence is a bit more varied and interesting on the whole. That said, there are some important conversations to have about the self-referencing that prevails in academic work and its ultimate complicity in, ironically, not its own isolated ideological agenda, but that which in practice is neatly aligned with those who are most critical of the academy. I have to say that the above analysis also plays right into this game. I am particularly struck by:
“Academics recognize the tension in terms such as race and sexuality, but they attribute its source to the resistances of others, persons who can’t give up their own biases and anxieties. That tactic will only work behind the campus walls. Try it in an outside setting and the arrogance comes across immediately.”
I would note that the issue in the above quote has little to do with some “narrow political agenda,” within the academy, and everything to do with how varied the ideologies are that inform or obfuscate terms like “race” and “sexuality.” The “outside setting” is attuned to the “arrogance” of such terms and not their ideological narrowness. Indeed, one would feel a bit ridiculous arguing for the “narrowness” of as much in the aftermath of “real world” events like Katrina or both sides of the debate in Texas re-districting. Is it not the case that it is often the “outside setting” that turns terms like “race” into self-referential, free-floating signifiers that can’t light upon meaning? In many places in the academy, intellectual work is about contesting suchirresponsibility not promoting it. Context is just that.
The quote betrays an uncomfortability around class and power issues, then, not communication. And the further problem here is that class comes in to re-direct attention away from the fact that there is no “denotative” meaning to call upon in the larger context. Many of the extreme criticisms of the academy that have prevailed of late are certainly not about re-connecting “institutional” and “denotative” language, but about making sure that the kind of work that takes place in the academy does not draw attention to the Rove-like spin on words that keeps meaning in perpetual exile from language. It seems absurd to make this about a narrow institutionalagenda, unless were talking about economic and geo-political institutions in full relief.
Jen E. Boyle, Assistant Professor, at 10:55 am EDT on July 10, 2006
Thanks for the selective critique
” .. Rep. Gibson Armstrong, who collaborated with David Horowitz in setting up these hearings, has now lost the Republican primary, in a very conservative district ..”
How convenient that this note FAILS to mention that Mr. Armstrong was a 20-year incumbent. He got tossed, along with a number of long-serving politicians whom the voters thought were smug, self-involved, and self-entitled for government paychecks for lifetime (tenured?).
Higher education (HE) would be well-advised to consider how PA voters’ anti-incumbent attitudes could transfer from career politicians to smug, career HE workers.
Bart J., at 11:05 am EDT on July 10, 2006
Bart J — a slight correction
Gibson C. Armstrong serves in the PA House of Representatives and sponsored the resolution that created the Select Committee on Academic Freedom. He was first elected in 2002 and recently lost his bid for renomination in the Republican primary.
His father Gibson E. Armstrong has served in the PA state Senate since the 1980s.
When the son was defeated in the Republican primary 2 months ago, his challenger cast it as a pocket book campaign, and associated Armstrong with a recent pay raise for legislators (even though Armstrong voted against it).
Hiram Hover, at 12:05 pm EDT on July 10, 2006
Rep. Armstrong’s primary loss
Bart J. is right, that Rep. Armstrong’s loss appears to have been largely the result of backlash of a pay raise. I did not suggest otherwise, merely saying that it was unclear what would now happen to the Academic Bill of Rights in PA at this point. Certainly the state legislators I witnessed for two days in January seemed fed up with the activity. It did not help that David Horowitz was on hand to interrrupt, talk over, and condescend to Republicans and Democrats alike.
That said, Rep. Armstrong’s advocacy of ABOR seems to have given him no boost in a district where the issue should have been expected to play well.
Dan Tompkins
Dan Tompkins, Temple University, at 1:00 pm EDT on July 10, 2006
“Taking Up the Critical Challenge”
I think most professors, liberal or otherwise, are more than happy to engage in an open and honest dialogue with open and honest counterparts. But to engage with the likes of Horowitz or ACTA is to fall into the proverbial trap of responding to someone who has just asked if you have quit beating your spouse.
Horowitz’s organization and ACTA are activist right-wing groups that seek to intimidate and defeat leftists on campus. Nothing more, nothing less. The ACTA report on Ward Churchill, in particular, had the effect of ensuring that numerous innocent professors will, for the forseeable future, have their names linked with Churchill (with all that implies) in any Google search. That the ACTA blogger can, after that episode, accuse ACTA’s opponents of making ad hominem attacks is both stunning and laughable. (And no, I am not one of the “Ward Churchills” named in the ACTA report.)
So what exactly are we supposed to engage? Several anecdotal and politically motivated “studies” that prove...what? That most professors are Democrats? If true, so what? Unless or until someone credible can demonstrate that discrimination against campus conservatives is truly rampant and/or that “indoctrination” attempts are actually commonplace in the classroom (and be careful how you define “indoctrination"), then there’s really nothing to engage. There is simply an attack on academic freedom (or, as the ACTA blogger would say, the “privilege” of academic freedom) by the right wing, and it needs to be unmasked for what it is.
In reading the comment thread, I was amused to learn that there is apparently something improper about rejecting the ACTA report “on technical grounds". In this case, of course, the technical grounds in question involved the utter lack of validity of the research design, measurement, definitions, and analysis. Or, to put in another way, many of us rejected the ACTA report because it was fatally flawed, misleading, and specious. But I guess those are “technical” terms...
Unapologetically Tenured, at 3:20 pm EDT on July 10, 2006
The electorate is disgusted with the status quo
Higher-ed in PA just does not get it. The public is fed up with the bull-crap from BOTH entrenched political parties — including HE’s. Per E.J. Dionne —
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-...icle/2006/06/08/AR2006060801669.html
They are tired of hearing about “free speech” from those who censor others. Tired of hearing about “limited government” from those out-spending previous administrations to be re-elected. They know bull-crap when they see it.
Please do not act surprised, if these tired, working-class folks decide to cut larded budgets to sent a message that will be heard.
Bart J., at 3:25 pm EDT on July 10, 2006
Many of the extreme criticisms of the academy that have prevailedof late are certainly not about re-connecting “institutional” and “denotative” language,but about making sure that the kind of work that takes place in the academy does notdraw attention to the Rove-like spin on words that keeps meaning in perpetual exile fromlanguage.
What a marvelous example.
Charlie (Colorado), at 3:25 pm EDT on July 10, 2006
Professor Boyle: Wow
“The notion that the “best” of post-structural thinking about language and its failed or interrupted transparency comes down to a muckraker?s-like expose of the underside of language does little more than invert the metaphysical tyranny of a ?here and now? nostalgically missing going topside into the light.”
Anyone who could author this opening sentence and then derisively refer to a “Rove-like spin on words that keeps meaning in perpetual exile from language.” just doesn’t get the concept of irony.
pepster, at 3:41 pm EDT on July 10, 2006
Bauerlein writes: The academic defense comes down to this: conservatives and libertarians read too much into bits and pieces of language.He’s right, but he conveniently avoids the reason we make this claim: these are selected bits, chosen to support a conclusion reached long before the research was ever started. You can only draw conclusions from parts to the whole if the parts are representative. Because these were selected based on outside criteria, not on their position vis- -vis the whole, they cannot serve as a basis for commentary on the whole.
Bauerlein should know better than to overlook this basic, simple fact.
Aaron Barlow, at 5:00 pm EDT on July 10, 2006
Words and their contexts
“The question rests upon the frequency of biased meanings,” says Mr. Bauerlein. A thornier question concerns the work of language within institutional contexts. The conservatives under consideration rest their case on the assumption that certain words indicate more than certain attitudes: they indicate a discourse with the power to impress such attitudes on a captive audience. In this assumption the conservatives are staging an ideological critique, as Mr. Bauerlein aptly points out. The standard academic defense, on the other hand, requires us to assume that language can serve an objective function, and that the measure of this function lies in the degree of subtlety and nuance involved in the deployment of this language. Those on both sides of this polemic would agree, in principle, to both assumptions; otherwise, the very form of their arguments would disqualify them from consideration in this discourse, whose spirit is at once critical and rhetorical. Indeed, we can discern the form they have in common in their very efforts to disqualify each other: each side arrogates the critical function to itself and charges the other with being thoroughly rhetorical. Each side plays Socrates attacking the Sophists.
Two things to consider:
1. The power to inculcate in an audience certain habits of belief (as in the purported “liberal bias” of the professors) does not inhere in a given discourse, taken as a set of statements, but derives from the social group or institution in which that discourse occurs. Nor do these statements reliably indicate the beliefs that get inculcated, since no statements can have meaning outside of the nested social contexts where they arise and to which they refer. The factors that determine the influence and the effect of institutional habituation are complex enough to elude words like “liberal” and “conservative.” The institutions of higher education, writ large, reproduce the status quo, of which “liberal” and “conservative” polemics are alike the emanation. It’s not that the status quo doesn’t change, but its changes are not under the intentional control of anybody’s discourse (however much each of us would like that to be the case).
2. Statements don’t become more honest, or more useful, just by being more “nuanced.” The utility of any statement depends on the degree to which it is ratified and reproduced by a social or institutional context...and maybe on something else as well. But we can say at least the following: Within the academy, speakers prefer statements that refer to the world at a certain level of abstraction and adhere to a certain vocabulary. This preference does not govern speakers outside of the academy. Even if the statements produced and reproduced by academics were truer than other statements, and even if by being truer they were in principle more useful, it does not follow that outside of the academy these statements would make an impact proportionate to their utility. Their impact must depend on the interface between academy and society. Leaving aside the question of the classroom—whose influence the conservatives overstate—the interface currently stands reduced to the slimness of a polemic. As a result, conservative writers and bloggers of an academic bent, and their polemically inclined academic opponents, who are also writers and bloggers, can delight their ire and duke it out to their heart’s content, syllables flying like moths in Chinese lantern. When they settle, we’ll probably all be a little less literate and a little more recalcitrant.
Benjamin Smollet, at 5:05 pm EDT on July 10, 2006
Greater clarity, please!
I got what Professor Bauerlein was saying, but there were many sentences I had to reread. And I have a Ph.D.! So many passive constructions. Imagine the response not simply of an ordinary American unused to “scholarly” language or the current debates but of a college grad who would like to know what these cultural disputes are about. He (sorry!) would probably move on, and you can hardly blame him.
Goethe Girl, at 5:06 pm EDT on July 10, 2006
Mr. Clemens on reading
In 1909, Mark Twain wrote a little piece called “A Fable.” It fills a trifle more than two pages in the Library of America edition of his work. The fable concerns a bunch of animals who disagree about the image in a mirror, each animal, of course, seeing only its own reflection. Twain’s fable ends with this moral: “You can find in a text whatever you bring, if you will stand between it and the mirror of your imagination. You may not see your ears, but they will be there.” Indeed.
Twain fan, at 7:55 pm EDT on July 10, 2006
The substantive criticisms here from Tim and others make the point that the ACTA report and other conservative/libertarian arguments against academia fail to make their case on solid evidence. They rely on snippets and anecdotes, then use the political airwaves to amplify them.
My point is not to defend the outside critics, but to ask why the professorate hasn’t applied to current academic discourse the same political/linguistic/institutional analysis professors have applied to scientific discourse, Donald Rumsfeld, marketing, etc. Academia is just as institutionalized, hierarchical, market-conscious, and monied as any sector in our society. To regard the institutionalized language of academe (course descriptions etc.) so credulously is to fail the ideals of critique, ideals inculcated from the first days of graduate school in the humanities and social sciences.
As Tim says, to do that job well requires a heap of learning, experience, and hermeneutical skill, and outsiders generally haven’t the background or personal involvement to carry it out. Yes, which is why I said that academics are the most qualified ones to do it. That they have resisted the challenge is why I stated to the Pennsylvania legislators that we need to have more public discussion of the problem. That doesn’t mean that outsiders are more qualified—I never said that—but only that when professionals become so parochial, they need to feel some accountability beyond each other to bring them back to the basic ideals and protocols of their profession.
The fact that some of the outside attacks are polemical doesn’t remove the necessity of taking up their challenge. To question the methodology of, say, NAS’s Google search for “diversity” in campus web sites is to discount the conclusions too hastily. To dismiss evidence such as voter registration and campaign contributions is to stretch one’s credibility too far.
It is also a suicidal strategy. Instead of blocking the criticisms, professors should seize them. If ACTA and others haven’t wielded evidence appropriately, let’s see the academics do it better. If they reached the wrong conclusions, let’s see some academic studies appear that demonstrate the opposite. Denial isn’t going to work. The criticisms will keep coming, and skeptical actions such as the US Dept of Ed commission will continue.
Mark Bauerlein, at 9:50 pm EDT on July 10, 2006
Mark Bauerlein’s response
There is every reason for academics to be self-critical. Anyone who has studied organizations knows the danger of latent social structures that affect our choices, language, behavior. Wake-up calls are certainly worthwhile.
I am not sure that accompanying David Horowitz’ traveling circus in Pennsylvania is the appropriate way to do this. There is no evidence in the reports I’ve seen that Prof. Bauerlein dissented from Horowitz’ more outrageous claims, or criticized his self-aggrandizing behavior. What does Prof. Bauerlein have to say about The Professors, with its documented list of misrepresentations? We still don’t know.
Prof. Bauerlein would have more of an impact on his intended audience if he chose his friends more carefully.
For a many of many words, Prof. Bauerlein sometimes says too little. Does his clipped remark, “I never said that,” mean that Accuracy in Academia (not a liberal group) misreported what he told Pennsylvania Representative Curry?
As I walk around Temple University, I meet colleagues with a variety of hermeneutics. That’s good. Some people use words in the way that bothers Prof. Bauerlein, others don’t (try hanging out with economists and engineers). Most faculty are careful — perhaps more than ever — not to politicize their classes. We are more accountable than ever, a point Prof. Bauerlein ignores, though it’s been made repeatedly. Surveying over 10,000 student evaluations per year for five years in my own program, I’ve seen only a small percentage of such complaints, some of the loudest against conservative professors. My experience mirrors the overall experience at my own and other Pennsylvania universities.
Isaiah Berlin, Max Weber, and Jerry Graff have all told us that conflict is built into most adult situations. We need conflict, we need argument. We need to resist pressures to conform, and we need to be aware of the hidden freight our language carries. That does not mean we need to misrepresent our colleagues or urge government intervention in the academy, or hang out with the Horowitz crowd. I have seen up close how he reads a syllabus and a website — and how ready he is to attack unsuspecting faculty. It is not pretty.
Dan Tompkins
Daniel Tompkins, Temple University, at 4:30 am EDT on July 11, 2006
Proving a Negative
I believe that Professor Bauerlein’s concerns—unlike those of ACTA and David Horowitz—are genuine, but I still see two problems with his proposed strategy.
First, engaging these people simply plays into their hands. In the court of public opinion, disingenuousness, anecdotal evidence, and overgeneralization often carry the day. Every time an academic spokesperson appears on camera with Anne Neal or David Horowitz, it simply lends credibility to non-academic ideologues and makes it appear that these are people who should be taken seriously.
Second, and more important, any attempt to engage these specious arguments puts us in the untenable situation of trying to prove a negative. It is easy for ACTA to marshal anecdotal evidence and use it to claim that leftist indoctrination is rampant on campus. But how, exactly, do we refute such a claim?
If we demonstrate that the courses they cite are only a small fraction of any college’s curriculum, do you think these folks will actually shut up and go home? Of course not. They’ll claim that even one of these classes is too many, and ten is far too many, and 100 or 1,000 is proof that the situation is totally out of control. And then, while you’re trying to prove, point by point, that many syllabi and course descriptions have been unfairly characterized, they’ll be explaining that all this just has to be true, because, after all, some study somewhere shows that 80% of all humanities professors voted for Al Gore in 2000 (as if this were proof of anti-conservative bias, rather than self-selection).
Do you really think you can win that kind of “whack-a-mole” argument?
I’m not suggesting that we surrender. But I don’t think we have a prayer if we fight the battle on their terms. Instead, we should consistently point out who these people are and why they are anything but disinterested observers. And we should find and expose all of the flaws inherent in their research, even if some might consider this to be dwelling on technicalities.
But more than anything else, we should do our jobs in the classroom to the best of our abilities and with the utmost integrity and authenticity. In the end, the definitive rebuttal to ACTA and Horowitz will come from each generation of college graduates who know that the overwhelming majority of their professors, liberal or conservative, were dedicated teachers who are not at all in the indoctrination business. Ultimately, it is the testimony of the vast majority of our students that will refute the attacks of these ideologues.
Unapologetically Tenured, at 4:35 am EDT on July 11, 2006
Students
“UnApologetically Tenured” tells us, “Ultimately, it is the testimony of the vast majority of our students that will refute the attacks of these ideologues.” At my own institution, Brooklyn College, this hasn’t quite been the case. In the “dispositions” controversy, a group of students publicly resisted a School of Education program that tested the “disposition” of all students to, among other things, “promote social justice"—in one course, through the showing of Fahrenheit 9/11 the class before Eletion Day 2004 and the teaching that “white English is the oppressors’ language.” The issue eventually attracted national attention—and Education students at LeMoyne, Washington State, San Jose State, and Alaska-Fairbanks came forward with nearly identical experiences. Under pressure of losing its accrediation authority, NCATE modified the dispositions standard to eliminate the social justice requirement.
At Columbia in 2004-2005, a gour of courageous students stood up against transparently biased (and, in the case of one professor, often factually inaccurate) teaching about Middle Eastern affairs.
In general, however, assuming that students will be the police to “refute” claims of bias in the academy seems to place far too much of a burden on students. At Learning Communities institutions such as Evergreen or Monterey Bay, students receive exclusively one-sided curricula: how would they even know what a non-biased curriculum looks like?
In general, though, I think that in the short term, the academy might be better off following the tactical recommendations of “U.T.,” and simply dismiss all outside criticism as that of “ideologues.” As Mark Bauerlein points out in his piece, academic attempts to engage the arguments of the critics quite often have yielded remarks by professors that only strengthen the critics’ case.
KC Johnson, Professor at Brooklyn, at 10:00 am EDT on July 11, 2006
conscious / conscientious use of language
Nicely done, Mark. I agree with many of your observations and I appreciate what you’re doing with your own use of language here because it is important (but not easy!)to write about this topic in non-tendacious language.
Amy Brown, at 10:35 am EDT on July 11, 2006
Proving a Negative
Unapologetically Tenured writes:
“I believe that Professor Bauerlein’s concerns—unlike those of ACTA and David Horowitz—are genuine. . ..”
Could you please elaborate on what you mean by the dichotomy you have created here, genuine vs not genuine?
Thanks.
Clawmute, at 12:00 pm EDT on July 11, 2006
Mark Bauerlein’s Response
Daniel Tompkins wrote:
“Prof. Bauerlein would have more of an impact on his intended audience if he chose his friends more carefully.”
What an odd thing to say, one not entirely without irony, given the response of the academic community to the Ward Churchill fiasco, a response which saw precious few condemning his shenanigans outright, but a far greater number downplaying the evidence against him, remaining silent about it, or even defending him!
Clawmute, at 12:05 pm EDT on July 11, 2006
The Plural of Anecdote Still Isn’t “Data”
As if on cue, along comes Professor Johnson to make my point for me. A few students at a few schools rise up against...whatever, and somehow that’s supposed to be a refutation of my argument. This is, of course, a perfect example of the “whack-a-mole” game that right-wing academic critics want us to play.
So you want to argue that actual attempts at classroom indoctrination are rare, and that our students can testify to that fact? Well, look over here , “a group of students” at Brooklyn College is fighting against your liberal notions of social justice. And look over there, a handful of undergrads at four additional institutions “came forward with nearly identical experiences". Oh, and wait, look east again, because “a gour of courageous students [at Columbia] stood up against transparently biased...teaching about Middle Eastern affairs.” [Not sure what a “gour” is. I assume it’s a typo, maybe the same keyboard problem which causes Professor Johnson to type my screen name as “UnApologetically Tenured".]
Anecdote on top of anecdote on top of anecdote. And we’re really supposed to engage these people?
Unapologetically Tenured, at 12:30 pm EDT on July 11, 2006
Professor Tompkins aligns me with the “traveling circus” in Pennsylvania, but I didn’t experience it that way. David Horowitz wasn’t there, and my exchanges with the committee members were respectful on both sides, even when we disagreed. In fact, the sharpest questioner among the democrats was not representative Curry, but another democrat who came up to me afterwards, thanked me for my testimony, and gave me his card.
As for the exchange on ISI, I believe I said that ISI was “traditionalist,” not “traditional,” and while it has an “agenda,” the agenda doesn’t fit either Republican or Democratic politics very well.
Professor Tompkins also claims that professors are strictly accountable, citing student evaluations as proof. But in many areas of accountability, that process has broken down. I mean in hiring, peer review of scholarship, and tenure review. I can only speak for the humanities here, but I have seen and heard of too many corruptions in all of those areas to trust them very far any more.
Additionally, we have no accountability for the amount of learning our students acquire during their years on campus. No exit exams in areas of knowledge and skills. Instead, we have a lot of indirect assessment such as the National Survey of Student Engagement, a strong annual project giving broad profiles of college student experience, but not tied to a specific learning outcomes.
Finally, I believe that Unapologetically Tenured’s concerns, too, are genuine, but he focuses them too much on the outside critics. They loom in his mind as monstrous antagonists, as his language of “battle” and “surrender” shows. He could disarm them with a simple response: to admit that they raise legitimate concerns about academic practice, but argue that the best people to handle those concerns are academics themselves, not legislators or outside organizations.
And I’m not sure that the statistical counter-argument would be as ineffectual as Unapologetically Tenured thinks. If this is a public contest, then showing empirically that the tendentious and biased courses are but a small fraction of the university curriculum would go a long way toward stealing the thunder of Horowitz et al.
Mark Bauerlein, at 1:05 pm EDT on July 11, 2006
Mark Bauerlein says that scholars should come up with their own research reports on the subjects of allegations by ACTA, Students for Academic Freedom, and other conservative groups. He knows very well that funding resources for this kind of research are not readily available to university faculty, as they are to the attack groups funded by the Scaife and other Republican-front foundations. Indeed, the whole conservative strategy is transparent: to produce an endless flood of factitious “reports,” trumpeted by hired publicity agents to the credulous media and public, swamping academics with so many accusations that it would take months or years to investigate all of them (even if we had the time and funding to do so)—after which time all of our refutations would be ignored by the media as “old news” and “only of interest to academics.”
Donald Lazere, at 1:05 pm EDT on July 11, 2006
Funding
Don Lazere writes that “funding resources for this kind of research are not readily available to university faculty, as they are to the attack groups funded by the Scaife and other Republican-front foundations.” As someone with a bit of experience in searching for grants (I run a small project at CUNY devoted to promoting new courses and scholarship about the American state), it seems to me a stretch to argue that outside funding sources for the academic community are disproportionately tilted to the right. Ford, MacArthur, Rockefeller Foundations, etc. would be a place to start.
“UnApologetically Tenured,” meanwhile, complains about anecdotes. Earlier, he/she complained about statistical surveys of faculty party affiliation or ideological viewpoint. In a previous thread, he/she complained about the remarkably comprehensive inquiry into Ward Churchill’s scholarship. It seems as if there are no grounds for criticizing academic practice in his/her world.
I couldn’t help but notice, however, that “U.T.” didn’t comment on the appropriateness of using Education classes to screen out students with an inappropriate “disposition” to promote social justice. Or on whether it’s good academic practice for an Ivy League institution to run Middle East Studies classes where a professor regularly states things that are factually inaccurate.
Perhaps “U.T.” considers these to be examples of how we’re all “dedicated teachers who are not at all in the indoctrination business.” Perhaps he/she doesn’t. But, as Mark Bauerlein points out, the public seems increasingly disinclined to simply trust the academy, in light of controversies such as dispositions or MEALAC, when large numbers of professors eagerly defended teaching practices most outsiders (and most legislators) would, correctly, consider improper.
KC Johnson, Professor at Brooklyn College, at 2:55 pm EDT on July 11, 2006
KC is right to note the abundant funds coming out of liberal foundations and think tanks. Academics also find support from government agencies and their own institutions. The study of the pathological conservative personality that I mentioned in the piece was funded by National Institute of Mental Health, National Science Foundation, and the Graduate School of Business at Stanford.
Mark Bauerlein, at 3:45 pm EDT on July 11, 2006
As a faculty member at an institution in the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education (PASSHE, not to be confused with Penn State), and therefore as someone directly affected by Mark Bauerlein’s participation in the academic freedom hearings held here recently, I would like to make a couple of comments.
As a registered Republican (though I consider myself neither conservative nor liberal and generally vote a split ticket), I was pleased when Rep. Gibson Armstrong announced he would be holding hearings on academic freedom around the state. Some of my colleagues thought I was crazy, but I told them I was confident that the hearings would demonstrate what my experience told me was true: There is no pattern of indoctrination, left-wing or otherwise, at our universities. I thought it would be good for the public to see this. And indeed, this is what the hearings did demonstrate. At one of these hearings, in fact, a number of students who identified themselves as conservatives testified that they had never been discriminated against, and that their professors, by and large, did a great job of keeping classroom discussion open to multiple perspectives.
After this very hearing, however, Rep. Armstrong announced that he still believed left-wing bias and indoctrination are serious problems in Pennsylvania universities, and that legislation to remedy the problem might be necessary. That’s when I changed my mind about the wisdom of Rep. Armstrong’s hearings.
I also found it disturbing that many of the witnesses invited to testify at these hearings were from outside the state and had no conenction whatsoever to higher education in Pennsylvania. David Horowitz testified at these hearings (though he may not, as Bauerlein claims, have been there on the day Bauerlein testified). Anne Neal was also a participant.
In Bauerlein’s case, I wondered how someone with a cushy position at a research university in Atlanta could be considered an expert on public higher education in Pennsylvania. A good question for Dr. Bauerlein might be: Under what circumstances were you invited to participate in the Pennsylvania hearings? I’m sure I won’t be invited to Emory any time soon to comment on the political climate there. Were you reimbursed for your travel expenses by Rep. Armstrong’s office? If so, I helped pay for your trip.
We have a number of problems here in Pennsylvania that might be called political: A crushing 4-4 teaching load with steadily increasing class sizes; a promotion system that is horribly broken, though what’s wrong with it has absolutely nothing to do with political bias in the liberal vs. conservative sense; a focus on fancy, expensive building projects at the expense of things that might actually have an academic impact. Dr. Bauerlein’s participation in these hearings ultimately aided and abetted Rep. Armstrong in his diversion of the electorate’s attention from these problems. As a voter in Rep. Armstrong’s district, I’m proud to have helped show him the door. But the damage may already be done. Thanks a lot, Dr. Bauerlein.
Not Buying Bauerlein’s Line, Associate Professor of English at a Pennsylvania State System University, at 9:00 pm EDT on July 11, 2006
To the previous poster:
You speak personally about the Pennsylvania hearings, so I’ll keep this short. If you read my testimony, you’ll see that it made general points about academic training and acculturation with reference mainly to the humanities and ed schools, saying little about local conditions. My previous writings on the subject were what prompted the invite. If you wish to contest or correct any of the statements I made, I’ll be happy to respond. (We can do this by private email.)
Mark Bauerlein, at 6:00 am EDT on July 12, 2006
Whack-a-Mole
Once more, Professor Johnson invites me to play whack-a-mole, and once more I decline. Indeed, he can’t even goad me into it by saying nasty things about me on his own blog (HNN’s multi-authored “Cliopatria"), where he bizarrely refers to me as “Apologetically Tenured". I’m not sure why I drive him into this sort of rage (I don’t know him, so it’s really not personal on my end), but it obviously suggests that any sort of engagement on the issues would be a waste of time.
On a different topic, I am a little confused about Professor Bauerlein’s reference to “the abundant funds coming out of liberal foundations and think tanks". The three agencies he names (NIMH, NSF, and the Graduate School of Business at Stanford) hardly fit the definition of “liberal foundations and think tanks". I know some people like to refer to the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations (or Brookings) as liberal, but I don’t think anyone can, in all fairness, compare their aims and objectives to those of Olin, Scaife, or Mellon.
Unapologetically Tenured, at 6:00 am EDT on July 12, 2006
Responding to Profs. Bauerlein and Johnson; some common ground
At this point in the dialogue, it may be appropriate to point to areas of possible agreement as well as disagreement. I don’t believe mentioning the former will resolve all of the latter, but I see some common ground. Apologies for the length.
I’ll begin by revising Prof. Bauerlein’s statement that “Professor Tompkins also claims that professors are strictly accountable, citing student evaluations as proof.”
What I said was, ” We are more accountable than ever, a point Prof. Bauerlein ignores, though it’s been made repeatedly.” Consider: we have the Buckley Amendment, which guarantees students the right to a hearing if accused of academic dishonesty; grievance procedures allowing much more orderly grievances about grades in a course than in the past; administrations that are extremely sensitive to reports of faculty intolerance. I’ve been teaching since 1965. When I entered the profession, the high-handedness of professors was striking. Now, I have to train people with European backgrounds not to assume they have carte blanche to do what they want. Some are shocked to find that here in the US they are … accountable!
Still, I would not stay “strictly accountable.” That assumes too much. And I would never say, “proof.” I would say, that I’ve offered evidence.
In the areas Prof. Bauerlein mentions, I can only say that I’ve seen procedures rigorously observed. In hiring, I’ve been involved in the hiring of one N.A.S. official, one Mormon, and two Knights of Malta in the past two years. Their politics may differ from my own, but I don’t really know: what we were interested in was their skill in the classroom. Deans and Provosts play a large role in guaranteeing fair processes, and they have the power to do this.
Next, Professor Bauerlein turns to a topic I am deeply invested in: “accountability for the amount of learning our students acquire during their years on campus.”
Exactly how to gauge this learning is a vexed question. Exit exams are one possibility, though exactly what to ask, beyond some basic factual questions, is a challenge. The American Association for Colleges and Universities did some good work on this two years ago, using the Graduate Record Exam. Like the MCATs and LSATs, this requires general knowledge and also general abilities, e.g. in English language proficiency. Other groups have experimented in other areas.
I concur that we need to provide “accountability” for student learning. Ideally, exit exams would be matched with entrance exams, to provide a measure of student gains while in college. Otherwise, you’re not measuring student progress. Exit exams at Harvard will probably show that Harvard grads are pretty smart: but is that because of what Harvard did for them, or because they were smart when the entered? (Barney on the Simpsons and Jim Ignatowski on Taxi both got into Harvard, I think, but they’re special cases.)
Personally, Iike portfolios, sampled after four years to get a general picture. But a test could be useful as well. Folks will quarrel about what to test, of course.
In short, I think it’s worth noting that conservatives and liberals share a concern for good instruction and for student learning. I have spent a lot of time working on this. I’m convinced, for instance, that the move to “contingent faculty” on campus is driving down student learning, since adjuncts don’t have time to be around as much as needed. That is a real issue. A conspiracy theorist might imagine that David Horowitz was hired by management to distract us all from the real problem, the plummeting instructional budgets in many institutions….
Now: Prof. Bauerlein says, ‘As for the exchange on ISI, I believe I said that ISI was “traditionalist,” not “traditional,” and while it has an “agenda,” the agenda doesn’t fit either Republican or Democratic politics very well.’
I was concerned less about ISI than about his apparent reference to “legislators": “Bauerlein suggested legislators, [or?] organizations like the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI)”
Legislators are the last group we want interfering in our educational system. Prof. Johnson must be aware that after the legislative investigations led by Fritz Coudert, his own institution, Brooklyn College, notoriously fired some of its best teachers, men like Fred Ewen and Meyer Reinhold, between 1941 and the mid-fifties, only to apologize for doing so decades later. I have Reinhold’s FBI file: it contains a single item: an outstanding scholarly review that’s still cited, but that was published in the “Marxian” journal, Science and Society. That was enough to get him in trouble, fired by Harry Gideonse, and out of the profession for a decade.
The last thing we want interfering in an institution is legislators, on left or right. They’ve done enough damage already. I’m glad faculty around the country rallied behind Prof. Johnson in his own well-publicized case: in the 40s and 50s they were generally too terrified to do this. (It’s interesting to note that Harvard Prof. Akira Iriye, a leader in backing Prof. Johnson’s, has also written sympathetically about Japanese historian and diplomat Herbert Norman, who committed suicide in 1956 after legislators went after him in an associated investigation.)
Two further points. Prof. Johnson has a point of view about the Columbia fracas. It needs to be said that some Columbia students provided an entirely different point of view about the Middle Eastern studies faculty there in the student newspaper. This is not to say either side is completely correct or incorrect, but that the picture resists oversimplification.
Second, Professor Johnson seems to believe that Learning Communities at Evergreen State College are “one-sided.” I developed and helped to run the Learning Comunities program at Temple, 1993-2000, and can say that a regular goal of such ventures is to give students varying perspectives on a problem. The Evergreen people provided a fine model, partly because they care about student learning. That is why Gerald Graff featured the State of Washington learning communities in his important book, Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education. He visited classrooms before he wrote, by the way.
So: yes, we all need to focus on student learning. It is crucially important. I don’t imagine the the current discussion will go away, but we should not let it distract all of us from the need to provide the best possible instruction for our students.
Dan Tompkins
Daniel Tompkins, Temple University, at 6:00 am EDT on July 12, 2006
Response to KC and Mark
KC and Mark show their usual penchant for evading issues here. I did not claim that liberal or left faculty members lack sources of research funding IN GENERAL, but only in the area of research investigating the subjects of allegations by conservative attack groups, which Mark suggested they should pursue. It would take so long to devise a grant proposal or foundation initiative for any such kind of systematic research, with controls against bias, then to have it peer-reviewed, approved and implemented, by the time the results appeared, the media and public would ignore it as “old news” and “only of interest to academics,” and the right-wing attack groups would have long moved on to their next ephemeral crusade. Conservative lobbies like ACTA, NAS, Campus Watch, and David Horowitz’s enterprises are not inhibited by such scrupulous procedures; they launch an attack campaign and commission quick “research reports” with results predetermined to support their agenda, much in the manner of corporate-sponsored studies deriding all evidence of the dangers of smoking and global warming.
Can KC, Mark, or anyone else here deny that the conservative foundations and various other Republican Party front organizations have set up a rapid-offense mechanism that by-passes the protocols of conventional foundation and university research procedures and that uses press agents to work the media, blindsiding the academics under attack from responding in kind? (Ample documentation is at hand, in Alan Jones’s April 16 “Connecting the Dots” column in IHE, my earlier one, “Money and Motives,” July 20, 2005, and elsewhere.)
Furthermore, regarding the endless barrage of academic atrocity stories put out by these groups and by individuals like KC and Mark, I made the point that it would be impossible for anyone to verify the accuracy of all of them. As with most human conflicts, there are likely to be at least two sides to every story; yet few who circulate these stories, or who recycle them at second and third hand, ever acknowledge that their side’s claims might on occasion be biased or disputable, and acknowledge the other side’s account (see Dan Tompkins’ last post on cases at Columbia and Evergreen). I am quite willing to acknowledge that some of the conservative claims may be accurate, but I have published several articles (necessitating months of unsubsidized research) documenting the inaccuracy of many others. So those who join in these attacks are somewhat in the position of the little boy who cried wolf.
At the very least, shouldn’t scrupulous scholars like KC and Mark express a bit of skepticism about the conservative attack groups’ motives, methods, and factual accuracy?
Donald Lazere, at 11:15 am EDT on July 12, 2006
A quick response to Dan Tompkins: I’m a great admirer of the Temple Learning Communities program, which seems to me a model of how to be innovative and retain academic excellence. From my understanding, however (correct me if I’m wrong), it’s structured differently than the Evergreen, in that individual courses retain autonomy. In general, I’d invite anyone to sample the Evergreen course catalog and not find it troubling one-sided (and very presentist).
Don Lazere notes that academics would have trouble getting funding for the type of research sponsored by ACTA; Mark suggests it’s more likely that academics aren’t interested in the topic. If people aren’t trying to get grants to do studies that defend the status quo, it’s hard to say whether the problem is that moneys for this cause don’t exist.
Don also notes, “Conservative lobbies like ACTA, NAS, Campus Watch, and David Horowitz’s enterprises are not inhibited by such scrupulous procedures; they launch an attack campaign and commission quick “research reports” with results predetermined to support their agenda, much in the manner of corporate-sponsored studies deriding all evidence of the dangers of smoking and global warming.” Yet these organizations are very different. Campus Watch is oriented around a single issue. Its website consists almost entirely of articles. You might not like its perspective, but it’s hardly riddled with inaccuracies. Horowitz, on the other hand, has a clear legislative agenda that’s often been linked to troubling causes (i.e., creationism), and published a book riddled with factual inaccuracies. The primary mission of NAS, as I see it, is raising academic standards.
Don says that “those who join in these attacks are somewhat in the position of the little boy who cried wolf.” The curricular issues in which I’ve been most involved (the “Arts of Democracy,” Columbia’s Middle East instruction, and the dispositions controversy) were ones that grew from the grassroots and subsequently attracted the interest (sometimes) of outside groups.
As in the Ward Churchill thread, UnApologetically Tenured (who seems to take great offense at being criticized, although it remains unclear to me why someone who posts under the cloak of anonymity should take anything personally) refuses to answer basic questions, in this case whether he/she thinks the sort of instruction that occurred in the Brooklyn dispositions controversy or the factual inaccuracies taught in the MEALAC controversy represent appropriate teaching. Since he/she seems unwilling to criticize such behavior, I’m not reassured by his/her general assertions of what constitutes appropriate classroom behavior.
KC Johnson, Professor at Brooklyn, at 4:05 pm EDT on July 12, 2006
Donald, you treat the professors as so helpless and outmaneuvered. And, you attribute the outflanking by the outside critics as entirely due to money and tactics, not at all to ideas.
There are, in fact, deep sources of funding for institution-building research and programs for progressive and liberal academics, for instance, Ford Foundation’s support of affirmative action networks in higher education.
Mark Bauerlein, at 7:40 pm EDT on July 12, 2006
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The Selective Critique: who decides?
At the end of his endless essay (three times the length of a David Brooks column), Prof. Bauerlein says: “Public observers realize, however reluctantly, that the best people to conduct that examination are the professors themselves, if only they will stop acting so proprietary. “
This is not what he appears to have told a legislative committee in Pennsylvania last April, according to Accuracy in Academia:
‘Curry then asked who should fix the academy if it is to be fixed from the outside. Bauerlein suggested legislators, [or?] organizations like the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI), at which point Curry insisted that ISI has a political agenda. Bauerlein disagreed saying “they are traditional—not political.” “But their board is conservative. They have an agenda,” Curry exclaimed.’
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1636488/posts
Rep. Gibson Armstrong, who collaborated with David Horowitz in setting up these hearings, has now lost the Republican primary, in a very conservative district. It’s unclear where the Academic Bill of Rights will now go in Pennsylvania. In his testimony in Pennsylvania, Horowitz misrepresented programs (including my own) and individuals (including the guy whose office is next to mine). It was certainly dispiriting to see Prof. Bauerlein supporting this guy.
Dan Tompkins
Dan Tompkins, Temple University, at 8:00 am EDT on July 10, 2006