While settling down on the patio with a tasty but simple bagel-cheese-espresso combination, I idly reached over for the LA Times, and ran across three interesting articles that I thought I'd point out to you. Like me, if you teach, you might well have varied from the script a few times and ad-libbed a joke with a little political flavour. We've all done it from time to time, right? Well if so, be careful...you could find yourself a target of certain groups that would like to claim that you're part of a movement to indoctrinate your students with political ideology. A read of the article entitled "Witch hunt at UCLA", by Saree Makdisi (a professor of English and Comparative Literature at UCLA) gives you a good taste of the debate raging in the press right now. It seems that there is a website, created by the Bruin Alumni Association, which offers money - real folding money - to students who help them "expose" professors who "can't stop talking about President Bush, about the war in Iraq, about the Republican Party, or any other ideological issue that has nothing to do with the class subject material...". Wow. Makdisi notes however, that a lot of the specifically targeted professors on the website are targeted mostly for what they've been saying outside of the classroom, rather than inside. The case is made that it is part of an academic's duty to engage in such discussion:
I earned my own inaccurate and defamatory "profile," for example, not for what I have said in my classes on English poets such as Wordsworth and Blake â€" my academic specialty, which the website pointedly avoids mentioning â€" but rather for what I have written in newspapers about Middle Eastern politics. My colleagues and I are being targeted for speaking out on the kinds of urgent social matters and universal principles that it has always â€" in every society and every age â€" been the task of intellectuals to address.
The article goes on to say:
The website assumes that any professor who speaks out in a public forum must at the same time be indulging in ideological abuse of his or her students â€" proselytizing them, indoctrinating them. And it's actually not just any professor; it's only the supposedly "liberal" ones, since "conservative" faculty are not targeted on the website.
Ah. That's what this is about. The usual case of trying to stop someone from saying something when it is something you don't want heard. (This can take place on both sides of the divide, of course.....) Alongside the article (and the other two I'll mention in a moment) is a sidebar which has some very interesting numbers in it. The numbers (if the self-reporting they are based on is to be relied upon) seem to support the often made statement that university campuses are becoming more left-leaning in recent years. It's all very interesting, and so I did a separate post on it for you to discuss the data if you like. The data are silent (as far as I can see) about whether the presence of left-leaning professors (and to a lesser extent, students) actually is having a significant effect on the student body. Well, it almost certainly having some effect, but what is the effect and what is its extent? Surely, data like that is what the worried Conservatives who started this whole discussion should (perhaps) be waving around, no? Let's hear from them next.... An example of such a worried conservative is the author and activist David Horowitz, who started something called the "student academic freedom movement", who has an article alongside the one discussed above, entitled "Ideologues at the Lectern". He is a supporter of the Academic Bill of Rights, introduced, its authors believe to protect students from the sort of classroom abuses (if that is what they really are) discussed earlier. He (and other supporters) are trying to use this as an instrument to bring what they call "balance" and "neutrality" into the classroom, since if these are not present (they argue) then the students' rights are being violated. Apparently (I learn this from the third article on this topic in the section...the one by Joan W. Scott (professor of social science at the Institute for Advanced Study) entitled "Professors as Liberators"), the Bill would require students' opinions to be counted as valid "even if they are right or wrong". (Now I'd be careful there. An opinion itself (in my opinion) cannot be easily (ever?) judged as right or wrong; rather the facts upon which that opinion is based can be evaluated thus, and then the opinion weighed accordingly...but I digress.) Scott reminds us (thank goodness):
It's one thing to insist that differences of opinion be respected. It's another to claim that all opinions have equal weight. For the most part, students lack the training and knowledge of their teachers. They are in college to learn. Final judgment on what counts as serious academic work and legitimate course content rests with faculty.
Horowitz says:
The Academic Bill of Rights is a modest attempt to improve a bad and deteriorating situation on our campuses. It would restore the idea of intellectual diversity as a central educational value. It would make students aware that they should be getting more than one side of controversial issues and that they should not be browbeaten (or graded) on the basis of their political opinions.
It seems to me (based on no data in front of me, I admit) that this last part is a bit alarmist: Are students really being browbeaten and graded on the basis of their political opinions, even if (as Horowitz reminds us) the faculty in disciplines related to politics (political science, sociology, anthropology and others; see above) are leaning a lot toward the Democratic side of the aisle? I'm not sure of how widespread this is, but is this really the way of keeping a check on such practices? Might not our existing mechanisms for quality control in the classroom play a role here? Scott's article points out (and that of Horowitz denies) that this sort of Bill raises the possibility of a student being able to claim that their rights were violated if creationism was not taught in their Biology class (here we go again) of if Holocaust denial was not showing up on their History syllabus. I'll end with the two rather good (imho) closing paragraphs from Scott's article, and step back to let you have your say:
It's hard not to conclude that the demands for "balance" and "neutrality" by supporters of the Academic Bill of Rights are actually intended to stifle critical thinking of any kind by insisting that all ideas are of equal merit. Aside from the fact that this approach omits the role judgment must play in scholarly work, it cancels higher education's critical mission. The best teachers are usually those whose commitment and point of view, thoroughly grounded in knowledge of a field, inspire students to think differently about the world by challenging the pieties and certainties they bring to college. It is precisely this kind of experience that opens students' minds, engages them in learning and sets them on paths they never knew they could take. Such critical thinking is the hallmark of American education â€" an education designed to create thinking citizens for a free society. It is that education that is under attack by supporters of the Academic Bill of Rights.
(Pity about the insertion of the phrase "American education" in there, and a point off Scott for such silliness: We're talking about education here, whether it is American or in any other country......but anyway, I'm getting off the point. That sort of nationalistic langues just annoys me.) So, he says, taking cover behind the sofa..... what do you think? -cvj
