NAS Blog

Our friends at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education continue their stellar work defending the academic freedom and First Amendment rights of college faculty members – especially untenured adjuncts – who collide with stifiling campus political orthodoxies. This time, they’ve scored against the San Jose/Evergreen Community College District, which will have to pay 100K in lost wages to an adjunct instructor who was terminated in 2007 after a student complained that her brief classroom discussion of the origins of homosexuality was “offensive.” The district will have to pick up the tab for legal expenses as well. Too bad for them – and the taxpayers who will carry theses costs – that they didn’t simply respect the instructor’s academic freedom in the first place.

But while I’m glad that FIRE was able to intervene successfully in this case, I also wish that they and other organizations such as the Alliance Defense Fund (ADF) didn’t have so much work to do. This is getting to be a depressingly familiar scenario: 1) Instructor in a psychology or ethics course examines homosexuality or sex differences, says something that a student finds “offensive.” 2) A complaint is forwarded at the speed of light to the administration, cc to the campus women’s center, the dean of multicultural affairs or the LGBT office, who don’t necessarily need to interview the instructor, but nevertheless agree that yes, yes, the classroom discussion was indeed “offensive.” 3) The administration informs instructor that she’s outta here. 4) Board of directors upholds administration, unimpressed by quaint ideas about academic freedom or First Amendment protections.

Honestly, I wonder what the worst aspect of cases such as this one is. It’s appalling, of course, that such an Orwellian intellectual climate exists on so many campuses, and the examples of outrages such as this one seem to pop up weekly. See Ashley Thorne’s recent post detailing the latest incident involving a socal work student whose religious convictions ran afoul of a counseling program at Augusta State University in Georgia. But what about boards of trustees, such as the one in the San Jose/Evergreen case? What could they, as the governing bodies at a public institution have been thinking? Apart from the deserved embarassment their school has incurred and the hefty settlement costs they’ve handed to taxpayers, what does academic freedom or First Amendment protections mean to them? Not much, I have to conclude, since they upheld the administration’s outrage, without apparently seeing it as such. Kudos to FIRE once again, which seems to have a much firmer grasp of the academic enterprise and its mission than do many of the people to whom it’s been directly entrusted.

Tom Blumer observes that our leftist universities and their ilk possess and abuse their power to destroy careers and control people’s lives. The communists, he says, constructed checkpoints, whereas our leftist leaders use “chokepoints”:

Those who occupy positions in university systems, government bureaucracies, as well as certain union and professional organizations, often with the active assistance of the courts, serve as the system’s “Chokepoint Charlies.” You can’t get through or move on unless you jump through their hoops, comply with their demands, or behave according to their established norms.

Here is Blumer’s take on campus chokepoints:

In university systems, the most obvious chokepoint is tenure. If you achieve it, you have a position for life; if you don’t, your career is essentially over. Not surprisingly, leftist-dominated universities have used denial of tenure as a principal means of culling promising conservative professors, or even usually reliable liberals who utter occasional center-right thoughts, from their faculties’ ranks.

Other university chokepoints are in the classroom. For the most part, it’s still true that if you’re bright enough, apply yourself, keep your head down, and avoid making too many waves, you’ll get through. But if you happen to incur the wrath of an intolerant radical prof by expressing a dissenting view, no matter how well-supported, you may find yourself with a failing grade, a lengthy redress or appeals process with less than assured results, and perhaps the inability, at least at that university, to go on to the next step in your desired major.

Perhaps the most dangerous chokepoint at universities is in research. If your line of inquiry leads to conclusions that are contrary to established beliefs — say, just for the heck of it, if you find evidence that the earth really hasn’t been warming, or even if it is warming that it’s not significantly influenced by human activity — there’s more than a slight chance that your “peer reviewers” won’t be impressed and that your next funding request may not be granted. Just like that, you’re on the outside looking in.

Is there a strong bias against conservatives in higher education? Researchers have produced numerous studies to examine this question. They have sought to measure bias quantitatively through various surveys. Usually they conclude that there is little evidence of bias, and that people who say there is are merely crying wolf.

In a new in-depth essay at NAS.org, NAS Chairman Steve Balch argues that the burden of proof should rest with those who deny bias: they must prove that it does not exist rather than demanding proof that it does.

Dr. Balch’s timely essay comes the week after NAS published “They So Despise Her Politics – Do Conservative Faculty Members Get a Fair Shake?. That article describes the case of Teresa Wagner, who believes she was denied a teaching position because of her conservative politics. There we published documents from Wagner’s lawsuit against the University of Iowa College of Law.

What do you think? How can we know for sure whether conservatives face systemic discrimination in the Ivory Tower?

Education needs a manifesto for a new humanism; sadly, Martha Nussbaum’s new book is not that manifesto.  I had high hopes for Not for Profit but Dr. Nussbaum’s argument quickly becomes a tangle of faulty logic and ideology and notably stale seventies feminism.  Why is she still pumping the wells of female victimization (while referencing the female president of Harvard) and the plight of African American children who lack role models (while noting the African American President of the United States)?  At one point, she praises Mr. Obama’s personal values as developed by the progressive education she endorses.  Then she indicts him for not supporting such education for others, raising the question of just what sort of person her recommended liberal education actually produces.  When  Nussbaum pleads for progressive schools (wherein teachers sagely guide students to discover and construct knowledge themselves), I think of Geoffrey Pyke [pictured] and his Malting House School (John Dewey meets William Golding).

Although Dr. Nussbaum embraces Socratic self-examination, ideology blinds her to her own biases.  She is pedantic when attacking pedantry, and she abhors “the dead hand of authority” yet repeatedly invokes the authority of Nobel Prize credentials.  She advocates critical thinking to combat “demeaning stereotypes,” then proceeds to stereotype men, women, whites, and Southerners.  Masculinity comes off badly unless it is “maternal” which, she implies, is the true essence of human nature (making masculine behavior an aberration, less than human).  In this book, women are saintly and victimized (unless they are named Margaret Thatcher).  Nussbaum scorns the image of the self-reliant cowboy, then, on the next page, explains that every child must develop “less need to call on others.”  Decrying education that involves mere inculcation of facts (more Seventies flotsam), she later admits to the necessity for “a lot of factual knowledge.”

Worse, Dr. Nussbaum extols the individual but avoids any mention of the tribalizing effects of multiculturalism and its diminution of . . . the individual.  Among several straw man arguments, she condemns “the facile equation of Islam with terrorism” without mentioning just who ever assumed that equivalence.  The values she prizes are particularly Western, giving her desire to spread them globally a whiff of cultural imperialism.  And Dr. Nussbaum recommends role-playing to develop sympathy for “the other.”  I met an eyewitness from one progressive school in Northern California that did just that:  to develop sympathy for slaves on a ship, teachers locked students in a Quonset hut, chained to their desks surrounded by rotting fish.

In fact, Dr. Nussbaum’s book is a call not for a new humanism but for an old political correctness.  She even warns that because artworks are so effective at creating empathy, teachers must exercise “careful selectivity” so that students do not read “defective forms of `literature’” which evoke unsocial feelings and “uneven sympathies.”  Yikes!  Goodbye Salinger, Twain, Poe, O’Conner, Dostoyevsky, and Kafka.  With friends like Dr. Nussbaum, liberal arts education doesn’t need enemies.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal (June 18), Timothy Knowles, “a former teacher, principal and district leader” laments the difficulty of eliminating “low-performing teachers.”  Granted, there are abundant reasons for tenure reform at the K-12 level.  College, however, is a different matter.

Marketing his new book, Cary Nelson, spear point of the AAUP, says

I’m a dyed-in-the-wool, devout believer that you only have academic freedom and free speech if you have job security.  If you don’t have job security, you can’t speak out forcefully, and I think that means academic freedom will be diminished.

I rarely agree with Dr. Nelson, a fellow I find usually animated by left-wing, social constructivist, and Sixties sentiments, but in this case he is right.

Mr. Knowles paints administrators as ex-teachers called to a higher mission.  However, in college, many administrators have little or no classroom experience, and Mr. Knowles seems oblivious to just how political, punitive, and self-serving careerist administrators can be (just look at how many of the cases at FIRE originate from administrative excesses).  Without tenure, my campus would have no discernible conservative voice at all.  I would have been fired by at least three different college presidents for a variety of transgressions:  organizing the faculty union, suing the college, publically criticizing multiculturalism, openly opposing “student learning outcomes.”

Students can survive a poor teacher (how many great teachers are there?), but they can’t survive a university monoculture that is an ideological echo chamber.  Tenure may sometimes protect incompetent knaves but, where it still exists, tenure also protects vital intellectual pluralism.

The following column on George Orwell’s advice to free students from bad academic writing is worth reading:

http://chronicle.com/article/Bad-WritingBad-Thinking/65031/?sid=ja&utm_source=ja&utm_medium=en

In two decades of teaching, I’ve worked with exceptionally bright undergraduates. Once they enter graduate school, however, they conform to the “smelly little orthodoxies” of theory and the jargon-ridden writing of their discipline. I’ve always despised jargon that deadens prose and will be passé by the time these young conformists hit old age. Future generations will have to decipher why words and phrases such as “subaltern,” “post-structuralist,” “late capitalism” meant to the scribbling class of early 21st century academics.

The advice Orwell gives is very similar to advice Winston Churchill gave on good writing. This passage says it best (from Orwell, “Politics and the English Language”):

“Orwell leaves us with a list of simple rules:

* Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

* Never use a long word where a short one will do.

* If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

* Never use the passive where you can use the active.

* Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

* Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

I am posting this for my own students and as a reminder to myself (fallen creature that I am).

The shape of satire is circular; what a satire mocks can never be shown as improving because satire’s aim is to expose, ridicule, and thereby correct, similar folly in reality.  Nothing changes in Gulliver’s Travels or Candide because Swift and Voltaire want us to change and the world to change.

Fine satire can devastate its object.  I just finished watching 2081, The Moving Picture Institute’s film of Kurt Vonnegut’s short story “Harrison Bergeron.” Vonnegut imagines a world in which the familiar “progressive” goals of “equity” and “social justice” and “self-esteem” have been achieved . . . with a vengeance.  Vonnegut’s 2000-word reductio begins

The year was 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren’t only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General.

Equality of opportunity has become equality of outcome.  Strong people (and ballerinas) must wear weights; handsome people must wear masks; smart people must wear radios in their ears which shriek every few seconds “to keep people . . . from taking unfair advantage of their brains.”

Screenwriter/Director Chandler Tuttle and Producer Thor Halvorssen have created a tight, well-cast, well-acted, 25 minute visualization of what Richard Bernstein called “the dictatorship of virtue.”  I give the film an enthusiastic thumbs-up.

Today Peter Wood posted an article explaining how academic freedom should be a privilege for anyone who is committed to the search for truth through rational inquiry and dispassionate and scrupulous use of evidence. That includes students and administrators. His article is a response to this essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Conservative firebrand Ann Coulter was scheduled to speak at the University of Ottawa last week, having been invited by a student group at the campus. In anticipation of her speech, the University’s Vice President and Provost Francois Houle wrote her a letter warning her to use restraint, since “Canadian law puts reasonable limits on the freedom of expression,” and “promoting hatred against any identifiable group would not only be considered inappropriate, but could in fact lead to criminal charges.”

The night of Coulter’s scheduled appearance, about 2,000 angry student protesters crowded the entrance to the venue, and the fire alarm was pulled, causing everyone to have to evacuate the building. Coulter’s speech was cancelled due to fears of the protests turning violent. Apparently the chanting students had been emboldened by Houle’s letter.

It’s ironic that, rather than the calming effect it purportedly intended, Houle’s threat opened the door to so much outrage. It prompted Ed Morrow to jeu d’esprit. And Mark Steyn has an excellent response here.

At the Pope Center, Jay Schalin has a great article listing 10  discredited ideas propagated by colleges and universities. He says academics “tend to live in a theoretical universe, while the rest of America deals with real things with real consequences.” These are the myths he lists (see original article for his commentary on each):

1. There is no liberal bias in academia.
2. Everybody should go to college.
3. Academia is more noble than the business community.
4. Diversity makes everything better.
5. All faculty research is necessary and/or important.
6. Academic freedom means anything goes.
7. Higher education drives the economy.
8. Natural aptitude doesn’t matter.
9. Morality is relative.
10. All cultures are equally good.

As we have seen with Marxism, after radical movements lose credibility and die in the world at large, they remain in higher education and continue to shape the worldview of rising generations. This will also most likely be the case with the rising “sustainability” trend on campus.