NAS Blog

That is the question Scott Walter addresses in today’s Pope Center Clarion Call. He argues that the claimed threat to “academic freedom” if outsiders get to have any influence over the curriculum and the faculty is imaginary, and gives some interesting cases to support his point.

John Wilson replies to my article defending the Pope Center here.

My first response to the sleazy New Yorker hit piece by Jane Mayer on Art Pope (and spilling over onto the Pope Center) drew a reply from John Wilson on the AAUP’s blog. In today’s Pope Center piece,  I answer Wilson’s arguments that we are intent on “buying the curriculum,” imposing “ideological control,” and on subverting “academic freedom.” None of that is true. On the other hand, I maintain that if you want to find people intent on imposing ideological control but who don’t concern themselves at all with the academic integrity of colleges and universities, look no further than the mass of the professiorate.

Professor Daphne Patai of UMass-Amherst has a good post at Minding the Campus. She writes about the uniformity of thought she encounters among her fellow academics, which of course ranges from Marxist to “progressive.” One result, she observes, is that students absorb statist cliches, such as the notion that the Tea Party is rooted in racism, and rarely hear any arguments to challenge them. But when a conservative or libertarian tries to add programs, professors or speakers to provide the case for liberalism (in its original meaning) and to show how damaging the concentration of government power is, he is sure to be vilified for “undermining academic freedom” and “trying to buy the curriculum.”

No, but it’s responsible for much that is wrong in higher education, argues Naomi Schaefer Riley in her recent book The Faculty Lounges. In today’s Pope Center piece, Duke Cheston reviews the book. He agrees with the author’s conclusion that tenure has high costs but does little to uphold academic freedom, its principal justification.

The Chronicle reports:

Two conservative groups that have stirred controversy by demanding that public colleges in Michigan and Wisconsin hand over professors’ e-mails related to labor controversies have failed to produce any evidence of wrongdoing by the scholars from the documents obtained.

In March the deputy executive director of the Wisconsin Republican Party filed an Open Records Law request to see emails from University of Wisconsin history professor William Cronon’s university account. The request seems to have been a response to Cronon’s political activism – the Wisconsin Republicans were checking to see whether the professor was using his university account (at a public university) for political purposes.

The AAUP and other groups denounced the move as a violation of academic freedom. NAS president Peter Wood, however, called it petty and foolish but not an infringement of academic freedom or other rights:

I don’t know of any evidence that Professor Cronon did in fact violate any laws. It may be that the Wisconsin Republican Party is simply fishing. If so, its action is further unwelcome, not as a violation of academic freedom, but as a demonstration of small-mindedness. The better way for the Wisconsin Republican Party to answer a critic is by answering his arguments on their merits.

If Professor Cronon were in jeopardy of losing his job for what he wrote on his personal blog or published in the Times, I would agree with the AAUP and the AHA. Academic freedom in that case would be at risk. He faces no such risk.

The Wisconsin Republican Party has made no statements about its findings, so it may still be possible that the emails contain evidence of wrongdoing by Cronon. But even if it does not find such evidence, its actions were legitimate, albeit pettifogging. As the Chronicle puts it, “A Chronicle analysis of state open-records laws determined, however, that they contain no blanket exemptions for college faculty members or explicit references to the desire to protect academic freedom as grounds to withhold records from the public.”

The Office of Civil Rights for the Department of Education has retreated from its firm stance in favor of due process and put forth a new standard for enforcing campus sexual harassment codes based on “the preponderance of evidence” (rather than “clear and convincing” evidence). AAUP and FIRE are concerned that this lower bar deprives faculty, staff and students accused of the due process they need and deserve.

Keep in mind that “sexual harassment” codes extend to a wide range of behavior that is not sexual: namely, creating a “hostile environment.” The “hostile environment” category embraces speech and makes this an academic freedom concern, according to both AAUP and FIRE.

How low does this bar go? Pretty darn low. Consider a case from North Dakota where a male student (Caleb Warner) was suspended for three years after a female student accused him of rape. The police later found evidence that this woman had made a false accusation (they never happen, right?) and “lodged criminal charges [against her] . . . for filing a false police report.”

So the male student was let back on campus, right? No. Based on the “preponderance of evidence” letter just issued by OCR, North Dakota State still refused to re-consider the case. In the administration’s opinion, there was no “substantial new information” (bold for emphasis) and “Warner’s three-year suspension ‘was not a legal process but an educational one.’”

It’s a bad turn of events because in 2003 the same Office of Civil Rights was concerned with the “convict first and fast” attitude of harassment officers in areas of speech. In 2003, the Office of Civil Rights issued a statement clarifying that enforcement did not require campuses to abandon the First Amendment. Today’s OCR seems to think its lower standard is just fine, thank you. It will apply not only in cases of alleged rape but also “expressive activities” (speech).

This gutting of due process will leave administrations with the power to blur the difference between rape (a crime that must be proved, except on campuses) and innocent speech, however controversial. In either case, due process is there to prevent Star Chambers from walling themselves off from the rest of the world and declaring their authority Supreme on campus. So now places like North Dakota will stonewall and say: we don’t deal with legal processes, only educational ones.

AAUP and FIRE have fought so many of these cases that they have lost their shock value.  Indifference breeds the arrogance of power. Fortunately, faculty/staff/students can organize or speak out. In some cases, they can bring in the AAUP and FIREs of the world and “sue the bastards.” Perhaps that is the only thing that Power understands.

For more, read this FIRE FAQ on the new OCR mandates

HT: Adam Kissel

So argues Duke professor Michael Munger here.

The hard left needs to keep up a stream of pseudo-issues to keep its base whipped up. When the FSU/Koch Foundation flap stops working, they’ll replace it with something else that’s just as ridiculous.

In his speech on Saturday at the AAUP conference, Idaho State University Faculty Senate Chairman Phil Cole said,

In the words of Peter Wood, President of the National Association of Scholars, a university has a four-fold mission:  pursuit of truth, transmission of ethics, cultivation of character, and preparation for professional life.

He was quoting from Dr. Wood’s 2009 lecture in Switzerland on the Sustainability Movement in the American University.

From a letter to the editor of the Gonzaga Bulletin:

Alfino claims that performance of “The Vagina Monologues” is a matter of academic freedom.  However, academic freedom is not a blanket principle that mandates or legitimates that anything and everything can or must be done in an academic context.  It is, rather, the policy that specifies that academic life presumes the free inquiry into truth.

The author, David Calhoun (director of Gonzaga’s Socratic Club), also makes some good points about the university’s efforts to exclude dissenting voices from the conversation about the campus performance of “The Vagina Monologues.”

His letter responds to a posting by Gonzaga philosophy professor Mark Alfino, which argues that “academic freedom justifies allowing the play.”