Timothy Burke: ACTA Report, “How Many Ward Churchills?”
[Mr. Burke, a historian at Swarthmore, is a member of the HNN blog, Cliopatria.]
Are you interested in defending academic standards?
Let me tell you what I consider to be a few important academic standards. These apply across the disciplines. 1. Careful collection of evidence. 2. Constraining claims or arguments to the evidence available. 3. Proportionality of argument or analysis, especially in making demands for action or changes in practice. 4. Careful definition of key terms, concepts and methodologies used in scholarly analysis. 5. Respect for expertise and caution about making claims when you are well outside your areas of specialized knowledge.
Is ACTA interested in defending academic standards? Not judging from their lamely titled report, “How Many Ward Churchills?”.
What’s the method of the report? It’s just as bad as I feared: a casual, lazy, cherrypicking survey of whatever materials the author(s) were able to access on the web. There’s almost nothing beyond that in terms of evidence, except for citing other reports by people who are already well inside the echo chamber of the preordained argument, some of which offer exactly the same kind of “let’s take a quick run through the online catalog” evidence for their claims.
What kind of definitions of politicized content does it offer? Well, to some extent, all you have to do is be teaching about “race, class, gender, sexuality, ‘the social construction of identity’, globalization, capitalism, and US hegemony” (p. 7) to qualify as possessing “remarkable uniformity of political stance and pedagogical approach”. A syllabus that includes work that critiques or interrogates the status quo qualifies you for potential inclusion on the list of “politicized” faculty, as evidence of “remarkable homogeneity”. Having a course which has a point-of-view or argument may do so (as long as it fits ACTA’s ideological predefinition of politicization.)
There’s so much wrong here that it’s hard to know where to begin....
CLICK ON THE SOURCE LINK ABOVE TO READ THE REST OF THIS ARTICLE.
Related Links
Anne D. Neal: Churchill Fallout ... There Are More Like Him
Read entire article at Easily Distracted (blog)
Are you interested in defending academic standards?
Let me tell you what I consider to be a few important academic standards. These apply across the disciplines. 1. Careful collection of evidence. 2. Constraining claims or arguments to the evidence available. 3. Proportionality of argument or analysis, especially in making demands for action or changes in practice. 4. Careful definition of key terms, concepts and methodologies used in scholarly analysis. 5. Respect for expertise and caution about making claims when you are well outside your areas of specialized knowledge.
Is ACTA interested in defending academic standards? Not judging from their lamely titled report, “How Many Ward Churchills?”.
What’s the method of the report? It’s just as bad as I feared: a casual, lazy, cherrypicking survey of whatever materials the author(s) were able to access on the web. There’s almost nothing beyond that in terms of evidence, except for citing other reports by people who are already well inside the echo chamber of the preordained argument, some of which offer exactly the same kind of “let’s take a quick run through the online catalog” evidence for their claims.
What kind of definitions of politicized content does it offer? Well, to some extent, all you have to do is be teaching about “race, class, gender, sexuality, ‘the social construction of identity’, globalization, capitalism, and US hegemony” (p. 7) to qualify as possessing “remarkable uniformity of political stance and pedagogical approach”. A syllabus that includes work that critiques or interrogates the status quo qualifies you for potential inclusion on the list of “politicized” faculty, as evidence of “remarkable homogeneity”. Having a course which has a point-of-view or argument may do so (as long as it fits ACTA’s ideological predefinition of politicization.)
There’s so much wrong here that it’s hard to know where to begin....
CLICK ON THE SOURCE LINK ABOVE TO READ THE REST OF THIS ARTICLE.
Related Links