UNC's Group of 71

by Cliopatria

Today’s Daily Tar Heel published the letter from the 71 North Carolina faculty members demanding that the UNC administration suspend negotiations with the Pope Foundation about funding an enhanced Western Cultures initiative at the university. (The paper has also run an article and a letter from the undergraduate dean reiterating that the Pope Foundation would not dictate course content for the proposed program.) Among the Group of 71’s demands: that any program proceed only after the appointment of “an intellectually diverse faculty committee - whose proceedings will be open to the College - to clarify the definition of ‘Western Civilization’ and ‘Western Cultures’.”

This ringing endorsement of intellectual diversity heartened me. If I were a UNC administrator, I would immediately accept the group’s demands—contingent, of course, on a broader assurance that all search and curriculum committees, and not solely those regarding Western Civilization, were intellectually diverse.

Looking through the backgrounds of the signatories, I must admit I was a little surprised to see the Group of 71 hail intellectual diversity so resolutely, since it’s hard to find even one of the 71 who had previously endorsed the principle. In 2002, for instance, UNC witnessed another high-profile controversy, when it required all incoming first-year and transfer students to read and then write an essay on Michael Sells’ Approaching the Qur'an: The Early Revelations. Conservatives attacked the book for deliberately downplaying the violent elements of Islamic writings; Sells, a sharp critic of the administration’s Middle East policies, fired back by describing the philosophy of Middle East scholars such as Bernard Lewis as the “’Let’s be colonialists and do it right’ faction.” (Sells added that as American “Muslims are also now harassed in airports and encounter extreme prejudice,” they “also feel that the United States is an aggressor power and that Western powers are still aggressor powers and occupiers in the Middle East.”) In response to the selection of Sells, the North Carolina legislature threatened to defund the summer mandatory reading program.

A leader of the Group of 71, former faculty senate president Sue Estroff, didn’t seem too concerned with upholding intellectual diversity during the Sells controversy: she said that UNC should mandate the Sells-only program “come hell or high water." Dismissing calls to couple Sells with an offering from the Lewis school of interpreting Islam, Estroff defended the selection as “a terrific choice,” and described the controversy as “just bolster[ing] the case of why we have to do this. There is such a lack of knowledge about Islam.” Estroff denied that the assignment could be construed as indoctrination, since the reading wasn’t really “required” even though the university sent out letters to all incoming students saying that they had to read the book and submit a one-page paper in reaction to it."I understand what ‘required’ means on campus," she reassured one reporter. “If we had said that it’s required and if they don’t do it we will take away their admission, that’s a different matter. But it’s not a law, it has a very different meaning on campus." Hmm.

The Group of 71’s membership overlaps with that of a campus organization called the Progressive Faculty Network. PFN member and Group of 71 signatory elin o'Hara slavick (an art professor who capitalizes only the “H” in her name) has attracted controversy before: as part of a controversial “teach-in” six days after the 9/11 attack that opposed retaliation against Afghanistan and seemed to blame the United States for the attacks, o’Hara slavick showed slides of her artwork,"Places the United States has Bombed.” The sketches, which she claimed provided a “history lesson on U.S. foreign policy,"(!) depicted what she termed the devastation and destruction caused by past U.S. aerial raids.

o’Hara Slavick is joined in the PFN and the Group of 71 by Anthropology professor Don Nonini, another strong critic of the administration’s foreign policy. Shortly after 9/11, Nonini asserted,"To prevent further acts of terror, wherever they occur in the world, also requires confronting some unpalatable facts of the history of U.S. foreign policy and military intervention." This, of course, is one interpretation of the causes of terror, but I’m not sure it’s the most compelling one. Nonini has articulated some strange views in the past. In what could be termed a parody of political correctness, he hailed the non-reporting of income for tax purposes by “the working class, poorer blacks, and other minorities” a “most effective means of tax evasion,” indeed “another arena of resistance” against the “corporate economy.” To deem such actions illegal, Nonini scoffed, is “the view of the IRS and of academics servicing the business community.”

The Group of 71 includes not only the far left among the UNC faculty but also former Romance Languages chairman Frank Rodriguez, who seems to have more personal reasons for attacking the administration: he was removed from his chairmanship in the middle of the academic year after an external review committee reported that there was"bitter infighting" and"unprofessional behavior" in the department and that the faculty was"unproductive.”

What sort of curricular initiatives have the Group of 71 supported in the past? Expanded ethnic and gender studies programs, of course. And during her tenure on the faculty senate, Estroff came out for expanded coverage of tourism, which she termed “a large, active, and multidisciplinary academic area.” “Tourism yes, Western Civ no” is probably not the slogan that UNC wants as its curricular mantra. “It’s not that we shouldn’t be offering classes that deal with Western civilization, but we also need to be concerned about other perspectives and other cultures,” explained Group of 71 member and Education professor Dwight Rogers. The Pope Foundation’s"lens is very much a Euro-centric, Western civilization focus, and they don’t seem to be open to other ways of knowing.” Yet as there’s nothing in the proposal that says UNC needs to eliminate offerings “about other perspectives and other cultures,” Rogers’ complaint makes little or no sense. Is this the approach he carries to all curricular matters: that any offering that doesn't demonstrate sufficient concern"about other perspectives and other cultures" is not"open to other ways of knowing" and therefore should be rejected?

All of these professors, obviously, are entitled to publicly articulate their viewpoints on U.S. foreign policy as frequently as they desire. But their opinions about international affairs could also be described as shrill and reflexive—adjectives that characterize their response to an expanded Western cultures program at UNC. It is distressing that such faculty members regard the study of Western civilization as in and of itself anti-“progressive,” and seek to deny UNC students even the option of enrolling in additional courses about the topic, regardless of the quality of these offerings.

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Robert KC Johnson - 3/7/2005

Point taken in general, but I don't think it applies in this particular case. UNC has had a number of issues relating to intellectual diversity that have been extraordinarily high profile (the Sells controversy, a FIRE lawsuit on the university's attempt to defund a religious frat, and, most important, the OCR's public rebuke of an English lecturer Elyse Crystall for violating Title IX and the University's concession of Crystall's wrongdoing).

On the Sells question, both Estroff and slavick explicitly came out against intellectual diversity arguments. On the Crystal question, the Progressive Faculty Network, whose roster provided around 15 of the Group of 71, held an event in favor of Crystal--who the University itself (much less the OCR) conceded had violated the academic freedom of a student in her class by sending an email attacking him for being a white male Christian.

Beyond these two instances, where every member of the Group of 71 who took a public position took one that would not be perceived as friendly to intellectual diversity, the fact remains that I've been unable to uncover a previous case at UNC where any of the Group of 71 took the type of public position in favor of intellectual diversity that they did in this case. So the question remains: why did they do so here, when they had never made public statements in the past; and, for those who reversed their previous public positions, why did they do so here?

A savvy administrator, of course, would use this as an opportunity to incorporate intellectual diversity into the UNC committee structure, but I don't get a sense that the UNC administration cares much about the issue one way or the other.

Jonathan Dresner - 3/6/2005

I submit that the absence of (searchable, accessible) journalistic records regarding faculty positions on issues like diversity is the weakest possible evidence. On a matter like this, it's hard to see that it qualifies as evidence at all. There are a lot of university faculty who do not blog, or write (published) letters to the editor, or give (useable) quotations to reporters, but who nonetheless take issues of intellectual diversity seriously. In fact, reading the petition at something like face value would be prima facie evidence that the majority of the signatories fit that description.

Robert KC Johnson - 3/6/2005

As I said in my original post: I hail the group's demand that the committee be intellectually diverse, and if I were a UNC administrator, I would take them up on it immediately, provided this policy were subsequently applied to all curricular and personnel committees at the university, and not just this one.

Still, I'm suspicious of the motives here: as someone who's been quite outspoken on the issue of intellectual diversity and has written about UNC on two other issues in the past, I don't recall any of these 71 coming out in favor of intellectual diversity then, or on any other occasion. I've uncovered no evidence in searches the last few days suggesting that any of the group had previously demanded intellectually diverse committees. To demand "intellectually diverse" committees only on one type of curricular topic is masking an ideological dissent in a procedural argument.

Tim's right that I'm dealing in hypotheticals, because I don't have access to (nor, I suppose, does anyone outside of UNC have access to) the other outside grants that UNC has received over the years. But, as we all know, large universities often receive grants--whether from the NEH, FIPSE, Ford/Rockefeller, or private foundations--dealing with curricular issues. Looking through the past editions of the Daily Tar Heel, there's no evidence that any of this Group of 71 made a similar public demand regarding any other curricular grant that UNC has received.

I can see an absolutist position here: there should be no application (and, remember, the Group of 71 is demanding a suspension of all discussions) for outside grants until the subject matter proceeds through relevant college committees and another, intellectually diverse, committee establishes what an official college definition of the subject matter of the grant. This would seem to me a needlessly bureaucratic position, since any major outside curricular grant (I've gotten two thus far at CUNY) requires substantial administrative and faculty input. But I can see how a person jealous of faculty rights could adopt such a position in good faith. But, again, there's no evidence that the Group of 71 members have taken this absolutist position regarding previous grants. So they can't claim such a ground now, and say their sole motive is procedural.

Two other specific points: (1) much like some of the Title VI debates Tim cited, this is not a new curricular concept, at least as I understand it: UNC already has Western civ courses on the books. This program would expand the number of courses offered, add honors courses, etc. Presumably when these Western civ courses were originally approved, the faculty already judged them to meet its curricular criteria. It might be that some of the Group of 71 wish that such approval were never granted, but that's another matter.

(2) I agree that we don't know how the Group of 71 would react if the Ford Foundation were to come in with the exact same terms as the Pope Center, but to be applied to UNC's ethnic studies courses rather than western civ courses. Maybe a majority of the 71 would similarly issue a public letter of rebuke to the administration demanding an immediate suspension of all negotiations with Ford until an intellectually diverse committee has decided the meaning of ethnic studies. And maybe the current administration of Brooklyn College is going to nominate me for a "collegiality" award . . .

Timothy James Burke - 3/6/2005

How is that an ideological demand? I read it as a simple request: please make sure that the faculty entrusted with looking after this program aren't purely people who have a largely celebratory sense of "the Western tradition" (and such academics do yet exist) to "clarify the definition".

Asking to "clarify the definition" of the Western tradition is ideological? It strikes me as the heart of the matter, and in fact, possibly the most interesting intellectual question that the "Western tradition" raises: what is it, how shall we know it, are do we separate out the thing itself from the many dramatically different claims made about it or on its behalf. If someone wanted to fund a program of this kind, I'd very much want to do the same thing, precisely because "the Western tradition" means such a variety of things to various individuals.

If a donor wants to give money to fund "the history of Mexico", to go to an earlier example brought up in this conversation, while there may be some debate about what the limits of that field might be, it's still a relatively concrete topic. If a donor wants to fund "film studies", the same, though in that case there might be a specific debate about whether that meant critical theory of film or film production or both. In either case, the number of people involved in that debate would legitimately be small and the focus of the debate fairly narrow. But funding "the Western tradition"? That's legitimately an instance where you want intellectual diversity involved--virtually the whole of an academic community might have a stake in the discussion--and where you would of necessity have to insist on the contentiousness of the definitional effort.

I think you should take this request as a good thing, and just ask how the Group of 71 intends to insure that this discussion include people who have a largely positive sense of the "Western tradition".

Would they show such diligence in the case of an ethnic studies program? Some of them just might. Certainly I know that Title VI programs in various "area studies" areas tend to engender a lot of debate among the faculty called upon to deal with them. In most cases, faculty come into institutions which have had Title VI programs for years, so it's not so much about exercising diligence over a decision yet to be made. But I can think of at least one institution where the faculty decided to turn down a Title VI opportunity precisely because of concerns about how tightly it might restrict academic freedom in the affected areas of inquiry and teaching.

If you've got a concrete example of faculty that you think failed to demonstrate due diligence about something like "ethnic studies" funded by an outside foundation, please cite it. Don't traffic in hypotheticals. Deal with what this group has done and has said on paper. On paper, their letter is anything but ideological: it's process-oriented and makes no specific claims or demands about "the Western tradition" save that it requests that the meaning of this concept be defined in an open and intellectually diverse manner. How can you possibly object to that, unless you're the one with an ideological sense, a belief that the Western tradition can and must mean one clearly defined thing?

It's very clear that some of the signatories have additional motives. Some almost certainly do not. That's irrelevant. You have to deal with what they've said on paper, what they've actually asked for, and I think it's a significant distortion to deem any aspect of that "ideological".

Robert KC Johnson - 3/6/2005

The letter does raise due-diligence issues (although, as we've seen from the administration's responses, it appears as if the claims of "secrecy" or Pope Foundation dictation made in the letter are, at best, considerably overblown).

But the letter also attacks the Pope Center on ideological grounds, and makes the demand that the administration "appoint an intellectually diverse faculty committee - whose proceedings will be open to the College - to clarify the definition of 'Western Civilization' and 'Western Cultures.'"

The ideological issue is therefore present from the start, in both the letters and in the public comments about the letter of Nonini and Estroff.

The other issue here, of course, is how legitimate the due-diligence matter is for the signatories. Have they made similar demands every time the university or members of the university have sought outside funding on curricular initiatives? If they have, their due-diligence argument could be taken at face value; if they haven't (as seems likely), their due-diligence argument seems less significant.

If, for instance, the proposal centered around a Ford Foundation grant to bolster the UNC ethnic studies program by funding honors courses, increased undergraduate offerings, and study abroad opportunities in the Third World for UNC students, would any of the Group of 71 have signed such a letter?

Timothy James Burke - 3/6/2005

But the letter, KC, just really speaks to the due diligence issues I've noted before. That's what the signatories signed; that's what the "71" is about. If some of the 71 have other readings of their motives, interests, understandings of their actions, engage them critically as individuals--don't bring it back to the 71 and their leter.

Robert KC Johnson - 3/6/2005

I chose Nonini, Estroff, and Rodriguez not because I cherry picked but because they are the only three of the Group of 71 who have been quoted, in multiple stories (both in wire services and in the campus newspaper), and therefore have emerged as the group's de facto public voices. I picked o'Hara slavick because she has been a driving force on a variety of protest-related events on campus. As far as I know, Bennett, Burns, Grossberg, and Wooten haven't been quoted: if they had been, perhaps they would have offered a more convincing rationale for the group's case.

I explicitly said nothing about the group's scholarship--for all I know, all 71 might be deserving of Pulitzer Prizes--or whether any or all deserved tenure at UNC. I suspect that many if not all are fine scholars. (o'Hara slavick might be an exception.) There is, however, a difference between whether someone deserves tenure and whether someone's ideas, on broad policy issues related to curricular matters, deserve influence. (The Noam Chomsky rule, perhaps . . .) It is the signatories themselves, in their letter and subsequently in their comments, who explicitly brought political ideology into this question, both by denouncing the proposed grant on the grounds of the Pope Center's conservative ideology and by demanding an "intellectually diverse" committee to evaluate this but only this one one curricular question at UNC.

Since the signatories raised the question, it's perfectly legitimate to look at their views on political issues, to determine the lens through which, by their own admission, they're viewing this matter. I don't think I've in any way misrepresented their viewpoints, as based on their public comments about this and other issues. (Maybe on other matters in which they haven't been quoted previously, they're nuanced moderates or thoughtful radicals, but I doubt it.) Do I wish that they were approaching this question as an academic rather than as largely a political one? Absolutely. But they're not, and that's their decision, not mine.

Timothy James Burke - 3/5/2005

KC:

Let me observe something. Looking at the signatories to the letter, I can do exactly what you've done and hand-pick some names from the list.

Let's try: Judith Bennett. Well-respected medievalist and social historian, author of a biographical study of a medieval peasant, on the economic and social history of the brewing industry in medieval England with particular attention to women's roles.

Kathryn Burns. Historian of Latin America. Author of a careful, meticulous social history of convents in colonial Peru.

Lawrence Grossberg. One of the major figures in cultural studies scholarship in the US. Careful, meticulous and generous in his writing and at professional meetings.

Cecil Wooten, classics. Has written on oratory in classical Greece and Rome, on Cicero's Philippics.

---

I just want to observe that in *any* petition or campaign by faculty, you're going to find on the signatories list a variety of types of academics. You're going to find respectable, careful, diligent scholars. You're going to find marginal oddballs. You're going to find people who signed to please a friend and others whose political agenda is actually much more extreme than the petition but who are settling for the petition for the moment.

I think it's bad practice to find a few signatories that you can produce a highly negative portrait of and pass them off as representative. I have no idea where you are getting the sense that none of these 71 have ever endorsed intellectual diversity, or even where you derive your sense that the few you've cherry-picked are representative of the whole. In a few cases, I really worry about your reasoning, as in your characterization of Frank Rodriguez. I have no idea what his views are on anything, but to assume that he signed because of an antipathy to the UNC administration, as a gesture of revenge, is a great example of ad hominem argument.

KC, what especially bothers me is that in some of your postings on these topics, and especially in this one, you seem to be doing something that bears a passing kinship to what was done to you. Here you're cobbling together statements in the public sphere from a cherry-picked sample and using that to impugn the general scholarly or professional judgement of an entire group of people. How different is that from your colleagues trying to infer an undeclared motive for your expressed views about a departmental search, playing a kind of malicious "connect-the-dots" smear campaign, ignoring your scholarship and general professional rectitude, and so on?

I think if you're going to critique this petition you should do it first, foremost and perhaps exclusively on the grounds of what the petition itself actually says and the issues it raises. There's grounds to do that, in my judgement, if you want. If you feel the need to discuss your sense of the motives that underlie the petition, then I think you need to have the evidentiary meticulousness that would go into good scholarship. If you're going to characterize the motives or political intent of this entire group of people, talk about the entire group. Tell me how you've made a judgement than none of these 71 care about intellectual diversity. Tell me why you think Estroff or Nonini stand in for the whole. For that matter, tell me how you judge that Nonini's "strange views" are representative of his work as a scholar. I know Nonini primarily for a careful monograph on British colonial rule in Malaysia. I wouldn't want somebody cherry-picking my blog, finding an essay about Ren & Stimpy, and saying, "This is a guy who cares more about cartoon boogers than African history".