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On Monday, Ralph mentioned the peculiar Inside Higher Ed column from Alan Jones, dean of the faculty and professor of psychology and neuroscience at Pitzer College. The piece provided a conspiratorial analysis of how the dreaded “well-funded right-wing think-tanks” seek to take over the academy. Leaving aside the logical discrepancies in Jones’ argument, to which Ralph’s post provided a link, Jones’ closing suggested a figure whose viewpoint is not, to put it mildly, mainstream: “The academy stands today as one of the last spaces in America where the democratic ideas that shape the social, economic and political fabric of the nation can be openly and independently debated on the basis of their merits and without coercion or distortion from vested economic and political interests.”
As often occurs in Inside Higher Ed columns, the most (unintentionally) revealing commentary came from defenders of the status quo, who praised Jones for his courage and clarity of argument. One professor, who said that she works in a department whose “mainstream view . . . is evangelical Christian,” pronounced herself “very worried about the assault on academic freedom being launched by the right wing because historically every dictator has attacked the intelligentsia in order to consolidate power.” She added that she had “never met anyone in academia remotely resembling Ward Churchill.” I suspect that few professors at evangelical colleges have. But then again, evangelical colleges, unlike public or secular universities, don’t promise to respect academic freedom.
An Education professor from North Carolina discerned the motives of the academy’s critics: “Our commitment to reasoned discourse is a threat to conservative hegemony, which depends on fear, distraction, irrationality, and deception.” (Michigan State’s Ira Socol agreed: the critics simply wanted “the ability of their right-wing-raised children to opt out of being intellectually challenged.”) Anyhow, the UNC professor added, it didn’t matter if classes were biased, since “education is always political . . . learning either prepares people to accept the status quo or to change it.” Such statements, of course, only confirm the concerns of the groups that Jones’ essay attacked.
Donald Lazere, an English professor from the University of Tennessee whose homepage shows him at a campus protest rally, likewise seemed to celebrate biased instruction. “Conservatives,” he mused, “cannot or will not acknowledge that whatever liberal bias humanities faculties might have, they serve as a minimal counter-agent to the vast apparatus of conservative bias resulting from the billions of dollars corporations, the corporate wealthy, and foreign governments spend annually on public relations, advertising, lobbies, PACs, law firms, media ownership, foundations, think tanks, and advocacy organizations like Horowitz’s.”
Lazere also argued that his students require such an education. “The large majority of my students have identified themselves as coming from conservative communities and have acknowledged that their main sources of information are primarily their parents, peers, churches, and media like Fox News and talk radio. Far from ‘thinking for themselves’ many of them simply parrot the views they have been indoctrinated with by these sources, by the political party that currently controls the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of federal government, the military, and the corporations and lucrative professions that most students hope to work for.” Setting aside this stunningly dismissive view of Tennessee’s student body, Lazere did not indicate how he ascertained that “the large majority” of his students had “acknowledged” that they relied on media like Fox News for information. Indeed, while Fox is the largest cable news channel, its ratings run well behind either network or local news broadcasts. But apparently, according to Lazere, the cable channel enjoys extraordinary support among students who choose the University of Tennessee.
Some of the comments seemed almost willfully ignorant. Responding to critics who noted his selective condemnation of ideological mission statements, Jones hypothesized, “Nowhere in the Academy will you find organizations whose ideological focus is as clearly defined as is in those [mission] statements” of “the Manhattan Institute, the Hoover Intitution [sic] and the American Enerprise [sic] Institute.” Perhaps Jones didn’t come across Robin Wilson’s Chroniclearticle on dispositions, which quoted from such Education Department mission statements as Alabama’s (“The College of Education is committed to preparing individuals to promote social justice, to be change agents, and to recognize individual and institutionalized racism, sexism, homophobia, and classism. It includes educating individuals to break silences about these issues, propose solutions, provide leadership, and develop anti-racist, anti-homophobic, anti-sexist community and alliances”) or Brooklyn’s (“We educate teacher candidates and other school personnel about issues of social injustice such as institutionalized racism, sexism, classism, and heterosexism . . . These efforts will help to ensure input from all stakeholders and to generate opportunities for everyone to be co-owners, thus shifting the balance of power in ways that create a truly democratic society”). This rhetoric would match in ideological focus anything the Manhattan Institute could offer.
The most piercing comments came from a figure dubbing him/herself “Unapologetically Tenured,” who was previously heard from at Inside Higher Ed arguing that Ward Churchill should get a pass for his academic misconduct. In this comment thread, he/she seemed especially concerned with ACTA, and demanded that the organization publicize its donor list: “Sunlight, after all, is the best disinfectant, right ACTA?” U.T.—whose nom de plume perhaps hides a sense of shame about the manner in which he/she received tenure—seemed unable to detect the irony of a figure posting under a pseudonym demanding “sunlight” from others.
U.T., who made several posts, regularly detected a tendency toward “ACTA-like unspported [sic] assertion. Evidence, please,” he/she demanded of Jones’ critics. Yet the anonymity of “Apologetically Tenured” meant that he/she didn’t have to hold him/herself to his/her own standard. For instance, he/she assured Inside Higher Ed readers that “those faculty who do regularly interject their views into their lectures treat their students with respect and would never dream of penalizing them for holding differing opinions.” The “evidence” for this “ACTA-like unspported [sic] assertion”? The word of an anonymous poster. “As far as hiring and tenure decisions, I have never—never—heard a candidate’s ideology mentioned in any committee meeting.” The “evidence” for this “ACTA-like unspported [sic] assertion”? The word of an anonymous poster. There are “thousands of conservative faculty, administrators, and students at every college and university in the United States and 99.9% face no difficulties whatsoever, unless, of course, one asserts a right never to have to encounter an opinion contrary to one’s own. Obnoxious right-wing faculty and students violate standards of collegiality and provoke overreactions from well-meaning colleagues, and then try to claim that their cases are typical.” The “evidence” for this “ACTA-like unspported [sic] assertion”? The word of an anonymous poster. I’d need a little more to be convinced that those subjected to “collegiality” cases are the victims of “well-meaning colleagues.”
It’s easy to dismiss statements from figures such as Lazere, Socol, or Jones as coming from an unrepresented minority; indeed, there’s no way of knowing whether someone like U.T. is even an academic at all. But their sentiments are shared by prominent figures within the academy. For instance, Joan Scott, immediate past chair of the AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure, recently criticized the work of FIRE. Apart from its “questionable motives,” she asserted, FIRE had “an evident desire to shift the emphasis of the public conversation about higher education to individual merit and the diversity of ideas and away from the importance of opening the university to many different social, economic, and demographic constituencies.” In the process, its position effectively defended the negative hierarchies of “enforced exclusions based on race and gender and that reformers sought to overturn in the name of social justice.”
An academy where promoting “individual merit” and the “diversity of ideas” can be seen as a potentially negative development seems to be one where Jones, Lazere, and U.T. would be very much at home. But the willingness to make such statements"unapologetically" in the public eye might lead some to suggest that U.T., et. al., are actually secret agents of ACTA, providing concrete evidence for the existence of out-of-touch tenured radicals.
I realize that "many religious or conservative institutions like BYU and Patrick Henry could be accused of a similar contradiction. Very few institutions get up and say, "We are committed to a narrow, unfree, highly political or social agenda which strongly suppresses the freedom of thought or action of our faculty and students."
But does anyone outside of Mormons/fundamentalists or strongly conservative ideologues really believe such claims? In my mind, it's a settled question that institutions such as BYU or Patrick Henry or Liberty are trying to shape students' opinions on a range of political and social questions. It's one reason why I think very few people, outside of adherents to whatever religion dominates the school, consider such colleges to be first-rate. Perhaps I'm wrong about this?
On the other hand, secular schools that promote "social justice"-type curricula have by and large maintained a degree of public faith in the fairmindedness of their curricula that strikes me as unwarranted. And, of course, there are serious First Amendment problems with an issue such as dispositions applied to public institutions, which cannot screen out students on the basis of their political beliefs. Ditto with schools such as Evergreen, Portland State, or CSU-Monterey Bay, which are public schools but have unabashedly left-leaning curricula.
Timothy James Burke -
6/23/2006
In one sense, if a private secular college says, "We believe that the principle of social justice is an important part of our curriculum, and we expect our courses to speak to that priority", isn't that doing exactly what you say they have a right to do? If you take "social justice" as a left or liberal project, then isn't that declaration just the equivalent of Patrick Henry or BYU? You might protest that the private secular college in this case would claim to be open or academically free or whatever, but Patrick Henry and BYU do not claim to be narrow, sectarian, or any of the other pejorative terms one might use to characterize their commitments. In fact, I wonder if BYU would even accept a characterization of their institution as "conservative", or having a specifically political value system. They, too, would claim a commitment to academic excellence, open research, and so on--just within constraints, just that their constraints are in their view compatible with the pursuit of knowledge.
In that sense, why is proclaiming an institutional interest in social justice different? The institutions in question would say that they are commited to openness, academic freedom, and so on, and insist that "social justice" is not a political or narrow constraint on that openness.
The essence of your argument is that you simply do not agree with that claim, that you read "social justice" as a quite constraining commitment that contradicts what these institutions say they are attempting to be or do. But really, many religious or conservative institutions like BYU and Patrick Henry could be accused of a similar contradiction. Very few institutions get up and say, "We are committed to a narrow, unfree, highly political or social agenda which strongly suppresses the freedom of thought or action of our faculty and students."
My underlying point here is that you need a better positive or affirmative model of what freedom looks like, of what you mean by academic freedom, a description of the practices you would like to see, and not just a case-by-case critique of the particular practices which happen to most dramatically stick in your craw. Or you need a much more consciously cavalier blogging persona, where you write what you like because that's what you do--I think Margaret Soltan's critiques have that character. She's not pretending to be holding people to a consistent set of standards, she's just needling people about the things which draw her own eye.
Right now, you want the force of critique that comes with a consistently worked-out theoretical position about what people should be doing, but I don't think you've shown your hand in a way that explains why your attention is drawn where it is and not where it isn't. I want to think that you've got a relatively even-handed view of what academic practice ought to be, the way that Nat Hentoff's free-speech fundamentalism fairly consistently leads him to attack just about anybody he thinks is violating free-speech rights, right left or center (well, he does have his hobbyhorses, most prominently abortion, but that's another issue). But your eye is drawn so specifically and insistently to a relatively constrained range of problems, almost all of them identifiably "left", that it's hard not to think that this is less about a deep vision of academic standards and more about being "political".
Michael R. Davidson -
6/23/2006
A minor point Robert - Patrick Henry does, in a tortured, convoluted fashion, make a claim to Academic Freedom:
Prof. Lazere's comments really stand for themselves. But I'm struck by his belief that we should embrace "Jefferson’s model of universal, FREE, tax-supported liberal education at all levels, dedicated to overcoming the power of the wealthy and corporations over government and public opinion, and to teaching students to “question with boldness even the existence of a God."
Nothing even resembling such a system, of course, existed in Jefferson's time. And I can't think of any period in American history where anywhere close to a majority believed such a politicized view of education would be proper.
I also disagree with Prof. Lazere's approach that our goal as professors should be to "familiarize students with all these media, on both sides," and therefore ensure that if students get most of their current events from one segment of the media, we should shade our courses to offer the "other" side. Prof. Lazere is quite passionate in denouncing anti-intellectualism, but that strikes me as an incredibly simplistic pedagogy to teach a course in History.
Robert KC Johnson -
6/23/2006
To me, the fundamental difference between, say, dispositions and the AEI, Manhattan Inst., ACTA, etc. is that with the latter we're not talking about academic appointments/people who teach. It's quite clear that the AEI is conservative, the Manhattan Institute is basically libertarian, ACTA is more interested in right-of-center issues--just as the Ford or Rockefeller Foundations tend to be more interested in left-of-center matters. But the AEI or the Manhattan Inst. aren't "in the academy"--they're private groups with no academic affiliation, like the Ford Foundation or the Rockefeller Foundation.
I have no problem with outside groups from both sides playing a role in higher education--giving grants, commenting on issues, etc. In fact, as you know from some of my earlier posts, I welcome it. But I don't see how we can compare, say, ACTA--which employs no professors and teaches no students--to dispositions theory--a policy that involved hundreds of professors teaching thousands of students nationwide.
You're right that I don't comment very much about BYU; Patrick Henry-like instances--partially because there's little news here. My position has been pretty consistent--religious or private right-wing colleges have every right to discriminate on the basis of ideology. And the rest of us have every right (as I think most of us at Cliopatria do) to state that we don't consider such colleges to be educationally first-rate because they make no claim to academic freedom.
My objections focus on actions at public or private secular colleges that claim they don't discriminate on the basis of ideology, or claim that uphold academic freedom and diversity of ideas in their coursework, but don't seem to do so. Private secular colleges, if they so chose, have every right to discriminate in favor of left-leaning views, just as BYU has every right to discriminate in favor of right-leaning views. But they claim not to do so. And, of course, public colleges have no right to discriminate on the basis of perceived political views at all.
In general, I think it's a good think for the academy to have a diversity of pedagogical approaches. BYU doesn't, which is why I wouldn't recommend anyone I know going there. But what strikes me as remarkable in a field like History is that the last 15 or so years have featured conscious decisions to narrow the range of questions historians can legitimately consider at colleges that claim, unlike BYU, to be open-minded. This strikes me as an extraordinary development.
Timothy James Burke -
6/23/2006
KC, if I can go to one limited point in this exchange, you suggest that Jones, Lazere and other commentators are at fault for seeing the American Enterprise, Hoover and Manhattan Institutes as being highly ideological while overlooking something like dispositions.
Aren't you vulnerable to a version of the same complaint? I appreciate that you wrote recently about BYU: that seems to me evidence that you're trying to think about how the ideals you profess ought to apply across the ideological spectrum. But on the other hand, dispositions and similar issues occupy your attention in a way that highly ideological groups, disciplines, and institutions that lean rightward do not.
Now from my own perspective, I can see some differences--in fact, I have no problem with AEI, Hoover or Manhattan as such. I think highly focused institutes and centers of study with strong viewpoints are a good thing in the academy. You could argue that in contrast, educational training a general curricular project, a gateway through which many must pass in order to gain certifications to carry out a basic professional license, and therefore carries a different burden,a different need for neutrality.
The point is that making this distinction requires a fine-grained attention to the structure of curricula, to underlying understandings, to consistent views of professionalism. A lot of the sloppier criticisms of "politicization", which I think you sometimes verge into, don't have that kind of precision, and so leave themselves vulnerable to the charge of inconsistency; indeed, of incoherency. For example, in ACTA's recent complaints, it's impossible to tell why they wouldn't object to courses offered by conservative academic institutions or projects with equal vigor to those with a perceptible leftward tilt, why Hoover shouldn't be as alarming as Hamilton College's Kirkland Project. But of course, they are not concerned with courses that have a conservative (or any other than left) political bent or emphasis. Or for that matter, why financial or institutional affiliations between leftwing academics and leftwing political campaigns should be worth attention while the financial connections of rightwing think tanks and organizations with an interest in higher education should be beside the point. Why shouldn't transparency of interests and funding be a universally applicable demand around advocacy for higher education? Why shouldn't a group like ACTA commit to the kind of transparency it advocates for others?
This is why I think it's really imperative for you to continue to work out some relatively consistent view of academic professionalism and then figure out what practices are most in violation of that professionalism, and some consistent position about what makes them the most urgent priority in your view. As it stands, I feel most of the time as if your cart leaves the stable well before the horse, that your attention is drawn not by an underlying theory of academic professionalism, but by more superficially political red flags. You leave me desperate for a kind of affirmative description of how we ought to behave as scholars and intellectuals that is independent of you flogging some of your habitual victims, that is without a "This is bad, but the left is worse" kind of coda.
Donald Lazere -
6/23/2006
So where is the serious scholarly discussion I invited about the proper relation of higher education to public opinion and political authority? I would have expected Prof. Johnson and other conservatives to weigh in with Plato, Leo Strauss, and Allan Bloom against the contamination of elite education and government by the ignorant masses. Not a problem, when the masses support your side politically?
Johnson:
As to Prof. Lazere's post: I don't see that there's anything out of context in my quotes of his work. As he notes above, we live in "a dominant public atmosphere, that denigrates the value of Jeffersonian education for critical citizenship."
That seems, at the very least, to be a considerable overstatement: measured by almost any poll, support for public education in this country (even, I suspect, in Knoxville, TN) is very strong.
Response:
I now understand the comment about Prof. Johnson’s penchant for obfuscating. Does he or anyone else here really believe that the level of support for public education, poor thing that it is in this era of tax-busting Republicans, is based on high regard for liberal education and civic literacy, rather than on its perceived economic and occupational benefits? How many parents are strongly supportive of Jefferson’s model of universal, FREE, tax-supported liberal education at all levels, dedicated to overcoming the power of the wealthy and corporations over government and public opinion, and to teaching students to “question with boldness even the existence of a God"? Is that Prof. Johnson’s ideal of public education? If not, what IS? Incidentally, how would Prof. Johnson compare Jefferson’s intellectual stature with that of George W. Bush? Which should we teach our students to emulate?
Johnson:
Leaving aside the likelihood that in a country where something like 5% of their people get their news from Fox that a "large majority" of students in Prof. Lazere's class would do so, the question is: so what??
Response:
Another decontextualized quotation. Check the context of my full sentence. My students’ beliefs such as that the 9/11 hijackers were from Iraq are consonant with studies by the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland finding that Americans who rely heavily on Fox and talk radio are most likely to be misinformed about such facts.
By the way, if conservative media and political forces have so little influence, and if the Democratic party, liberal media, teachers, and students are so prevalent, how on earth have the Republicans become the majority party and gained control of all three branches of federal and many state governments? Us liberals must be doing SOMETHING wrong, so why don’t conservatives rejoice over our feeble influence rather than getting hysterical about it? Hmm?
Johnson:
If a "large majority" of students in my class got their news from NPR, should I teach a "conservative" course to deprogram them?
Response:
In that delightful but unlikely event, or better yet if most students were getting their info from The Nation and Pacifica Radio, you should indeed teach a conservative course, as I would! Don’t you agree that that we should familiarize students with all these media, on both sides, and teach them to evaluate opposing ones against each other?
Johnson:
Several commenters on the IHE thread likewise wondered what relevance his students' TV viewing habits had to his classroom content, but Prof. Lazere seemed reluctant to respond.
Response:
I did respond, that many of my students cite Bill O’Reilly’s, Ann Coulter’s, and Rush Limbaugh’s broadcasts and books as sources in class discussion or research papers, without questioning their accuracy. For examples, see my column in The Chronicle of Higher Education, at http://chronicle.com/weekly/v50/i43/43b01501.htm
Here’s another Limbaugh gem that my students have cited, from See, I Told You So:
“Is it possible that supply-side economics could have existed before the 1980s? Yes. Read the story of Joseph and Pharaoh in Genesis 41. Following Joseph’s suggestion (Gen. 41:34), Pharaoh reduced the tax on Egyptians to 20 percent during the ‘seven years of plenty’ and the ‘Earth brought forth in heaps’ (Gen 41-47).”
I assign all my students, many of them fundamentalist Christians, to check out their Bible on this, yet even then, some resist conceding that Rush made up the reference to taxes here out of whole cloth, as is his wont. Prof. Johnson, is this a guy you really want on your side? Thomas Jefferson, where are thou?
So long, it’s been fun, but I have more challenging matters to attend to.
Robert KC Johnson -
6/22/2006
CP: thanks, as always, for the kind words.
As to Prof. Lazere's post: I don't see that there's anything out of context in my quotes of his work. As he notes above, we live in "a dominant public atmosphere, that denigrates the value of Jeffersonian education for critical citizenship."
That seems, at the very least, to be a considerable overstatement: measured by almost any poll, support for public education in this country (even, I suspect, in Knoxville, TN) is very strong.
Leaving aside the likelihood that in a country where something like 5% of their people get their news from Fox that a "large majority" of students in Prof. Lazere's class would do so, the question is: so what? If a "large majority" of students in my class got their news from NPR, should I teach a "conservative" course to deprogram them? Several commenters on the IHE thread likewise wondered what relevance his students' TV viewing habits had to his classroom content, but Prof. Lazere seemed reluctant to respond.
Ralph E. Luker -
6/22/2006
Glad you got that off your chest, Chris -- not that you haven't said it a thousand times already. Your rant gets real old and tired. Your attitude toward KC isn't shared by the most distinguished publishers in the western world who publish his work.
Apart from that, next time you comment, why don't you discuss the issues rather than the personalities of the group members at Cliopatria?
chris l pettit -
6/22/2006
I think that is where you go wrong. To consider KC a serious scholar is a fundamental mistake, as is to consider many of the readers of HNN and Cliopatria "scholars" in any form. To attempt to debate or reason with them using any sort of critical analysis and rationality is like bouncing a ball off a brick wall...the ball might change shape given some of the wisdoms that accidently escape from the ignorance, but the ideologues themselves will be unswerved in their fervent faith. KC is more like a member of a religious cult than a scholar of any sort...when he is shown to be incorrect, he resorts to semantical manipulation and the use of misinformation or convoluted reasoning to try and "change the subject"...much as many politicials and current members of the religion of US nationalism do. There is little to no hope of actual discussion or debate. Dr. Luker is slightly better, but oftentimes flies off the handle when one of his sacred zones or "colleagues" are breached. There are an equal number of loonies on the left on these pages, from Mr. Baker to Mr. Proyect.
I direct students to this site to demonstrate some rare decent examples of scholarly writing...even a few posts appearing on Clio. But for the most part, I send them here to see the paucity of artificial "scholars" and their ideological ramblings...examples of how not to crtitically analyze an issue...and a decent listing of relevant historical articles and issues (Dr. Luker does do that well).
I think your hope that readers and the scholars here will actually analyze the issues and readings will end up being fruitless...except for a few exceptions that will hopefully interject some sense into the discussion.
For my part, I have often posted on how relevant Parsig's book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is to the present debate over the politicization of the university. Ideologues from all sides are causing the university to transform from a place of learning and critical analysis to a place of indoctrination. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the law schools of this country, where an almost unquestions ideological bias towards legal positivism has made law schools into trade schools...no critical legal theory is taught...international law is taught from the view of the US and its nationalists (which means it does not exist except when it suits us)...law itself disappears in favor of the application of rules handed down by a power majority with no essence of law, but rather only in the power to enforce. As a result, our legal culture has been poisoned to the point that it is at currently...which then only continues to serve the ideologues on either side. Denialists like KC will either argue that it is only happening on one side, is a "correction," or is simply being more "democratic." I am still waiting for KC to adopt a position advocating the teaching of communism or facisim as a viable "alternative" to democracy...not because he believes in them (which he does not to my knowledge)...but because that is the only position that would be consistent with his insistence on the introducation of equally flawed and biased ideologies...he needs to basically admit that the university should simply become a battle of ideologies instead of an environment where critical analysis, rationality, logic, and human reason flourish (which would ironically eliminate many of his ideological shortcomings from introduction to the university).
CP
Donald Lazere -
6/22/2006
I am responding to Professor Johnson’s mischaracterization of my recent postings on Inside Higher Education. Since he echoes the “quotation out of context” fallacy of a couple of the conservative contributers like “Clawmuth” I am copying below the complete pertinent sections of my postings for your readers to judge them for themselves and respond to. I do not expect them to agree with my views of the political forces behind the recent assault on the academy, However, I hope that they will address in good faith the questions I raise about the responsibility of higher education to teach students to think critically, and for themselves, about the political forces and special interests influencing their lives, and what the best pedagogical practices for achieving this daunting task might be. I hope they will also seriously address the question of whether college faculties’ and their students’ views should simply follow majority public opinion and government administration of the moment, or should pursue intellectual independence and the longer historical view, in the spirit of Thomas Jefferson, urging his nephew Peter Carr, to “Question with boldness even the existence of a God, because if there is one, He must more approve more of the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear.”
Professor Johnson doubts my account of my students’ conservatism and asks how I ascertain their students’ political views and sources of information. First, I have taught for over thirty years, mainly at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, and more recently the University of Tennessee, both in heavily Republican areas with student bodies known to be primarily conservative (and overwhelmingly white, by the way, except for varsity athletes). The English courses I teach, mainly in argumentative writing and critical thinking, are General Education requirements for students mostly in business, pre-professional, or technological majors, many of whom would not choose to take any courses other than those that contribute directly toward their getting a job, and who consequently are not inclined to appreciate any course obliging them to question their received ideas. Do any of your readers endorse a view of education that is exclusively vocational or technical, at the expense of civic literacy, as some of the commentators on IHE seem to?
At the beginning of each course, I pass out an ANONYMOUS questionnaire about students’ political background, views, and sources of information, as well, recently, as ANONYMOUSLY polling their factual knowledge of current events like 9/11 and the Iraq War. (The large majority have said that some or most of the 9/ll hijackers were from Iraq.) Is this so hard for you to believe, concerning a pool of students, and a dominant public atmosphere, that denigrates the value of Jeffersonian education for critical citizenship, whether of a liberal or conservative scholarly bent? My students do not clamor to read Burke, Hayek, and Strauss (whom I would be delighted to teach), but consider Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, and Bill O’Reilly legitimate scholarly sources.
Here, then, are my IHE postings. I urge your readers, as serious scholars, to consider the substantive issues raised here in good faith, not just to perpetuate “gotcha!” games with decontextualized quotations and “tu quoque” accusations.
June 17
Conservatives cannot or will not acknowledge that whatever liberal bias humanities faculties might have, they serve as a minimal counter-agent to the vast apparatus of conservative bias resulting from the billions of dollars corporations, the corporate wealthy, and foreign governments spend annually on public relations, advertising, lobbies, PACs, law firms, media ownership, foundations, think tanks, and advocacy organizations like Horowitz’s. The incessant attack by the right on the academic left is a red herring designed to distract public attention from this apparatus. The exposure, finally, of the corruption of politics by the vast network of corporate lobbies in which Abramoff and Tom DeLay were at the center makes glaringly clear the true proportions of who wields political and cultural power in America.
June 18
Clawmute and JBM seem to have a view of college education that is strangely divorced from its traditional goal of educating students for informed, critical citizenship.
I have taught English courses, mostly general-education requirements for non-majors, primarily in argumentative writing and critical thinking, in half-a-dozen colleges, public and private. The large majority of my students have identified themselves as coming from conservative communities and have acknowledged that their main sources of information are primarily their parents, peers, churches, and media like Fox News and talk radio. Far from “thinking for themselves” many of them simply parrot the views they have been indoctrinated with by these sources, by the political party that currently controls the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of federal government, the military, and the corporations and lucrative professions that most students hope to work for (whose vast propaganda apparatus I detailed in my last posting).
So why are conservatives so terrified by the thought that college students, perhaps for the only time in their lives, should be exposed to views that differ from those which control most other aspects of their lives? Teaching them to think for themselves begins with challenging them to question their own biases and those of their accustomed sources of information, and with presenting opposing, liberal or leftist scholarly or journalistic sources—whose views virtually all eventually admit that they have never really heard expressed systematically, by their proponents, as opposed to the straw-man distortions of them in conservative sources.
To be sure, it is a daunting pedagogical challenge to try to balance the scales against conservative indoctrination without lurching into the opposite form, or without appearing to. The most scrupulous efforts to do so, however, are unavoidably perceived by many conservative students, parents, and critics—whose own biases they are blind to—merely as “liberal bias.” And this misperception has been exploited by demagogues like David Horowitz and ACTA, who (as a mirror image of the straw-man faculty leftists they attack) themselves manipulatively incite ingenuous conservative students to wage complaints against any teachers who challenge their biases.
This is not to deny that some liberal or leftist teachers are less than totally scrupulous. Conservative attack groups, however, show little concern for distinguishing them from the most scrupulous, but deliberately erase any such distinction in their pursuit of headlines, political capital, foundation funding booty, and eliminating any remnant of opposition to right-wing control of American society.
June 20
Clawmute writes, “I think the position adopted by Mr. Lazere — that political bias in higher education is justifiable as a counterweight to the political pressures of conservatives in other venues of society — is not going to sit well with the public at large. (Is there anyone who disagrees with Mr. Lazere, other them JBM and me?)”
S/he and JBM seem to have a reading impairment. Here is what I wrote on June 18: “To be sure, it is a daunting pedagogical challenge to try to balance the scales against conservative indoctrination without lurching into the opposite form, or without appearing to. The most scrupulous efforts to do so, however, are unavoidably perceived by many conservative students, parents, and critics—whose own biases they are blind to—merely as ‘liberal bias.’ And this misperception has been exploited by demagogues like David Horowitz and ACTA, who (as a mirror image of the straw-man faculty leftists they attack) themselves manipulatively incite ingenuous conservative students to wage complaints against any teachers who challenge their biases.”
The inability of Clawmute and JBM to address an opponent’s argument without distorting it is symptomatic of right-wing travesties of what particular scholars say and practice. I would like to see their own pedagogical model for teaching students to think for themselves in political controversies. My model is readily available in my textbook “Reading and Writing for Civic Literacy: The Critical Citizen’s Guide to Argumentative Rhetoric” (Paradigm Publishers). It presents paired readings from leading writers on the right and left and leaves it to students to compare and evaluate their lines of argument and supporting evidence. Authors of conservative articles include David Horowitz (2), William J. Bennett (2), Thomas Sowell (3), Christina Hoff Sommers, Rush Limbaugh, and George Will. (Horowitz has told me the book, and my presentation of his articles, is “much better than I thought it would be.”)
The problem with ideologues and propagandists, whether on the left or right, is that they are too blinded by their black-and-white certainties to see any fault on their own side or any rectitude on the other, and to be open to any evidence that contradicts their side’s “talking points.” In their crudely reductionist thinking, they project their own intellectual vulgarity onto their opponents.
Clawmuth and JBM are apparently incapable of considering substantive evidence indicating Lawrence Summers’ dismissal at Harvard was not reducible to being “mobbed” by leftist faculty, that Horowitz and ACTA’s allegations are often inaccurate and driven by partisan motives, etc. As I constantly tell my students, it is not the role of scholars to parrot the political orthodoxies of any one side unquestioningly, but to study the evidence on both sides fully and fair-mindedly before taking sides, and to be able to cite the evidence in support of the side you support, in accurate comparison to the other side’s. In this dispute or elsewhere, to all on either side who are unwilling to do that long, hard work before shooting their mouth off, a plague on both your houses.
June 21
Since you are getting personal, Clawmuth, you reveal the mentality of a David Horowitz clone, not only in “staying on message” with the same dreary repetition of the same “talking points” while being unable to present any substantive evidence (in response, for example, to my request for a list of your sources on opposing sides of the Lawrence Summers case), but in jerking opponents’ quotations out of context to create a straw-man argument.
All that you and other readers need to do is read the full text of my message on June 18th and the first of two on the 20th, which provide full context and justification for the phrases you distort. Why are you and others unwilling to respond in good faith to my complete statements and to the questions I posed to conservatives there and in my second message of June 20?
In particular reference to your implication that scholars should cater to “the public at large,” do you believe that the political content of higher education should simply follow the fickle winds of public opinion and the most recent election? How well informed is “the public at large” (and the average undergraduate) on political and scholarly matters? Are you saying that when the majority of Americans supported the Iraq War, we should have supported it, and now that the majority has turned against it, we should oppose it?
And should we be teaching our students just to go along with the crowd and blindly follow officials’ orders or to think for themselves? My messages presented my rationale and model, in my textbook and courses, for pursuing the latter goal, while trying as far as is humanly possible to avoid the danger of counter-indoctrination, which some teachers, liberal and conservative, do regrettably succumb to. As I asked you before, what is YOUR conception of the responsibility of higher education for citizenship and your model for its implementation? If your conception is indeed conformity to majority opinion and whatever administration is presently in office, it is not only logically untenable but reveals total ignorance of the central tradition in humanistic education of the affirmation of individual, rational principles against mob rule. (To anticipate your next distortion, I insist on my students reading both liberal and conservative scholarly and serious journalistic sources and learning to evaluate them even-handedly, but I also insist on their learning to distinguish between reputable sources and the demagogy of political spin-doctors and mass media rabble-rousers, whether David Horowitz and Ann Coulter on the right, or Michael Moore and Bill Maher on the left.)
