Teaching to the Audience?

Have they lived so long and so closely to “social justice,” “social change,” “queer,” “whiteness,” and “gender equality” that they do not recognize them as loaded terms? Have they imbibed the political currents of the campus so thoroughly that they regard a polemical phrasing in a course description as merely a lively description?

Bauerlein’s article, in some ways, carries forth an earlier IHE discussion triggered by this Alan Jones piece, upon which I also posted at Cliopatria. The Jones article drew the usual suspects—Grover Furr, who seems to pine for the long-lost days of Stalin; “Apologetically Tenured,” who seems to oppose all outside scrutiny of the academy lest someone look at the process by which he/she received tenure. The Jones article also provoked comments from Don Lazere, about whose views I expressed skepticism. Lazere emailed me a critique of my post, a slightly edited (for form, not content) version of which I repost here, with commentary.

DL: As a preliminary note, however, isn’t it somewhat presumptuous of you to pretend that you have privileged knowledge of the kind of business-and-technology-major students I have taught for thirty years, at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, and the University of Tennessee, or of the electorate and base of support for public education in these areas? (Tennessee, incidentally, has among the lowest rates of taxation and funding for public education of any state, along with much of the rest of the South.) Have you studied these areas or spent any substantial time there? We are all prone to generalize from our own limited realms of experience. I have seen both sides, however, having lived in cities like New York and Berkeley, as well as towns like Des Moines and Knoxville, and having experienced both Ivy League and provincial state college education. Will you believe me when I say that students and the public are VERY different in Cambridge and New York (or Berkeley) than they are in Knoxville and San Luis Obispo?!

KC: As a historian of Congress, I’ve spent a good deal of time just about everyplace in the country (except for Oklahoma, West Virginia, and New Mexico, the states I’ve never visited or done research in). My point was not to deny that students in Tennessee are probably more conservative than are students in Brooklyn—I have no doubt they are. It seems to me, however, extraordinarily unlikely that a “majority” of students at a state university receive their news from Fox (whose ratings suggest that, at most, 5% of the country watches it). But even if this were true, it strikes me as a dangerous approach to teaching. I work at a college in the bluest of blue congressional districts (upwards of 90% of the vote for Al Gore in 2000 and John Kerry in 2004). So should I frame my courses around a “conservative” orientation, in light of the fact that most Brooklyn College students tend to be Democrats?

DL: First you said, on June 22: 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." Incidentally, what does your second sentence here have to do with the first, since it doesn’t respond to my contextualized arguments justifying liberal/left views in humanities education as a counter-balance to all the social forces propagating commercial, conservative ones? You never do respond to those arguments in other form than unsupported dismissal.

KC: I’m not sure how else one could respond. Forty-two years ago in this country, we overwhelmingly re-elected Lyndon Johnson; gave Democrats overwhelming majorities in both houses of Congress; and ensured that the next four years would have the most liberal Supreme Court in American history. The media had played a critical role in building support for civil rights, and was about to launch an increasingly searing critique of the US involvement in Vietnam. Would this environment have justified a conservative/right viewpoint in humanities/social sciences to counterbalance all the social forces propagating liberal ones? If the academy defines itself in opposition to the dominant ideological perspective, we have to get rid of tenure—since we’d need to shift our own majorities every time the populace does.

DL: 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. But on June 23, you added: 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.” Well, doesn’t your second comment contradict the first (that the public DOES support Jeffersonian education) and support my point?

KC: No. my first statement was that there seems to be strong popular support for “public education in this country.” My second statement is that there isn’t now, nor, to my knowledge, has there ever been strong popular support for a vision of public education “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."

DL: I went on to comment: “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?”

KC: It would seem to me that Jefferson is overwhelmingly superior intellectually to George W. Bush (of, for that matter, to John Kerry or Al Gore). But I don’t see it as a proper role of the educational system to teach students to “emulate” anyone.

DL: I also asked what seems to me a crucial question: 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? Your unwillingness to answer these questions typifies conservatives’ disingenuous denial of all the forms of power the right exercises in America, and all of their attendant, propagandistic biases. That denial is what skews the conservative fixation on left academic views, which as I have argued, serve as a necessary thermostatic counterforce to the currently majoritarian, conservative views that are partly the product of corporate and military propaganda and that most of MY students, anyway, have been immersed in all their lives. (I don’t mean to go to the other extreme and suggest that liberal forces have NO power; there’s a reasonable discussion to be had about the two sides’ relative strengths, but isn’t it absurd to pretend that either is just a virtuous, pitiful victim?)

KC: As someone who didn’t vote for George W. Bush in either 2000 or 2004, indeed as someone who has never voted for a Republican candidate for any office in my life, I can’t really speak for “conservatives,” even in their “disingenuous denial of all the forms of power the right exercises in America, and all of their attendant, propagandistic biases.” That someone with my political views (essentially a centrist Democrat, who’s been critical of affirmative action but vocally supportive of abortion rights and gay marriage) can be deemed a “conservative” shows just how ideologically skewed the contemporary academy is.

. . . DL; Neither side is guiltless here, and both seem blindly averse to acknowledging any wrong on their side or any virtue on the other. Without whitewashing the faults of some of my liberal and left colleagues, however, it seems to me that Horowitz, ACTA, and many of their political allies are distinctively blameworthy in having fallen into various versions of the ad populum fallacy, to the effect that there is something wrong with liberal/leftist college professors because they are out of step with the majority of the American people, who (at least in public institutions) pay their salary—with the apparent implication that professors and their students should tailor their political views to follow the latest polls or election results. Some conservative politicians and members of the public who support Horowitz et al., seem to have no more familiarity with the nature of humanistic scholarship than they do of nuclear physics. The former field is at the disadvantage that it addresses some public issues on which everyone does and should have an opinion; what many in the public misunderstand, however, is the difference between just any such opinions and those derived from standards of professional accreditation, systematic research, and reasoned discourse. (Not all academics of any political persuasion, alas, adhere scrupulously to those standards, but neither does everyone in any other profession. The extent to which current faculty members have abandoned their fields of expertise to propagate irrelevant political views is legitimate grounds for debate, on a case by case basis, beyond tendentious, hearsay evidence—but that is a topic for another day.) So there is a daunting problem here both of the public acquiring respect for academic expertise and for the “thermostatic” function of higher education to counter-balance dominant opinion—and of the responsibility for scholars to show consideration and discretion toward public opinion (especially that of taxpayers), without becoming its slavish captive, an option that I would hope few of your readers endorse (though some of the non-academic respondents on IHE did), and against which most of the traditions of humanistic education, both conservative and liberal, are united in opposition. Can’t we have a cool-headed discussion of this admittedly complicated problem?

KC: As has been noted frequently, I opposed the Academic Bill of Rights, and was sharply criticized by Horowitz for my position. It seems to me a wild overstatement to conflate ACTA with Horowitz.

DL: Another widespread current tendency among conservative politicians, business interests, and members of the public is to conceive of secondary and college education strictly for their business-related, occupational, and technological functions—a view endorsed by many students who resent any general education requirements as an impediment to the most rapid progress toward getting a job. Oughtn’t conservative and liberal scholars be united in opposition to this tendency and in support of education for civic literacy for all students? Where is the needed discussion of the why, when, where, and how of education for critical citizenship—an appalling gap in American secondary and higher education? (My impression is that the exhortations of NAS, ACTA, and other conservative intellectuals for core liberal arts curriculum and more requirements in history—which I happen to agree with—fall short of outlining a curriculum for critical citizenship, but I would be delighted to see evidence to the contrary.) The majority of the American public in recent decades appears also to support (or not actively to remonstrate against) government and social rule by and for the rich and giant corporations, as well as fiscal policies that have reverted toward restricted access to quality secondary and higher education based on wealth.

KC: I don’t disagree with much of what Prof. Lazere says above. I do, however, have grave concerns about what constitutes promotion of “civic literacy.” As seen in programs such as the “Arts of Democracy” initiative or in the fight over “dispositions,” this too often is a cover for professors substituting the teaching of their political beliefs for academic content.

DL: Now, as I said in one of my responses here, I would have expected Prof. Johnson and other conservative scholars to weigh in with Plato, Matthew Arnold, Leo Strauss, and Allan Bloom against the contamination of elite education and government by the ignorant masses and philistine commercial interests. Not a problem, when the masses and philistines support your side politically, Prof. Johnson? Tell us about those philosopher kings George W. Bush, Dan Quayle, Pat Robertson, Richard Mellon Scaife, and the Coors family.

KC: Again, as someone who hasn’t backed any of the above-mentioned figures, I don’t believe that “the masses and philistines support [my] side politically.” In general, however, this seems to me a rather condescending attitude toward average people, which is, I think, one reason Democrats have struggled nationally as of late.

DL; Liberals, on the other hand, have on our side Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” and “Life Without Principle,” and Emerson’s exhortations for scholars and other intellectuals to “Defer never to the popular cry,” to stand on their own against majority opinion (specifically on issues of his time like support for slavery and the Mexican-American War), unjust political authority, plutocracy, and “the principles on which business is managed,” which inspire “disgust” (“The American Scholar”). We also invoke Thomas Jefferson’s Enlightenment religious skepticism and his model, which he proposed for Virginia when he was its governor and reiterated in his famous letter to John Adams of October 28, 1813, and elsewhere) of tax-funded, free, universal public education through the university level, which, if it had been implemented, would have “raised the mass of people to the high ground of moral respectability necessary for their own safety, and to orderly government; and would have completed the great object of qualifying them to select the veritable aristoi, for the trusts of government, to the exclusion of the pseudalists.” [That is, the aristocracy of merit over that of inherited wealth and power.]

KC: As someone who’s written two (transparently admiring) books about left-wing political dissenters, I would agree with much of the above statement.

DL: Prof. Johnson . . . seems to be saying that Jefferson’s model was a bad one because the majority wouldn’t support it then or now. Does he believe there should be no civic education at all, that it should be based on public-opinon polls, or what? On IHE, I asked the conservative commentators what THEIR model for civic education would be, and how they would control against teachers’ political biases, but there was no answer. I have developed my model in a textbook, Reading and Writing for Civic Literacy, which presents students out front with the current debates on such issues and familiarizes them with conservative vs. liberal or leftist positions on them and other matters, through readings propounding both sides (including two by David Horowitz), leaving it up to them to evaluate the opposing arguments. I do not claim that mine is a faultless approach, but I have heard few alternatives, especially from conservatives.

KC: I am, as I noted above, very skeptical of “civic education.” In my field, for instance, it’s hard to imagine “civic education” without considerable numbers of courses in political and constitutional history. Yet advocates of “civic education” have been the forefront of eliminating such positions from History Departments nationally.

DL: I also mentioned in this exchange that many of my conservative students at Cal Poly and the University of Tennessee are Fox News followers and have cited broadcasts and books by Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Bill O’Reilly, and Pat Robertson, as sources in class discussions and research papers, without verifying their accuracy. Prof. Johnson asked “what relevance his students’ TV viewing habits had to his classroom content.” I answered that the particular courses I teach involve enabling students to understand how these media conservatives’ ideology and lines of argument differ from those of liberals, socialists, and libertarians, to research the accuracy of all such sources’ claims, and to distinguish between this level of discourse and that of scholarship or responsible journalism. Does Prof. Johnson or any other reader here believe that there should be no such courses in high school or college enabling students to be critical consumers of the political, journalistic, and commercial rhetoric they are immersed in every day of their lives?

KC: Such courses are perfectly appropriate for an intellectually diverse curriculum. Mark Bauerlein’s post today mentions how frequently such courses tend to be abused.

DL: Prof. Johnson then added: “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” (sic). For starters, I had made it clear that I do not teach History.

KC: I know Prof. Lazere doesn’t teach History. But my remarks were written on a History blog, primarily of interest to people who follow History.

DL: However, I do teach a course in the history of American Literature beginning with the Puritans. As it happens, politicians and media commentators like Limbaugh, Coulter, and O’Reilly frequently invoke events in American or world history and the beliefs of “the founding fathers,” as, somewhat less frequently, do their liberal counterparts. These invocations are often howlingly inaccurate, such as Limbaugh’s claim about the eighteenth-century founders, in See, I Told You So: “Don’t believe the conventional wisdom of our time that claims these men were anything but orthodox, Bible-believing Christians.” (Limbaugh’s readers who would swallow this, as many of my students do, seem to have ever heard of the Enlightenment and Deism.) Limbaugh further says there that the seventeenth-century Puritans found that the Bible “prescribes limited, representative government and free enterprise as the best governmental and economic systems” and that this is what they practiced. (Pace Perry Miller!) Here is his only piece of Biblical support: “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 should think both liberal and conservative historians here would find Limbaugh’s con of his presumably Bible-savvy audience staggering. I asked Prof. Johnson, “Is this really a guy you want on your side?” but he declined to answer.

KC: It’s interesting how often the far left on campus use Limbaugh, Coulter, and O’Reilly as the harbingers of “conservative” thought. They are, in the same way that Michael Moore and Georgia Goslee can be viewed as typical of “liberal” thought. Even though, by design, I do my best to bring all my classes up to the present day, I spend little or no time on such figures, who strike me as hardly the most significant people in contemporary society.