It's no surprise that as the 2008 campaign revs up for the home stretch, discussions of politics will find their ways into many college classrooms. With this in mind, The Observer at Notre Dame University is running a series this week on "the thin line between debate and advocacy." The first installment in its entirety is definitely worth a read, but I'd like to focus on this one little bit:
The line between political advocacy and debating a certain position at an academic level is a hard one to draw, Political Science Department Chairperson Michael Zuckert said.
"It's hard to draw the line between political science - political analysis - and political advocacy because what's involved in political analysis is the judgment of the adequacy or inadequacy of various political proposals," he said. "And that may or may not end up favoring particular positions."
The evaluation of a political position, an integral part of the study of political science, is different than the evaluation of a work of art, Zuckert said, because it may seem appropriate for a teacher of art to make a distinction between better or worse.
"It's not as controversial," he said.
However, controversies related to politics are unavoidable, due to the nature of the discussion of differing opinions regarding a position, he said.
In the field of political science, he said, there is sometimes an "aspiration to be completely value free."
"But I don't think that generally works out or is what [political science] should do or be," Zuckert said.
I think this in an important point to note. Part and parcel of the social sciences and schools of public policy is the ability to be able to evaluate policy positions or other social actions against their intended goals and render a judgment on the efficacy of said policy. To use a historical example, we can evaluate the Compromise of 1850's effectiveness in resolving simmering tensions between slave and non-slave states in the United States. We would rightly note that the Compromise was ineffective. We would similarly expect social science courses to evaluate more contemporary policies in much the same respect (although they obviously don't have the benefit of almost 150 years of hindsight).
But as Zuckert points out, evaluating public policy almost inherently involves a critique of the politics which produce a certain policy, and saying that a policy is effective or ineffective is, in many ways, a political statement. Does this mean that these discussions and judgments should be verboten in the classroom? Of course not. We wouldn't shy away from calling the Compromise of 1850 and the politics which produced it a failure. Contemporary policies should be judged in the same respect.
That isn't to say that aren't limitations to this form of policy evaluation. Obviously, deriding or defending extant policies on purely ideological grounds doesn't add much to the conversation. Likewise, an analysis of proposed policies should be much more nuanced, as data on their effectiveness typically doesn't exist. In a similar vein, policies where the data is open to interpretation or where the timeframe for evaluation precludes definitive judgments should be handled with openness and candor. Underlying all of these discussions, however, is the need to render judgment based on empirical data. This approach will yield the most important lessons to college students and provide a common framework for discussion. In some cases, the data will lend itself to a definite conclusion, in others, the inferences will be much murkier. But the bottom line is that there is a sturdy foundation in academic analysis with which students and professors can broach controversial issues, and in some instances, come to conclusions while firmly avoiding the pitfalls of pure advocacy.
FrontPageMag
published a piece by a student at the University
of California at Santa Barbara detailing the usual laments about being a conservative student on a
liberal college campus. I'm not going to
go into detail about his list of grievances.
Rather, I want to focus on one particular aspect of his argument:
I just recently understood more clearly a big part of the
problem when I had a conversation with a friend who told me she was actually
very conservative, but had impersonated a liberal in a recent Political Science
paper she had written because she did not want to get a bad grade. I had not
heard about this before, or I had heard it and dismissed it as unlikely. So I
began to talk to other students, including conservative friends of mine, to see
what the deal was. Was this happening to them too? Were they espousing ideas in
their papers that they not only didn't believe but thought were ludicrous? If
so, why? Why were they betraying not only the conservative cause but themselves?
As a former social science instructor, this type of thinking
has always baffled me. Very few things
were more annoying than students who wrote papers that basically regurgitated the
political talking points they thought I wanted to hear instead of engaging the
scholarly arguments I wanted them to absorb.
More baffling to me was the idea that I was grading based on their
political views. I can recall some of
the best papers I read being from students who were clearly espousing
conservative views. Social science
professors are frequently delighted that students buck the intellectual trend
in their work, provided that their work is well
reasoned and well supported. Often, that's the rub.
Acknowledge the differences where they exist, listen well to the
students, create an atmosphere where they can challenge your positions,
respect the students enough to take their positions seriously and be
willing to state your own positions and to engage the students in
discussion and debate about those positions.
Roy Den Hollander apparently doesn't understand the point of Ladies' Night.
Hollander, a self-described "anti-feminist" lawyer, has filed a suit against Columbia University because he believes its Women's and Gender Studies program is discriminatory toward men. He also claims that feminism is being taught as a religion, and thus the program should not eligible for certain funds.
In the past, Den Hollander has also taken on such scourges as the Violence Against Women Act, and bars that serve drink specials to women on Ladies' Night.
Mr. Den Hollander devotes much of his private practice to representing men in civil cases -- “antifeminist cases or guys’-rights cases,” as he puts it -- and said his bitter 2001 divorce from a woman he married in Russia helped tweak his anger toward feminists and laws he sees as favoring women.
Roy, get thee to Ladies Night.
On second thought, maybe it's better if you stay away.
Temple University's former sexual harassment policy was "sufficiently broad and subjective" to merit its revision, a federal appeals court ruled on Monday. The court claims that the policy lacked "a requirement that conduct, to be punished as harassment, must undermine or detract from students' educational experience."
The case was brought by a former Temple grad student, Christian DeJohn, who claimed the policy "discouraged him from expressing in class his opinions about women in the military."
(DeJohn also brought an unsuccessful case against Temple, alleging the University had refused to allow him to graduate based on his conservative political and religious opinions. That case was thrown out in May 2007.)
Today, the Chronicle has some commentary from legal experts, some of whom worry about the precedent this case sets for similar policies on campuses and in workplaces across the country.
The law-types hash it out pretty well, and predictably the other side gleefully exclaims that the first amendment is "still alive" on college campuses, take that women's studies!, but I'd like to take a look at the excruciatingly tenuous claim made by the appeals court when they suggest that sex- or gender-based harassment-even when it does not forcibly deny access to scholarship-does not undermine or detract from the educational experience of students of all genders.
