items tagged with AAUP

In a crude, yet comical, paraphrasing of fictional character Steven McCroskey, it looks like we picked the wrong week to get really busy and neglect blogging.  A taste of what's gone on over the last few days:

• Our work week began with news that the College of DuPage Board of Trustees took the plunge (over the objections of students, faculty, and community members) and made institutional policy based on ideology rather than sound data.  Not well done.
• Another conservative speaker at the University of North Carolina had his presentation disrupted by protesters this week.  To the UNC student body's credit, it appears that folks from off-campus were driving the disturbances this time.
• The Boston Phoenix attempts to suss out what really was behind Bill Ayers recent disinvitation to speak at Boston College.
• Still speaking of campus speakers, Free Exchange coalition member the American Association of University Professors has reaffirmed its opposition to rescinding invitations to speak at campus events. 
• Finally, a politically charged e-mail sent from a professor to his students at the University of California at Santa Barbara is raising legitimate questions about academic freedom and professionalism.  Students have filed grievances in this case and the university is investigating.

The American Association of University Professors, a Free Exchange on Campus coalition member, released their Freedom in the Classroom statement today.  The statement is a powerful rejoinder to the critics of higher education who keep pressing the tired line that university faculty members are in the business of indoctrination.  The document not only makes clear why it is imperative to protect an open intellectual dialogue in the classroom, but ably discusses how efforts to restrict this free exchange are based more on politics than pedagogy. 

The AAUP report differentiates between education and indoctrination (and no, expressing a strongly held scholarly opinion in class is not indoctrination); eviscerates the notion that an abstract goal of "balance," absent any scholarly context, is a good in-and-of-itself; calls out critics of the academy for hijacking the concept of the "hostile learning environment"; and challenges the notion that certain types of knowledge are "irrelevant" if they don't narrowly hew to stated course objections.  The report also reaffirms traditional academic due process, rather than legislative fiats, as the appropriate manner with which to deal with the rare cases of professors who do actually stray over the line with inappropriate classroom behavior.

All in all, the Freedom in the Classroom statement is a passionate defense of the autonomy of college and university faculty to conduct their classes in ways that engage students in the substantive debates of a particular course or discipline (even if it doesn't go so far as to protect discussions of football or gardening).  Many thanks to the members of the AAUP for providing a another pillar upon which to mount our defense of the free exchange of ideas.

In the talk, I noted that one significant problem that I had encountered in my attempts to challenge Horowitz (and Stephen Balch, Anne Neal, etc.) was his failure to agree to the facts. The form of my critique, I said, had been as follows:

1.      Horowitz's Academic Bill of Rights is needed only if higher education is as Horowitz depicts it.
2.      Higher education is NOT as Horowitz depicts it.
3.      Therefore, Horowitz's Academic Bill of Rights is NOT needed.

I had even asserted this argument in my opening statement (which can be found here), when I debated Horowitz almost a year earlier. And, as in the debate, my talk focused on SHOWING that (2) is true, by focusing on the FACTS. Given that Horowitz accepted (1), by establishing (2), I figured that he had to accept (3), which FOLLOWS NECESSARILY from (1) and (2).

Since the above argument is valid, it is conceptually IMPOSSIBLE to imagine the premises true and, at the same time, the conclusion false.

Free Exchange on Campus' latest, Facts Still Count, also focuses on SHOWING that Horowitz's tirade against higher education fails, by focusing on the FACTS. Horowitz's failure to not only recognize the facts, but to deceptively INVENT them as needed, is troubling to anyone who cares about issues in higher education.

What's behind Horowitz's factual myopia (or is it factual blindness or even factual hallucination)?

more after the jump...

Cary Nelson, president of the American Association of University Professors (a member of the Free Exchange coalition), penned a thoughtful piece in IHE on the spate of speaker cancellations (and threatened repercussions for allowing certain speakers) that have cropped up on American campuses this winter and spring.  In addition to pointing out the value of inviting controversial speakers from a variety of perspectives (both scholarly and political), he makes this important point:

But then efforts to get an invited speaker disinvited are not necessarily really based on anger at giving the person a platform, especially since real monsters often acquit themselves poorly on stage. They are as much as anything else efforts to housebreak American higher education, to establish external forces and constituencies as campus powers. They are about establishing who is really in charge -- students and faculty, or politicians, talk show radio hosts, and donors.  

Students are perfectly capable of listening to a David Horowitz or a Bill Ayers and make up their own minds about what is being said.  Students and faculty already grapple with trying to maintain a broad array of speakers - they don't need folks from off-campus with political axes to grind imposing on these decisions.