Orwellian Issues

In defense of NAS, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with monitoring what colleges do, and protecting the rights of students and faculty is a good thing. I wish that progressives had some organization that did this, now that NAS, FIRE, Students for Academic Freedom, NoIndoctrination.org, and many others are monitoring campuses.

However, what makes the monitoring by NAS wrong is the ideological nature of it. Note how they proclaim that they will be scrutinizing “politicized teaching” or “slights to conservative students.” Neither of these are violations of student rights (and, of course, slights to liberal students will be ignored). Indeed, it is the attempt to banish “politicized” teaching that threatens academic freedom and free speech on campus.

As I argue in my book Patriotic Correctness, it’s time for progressives to form an activist organization that will monitor violations of liberty on campuses (especially the campuses ignored by the right-wing groups), and protect the intellectual freedom of right-wingers, left-wingers, and everyone in between. If you’re interested in helping with this (whether you’re conservative or liberal), please contact me at collegefreedom@yahoo.com.

John K. Wilson, collegefreedom.org, at 7:55 am EDT on July 30, 2008

Instructors are observed every day by people of all sorts of political inclinations. It’s an inescapable part of the job. Professional classroom conduct leaves no room for fear of such “monitoring” or complaint.

JBM, at 8:00 am EDT on July 30, 2008

Read their website

They are clearly a conservative group. No point even debating it. Their goal is to repair the damage brought about by liberal ideologies. They also claim that it’s dangerous to join their group because all of us mean old liberals are ready to plunge a knife into the back of anyone who does.

Once again, I’m grateful for a conservative mouthpiece to warn me about just how vile and dangerous I am. It’s time to get my black cape pressed.

For those disinclined to hit the wiki, this organ is funded by “the Sarah Scaife Foundation, the John M. Olin Foundation, the Bradley Foundation, the Castle Rock Foundation, and the Smith Richardson Foundation.[6] “

JP Craig, at 8:20 am EDT on July 30, 2008

NAS and Good Works

Recent perversities on campuses like the Duke lacrosse scandal with its faculty-supported, extra-legal public lynching of innocent students or the totalitarian brainwashing of freshmen at U. of Delaware residence halls are precisely what triggers a response from the NAS.

The instant name-calling and crude ideological tarnishing of the NAS by edgy, nervous, holier-than-thou faculty members are more reasons why the NAS’ new program is needed now more than ever.

Gertrude Stein surely did not have today’s thin-skinned and easily scared faculty in mind when she observed, “Considering how dangerous everything is, nothing is really very frightening.”

On today’s campuses, ever-hyper vigilance against outside critics and a fawning obedience to the strictures of diversity are a way of life. Welcome back.

Chuck, at 10:35 am EDT on July 30, 2008

No problem — just sue

Just sue students for disagreeing. This will create the right environment for professors to indoctrinate students in feminism, socialism and athiesm. And no one should monitor this — the wittle pwofessor might feel nervous while she heroically brainwashes her “students".

mike, at 12:20 pm EDT on July 30, 2008

Shaky Conservatives

Chuck calls us “thin skinned", but isn’t the main thrust of Big Argus the need to keep an eye on “leftists” who ignore the hitler jungen who are so sensitive.

Mike shares his list of “isms".

As a proud Argus-not (with apologies to Jason) I have eyes of my own, and I will be on the lookout for the big fundamentalism... mother of all sexism, racism, anti-intellectualism, and imperial capitalism.

dundermifflin, at 1:00 pm EDT on July 30, 2008

NAS Argus Project

Academic freedom means that professors have freedom to teach their disciplines, it does not mean they’re free to teach their political/social opinions in courses where those are not pertinent. When professors deviate from the subjects they’re paid to teach, they commit fraud against their students. Unfortunately, that practice is widespread. It’s high time someone insisted that students receive what they paid money for, and not something else. Professors who commit that fraud should be in jail. So should the administrators who permit it.

Donn Taylor, Fiction Writer at None, at 2:05 pm EDT on July 30, 2008

Report for Training

Karin,You have deeply offended me with your hate speech. Report for diversity training immediately.

mike, at 3:05 pm EDT on July 30, 2008

Private vs. Public

Brian,All private schools, religous or not, are welcome to teach whatever its students pay it to teach. That is the job of the private school and that is free speech.

The issue is with taxpayer funded classes only. Public schools force money out of the public to fulfill a mandate to educate in a way acceptible to the broad public. Free speech is therefore balanced by its forcefull taking of money and its publicly approved mandate.

mike, at 4:05 pm EDT on July 30, 2008

big brother?

I don’t think we give students enough credit on this issue. Back in the day, I could tell the difference between the lugnuts on both ends of the political spectrum who were trying to “indocrinate” me to their way of thinking. Sometimes I’d give my honest opinion. When I discovered that strategy was counter-productive to passing the class, I gave the teacher what I thought they wanted. Either way, I wasn’t about to let someone else tell me what to think.

Puh Leez, at 4:50 pm EDT on July 30, 2008

“conservative initiatives are often surreptitious in nature,”

Are you talking about the NAS? The organization and its announcement are completely out in the open.

“while liberal ones tend to be more open.”

Leftists so completely control faculties and the hiring process that non-conforming perspectives have no voice or chance of gaining one. Such control is indeed “open,” rigid, and absolute. For informed observers, there is no surprise in that.

JBM, at 5:50 pm EDT on July 30, 2008

Let’s Have Some Perspective Here

Poor Anna, fretting and worrying about the wrong threats to academia.

Identify for me one single university President in California, Washington or Michigan who has stated on the record, without equivocation, that he or she would severely punish any faculty member, committee or administrator who supported the use of racial preferences or gender double standards in the hiring of a faculty member.

Or even more simply, identify one single university President in California, Washington or Michigan who has stated on the record, without equivocation, that he or she would scrupulously uphold the will of the voters in that state regarding zero racial preferences and no gender double standards in faculty recruitment.

The NAS watchdogs are lightweights compared to the damage being done to universities from the inside.

Chuck, at 7:25 pm EDT on July 30, 2008

Public Money

“This would be very laughable — if the public’s money wasn’t involved.”

F.A.S., you could also be talking about the Pentagon’s budget, military related corporations, for-profit colleges going after government student loan money, Blackwater, other mercenaries and no-bid contractors in Iraq, etc.

Yep. It’s a social contract, and in a democracy we all have to pay some public money we don’t like and we all get to wrangle over how it should be spent.

Seems to me an awful lot of public money ends up in the private coffers of wealthy elites, no matter what their sector.

Charlie Kane, at 10:10 pm EDT on July 30, 2008

Mike — nothing in the story mentions limiting the “monitoring” to public schools. And those who go to public schools pay tuition too. I feel if public schools deserve scrutiny, then privates deserve even more. The effects on society are the same regardless of the amount of tuition or who’s paying it. If a private indoctrinates it has the same effect on society as a public school. I’m much more concerned about the intolerance at many religious schools than I am about a few nutjobs, right or left, at publics.

Brian, at 11:35 am EDT on July 31, 2008

Snippets Out of Context

We’re all guilty of seizing a sentence or two out of context and misconstruing others’ meanings. Seems inevitable. NAS’s response to my comment omits, for example, the following passage:

“That’s the opposite of indoctrination. Those who then retain or adopt traditional values or faith in God do so more richly, at a higher level of understanding. That’s education. Great minds strive to work through frames and counterframes—constantly.”

I’m all for transparency, too. The trouble is that we take the facts that scholarship digs up and imbue them with meanings according to our values. (Or we don’t like the inconvenient facts that some politically motivated scholarship digs up.) Students need to know what a given fact looks like under one frame of reference and how it looks under another. NAS tries to assert that leftist scholars are uninterested in facts. Not true.

The charges of McCarthyism that NAS has suffered may be a fear that our work will be labeled indoctrination when in fact it is presenting alternative frameworks, the contrary of indoctrination.

Not to recognize the existence of meaning-giving frameworks or contexts is an insult to science. But don’t ask a literary theorist, a philosopher of language, or an historiograpaher; ask a cognitive psychologist.

In cognitive psychology-speak, frames of reference are called schemata.

Transparency demands that we all admit that we’re studying competing schemata. For most disciplines, this cannot be done entirely in neutral. Passionate-to-mild advocacy of a given schema has pedagogical dangers and should be performed responsibly, always presented as a schema. But advocacy is also GOOD in that it seeks to do justice to a given way of seeing, which is probably better for students (at all levels) than a dismissive gesture in the name of diversity.

Nor is it tantamount to indoctrination. If anything, the pretense that social facts embody inherent, self-evident meanings without politically motivated interpretation is the most ingenious form of propaganda (or self-deception) possible. I point to sociology textbooks of the 1950s whose facts were interpreted in a way most insulting and oppressive to the working class. (See Barbara Ehrenreich, Fear of Falling, 1989: 25-29). This is an example of socially damaging “science.”

Let me respectfully revise my earlier comment: I fear that the NAS project may be UNAWARE of the deleterious effects to knowledge production and pedagogy alike if it cannot grasp what different frameworks do to facts.

We return to competing values: By and large, those with a leftist orientation value more social leveling. If you disagree, if your orientation says it’s actually better for society not to level itself, let’s go on debating the question. But I do grow weary of the “We’re-the-ones-who-are objective” stance.” Two or more frameworks can disagree; values can conflict.

Karin Foster, at 3:50 pm EDT on July 31, 2008

Market Imbalances

We all know colleges like to hire faculty with PhDs. Also, scarcity drives people to extra efforts to find what they want. Too few conservative faculty? Too few with PhDs!—see article called The Conservative Pipeline Problem, Insider HigherEd, posted Nov 16 2007. If there are too few of who we want as faculty, be they minorities or conservatives, put that scarcity to an end via QUOTAS!

An Old Goat, at 7:00 pm EDT on July 31, 2008