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Embrace your urge

From the I’m Just Getting Around To It files: Stanley Fish’s July 23 op-ed on academic freedom is pretty good, except for where it’s not.  It starts off with brio:

Kevin Barrett, a lecturer at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, has now taken his place alongside Ward Churchill of the University of Colorado as a college teacher whose views on 9/11 have led politicians and ordinary citizens to demand that he be fired.

Mr. Barrett, who has a one-semester contract to teach a course titled “Islam: Religion and Culture,” acknowledged on a radio talk show that he has shared with students his strong conviction that the destruction of the World Trade Center was an inside job perpetrated by the American government. The predictable uproar ensued, and the equally predictable battle lines were drawn between those who disagree about what the doctrine of academic freedom does and does not allow.

Mr. Barrett’s critics argue that academic freedom has limits and should not be invoked to justify the dissemination of lies and fantasies. Mr. Barrett’s supporters (most of whom are not partisans of his conspiracy theory) insist that it is the very point of an academic institution to entertain all points of view, however unpopular. (This was the position taken by the university’s provost, Patrick Farrell, when he ruled on July 10 that Mr. Barrett would be retained: “We cannot allow political pressure from critics of unpopular ideas to inhibit the free exchange of ideas.”)

Both sides get it wrong. The problem is that each assumes that academic freedom is about protecting the content of a professor’s speech; one side thinks that no content should be ruled out in advance; while the other would draw the line at propositions (like the denial of the Holocaust or the flatness of the world) considered by almost everyone to be crazy or dangerous.

But in fact, academic freedom has nothing to do with content. It is not a subset of the general freedom of Americans to say anything they like (so long as it is not an incitement to violence or is treasonous or libelous). Rather, academic freedom is the freedom of academics to study anything they like; the freedom, that is, to subject any body of material, however unpromising it might seem, to academic interrogation and analysis.

So far, so good.  The “both sides get it wrong” gambit is a familiar one, coming from Fish, who’s been deploying it for over thirty years now, ever since he strode boldly into the seminar room where people were arguing about whether texts determine meaning or readers determine meaning and informed the participants that both sides got it wrong. And I especially like the insistence that academic freedom is not a subset of the general freedom of Americans to say anything they like: this is precisely what Horowitz and Company have been telling students, in the course of trying to convince them that they have something called “academic freedom” which is violated every time they are made to feel uncomfortable about expressing a conservative opinion about something.  (The Young America’s Foundation is fighting back against liberal-professor oppression, by the way:  “Some people think because Republicans are in power, there is no need for conservative thought on campus,” [Roger] Custer, [director of the National Conservative Student Conference], said. “But the truth is, students become liberal by osmosis.” Damn!  They’re onto us.  We will need a new formula. We will have to start creating liberal students by hypnosis!)

But a bit later on, Fish gives away most of the farm:

The distinction I am making—between studying astrology and proselytizing for it—is crucial and can be generalized; it shows us where the line between the responsible and irresponsible practice of academic freedom should always be drawn. Any idea can be brought into the classroom if the point is to inquire into its structure, history, influence and so forth. But no idea belongs in the classroom if the point of introducing it is to recruit your students for the political agenda it may be thought to imply.

And this is where we come back to Mr. Barrett, who, in addition to being a college lecturer, is a member of a group calling itself Scholars for 9/11 Truth, an organization with the decidedly political agenda of persuading Americans that the Bush administration “not only permitted 9/11 to happen but may even have orchestrated these events.”

Is the fact of this group’s growing presence on the Internet a reason for studying it in a course on 9/11? Sure. Is the instructor who discusses the group’s arguments thereby endorsing them? Not at all. It is perfectly possible to teach a viewpoint without embracing it and urging it. But the moment a professor does embrace and urge it, academic study has ceased and been replaced by partisan advocacy. And that is a moment no college administration should allow to occur.

I shouldn’t need to say this, but what the hell: I think “Scholars for 9/11 Truth” is a ship of fools.  Quite apart from the fact that the Bush Administration has been so inexpressibly awful that there is no need to add 9/11 conspiracy theories to the bill of particulars, it’s become quite clear to observers of Iraq and the post-Katrina Gulf Coast that there is no way the Bush Administration is competent enough to have pulled off those attacks.  A few years ago, in Empire of Conspiracy: The Culture of Paranoia in Postwar America (a book about postmodern conspiracy fiction), Timothy Melley argued that conspiracy theories, for all the subterranean horrors they purport to unfold, are actually consoling devices one of whose functions is to reassure us that somebody, anybody is in charge, no matter how malevolent.  9/11 conspiracy theories seem to me to offer classic examples of this dynamic, inasmuch as they invest so heavily in the fantasy of American omnipotence.  Besides, Scholars for 9/11 Truth do us all a profound disservice in that they distract public attention from the fact that the Trilateral Commission had Bruce Lee killed because of what he’d discovered about all those Roswell aliens being held in Area 51.

So if I were to go into a classroom and talk about 9/11 conspiracy theories, that’s pretty much the way I’d do it: by holding them at arm’s length and studying them alongside dozens of other crackpot theories about how the Truth Is Out There if only you know where to look.

But here’s the problem:

It is perfectly possible to teach a viewpoint without embracing it and urging it. But the moment a professor does embrace and urge it, academic study has ceased and been replaced by partisan advocacy. And that is a moment no college administration should allow to occur.

OK, so “embracing” and “urging” viewpoints is right out.  Note that this is a significantly different standard from the one Fish urged two paragraphs earlier: “no idea belongs in the classroom if the point of introducing it is to recruit your students for the political agenda it may be thought to imply.” I happen to agree that it’s illegitimate to use the classroom to recruit students to a political agenda.  But I don’t agree that it’s illegitimate to embrace and urge viewpoints.  (The question is whether you embrace and urge them in such a way as to dismiss all competing viewpoints, and penalize students who advance them.) And I think it’s a very, very serious mistake to confuse the two under the heading of “advocacy.”

I’m tempted to say that this idiosyncratic take on academic freedom makes more sense for Stanley Fish than for anyone else in the world, because over the years, as he’s argued that there is no such thing as literal meaning, there is no such thing as interdisciplinarity, there is no such thing as interpretive self-consciousness, there is no such thing as free speech, etc., it’s often been something of a puzzle as to whether he actually “means” what he says “seriously,” or whether he’s just trying to start a good argument.

But I will avoid this temptation!  Instead, I will leave you with the words of Louis Menand, whose 1996 essay, “Culture and Advocacy,” is way better than Fish’s op-ed.  I embrace this view of Menand’s essay, and I urge it too:

I can think of only two hypothetical classroom situations in which what I assume is meant by the term “advocacy” arises as a problem.  The first is the situation in which a professor knows that, say, Heart of Darkness is not a racist text but teaches it as if it were a racist text because she believes that students should be impressed with the need to combat racism.  The second is the situation in which a professor in a math class spends all his time lecturing about why we should all emulate the moral life of the Victorians but fails to demonstrate any connection between this idea and the subject matter of mathematics.

Both of these pedagogical practices seem to me wrong, but not for reasons having anything to do with advocacy.  The problem in the first case, of the professor who teaches Heart of Darkness as a racist text even though she doesn’t really believe it is a racist text, isn’t advocacy; it’s dishonesty.  It’s also extremely bizarre.  I have never heard of anyone doing this, and I cannot imagine why anyone would.  The problem in the second case is that the subject matter of the class is not being taught, and it wouldn’t matter what the professor was filling the class hour with.  It could be his recipe for egg salad.  Again, this sort of problem seems to me to be very rare, and I know of no evidence to suggest that it is less rare now than it ever was.  It is clearly regulable by the math department or the dean’s office when it happens.  And it is unrelated to issues about politics, ethics, or academic freedom.  It’s just unprofessional.

Apart from these virtually nonexistent types of cases, what are we talking about?  The various remarks in the agenda for this volume seem to me to boil down to one question: Should professors attempt to put across their own point of view about the material they teach in the classroom?  Of course we should.  What else could we do?  It is because we have views about our subject that we have been hired to teach them.  Our ethical constraint is only that we teach what we honestly believe the significance of the material to be.

You know, now would be a good time to pick up a copy of the ten-year-old book in which Menand’s essay appeared.  It’s called Advocacy in the Classroom: Problems and Possibilities, and I embrace it and urge it upon you not because I have a little essay in it but because on my campus, I’ve heard some of our more thoughtful conservative students say (sometimes to me) that well, maybe David Horowitz is a sorry old crank, sure, but at least he’s brought these questions out into the light, where they can be discussed.  Because you know professors would never have spent the time and energy to do it on their own.  Again, Advocacy in the Classroom dates from 1996, and it’s based on a conference held by a whole mess of academic organizations in June 1995.  Just saying.

The invaluable Sherman Dorn has more, with sentences like “Fish’s redefinition is the immaculate conception of academic freedom, somehow removed from the potential taint of actual ideas.”

Posted by on 08/01 at 03:09 PM

  1. All this urging and embracing - I do believe I have the vapours.

    Posted by Central Content Publisher  on  08/01  at  05:01 PM

  2. Timothy Melley argued that conspiracy theories, for all the subterranean horrors they purport to unfold, are actually consoling devices one of whose functions is to reassure us that somebody, anybody is in charge, no matter how malevolent.

    Isn’t that what Nietzsche said about theistic religions?

    Posted by John Protevi  on  08/01  at  05:05 PM

  3. “embracing” and “urging” viewpoints is right out.  Note that this is a significantly different standard from the one Fish urged two paragraphs earlier: “no idea belongs in the classroom if the point of introducing it is to recruit your students for the political agenda it may be thought to imply.” I happen to agree that it’s illegitimate to use the classroom to recruit students to a political agenda.  But I don’t agree that it’s illegitimate to embrace and urge viewpoints.  (The question is whether you embrace and urge them in such a way as to dismiss all competing viewpoints, and penalize students who advance them.) And I think it’s a very, very serious mistake to confuse the two under the heading of “advocacy.”

    Suppose I teach the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus, asserting that it is true and provable. (What political agenda it may be thought to imply is a nice question; on the other hand there are professors of Obstetrics who have learned that teaching the procedure called Dilation and Curettage is viewed by some people as dangerous advocacy.) I dismiss competing viewpoints about the relation between a function’s derivative and its antiderivative, and if students advance such viewpoints, I conclude that they failed to understand the Theorem’s proof, which is a part of the course content, and I lower their grades accordingly.

    As I read the quote from Menand, he wouldn’t see this as an abuse of my authority or my academic freedom, or an improper restraint on students’ free expression. But I’m having trouble squaring my hypothetical situation with your paraphrase about “dismiss[ing] competing viewpoints and penaliz[ing] students who advance them.”

    Posted by  on  08/01  at  05:07 PM

  4. Quite possibly also what DH’s small staff says about the operations of FrontPage Mag.

    Posted by John Protevi  on  08/01  at  05:08 PM

  5. Damn you, “rootlesscosmo,” if that really is your name, for sneaking in between my first comment and the tardy realization that it offered a not-to-be-passed-up chance to offer a sophomoric swipe at DH!

    Posted by John Protevi  on  08/01  at  05:11 PM

  6. Isn’t that what Nietzsche said about theistic religions?

    That’s just what They want you to think, John.  All your gods are belong to us.

    Suppose I teach the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus, asserting that it is true and provable. . . . I dismiss competing viewpoints about the relation between a function’s derivative and its antiderivative, and if students advance such viewpoints, I conclude that they failed to understand the Theorem’s proof, which is a part of the course content, and I lower their grades accordingly.

    OK by me, rootlesscosmo.  I don’t see where a failure to understand the Theorem’s proof even counts as a “viewpoint” worth considering.

    Posted by Michael  on  08/01  at  05:23 PM

  7. So Menand wrote that in 1996 or so.  Heck, I bet David Horowitz was still taking cash from liberals then, before he realized the big money was all on the right.

    And what the heck was Gertrude Himmelfarb’s position anyway?  Well, sometimes you gotta read the book.

    Posted by  on  08/01  at  05:28 PM

  8. Although I know the real substance of your post is on the issue of advocacy in the classroom, I wanted to chime in and thank you for stating for the record that the “Scholars for 9/11 Truth” are nutjobs of the first order.

    Melley’s quote is right on the money.  In addition to being consoling fictions, conspiracy theories reveal the astonishing naivete of many so-called “leftists.” Running underneath the seeming pointlessness of their Sissyphean labor--the endless accumulation of “evidence” in support of their outlandish claims--is an implicit faith that the vast body of unbelievers can eventually be converted to the “truth” through their painstaking documentation of the “true evils” of the Bush administration.

    The distressing truth is that there are many who are aware of the real horrors of this administration and who, for a variety of reasons, either feel impotent to oppose it or who choose to ignore them. This is the tragedy of much of our history.  There was an awareness of slavery’s evil readily available to many people in the colonies and yet a simultaneous inability by many of these same people to oppose such a system of human exploitation and immiseration.

    The “Scholars for 9/11 Truth” unwittingly seek to play to (rather than oppose) an instinct near and dear to this administration and its allies: namely the idea that 3,500 American lives are worth infinitely more than 50,000+ Iraqi lives.  To “reveal” (here meaning to construct a fiction from whole cloth) that the Bush administration engineered the murder of (mostly) Americans in the WTC rather than to concentrate on its (real) butchery of (mostly) Iraqis is to play a very dangerous and racist game indeed.

    Posted by  on  08/01  at  06:03 PM

  9. I’m really sorry to hijack your comments section Michael, but you did boast 4 million readers and this cry for help needs a wider audience:

    http://beirutlive.blogspot.com/2006/08/aub-medical-center-needs-help.html

    Please click on it and lend some support to the American University of Beirut Medical Center. Because fuel is running out in Lebanon, thousands of patients in the hospital are facing death due to the Israeli blockade on the country. Read the article, and comment on the blogsite so ABC News picks up the story.

    Once again, I apologize. Back to Stanley Fish and Louis Menand. . .

    Posted by  on  08/01  at  06:04 PM

  10. Menand was certainly correct that “professors” are hired to teach their views.  The problem is that Barrett is not a “professor.” He’s a one-semester contract instructor.  Does anyone think he went through the drill that an assistant professor must go through before he is permitted to teach his views?  Did other faculty members make sure that he was up to the standards of their department before they decided that he would be permitted to stand up in a Wisconsin classroom?  Do they even know of his existence?  (Well, they do now.) And once on campus, does he face the institutional pressures that keep professors within the bounds of reason?  Does he care what his colleagues think of him?  (What colleagues?) Does he worry about tenure?  (At least he’s free of that problem.) Is he concerned about getting his articles published? Does he hope to live up to standards of the former occupants of his office? Does he yearn to become part of this great institution?  Of course he doesn’t.  He works out of his car and yearns to get his paycheck.

    Wisconsin may save big bucks by replacing junior faculty with migrant laborers, but there’s a reason that the university model has lasted for a thousand years. If Wisconsin wants to switch from a community of scholars to a pick-up team, they’ll get what they’ve paid for.

    Posted by  on  08/01  at  06:07 PM

  11. No problem, JL.  I only wish that 4 million people would lend a hand right now.  Alas, my four million visited this blog over the course of 31 months, and I have a sneaking suspicion that some of them came back more than once.  But please, everyone, if you’re reading this far down into the comments, click on JL’s link and give what you can.

    JR, great questions.  I’ll add only that Barrett has no specific qualifications to teach this material.  Pick-up team, indeed.

    Posted by Michael  on  08/01  at  06:15 PM

  12. The difficulty in your response to rootlesscosmo, Michael, is that it depends on the position that we can distinguish between legitimate “viewpoints” (which must be respected) and mere wrongnesses (which should not be).  That position’s at the core of academic practice today: I chair the tenure and promotion subcommittee at my law school, and we assert the power, notwithstanding academic freedom, to make negative judgments about junior faculty members based on our conclusions that the things they say in their scholarship are badly reasoned, not supported by relevant authority or data—in short, wrong.  But the distinction’s awfully hard to maintain in real life.  Those who sought the dismissal of Communists in the academy thought that their views were patently wrong.  Every fight over academic freedom today boils down to the claim that “that content should not be taught because it’s plainly mistaken (and pernicious to boot)—it’s not a viewpoint worth considering!” Indeed, that’s the fight over Barrett.

    Posted by  on  08/01  at  06:28 PM

  13. Fish misses a basic point.  Academic freedom means independence from political or economic coercion in the pursuit of one’s area of study.  Academic freedom is the freedom of *academics*, not the freedom for students to get things wrong.  (Failing a student because he gets basic facts about evolution wrong on a multiple-choice test is a perfectly legitimate practice, whatever ID-advocates might say, even if evolutionary theory continues to have open problems.)

    Each discipline has a right to manage itself from within and to justify its practices in terms of the best epistemic standards available to members of that disciplinary community.  A scholar who advocates the claim that Bush & co. engineered 9/11 ought to be judged by his peers.  It strikes me that any epistemically well-grounded and thoughtful faculty of history or political science would evaluate such a claim and reject it.  There’s simply no credible evidence to support the claim.  A scholar who builds his body of work on such a claim, and claims of similar merit, ought to be denied tenure.

    This pointedly does not mean that all academic fields have their epistemic heads screwed on straight.  Looking at the rise and fall of behaviorism in the U.S. academy is a perfect case study for how widespread wrong-headedness can be.  But the point about academic freedom remains:  when behaviorism fell, it was toppled from within its faculties, not because crusaders in the state legislature put an end to it.

    Posted by  on  08/01  at  07:56 PM

  14. The second is the situation in which a professor in a math class spends all his time lecturing about why we should all emulate the moral life of the Victorians but fails to demonstrate any connection between this idea and the subject matter of mathematics.

    I had one of these professors once.  It was really tiresome.  It was a required class, and the guy had a seating chart and required attendance.  Bleh.  I got back at him by making cutting remarks on his teacher evaluation forms.  Also I daydreamed in class a lot.

    But anyway, I see a loophole in your theory where a Bad Thing could happen.  Here’s the hypothetical.  You have a class where 9-11 theories are germane.  You have a professor who truly believes the MIHOP* theory.  So he teaches his theory, in good faith.  But he is teaching stuff that is (let’s stipulate) really truly wrong.  This seems much worse to me that my tiresome afternoons listening to Professor H. ramble on about politics.

    I guess the answer is that it is a rare occurence, and college kids can survive one semester of being taught really wrong stuff.  Perhaps it is even a learning experience. 

    Captcha word: trouble

    *i.e. the government Made It Happen On Purpose

    Posted by  on  08/01  at  08:24 PM

  15. This is Barrett:

    The instructor, Kevin Barrett, is co-founder of an organization called the Muslim-Jewish-Christian Alliance, which claims the Bush administration planned the attacks to create a war between Muslims and Christians…

    “The 9/11 lie was designed to sow hatred between the faiths,” Barrett has written on the organization’s Web site.

    “Either we discuss the compelling evidence that 9/11 was an inside job, or there is precious little to talk about.”

    http://www.jsonline.com/story/index.aspx?id=445190

    Ah, yes.  Either we discuss how right I am, or you can shut up.  Sounds like a true academic to me.

    Wonder how this guy got the job?

    “Barrett has accepted a one-semester appointment as an associate lecturer, beginning on Aug. 28. This is a 50 percent appointment that has a salary of $8,247.”

    http://www.news.wisc.edu/12701.html

    Oh, I see. This is a fellow who is willing to work a dead-end job for $16,500 a year.

    I really don’t think this is an academic freedom issue.  I think this is should be a discussion about universities as RICO enterprises, which lure unsuspecting young adults to mortgage their futures by promising them an education, and then fob them off of on deadenders and kooks who can’t or won’t find honest work.

    Posted by  on  08/01  at  09:21 PM

  16. The difficulty in your response to rootlesscosmo, Michael, is that it depends on the position that we can distinguish between legitimate “viewpoints” (which must be respected) and mere wrongnesses (which should not be). . . .  But the distinction’s awfully hard to maintain in real life.

    All I can do is agree, Jon.  When it’s not a question of students dismissing mathematical theorems—when, instead, it’s a question of bad arguments badly reasoned from bad premises—then it’s awfully hard to distinguish a legitimate from an illegitimate “viewpoint.” And you’re right, that’s precisely what the system of peer review, with all its inevitable messiness and judgment calls, is supposed to do.  Which is why it’s relevant that Barrett wasn’t vetted by that system, which brings me to . . .

    This is a fellow who is willing to work a dead-end job for $16,500 a year.

    I really don’t think this is an academic freedom issue.  I think this is should be a discussion about universities as RICO enterprises, which lure unsuspecting young adults to mortgage their futures by promising them an education, and then fob them off of on deadenders and kooks who can’t or won’t find honest work.

    JR, you really think it’s true that most academics take the line, “either we discuss how right I am, or you can shut up”?  Because that would be a kinda strange thing to say here, where people routinely tell me how partially wrong I am.  All I have to say is (a) universities should rely less on contingent labor, and (b) people who are willing to teach for $16,500 a year are not necessarily deadenders or kooks.  In fact, most of them are perfectly sane, about 9/11 and about everything else.  But over the past 10-15 years, American universities have hired roughly three part-timers for every tenure-track professor on the books.  Don’t go blaming the migrant workers for this state of affairs, now.

    Lee K., thanks for those first two paragraphs, but wait a second . . . when exactly did behaviorism fall?

    Posted by Michael  on  08/01  at  09:51 PM

  17. The difficulty in distinguishing “wrongness” from “perspectives” can in part be resolved by being utterly clear on the pedagogical goals of a given course or individual lesson.

    For example, you’re teaching *Heart of Darkness*.  You want to provide some context for understanding the novel, so you present late 19th century anthropological and travel writings, you show students ethnographic drawings of Africans, you share excerpts of Conrad’s Africa journals, and so on.

    You can then ask students to enter into a particular perspective on the novel: that is, you can ask students to play along with an interpretive game.  “If we accept a certain form of historicism, what can we reasonably say about the relationship between text and context?”

    Here, we can distinguish between wrongness and perspective.  Perspective implies assumptions, those unproveable foundations of further thinking.  Wrongness suggests an infelicity of logic, a contradiction or misstep even *granting* those assumptions. 

    In a discipline such as literary studies, the problem then becomes one of deciding when it’s proper to ask students to participate in one interpretative game over another.  Is it good pedagogy when a professor who is a strong historicist neglects to point out credible criticism of historicism—even if that professor is entirely convinced that some form of historicism is an objectively true understanding of literature?

    I would argue that it depends on the goals of the lesson.  The Horowitz-style “fair and balanced” pedagogy would insist that at the very moment of teaching, say, historicism, one would also have to teach alternative, anti-historicist ideas.  As a teaching strategy, that’s self-defeating.  Nietzsche wrote somewhere about the need to know one’s opponent’s arguments better than one’s opponent knows them.  Likewise, students need to spend quality time looking through a particular lens.  They need time to fashion their own critique before the professor simply says, “Historicism is right, but it’s also wrong.  Get it?”

    At the same time, I can think of few instances where it’s pedagogically sound to insist on only one interpretative game being played in a given course.  Classes on, say, Marxism and literature at some point must provide—but especially must ask *students* to provide—reasoned critiques of individual visions of marxian literary studies as well as reasoned disagreements with historical materialism as such. 

    In each instance—a professor asking for a marxian interpretation of a text and that same professor asking for a critique of marxian interpretations—we ask students to accept a set of assumptions for the sake of argument.  But given those assumptions, we can then evaluate the relative wrongness of the particular arguments students make.

    I do not think, though, that a professor has an obligation to present all the possible interpretative games to his or her students.  A professor should have the right simply to decide, “I refuse to teach Lacanian readings of Victorian fiction because I think Lacan was totally wrong.” A professor must provide *some* perspective or perspectives; a professor should provide some critique of those perspectives; but a professor shouldn’t be forced to entertain any and every possible perspective.  A course on evolutionary science should present the dominant understandings of evolution; it should guide students through published criticism of that science and should press students to make their own reasoned critique; but it doesn’t have to include intelligent design (or the Flying Spaghetti Monster).

    (One minor, final point: it’s important to remember that one can provide a false argument for a true thesis, such as “The cat is on the mat because the Flying Spaghetti Monster told me so.")

    Posted by  on  08/01  at  10:41 PM

  18. My goal next semester is to make sure that my students learn how to get to make their own contributions to this truthiness stuff
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmHm0rGns4I&feature=Favorites&page=1&t=t&f=b

    Posted by  on  08/02  at  02:23 AM

  19. Behaviorism’s fall:  I’m specifically thinking about the cognitive revolution in linguistics--and other domains of the human sciences.  No one I think believes that you can study an organism without regard for it’s mental states, or “purely” in terms of behavior.  Maybe I missed it, but are there behaviorists still running around in psych departments?  One of my undergrad degrees was in psych, and as far as I could see the faculty were all either social or clinial or cognitive people now.

    Posted by  on  08/02  at  06:37 AM

  20. Michael- sorry about that “true academic” line- I was being sarcastic, but it didn’t come through.  I happen to have an exalted view of academics. The idea that a university would hire a guy who says, “either you agree with me or we have precious little to talk about” sent me into a rage.  I thnk the “precious little” is what did it - it’s the combination of arrogance and stupidity that just makes my head explode.

    And no, I don’t blame the migrant workers for the fact that universities hire them.  I blame the universities, whose hiring practices show contempt for their faculties, their students, and the parents who pay the bills. 

    On the other hand, I don’t respect people who have jobs that they aren’t qualified for and can’t do properly with the resources that they are given.  It’s not their fault, but it’s no cause for honor, either.  I understand that many of them are wonderful, dedicated people who could have been competent assistant professors if they’d been trained, brought, along, etc etc - but they weren’t.  And I also understand that the brightest of them realize that they are being played for saps and move on, while most of the ones that stay either have an axe to grind or don’t have the ambition to make a change in their lives.

    Posted by  on  08/02  at  08:19 AM

  21. I see I’m not being terribly on-point so at the risk of hijacking this thread and losing all readers I’ll try again:

    Academics are people who have been accepted into a self-governing community of scholars.  This is a process that winnows out the people who can’t or won’t observe the norms of the academic community.

    Barrett is not an academic. He’s not part of an academic community.  His commitment is not to scholarship.  It’s to activism.

    He’s also a kook.  See http://www.mujca.com/essay.htm.  This little screed would fit right in on a bottle of Dr Bronner’s soap.

    What Barrett has to offer isn’t scholarship.  If you give teaching jobs to insane conspiracy theorists like Barrett because you’re saving money by hiring people to teach without admitting them to the community of scholars, then the institutional forces that keep professors within bounds don’t exist and academic freedom gives you bizarre results.

    Posted by  on  08/02  at  09:12 AM

  22. I always get this ringing in my ears when someone starts lamenting about those darned conspiracy theorists. (Yes, the ringing is coming from the men in black shooting in their radio beams and I should put my tin foil hat back on.)

    Someone out on the net used to use the tag, “One man’s conspiracy theory is another man’s business plan.” So maybe whether or not one sees a conspiracy is whether or not one wants to see a tragedy or farce. If BushCo are so incompetent how come so many of them are stuffing their pockets and getting reelected and making huge profits blowing up the world and all the clever liberals and humanitarians are sinking to the bottom of the food chain?

    If I am more apt to “go there” when conspiracy theories come up, it might be because of growing up with the image of Dealey Plaza. Anyone who reads the dissenters of the various official versions of that one, or who sees what happens to the dissenters, knows that conspiracies exist. 9/11? Well, if it wasn’t a criminal conspiracy then the invasion of Iraq based on it certainly was. I could go back to old issues of Covert Action Information Bulletin(I think twenty years ago they even printed Ward Churchill) from the mid-nineties and find articles documenting the intelligence/oil industry’s designs on Afghanistan and what kind of changes they’d need to get that pipeline. When African Americans think AIDS is a man-made disease they automatically refer back to the Tuskeegee Experiments. White folk don’t.

    Conspiracy theories are like indictments. They are only as good as their proof and the prosecution of the case. Generally, conspiracy theories accuse people in power and so often have the power of the state in opposition to those who investigate. Some theories are absolutely correct, some absolutely bogus, some in between. I personally don’t put the Queen of England ahead of the Dulles in my menagerie of evil.

    Should professors teach conspiracy theories in school? Depends on what the courses are and how good the professors are.

    Posted by Bob in Pacifica  on  08/02  at  09:55 AM

  23. Barrett is not an academic. He’s not part of an academic community.  His commitment is not to scholarship.
    JR, are you, by any chance, an academic? The distinctions you are trying to draw here are very prblematic. Wikipedia notes (and none of the reports I have read says claims otherwise) that Barrett holds a Ph.D. in African languages and literatures form Wisconsin from 2004, and also “received two graduate degrees in English literature and French from San Francisco State University in the early 1990s.” Furthermore, when provost Patrick Farrell reviewed Barrett’s record back in July, he found that he “has a record of quality teaching, including as a teaching assistant in this class [the one on Islam].”

    I agree with Michael that higher education’s increasing reliance on adjunct labor is a very serious problem, but implicit claims you are making here, that only tenured or tenure-line professors merit the designation of “academic” is unwarranted, disrespectful, and downright offensive. I would venture to say that the majority of humanities PhDs teach as lecturers and adjuncts (both before and immediately after receiving their degrees) before receiving a tenure line position. As a 2004 graduate teaching at his alma mater, Barrett falls squarely within this category, and therefore he should be given the same considerations that other “academics” would receive.

    Finally, the NY Times notes in a correction published today that “A university review determined that although Mr. Barrett presented a variety of viewpoints, he had not discussed his personal opinions in the classroom.”

    Posted by carlos  on  08/02  at  10:25 AM

  24. Barrett’s views of 9/11 appear to be completely nuts.

    But how can one simply say that Barrett has no scholarship to offer?  According to the website JR linked to, Barrett is an Arabist specializing in the analysis of myth, literature, and folklore.  Has he contributed valuable work on these subjects?  I honestly don’t know, and my guess is that neither does JR.  For better or for worse, plenty of scholars (and other human beings) who are very competent in their area of specialty have silly views about other things.  One might dismiss Charles Beard’s views about FDR and World War II as conspiracy mongering, but he was still one of the most significant historians of his day.

    You can’t judge Barrett’s competence as a scholar of Arab folklore on the basis of his 9/11 views.  Though these views might in some general sense call his judgment into question, presumably he’s written a dissertation in his actual area of specialty; members of his discipline should judge his scholarship on the basis of this and his other actual work in his field.

    In practice, academic units vary widely in how carefully they vet candidates for adjunct appointments: some departments will hire any PhD or ABD who happens to be around; others do full-scale searches. Barrett’s position as an adjunct does not necessarily indicate a total lack of concern about his qualifications, though in all likelihood his scholarship was less carefully considered than it would have been had he been up for a tenure-track appointment.

    Posted by  on  08/02  at  10:38 AM

  25. Michael- sorry about that “true academic” line- I was being sarcastic, but it didn’t come through.

    See, that’s the problem right there, JR—we eschew sarcasm on this straight-faced blog.  Anyway, thanks for the followup, and for the link to Barrett’s essay.  It sets my teeth on edge for the reason you name—and one more:  the “agree with me or STFU” sentence, “Either we discuss the compelling evidence that 9/11 was an inside job, or there is precious little to talk about” is bad enough, but it’s followed by this little threat:  “If non-Muslims persist in allowing the 9/11 Big Lie to stand, in the teeth of overwhelming evidence, Muslims will be tempted to find something other than words with which to defend themselves.  In a future without 9/11 truth, ‘Islamic terrorism’ may well become a self-fulfilling prophecy.” Well, at least we were warned.  But it’s good to know the attacks on the U.S.S. Cole and the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania never happened.  More Big Lies, I presume.

    I remain agnostic, however, as to whether people who write such things can be responsible teachers. If the university review determined that Barrett checked his beliefs at the door, that’s good enough for me.  For here we are not afraid to countenance “Scholars for 9/11 Truth” whatever they may write, nor to tolerate their errors so long as reason is left free to combat them.  To coin a phrase.

    Posted by Michael  on  08/02  at  11:51 AM

  26. I am leery of nitpicking such a minor point by “El Tigre,” but nitpicking is what I do (part-time, for about $16K a year).

    Although I am not much for conspiracy theories (largely since all that ranting about “back and to the left” ignores physics), I think it’s better to dismiss them on the basis of their absurdity, rather than by an appeal to incompetence:

    it’s become quite clear to observers of Iraq and the post-Katrina Gulf Coast that there is no way the Bush Administration is competent enough to have pulled off those attacks.

    The war in Iraq (and “on Terror” in general) has greatly enriched Halliburton and other major Republican enterprises, helped Republicans win elections in 2002 and 2004, and has been a major justification for previously undreamt-of expansion of executive power.  New Orleans was a city full of African-Americans, and Mr. Bush was no longer running for reelection (see Florida 2004 for a coincidentally very different federal hurricane response).  In neither case do I think this administration has failed in what they desired to do.  Civil war in Iraq and drowned poor people in New Orleans are simply irrelevant.  Never put down to incompetence what can be explained by sociopathic indifference.  None of this means that the administration “planned” 9/11, but can certainly explain continued vacationing in the face of “Bin Laden determined to attack inside United States.”

    I now graciously give you all permission to resume your commentary on academic freedom.

    Posted by  on  08/02  at  12:19 PM

  27. Oh, mds, I was being facetious, you know.  I’m well aware of the Administration’s many talents.

    But I had no idea nitpicking paid so well!  I guess we don’t need that minimum-wage increase after all.

    Posted by  on  08/02  at  12:53 PM

  28. "here on this straight-laced blog”

    And all this time, I thought it was a risque blog.

    Posted by  on  08/02  at  12:55 PM

  29. No no no, mirm, the fun-with-phonemes bit is the next post up.  Here we are straight-faced, because we type all this stuff with a straight face.

    Posted by  on  08/02  at  01:14 PM

  30. But I had no idea nitpicking paid so well!

    Well, it helps to have been a Physics/Nitpicking double major (We got to watch Star Trek episodes for credit!).  They won’t let just anyone into academic nitpicking, you know.

    Something that bothers me about the pernicious way Mr. Fish addresses academic freedom is its disturbing parallel (or non-orthongonality, at least) with too much current thinking about “freedom of the press.” There is all-too-frequently a failure to recognize the existence of any middle ground between the worst excesses of Billy Bo Bob Hearst and “Shape of Earth: Views Differ.” When journalists feel that the price for a free press is reducing everything to “he said / she said,” with no room for injecting judgment, it’s no longer a free press.  Likewise with a definition of academic freedom that mandates instructors behaving as entirely disinterested conduits for information.  Perhaps I’m stretching this too far, but it allowed me to overuse quotation marks and refer to Mr. Hearst as “Billy Bo Bob.” (See?  Overuse!)

    Posted by  on  08/02  at  01:32 PM

  31. I was wondering when you’d get around to Fish’s brain fart Michael. And I agree with pretty much everything you happen to say in regards to it. But can you square disavowing the use of “the classroom to recruit students to a political agenda” with the idea that the critical skills supplied by a liberal arts education makes better citizens and a healthy democracy?

    Posted by  on  08/02  at  03:02 PM

  32. Tom, I guess we have come to the point where working to have our students develop critical thinking skills is itself seen by our petrocon authoritarian overlords ("I for one would like to welcome ...") as the adoption of a political position, that is, liberal republicanism (small “r,” thank you very much). If I’m catching your drift?

    Posted by John Protevi  on  08/02  at  03:20 PM

  33. I guess if Stanley Fish were in charge of a medical school, he’d fire teachers for urging that antibiotics be used to treat infections rather than leeches or chanting or whatever.

    Posted by  on  08/03  at  02:13 PM

  34. Consider the argument “Is the fact of this group’s growing presence on the Internet a reason for studying it in a course ... And that is a moment no college administration should allow to occur.”

    I elide mostly to save space, but deliberately delete “9/11” because Fish’s argument does not rely on that specific case.  It would apply equally to the growing presence of say Darwinian evolutionary biology on the net (see Pharyngiulla sp?). 

    According to Fish’s logic, such as it is, a biology professor may discuss the “structure, history, influence and so forth” of the theory of evolution by natural selection but may not argue that it is the best available explanation of the facts and, so far as it goes, probably corresponds to reality. 

    As quoted, Fish does not object to the idea that some theories are more valid than others.  I think it is clear that he logically has to object to presenting any theory of 9/11 as the most plausible given the evidence and thus ban professors from arguing that the evidence strongly supports the view that 9/11 was not a Bush administration conspiracy.

    The problem with 9/11 scholars for truth is not that they present their views as more plausible than others, but that their theory is crazy.  Fish has to explain why he thinks Kevin Barrett has gone too far but does not think that every professor in every field of natural science has gone too far.

    He must, of course, know that his argument has been used to argue against teaching evolutionary biology.  Does he agree with the creative designers ?  If so how about relativity. Should physicists teach about it only relative to the Einsteinian discourse ? 

    I think we are forced to choose and I, for one, choose “cut bait” over Fish.

    Posted by Robert Waldmann  on  08/05  at  04:14 AM

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