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Friday, October 13, 2006

Paper grading post I

The good people at Free Exchange on Campus have given me permission to re-post my interview with them on this humble and harried blog.  Thanks, Free Exchange—for this, and for everything you do!

Free Exchange:  First of all, thanks for taking the time as clearly you have a lot on your plate.  Let me start by asking a question that might seem to have an obvious answer given that the NYT has anointed you David Horowitz’s “most engaged critic” (we defer of course), but what prompted this book? More specifically, why did you think that the focus of this book was important and worth writing at this time?

Me: Well, the funny thing is that this book really isn’t a direct reply to Horowitz.  (And I do hope he’s dismayed at the degree to which the book is not about him.) It’s not even a reply to Horowitz’s designation of me as one of the 101 most dangerous professors in the country; my book doesn’t mention The Professors at all.

I began writing it in 2004; at that point, Congress was considering an amendment to the Higher Education Act that would have created an “advisory board” for all Title VI international studies programs.  The board would have been made up entirely of political appointees, and it would have been empowered to investigate the “activities” (quite a vague term) of all “grant recipients” (i.e., entire programs or individual students and professors).  That amendment had passed the House unanimously in October 2003, and it was motivated by the sense, among some conservatives, that Middle Eastern studies programs were anti-Israel and therefore anti-American.  But I don’t think I need to explain how dangerous such a board could be—or how, for that matter, it might discourage smart graduate students from studying Arabic and aspiring to jobs in the State Department.

Horowitz’s “Academic Bill of Rights” was drafted around the same time—the fall of 2003—and Horowitz had sent me the first draft, which actually spoke of audiotaping faculty search committee meetings and providing every academic job applicant with a detailed rejection letter explaining the reasons for his or her rejection—all in the name of combatting “bias” in hiring.  And, of course, although we were still a year away from the ludicrous Ward Churchill Extravaganza of early 2005, numerous other scholars had been vilified and hounded for making statements after (and about) 9/11 that were far, far more innocuous than Churchill’s vile remarks.

A pamphlet released in late 2001 by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, for example, went after Joel Beinin for saying, “if Osama bin Laden is confirmed to be behind the attacks, the United States should bring him before an international tribunal on charges of crimes against humanity.” Apparently anyone not calling for World War III at that time was an enemy of the state, as far as ACTA was concerned.

So even though I was aware that one wing of the culture-war right has been outraged by liberal campuses and liberal-left professors for many years, I believed that some aspects of the post-9/11 political climate had gotten especially toxic for those of us who believe that academic programs should be intellectually independent from the state—and from whatever political party happens to be in power at any moment in history.

Free Exchange:  Well, we certainly would be interested to know what your response to Horowitz was!  However, in the interest of not feeding his ego with more press, let me follow up on your sense of the “climate.” Do you feel the attacks on higher education have changed since you began this project, and if so, how?

Me: I don’t think there’s been any significant change in the climate; the right’s attacks on higher education were pretty frantic in 2001-03, and they’re pretty frantic now.  I do, however, sense two important developments.  The first is that liberals, progressives, moderates, and some conservatives have begun to realize just how radical these attacks are, and how dangerous—I use the word advisedly—it would be to place universities under direct state control, particularly in states where you’ve got a large body of legislators who don’t like this whole “science” thing.

The other, unfortunately, is that the meaning of “academic freedom” has been almost hopelessly confused by these attacks.  “Academic freedom” actually means (according to the American Association of University Professors, whose definition is actually the foundation of the idea) that “teachers are entitled to full freedom in research and in the publication of the results, subject to the adequate performance of their other academic duties.” It has to do with teaching and research—not with the right of students to speak up in class, or with “campus climate” in general.  So, for example, when conservative Emory University professor Mark Bauerlein testified to the Georgia legislature (on behalf of the so-called Academic Bill of Rights) that “Academic freedom isn’t the property of the faculty.  It is the responsibility of campus dwellers, yes, but the property of all citizens,” he was precisely wrong—and statements like this, I believe, have the effect of confusing academic freedom with freedom of speech in general.

Free Exchange: Given those developments, do you believe that professors need to, in fact, get more politically active outside of the classroom?  And does this mean anything in terms of how academics talk to state legislators and the public in general about their work?

Me: The short answer is yes.  As I note in the book, professors are an exceptionally weak constituency, politically speaking.  College professors, it seems, are especially disorganized when it comes to political advocacy and political organization.

At the same time, I’m not suggesting that professors should organize simply to protect their own interests—though that would be a decent start, with regard to the virtues of protecting the intellectual independence of college teachers.  Professors also need to learn how to address the legitimate concerns of legislators and the public in general-about everything from academic freedom and civil society to grade inflation and tuition hikes.  Very, very few people understand how public universities are funded, for example, and I think if they understood the relation between state budget cuts and tuition increases at places like Penn State, they’d see the wisdom of the social contract we had in place until quite recently, in which universities were seen as a public good that offers all kinds of intellectual and financial returns on public investment.

Free Exchange:  Let’s turn to the classroom. You spend two substantial chapters of your book discussing what goes on in your classes and your opening chapter discusses your own personal and professional struggle with how to best meet the needs of one of your outspoken students, “John,” as well as the other students in that class.  How common do you believe that struggle is for professors teaching in today’s environment and is one hope that your book helps other liberal arts faculty members think through their own class situations and these issues?

Me: Well, I think every responsible professor struggles to meet the needs of his or her students.  My own standard for this, as I explain in the book, is the standard of “reasonable accommodation”:  every student and every perspective should be accommodated in the classroom, within reason.  Now, that standard is drawn from disability law, so when I first elaborated it, back in 2003, a few opportunistic critics on the right tried to make the bizarre claim that I was suggesting we treat conservative students as if they have mental disabilities.  But, of course, I was arguing that every student should be accommodated.  As I argue in the book, the beautiful thing about the standard of “reasonable accommodation” is that it is a universal imperative that requires one to acknowledge individual idiosyncrasies (because not every “accommodation” will take the same form).

The real challenges come when you find yourself with a student who makes arguments you consider unreasonable.  In my case, it was “John“‘s defense of the WW2 internment camps for Americans of Japanese ancestry.  For other teachers, it might be a student who won’t question the Biblical account of creation, or who insists that homosexuality should be cured so that we can save gay men and lesbians from eternal damnation.  In my book, I mention the case of Ann Marie B. Bahr, who teaches philosophy and religion at South Dakota State University and had a bunch of students walk out of her lectures (though they continued to show up for exams, remarkably enough) because she had assigned readings that were critical of the white supremacist and anti-Semitic group Christian Identity.  I think that for professors whose courses touch on politically volatile matters—from the Middle East to African-American history to gender and sexuality—the question of how best to stimulate and lead productive classroom discussion is absolutely central to their teaching.  But yes, I hope that some aspects of my book encourage all of us, even those of us whose course material is not quite so volatile, to think through our politics and our pedagogy.

Free Exchange:  In your closing paragraph, you eloquently argue that the teaching of the liberal arts strengthens our democracy. In your mind, are our colleges and universities vis-à-vis the liberal arts doing a better or worse job of strengthening our democracy today than say we were 50 years ago-or has it changed?

Me:  Better, I’d say—but not necessarily because of the liberal arts.

Let’s go back 50 years, to 1956.  Though the GI Bill had enabled a new generation of middle- and working-class adults to attend college, most American universities were still racially segregated; the real opening of the gates didn’t happen until the 1960s, when universities witnessed an extraordinary decade of expansion, fueled in part by women and minorities and in part by massive Cold War funding in the wake of Sputnik.  (It is something of a historical irony that so many academic liberals and progressives of the era were supported by the National Defense Education Act.  Ah, those were the good old days.)

I can illustrate what’s at stake by looking back at my own degree-granting institutions:  I was part of the last all-male cohort of Columbia University when I graduated in 1982.  That’s right, Columbia didn’t admit women until 1983.  Even more amazingly, my doctoral institution, the University of Virginia (a public school, though it often likes to imagine itself otherwise), didn’t admit women until 1970.  It’s now one of the so-called “public Ivies”; before 1970, it was known widely as a place where the gentry learned to hold their liquor while cruising through the curriculum with the “Gentlemen’s C.” Fred Barnes and Brit Hume both graduated from Virginia in the 1960s.  Back then, white guys only had to compete with about 44 percent of the population for spots at U.Va.  So think about that the next time a conservative writer tells you that affirmative action has led to a decline in academic standards, or the next time the College Republicans hold one of their charming little “affirmative action bake sales” on campus.

But at the same time, we’ve done a good deal of backsliding over the past twenty years when it comes to making college accessible for poor and working-class families.  For too many Americans, elite universities are out of reach, and millions of students graduate with crushing debt loads.  It’s time we began taking on Adolph Reed, Jr.’s suggestion for Free Higher Ed:  a 50 to 60 billion dollar federal program to subsidize higher education throughout the United States.  Would it break the bank?  Not at all—it’s a pittance compared to the war in Iraq.  And look what happened to Ireland after it decided to subsidize its citizens’ college tuitions:  it’s now the Celtic Tiger, the economic star of the European Union.  Ireland!  Twenty years ago it was almost a third-world nation economically.  Now it’s booming beyond belief.  Celtic Tiger, indeed—it’s almost as weird as seeing the Detroit Tigers make the playoffs.  And it reminds me that the greatest periods of American economic expansion, after the Civil War and after World War II, just happened to coincide with massive investments in American universities.  I think there’s a lesson there for sensible Republicans as well as the entire Democratic party.

Free Exchange:  We at Free Exchange have always admired your writing on your blog and this book has moments of “blog-like” writing.  Does your blog influence your academic work stylistically or substantively?

Me:  Sure—though I’ve always had a more or less colloquial prose style, I think.  But there’s a difference between my blog writing and my more formal writing:  the former tends to be more playful, even silly at times (I get to indulge my love of Monty Python and the Simpsons more often), whereas the latter tends to have a lower snark content.  I simply assume I’m writing for a more diffuse and diverse audience in What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts? than I am on the blog, where I have a regular readership that is usually fairly indulgent about my moments of self-indulgence (or silliness).

While I was writing Liberal Arts, though, I sometimes felt a conflict between the blog and the book.  News stories about conservatives in academe would pop up every now and then, and there was a flurry of such stories right after the 2004 election.  At the time, I wrote something fairly facetious on my blog—a post entitled “Keeping Conservatives Out of Academe” about how I was screening job applications for the codewords that would give away the Republican Ph.D. candidates.  I was kidding, of course; my real point was that conservatives hadn’t (and they still haven’t) provided any evidence for their numbers in the applicant pool.  And I do think that one weird effect of the right’s attacks on liberal professors is that it allows some conservatives to pretend that they are too interested in teaching the arts and humanities and are just being prevented from doing so by nasty liberals.

But at the time, I remember Ralph Luker, a smart conservative historian and prolific blogger, taking exception to this post—I think he considered it cheeky and evasive.  I wanted to say, “no, that’s just the snarky blog version—I promise you I’m working on a more substantial and sustained argument for the book,” but of course I didn’t want to give away that argument ahead of time, either.  So at times during 2004-05 as I was writing the book, I found myself writing in one mode for the blog and quite another for the book.

My education as a blogger, though, has involved my gradual realization that I had developed a readership that would actually stay with me for 2000- or 3000-word posts on politics, literature, literary theory, and disability issues.  And not only that:  this readership would respond with smart and challenging and sometimes hilarious comments day in and day out.  That’s been a truly delightful surprise; I didn’t imagine that blogging could be so substantive or so fun when I started out in early 2004.

Free Exchange:  Lastly, you talk about what you look for in your students’ writing.  You say that you “tend to be especially impressed by papers that ask themselves the simple but profound question, so what?” What do you believe the “so what” question is that your book considers?

Me:  I guess I’d put the “so what” question this way:  Universities are under attack from an ascendant wing of the Republican Party that would like to see them placed more directly under the control of government-so what?  Why should average Americans care about this when they’ve got so much else to worry about, from health care costs to pension-looting scandals to the Bush-Cheney attack on civil liberties and habeas corpus?

And my answer is that the attack on American universities is part and parcel of that ascendant wing’s larger program for American society.  They now control all three branches of government, they’ve got their own Philip K. Dick-like alternative-universe media in Fox News and the vast right-wing noise machine, and they’re striking out at the few areas of American life they don’t dominate—Hollywood, unions, college campuses.  (You know, the real centers of power.) It’s a little hard to believe, at first; if I were a conservative, I’d be quite happy with an arrangement under which my allies control the country and my opponents control the survey courses in American fiction.  But it helps to understand that the ascendant wing we’re talking about is not, strictly speaking, a conservative wing.  We’re talking, instead, about the radical right—some of whom believe in the theory that the President can set aside the Constitution at will, some of whom believe that America went wrong when its founders decided to separate church and state, but all of whom regard with distrust or disdain any and all arenas of intellectual independence and political pluralism in American life.

As I argue in the book’s final chapter, these people don’t simply hate this or that “liberal” social policy, from Social Security to the minimum wage; they hate procedural liberalism itself, the very idea that there should be plural and competing centers of power in a flourishing civil society that has some degree of autonomy from the apparatus of government.  The defense of the intellectual independence of American universities is therefore part of the defense of a democratic, procedural liberalism, and it is a defense that all liberals—and most conservatives, if they are truly conservative—should be willing to undertake. 

Posted by Michael on 10/13 at 08:40 AM
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