ACTA Report, “How Many Ward Churchills?”

71 Responses to ACTA Report, “How Many Ward Churchills?”

1. Alan Jacobs says:

   May 17, 2006 at 6:46 pm

   Thanks for doing this, Tim — the detail work was drudgery for you, I’m sure, but it’s a real service to the conversation. As you say, ACTA has some legitimate concerns, but if they continue to paint with so broad and careless a brush, they are going to render themselves useless — at best.

   A friend sent me a link earlier today to the National Review website, where Anne D. Neal, the president of ACTA, writes, “Indeed, what is truly significant about Ward Churchill is not that he is guilty of plagiarism and misconduct, as serious as that is, but that he is a symbol of a much larger problem in American higher education: the replacement of impartial teaching with politicized preaching.” This is pretty astonishing. A professor repeatedly steals from other scholars, fudges or cooks data to the point of “falsifying” and “fabricating” that data (so says the University of Colorado report), and lies about his own credentials and experience — to Neal those are relatively trivial concerns in comparison with the crime of “bringing politics into the classroom.” One wonders whether Neal could even be bothered to care about a professor whose behavior radically corrupts the very idea of scholarship itself if that professor was unpolitical — or shared Neal’s politics. I don’t know how anyone can take ACTA seriously when its president mouths crap like that.
2. withywindle says:

   May 17, 2006 at 11:56 pm

   1) “There’s almost nothing beyond that in terms of evidence, except for citing other reports by people who are already well inside the echo chamber of the preordained argument.”

   Your use of the term “echo chamber” is itself a way of dismissing arguments and evidence; you can construct your own echo chamber by dismissing contrary reports in their entirety as an “echo chamber.”

   2) “Why isn’t an economics course that supports mainstream neoclassical argument “political”?”

   An economics course that teaches the rules and mathematics of economics is not political; an economics course that seeks to explain all history by neoclassical economics, and which inculcates political values derived solely from neoclassical economics, is political. A class on evolution that teaches evolutionary principles is not political; one which seeks to inculcate some sort of Darwinist atheism is.

   3) “Why isn’t a class on the Declaration of Independence that supports or takes for granted the value of the Declaration “political”?”

   Of course it would be political. But this is irrelevant. The charge is not that academia has a political valence, per se, but that it has a particular narrow, partisan, homogenous political valence; that academic professionalism is unable to disentangle itself from a particular left-liberal indoctrination. Ad arguendo, as you say, that a positive outlook on the Declaration is political, it does not affect ACTA’s argument.

   4) Would it be professional to teach a subject and exclude major arguments, scholarship, or perspectives which are dominant in that field?

   It would be inevitable in any course. You presumably do not devote great attention to 19th century racist scholarship on Africa—I suspect you would choose more recent books that contain whatever the 19th century scholarship has that you consider of value, and exclude from your syllabus whatever books are beyond the pale. You would also exclude or minimize professional controversies that are passé—there must be some dust-up from the 1950s that no-one cares about now. I, for instance, would not spend over-much time on the “Storm Over The Gentry” when teaching about early-modern Britain, since no one much cares any more about anything save the last word on the subject. And note, incidentally, that most of the prior views were Marxist views that turned out to be basically bollocks—why waste students’ time on ideologically motivated writing that had great currency in the profession, but little relationship to history? Furthermore, your political perspective (and the profession’s) has something to do with the judgment of what is a major argument, scholarship or perspective. You mention Afrocentrism, pan-Africanism, nationalism, and Marxism, and you—and the field—are close enough to them that they seem to be a great range of material. From farther off, they look like rather similar humbuggeries. Again, there are a great variety of Marxisms in British history, but they only seem like a great range of opinion if you’re rather close to Marxism yourself. Otherwise its different flavors of vanilla.

   5) “Yet if my syllabi got a quick and careless read-through, I might end up confirming the sense that I’m part of the “remarkable homogeneity” that ACTA perceives.”
   Syllabi are good rough proxies for a professor’s beliefs. As indeed are course descriptions!—and I am afraid that in my experience I have never been pleasantly surprised to find a professor whose teaching is more pluralistic and welcoming than his syllabus. (Although it is true that I have found professors more propagandistic than their neutral syllabi revealed.) At any rate, the experienced conservative student has learnt by grim experience which courses are definitely agit-prop, and can pick up the warning signs of the vocabulary.

   (I was just re-reading The God that Failed—Arthur Koestler talks about a Communist who was caught by the Gestapo because she couldn’t help using Communist lingo. “Concrete,” I think was the word she used. Professors’ lingo and use of “quotation-marks” is a similar give-away.)
   6) If I’m teaching early modern English literature, should I stick to my Shakespeare and skip “Goblin Market” for fear that I’ll be lambasted as a trendy feminist who is “politicized”?
   “Goblin Market” is 19th-century, not early-modern. Aphra Behn is the token female authoress for early modern England. Cause, you know, Oroonoko is about black slaves, and you get a twofer.
   7) Words like “typical” and “representative” are thrown around casually throughout the report, without any sense of how such conclusions were made.

   This is a standard argument historians use against each other. I am reminded of Adrian Johns’ assault on Elizabeth Eisenstein several years ago, in relation to her Printing Revolution thesis; essentially he accused her (falsely, I think) of cherry-picking data to support her thesis. The trouble is, while bad historians do engage in cherry-picking—getting back to Marxists—much of history is not subject to quantitative number-crunching, but is rather a qualitative assessment, picking out skeins of facts and assembling them into a pattern; their plausibility stands or falls not on numbers but on internal coherence and instinctive recognition of truthfulness, against the backdrop of the world around us. (And so are not ultimately provable or disprovable, since our instinctive recognitions vary.)

   As for the typicality and representativeness: There are a very large number of courses obviously politicized to the liberal-left at Duke, and there are approximately zero obviously politicized to the right; the remainder, innocuously titled, are far more likely to skew left than right. And of course the vauntedly pluralist faculty sees no problem with a very large minority of their colleagues engaging in left-liberal indoctrination, and does not consider it a breach of professional standards. This tells us nothing about these pluralists? You see political variation in these syllabi; I see cadres and fellow-travellers.

   8) The report’s authors obviously think “Eurocentric” is one of those buzzwords that means somebody who uses it is a doubleplus nogoodnik.

   In my graduate school, it was used exclusively in this fashion—and the “technical” usage generally correlated with the doubleplus nogoodnik attitude. Why should I care that there are a few high-minded heirs to Lionel Trilling who use “Eurocentric” detachedly, when the vast majority are engagé, and the use of the term is generally a sign of membership in the fraternity?
   9) That pervades the report. It isn’t just that they see what they want to see, and ignore context or specificity, but also that they want to avoid REAL argument of the kind that scholars routinely engage in.
   Much of which involves accepting left-liberal assumptions.
   10) Now here’s what the ACTA report says by way of describing the course: it “takes as its point of analytic departure the putative bad faith of the Declaration of Independence”. Excuse me? Is that a good faith summarizing of that course description?
   Yes. Obviously so. It has a carping, doubting, snarky tone—qualitatively, a sneer.
   11) The report treats someone who defines themselves as a “scholar-activist” as if that definition is self-evidently, independent of conduct or practice, a violation of professionalism.
   From weary experience, self-defined “scholar-activists” are almost universally engaged in agit-prop, not in teaching facts, much less promoting free inquiry and a liberal education. Why, yes, one can learn from their idiocies—but only if you have a mind already formed politically, both willing and able to resist indoctrination. But for the vast majority of students, unformed, the teacher is simply the authority to accept, and the agit-prop simply deforms. (See my experience at Swarthmore.) No, it really has no value; it is simply a mis-education of students—a sin of commission by the scholar-activists, a sin of omission and complicity by their colleagues who tolerate such mis-education within the profession.
   12) But that’s not what ACTA is writing about in this report: it’s not an attempt to think about the problem of superficial or simple-minded professors, because if it were, they’d have to include a lot of people with no perceptible political bias, or even (gasp) right-wing political bias.
   No. There is no remaining right-wing political bias in the humanities outside of Hillsdale or among a scattering of professors over 60 and retiring. It’s all gone, driven out. Superficiality and mediocrity are exclusively left-liberal, because the academy is now exclusively left-liberal. And your toleration of “mediocrity” includes toleration of mediocre agit-prop, and the inability to distinguish agit-prop from teaching, and most of you can’t even tell that this is happening.
   13) I’m pissed by this document because I think those of us who are trying to push and pull for change need real help, not this kind of weakly argued, weakly substantiated begging for applause from the right-wing peanut galleries.
   They recognize the problem and the danger. You do not. And you are begging for applause from the left-wing peanut galleries; justifying your deviation from their orthodoxies by bashing those farther to the right.
3. Timothy Burke says:

   May 18, 2006 at 7:05 am

   Well, they have a fan in you, Withywindle. I’m sorry, but I think you’re being just as tendentious as they are in much of this reply.

   There are some genuine meeting grounds that I could imagine, but it’s going to take a lot of work to get there. For example, you complain that there isn’t a single conservative course in the Duke history catalog. You don’t think that History 146A, Adam Smith and Natural Liberty, might fit the bill? More importantly, it seems to me that quite a few of these courses are basically professional history and that the political attitudes or views of the professor are likely to be immaterial. If for you (or ACTA), balance means that there need to be classes explicitly designed for or speaking to conservatism in equal numbers to those that might speak to various left-wing views, then you’re seeking something different than what I would seek, and nearly the opposite of what I imagine a professionalized comportment in academia to entail. Sketch for me what you think an ideal history department’s offerings look like.

   Other points where I’m not sure how to build a conversation: you seem to contend that as a historian trying to represent historiography in my field, I should position myself in some distant future time and exclude vast swaths of recent scholarly work from some futureward point of judgement that allows me to declare it all irrelevant. You’re wrong, at any rate, about what I do teach when I try to teach to the historiography (primarily in my Honors seminar): I often consciously reach back and look at debates from the 1950s and ask what’s relevant about them, and I often do go back and read 19th Century texts as if they have “live” concerns, not just treating them as source material. I spent an entire semester on a class dedicated to re-reading Frederick Lugard’s Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa. I spend a good deal of time in my Honors seminar trying to make my students do the work of deciding what their moral position on colonialism actually is rather than letting the historiography dictate it to them, and give them “conservative” appreciations of empire like Niall Ferguson or Gann and Duignan as tools to let them think in other directions. But the vast bulk of the historiography in my field lies elsewhere; Gann and Duignan ARE outliers. I can’t alter that empirical FACT, nor is it arbitrary or “political” that people are where they are.

   This is what I mean when I say ACTA doesn’t want to do the hard work of rolling up its sleeves and getting into the scholarly terrains that it wants to criticize. You’re doing kind of the same Humpty-Dumptyism here by saying, “Well, in MY graduate school, Eurocentrism was just an epithet”. The point is, in the debate in world history, it’s not just an epithet. Yes, it often has a pejorative undertone, but it also has a technical meaning. It isn’t just that teaching about that debate requires using the word, and teaching the scholarship that uses the word: if you want to argue AGAINST a class that approaches the question of the rise of the West, you have to argue against its use on its intellectual merits, actually get into the debate. Same for Kendall Johnson’s class: you want to argue that one should not teach autobiographical writings of Americans who have struggled to make sense of the Declaration of Independence’s promises because of their own exclusions from its universalizing language, then are you saying those texts and writings don’t exist? That Frederick Douglass should not be taught? Or that Douglass should always be taught alongside antebellum defenders of slavery? I mean, the texts exist, the question is valid and interesting to teach. What more do you need? You say that REAL arguments involve “liberal-left assumptions”. Well, fine. Then roll up your damn sleeves, ACTA, and challenge those assumptions on empirical and theoretical grounds when you want to complain about them, because it is not self-evident that such assumptions are factually or conceptually incorrect in all cases merely because they’re liberal-left. Jim Blaut is a leftist, but that doesn’t mean you just get to ignore the empirical argument that European expansion was driven by factors exogenous to Europe.

   On typicality and representativeness. It says nothing to me that this is a common historians’ complaint. That doesn’t make it incorrect! The ACTA report makes an extraordinary number of claims of commonality and typicality without a single feeble attempt at quantification. I did some rough work along those lines. I invite you to do the same to the Duke history catalog for Fall 2006. What you seem to suggest is a kind of Supreme Court pornography-standard, that you feel licensed to count things as “liberal-left” because you know it when you see it, even if it’s hard to see on paper how a course could be said to be such. You read Kendall Johnson’s description differently than I do, and I don’t know how we can bridge the way you see the world and the way I do.

   For that matter, you end up just writing me off as another left-winger who is trying to “justify my deviations” by bashing folks further to the right. I think this annoys me most of all as a cheap ad hominem. What I think, I say, and what I think, I do. I don’t need anybody’s permission for my “deviations”: I teach and think and write to the truths that I understand and perceive, and try to debate what I think in an open-minded spirit with anybody that I respect. I think in the end that may be what separates you and me: I think basically that anybody who is smart, basically fair-minded, comports themselves professionally within a fairly broad spectrum, should be free from petty sniping of the kind that I think the ACTA report represents. I think that a conservative student could get a lot from Kendall Johnson’s course; I suspect that a liberal student could get a lot from your courses. It’s all good, at that level. ACTA (and you, here) define a problem in such amorphous, loose and tendentious terms that you damn a huge swath of people who I think are basically good professionals doing the best that they know how to do. I think it’s unprofessional to do that, to be frank.
4. Alan Jacobs says:

   May 18, 2006 at 8:20 am

   wirthywindle writes: “The charge is not that academia has a political valence, per se, but that it has a particular narrow, partisan, homogenous political valence; that academic professionalism is unable to disentangle itself from a particular left-liberal indoctrination.” But actually ACTA’s charges — and those of similar groups — vary. Sometimes the complaint is that there’s too much “political preaching” — that politics is unwarrantedly imported into courses that should be non-political — and sometimes the claim is that politics in academia is, as you say, homogenous. Both kinds of claim appear in the “Churchills” report, so it was fair of Tim to make the point he did.

   “Why should I care that there are a few high-minded heirs to Lionel Trilling who use ‘Eurocentric’ detachedly, when the vast majority are engagé, and the use of the term is generally a sign of membership in the fraternity?” Look: I’m an evangelical Christian who teaches at a Christian college; I’m a conservative by almost any definition of the term, except that I’m not a Republican (because I think the Republican Party is not conservative, but that’s another story). And yet, ACTA would look at the descriptions and syllabi of several courses I teach — African Literature, The Literature of Modern India, Modern Literary Theory — and conclude that I must be a member of the “fraternity” you speak of. Which is total crap. But because they could never be bothered to learn what I actually say in my classes, they could never find that out. So that’s why I think you should care. Sloppy “research” — or rather, the cherry-picking of certain words, phrases, and topics as automatic identifiers of political bias — is something that all scholars should repudiate. Methodologically speaking, ACTA seems to have an awful lot in common with Ward Churchill.
5. Alan Jacobs says:

   May 18, 2006 at 8:27 am

   And by the way: I’ve had my share of disagreements with Tim on this blog, but if he’s “begging for applause from the left-wing peanut galleries” he’s got a hell of an odd way of going about it.
6. Timothy Burke says:

   May 18, 2006 at 8:52 am

   BTW: Withywindle is right that I was thinking Aphra Behn, not Rossetti’s Goblin Market. My bad.

   So should I not teach Aphra Behn if I’m talking about early modern English literature?
7. Caleb says:

   May 18, 2006 at 9:30 am

   You know a little about my classes from my syllabi, but you’ve really got to see what I do with them day-in and day-out to know whether I’m biased or politicized.

   I was going to say something to this effect in a comment to your previous post on online syllabi, but here you made the point for me. I think part of the reticence that some historians might have in posting syllabi comes from a fear that readers will leap to unfair conclusions about the classroom experience that emerges from the syllabi. I don’t myself feel such a reticence to post syllabi, but the thought that people like the authors of the ACTA report might crawl the course listings for disingenuous reasons certainly makes me understand why some people do.
8. Western Dave says:

   May 18, 2006 at 10:14 am

   Withywindle,
   The course summary clearly does not argue that the Declaration of Independence was made in bad faith. Rather, it argues that the phrase “all men are created equal and are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness” becomes laced with ambiguity when later in the document it mentions as a grievance against the King that “He has excited domestic insurrections against us.” I’ll accept that there is a doubting tone, for academic study begins from a position of doubt. But where is the snark and sneer? The central question of the course seems to be “how did people try to manifest the ideals expressed of the Declaration of Independence.” You seem to be saying that those ideals were already in place in 1776, in which case you are no longer studying history but fantasy. So I ask you, point to the specific language that you say gives it the snarky, sneering tone.
9. Timothy Burke says:

   May 18, 2006 at 10:32 am

   Thinking about this some more this morning. Let me break down, line by line, the description of Kendall Johnson’s class to demonstrate what I mean by rolling up one’s sleeves and getting into the guts of the argument.

   “In 1776, Thomas Jefferson asserted the self-evident truth that ‘all men are created equal.’

   Is this an unfair, untrue or biased sentence? Seems pretty much on the money to me.

   “But, in a country committed to ideals of property, what does this maxim mean?”

   Isn’t this a legit question? I mean, isn’t it precisely the dilemma that Enlightenment ideas of liberty struggled with vis-a-vis slavery: how to reconcile property rights with universal human rights? Didn’t Jefferson struggle with that? Wasn’t the Constitution left very distinctly marked by this struggle? Wasn’t this a primary question in American life from 1776 to 1865?

   “Beginning with the ‘Declaration of Independence,’ the recognition of full personhood in the United States has depended on privileges related to race, class and gender.”

   Again, would even a conservative disagree with this as a factual statement? I mean, it’s true, isn’t it? Were slaves included in the promises of the Declaration when it was written?

   “In this course we will read autobiographies, novels, slave narratives, plays, and poems written by people who found their humanity challenged by federal law.”

   There are many such texts, aren’t there? Don’t they have a very wide variety of ways of negotiating the basic problem and working towards claiming the rights enunciated in the Declaration? Aren’t they interesting texts to read? Isn’t contradiction or tension one of the things that makes texts interesting to read both as historical documents and literary expressions?

   “Through their stories we will examine how these authors used words to resist the historical circumstances in which they had to fight for legal and even social identity.”

   Is it political to claim that these authors tried to resist their circumstances? That they had to fight for (and struggle to define) their social identities within American democracy?

   “We will also consider the particular logics that enable different kinds of writing — legal, scientific, and autobiographical non-fiction as well as drama, film, novels, and poems — to persuade their audience in establishing what the Declaration called ‘truths.’”

   Doesn’t the description here imply an interest in how these authors tried to make the promises of the Declarations into deeper, richer, more universally resonant truths? It doesn’t say, after all, that “we will also consider how these authors thankfully rejected the Declaration”?

   ———–
   So what are you left with here as a possible critique, a basis for the sneer that ACTA directs? The only thing I can see is a critique of the whole, and to argue that it is not to be found in the sum of these parts. But that’s a huge, difficult (and potentially interesting) task. It involves arguing one of two things: that at some huge zero-sum level of things there is too much investment in studying race, class and gender, something that the ACTA report contends. But then that really, really does require you to get into the guts of the “curricular economy” and looking at where investments are actually being made.

   Kendall Johnson, for example, also teaches the American literature survey, a course on Henry James, a very open-ended course on expressions of sentimentality in early American literature, on ideas of authorship, on 20th Century poetry, on the concept of “American exceptionalism” in American literature and so on. I’m sure ACTA or Withywindle would question some of the textual choices he makes in those courses, but they seem well within a very generous range of what I would say is professional (and compelling) pedagogy. So even within his “budget”, a course of this kind is not sucking up a huge amount of his curricular economy: poetry surveys, literature surveys, other topics, are still being taught. If we wanted to make an argument about the curricular budget writ large, it’s going to require both a scrupulous accounting of where investments actually are, and an account of what we think is being excluded by those investments. If you take Duke’s history curriculum, for example, what’s missing and potentially excluded by their pattern of investment? They’ve got Western Civ surveys at several levels, a course on the intellectual history of Adam Smith and natural law, a two-part American Constitution survey, and so on.

   The other “holistic” response you could make is that it is flatly wrong and inevitably political to teach a course that focuses on the struggles of some Americans to reconcile the promises of the Declaration with the actuality of their historical circumstances, that the only proper course on the Declaration in a literature department is to teach works of literature that exalt or celebrate the Declaration, or at least to have both kinds of work in the course. The first assertion, if that’s what some conservatives think, strikes me as just as repellantly “politicized” as the worst-case scenario that ACTA is responding to. The second assertion, that a course like Legal Fictions should include works of literature and memoir which confidently assert a close match between personal circumstance and the ideals of the Declaration, strikes me as an unbelievably rigid diktat likely to produce sterile, artificial and unengaging courses, as well as a long line of aggrieved partisans of many types complaining that their idealized conception of historical, social or philosophical truth is insufficiently represented in such a course. For example, a radical could easily complain that Johnson needs more texts by Americans who utterly and finally reject the Declaration and embrace the revolutionary overthrow of American society. A skinhead could complain that the course needs more people who embraced slavery and believed that non-whites could never be citizens under the Constitution. You think I’m being absurdist and reductionist here, take a look at what happens to K-12 curricula when a long line of interest groups begins to monitor them (cf. Diane Ravitch). There is just as much pedagogical reason, in a completely professional sense, to focus on texts that are part of a common lineage or dialogue as there is to pick texts that radically oppose or diverge from one another.
10. Ralph says:

    May 18, 2006 at 12:49 pm

    I have a friendly question, Tim. You’ve been fairly critical of people who skim through a catalogue or an on-line set of syllabi to cherry-pick evidence of academically soft, propagandistically slanted, or otherwise irresponsible courses. They aren’t willing to do the “hard work” of finding out how the courses to which they point actually work in the classroom. But some of us have also objected when academe’s critics _have_ sought to get evidence from inside the classroom. Can we really have it both ways: criticize them when they don’t and object to them when they do?
11. Timothy Burke says:

    May 18, 2006 at 1:00 pm

    Sure we can. Because what we’ve objected to, in those specific cases, is the way they go about getting evidence from inside the classroom: by asking aggrieved, politically motivated students to monitor a preselected group of professors who have been tried and convicted of bias on grounds no more convincing than ACTA’s.

    Now if someone wanted to promote a general, overall requirement for transparency in teaching, I’m 100% behind that. Just as I am for the posting of syllabi. Because sunlight is a good disinfectant both for “bad practices” and for bad-faith critiques. This is pretty much what I’m observing about ACTA, in fact–that even within the limits of the evidence they’re relying on, if you choose to look at that material more systematically, few of their claims hold up. So by all means, let’s see what people do in their classrooms, but make it EVERYONE. Create general institutional forms of transparency.

    Or, if a group like ACTA wants to investigate, let them carry the same burden. Use a genuinely random sampling method, ask permission to observe the sampled classes, seek institutional support for their research, transcribe those courses in toto from a tape that is also given to the professor or institution, and then let’s see what emerges in a fully contextual, meaningfully random, rigorously compiled data set.
12. Kathleen says:

    May 18, 2006 at 1:36 pm

    Tim — I appreciate your take-down of a sloppy report. Still, I wonder: how much do we really have to worry about this stuff? The lacrosse team aside, Duke is a pretty good university (and I say this as a Carolina graduate), a place where people are thrilled to send their kids. Ditto Swarthmore. 50 plus years ago, William F. Buckley published _God and Man at Yale_ in which he basically argued that if the wacky liberals wanted to teach their wacky liberal schtick they should go found their own universities, far far away from Yale, to do so. Sorry, Willy: as we all know, the reverse has been the case. Several generations of wacky liberal profs along, most families still want to send their kids to Yale, Duke, Swarthmore, etc — all institutions that have maintained a pretty good record on academic freedom and other such naughty frou frou. And in fact it’s been the angry conservatives who’ve had to found their own weird fringe institutions, far far away from Yale, to teach what they consider the One True Canon. There are families that will turn down an Ivy for Patrick Henry College, but seriously, not many. ACTA can squeak away but the historical facts are the historical facts in regard to how to establish and maintain academic excellence. I think we can maintain our brows in smoothly untroubled, unwrinkled form about this.
13. Alan Baumler says:

    May 18, 2006 at 2:00 pm

    Kathleen,

    I agree that there is very little chance of ACTA enacting a Buckley style purge of faculty at Yale and Swarthmore. It helps though if silliness is pointed out at the beginning, before it legitimates itself by being unchallenged. I don’t really think that the ACTA report is intellectually honest in the sense that any rational argument Tim could make would change the author’s minds. Still, Tim’s critique is being linked to by various people, and it might be very helpful to someone who came to the ACTA report not knowing much about academia.
    There is also the group solidarity angle to consider. Tim, Swarthmore and Yale are safe. The ACTA report and things like it are part of the atmosphere that is creating things like the current Pennsylvania legislature’s inquiry into bias among college faculty. (They have not found anything yet, but they promise to keep looking.) Tim is of course safe even though Swarthmore is in PA. Still, the more silliness like this goes unchallenged, the more likely it is that bad laws and rules will be passed to cover state schools. As someone who teaches in a state school in PA I would be very annoyed to have my class sizes increased and my reading lists vetted because the legislature knows that some guy at Swarthmore is defending Ward Churchill and only works 6 hours a week.
14. withywindle says:

    May 18, 2006 at 4:42 pm

    1) I grant that “Adam Smith and Natural Liberty” sounds promising. So does “Business History” and the various military history courses.

    2) You have a bugaboo about “balance,” with the idea that I (or other conservatives) want a quota of conservative books and courses. I have said before—and you granted then there was a difference between this and your idea of “balance”—is that one can conceive of oneself as more broadly American, Western, historical, and disassociate one’s commitments, political or professional, from a more narrow left-liberalism. This is not inapplicable to how one conceives of syllabi, much less to teaching in general. Now, you seem to assume that some narrow prescription of necessary texts follows. No such thing is practicable, much less desirable. But one can object to courses, and syllabi, that bear the imprint of ideological prescription, and say that something must be changed—if not to have a medicine for the illness, at least to recognize that the illness exists, and that we should strive for a different, better state.

    3) The ideal history department for a small American liberal arts college? Assuming a Classics Department, an eleven member department would have Colonial America, 19th Century America, 20th Century America, Medieval Europe, Early Modern Europe, Modern Europe, East Asia, South Asia, the Muslim World, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Latin America. A variety of methodological specialties, but an institutional recognition of the primacy of political history, with attention paid to legal, diplomatic, and military history equal to that paid to economic, social, and cultural history. No institutional bar, but no institutional commitment, to the study of the holy trinity of race, class, and gender, much less to the history of homosexuality. And in spirit, if not in regulation, some pride in the achievements of America and the West, and a desire to instill in the students some knowledge of the good things we have fought for and achieved the last few millennia. This last I do not think mutually exclusive with the forming of an inquiring and critical mind.

    4) I’m not asking you to teach from the perspective of God almighty. But some recognition that scholarly debates have a limited half-life, and that the Marxism which has produced so much “scholarship” this century is already fast-fading—and that current fads, Foucaultian and otherwise, may fade equally rapidly, might provide some useful perspective. And allow for a salutory editing while considering what is worthwhile in the field.

    5) I commend you for your exceptionalism. It does not alter my experience, and the experience of many of my peers, that you are an exception, and that our reaction is to academia as it is, not academia as it would be were it composed entirely of Tim Burkes.

    6) Eurocentrism is an epithet in the multiple graduate schools I have attended, in the scholarly conferences I have attended, in the books I read, in the exchanges of professors in print and on the web. I hear similar stories from multiple contacts, both friends in person and testimony in print and on the web. Both its enemies and many of its partisans acknowledge the fact; I don’t see why, at this point in time, the burden of proof on the subject is on my side, not yours.

    Furthermore, a great deal of world history—both the writings and the development of the courses—is avowedly aimed to relativize and to minimize the contributions of Europe and America to history. To offer the course at all is very often as a substitute, not a complement, to the teaching of Western Civilization. Doubtless there is a high-minded professional debate, but the very subject of world history was promulgated in good part by the relativizers and the minimizers; I think it reasonable to remain suspicious that the subject has risen above its origins.

    And indeed, the world history books I read largely struck me as specious, second-rate, unconvincing material, whose anti-European animus was obvious. You want to argue specifics?—I would be more eager if my memory of these books was not of dreary dullness.

    7) I’ve been looking at your blog off and on for a few years. It seems to me that as a rule you do follow any criticism of the left pretty quickly with a criticism of the right. It also seems to me that is standard behavior for any one drifting a bit from the standards of his peers. You call it an ad hominem; I call it analysis—and surely historians should pay attention not only to the self-understandings of their subjects but also to the patterns revealed to an outside observer?

    8) This debate does turn, again and again, on professionalism and professional behavior. The conservative case is that academia’s professional standards have been inflected with narrow, partisan ideology, such that you cannot correct *or even notice* how much of what you do conforms to left-liberalism. Now, you say “I think basically that anybody who is smart, basically fair-minded, comports themselves professionally within a fairly broad spectrum, should be free from petty sniping of the kind that I think the ACTA report represents.” Presumably you do not mean this literally, since you are in favor of freedom of speech, and do not take professional membership to grant you immunity from criticism. I take you to mean that “ACTA should not dictate how the profession is run.” This is not immediately at issue—but I do ultimately think that the professoriate has proved itself to lack the ability to regulate itself properly. Let me put it a different way: we will take it for granted that some number of classes are left-liberal agitprop, whether the number is small or large. (You have previously granted that the number is greater than zero.) But doesn’t the existence of *any* class of that nature violate professional standards? Shouldn’t academia as a whole have already censured professors who engage in such, and expelled anyone who engages in agit-prop from the profession? Yet they have not. Academia, as a whole, tolerates agit-prop of the minority, and thus fails to engage in the minimal standards of professional self-regulation. Presumably you argue academic freedom—but here you are using it to protect those who do not grant it to their students, or foster it itself; your liberal principle defends illiberal professors. So set aside the possibility of a liberal skew in the majority of classes—the failure to rein in the agit-prop fringe, in itself, justifies the charge that the professoriate has failed, egregiously and for a generation, its professional duties—they are not “good professionals,” but “very bad professionals”—and that society at large may now justly abrogate the professoriate’s professional autonomy to correct this problem, as best it can.

    9) I will grant ACTA does not make the best possible argument for its case. You should be more concerned with the best possible argument for the case than with ACTA’s flaws.

    10) I myself rather like Anne Bradstreet, the Massachusetts poetess. There are by now an increasing number of editions of writings by early modern English women, with which I am not altogether familiar. But, frankly, I like Aphra Behn—she has a poem called “The Disappointment,” a pastoral romp ending with male impotence, which is hysterical, and I saw a brilliant production of her play The Emperor of the Moon. The fact that Oroonoko is actually a three-fer, since it has coded reference to James II and Catholicism in it, really does make it worth teaching.

    11) “In 1776, Thomas Jefferson asserted the self-evident truth that ‘all men are created equal.’

    “Assertion” has always possessed the meaning of “disputed claim” within it. In modern language, I read it to have a skeptical tone very often. Here it introduces a tone of free-floating skepticism at the beginning.

    “But, in a country committed to ideals of property, what does this maxim mean?”

    This is an abbreviation of American ideals that woefully distorts the reality. Property was not an ideal in and of itself, but (see Locke) bound up in both the ideals of liberty, stability, and the general commonweal. The impression given is of mere “I got mine, Jack,” which does not do justice. Also, the “but” at the beginning predisposes one to the view that there is a conflict between “all men are created equal” and “the ideals of property”—which is, indeed, taking one side of the debate from the beginning. (And I would add that it is rather modern-day left-liberal to see these two in essential conflict.)

    “Beginning with the ‘Declaration of Independence,’ the recognition of full personhood in the United States has depended on privileges related to race, class and gender.”

    This conflates “personhood” with “full civic rights”—the eighteenth century did not deny that women or the poor were people (and they didn’t always deny it to Indians and blacks either), but rather did not think they should be full participants in the state. Indeed, they claimed that women achieved their full “personhood”—awful word, PCish jargon—best in the private realm, separate from politics. To reduce the traditional view of different roles and hierarchies to “privileges” is a woeful distortion, 2006-minded rather than 1776-minded. Likewise, “race, class and gender” is a 2006 way of looking at the world then, that only loosely, if at all, maps to 1776 conceptions. (Gender, incidentally, should be “sex”—it’s just that we got embarrassed by the word, and came up with a clunky euphemism.) If this reflects any contemporaneous view at all, it is the radical Tom Paine fringe of the Revolutionary generation—a partial view at best, and, again, the distant ancestor of modern left-liberalism.

    “In this course we will read autobiographies, novels, slave narratives, plays, and poems written by people who found their humanity challenged by federal law.”

    They could start with the works of political theory and the legal cases, especially the ones explaining the whys and wherefores of what the Revolutionary generation did and believed. Before we got to the novels, I would give some time to Linda Kerber—but, oh well, it’s an English class. And again, it was not their humanity but their civil status that was challenged by Federal law. The mistake in vocabulary is profound.

    “Through their stories we will examine how these authors used words to resist the historical circumstances in which they had to fight for legal and even social identity.”

    I want the context of which authors used words to welcome historical circumstances, to praise them. Prioritizing of “resistance” implies, of course, a negative judgment of the historical circumstances as a whole, and of course adds a positive valence to “resistance.” “Legal” gets us back toward reality—but “social” and “identity” are whiffly words, very 2006ish, and they assume the existence and value of particular “identities.” I note also the engagé assumption that these words matter, not for any inner beauty, not for their relation to the autonomous development of the canon of English-language literature, but for their relationship to history, to culture, to the outside world—the value of the words is how they “resist historical circumstances.” Returning to Trilling: this is Dreiserism at its worst. Reading Lolita in Teheran has some moving passages about how awful this approach to literature is.

    “We will also consider the particular logics that enable different kinds of writing — legal, scientific, and autobiographical non-fiction as well as drama, film, novels, and poems — to persuade their audience in establishing what the Declaration called ‘truths.’”

    “Truth” in quotation marks—again, a free-floating snarkiness and cynicism. “Logics” is contemporary lit-crit speak. I rather like the mention of persuasion, since rhetoric matters, but I don’t know that there’ll be any actual examination of eighteenth-century rhetorical theory in the course. It does assume that the Declaration failed to establish any of its truths—where this is precisely the point at issue.
15. Alan Jacobs says:

    May 18, 2006 at 6:38 pm

    Just out of curiosity, Kathleen, who would “we” be? (As in “how much do we really have to worry about this stuff?” and “I think we can maintain our brows in smoothly untroubled, unwrinkled form about this.”)
16. withywindle says:

    May 18, 2006 at 8:14 pm

    Bloody hell. I had a long response which I thought I had posted, but it seems to have disappeared into thin air.
17. withywindle says:

    May 18, 2006 at 8:15 pm

    Ah, no, it’s awaiting moderation. Hope it shows up sometime soon.
18. Timothy Burke says:

    May 18, 2006 at 9:25 pm

    There you go. Sorry, I was at dinner. I’m still baffled sometimes by what WordPress’s moderation ends up flagging (I end up having to rescue my own comments a lot of the time).

    More substantive replies later, if I can, though tomorrow is a hectic day. (Our Honors examiners are visiting Swarthmore this weekend.)
19. Doug says:

    May 19, 2006 at 4:00 am

    “To offer the course at all is very often as a substitute, not a complement, to the teaching of Western Civilization.”

    Western Civ courses are a terrific way to prepare students for the twentieth century.
20. emmanuel.goldstein says:

    May 19, 2006 at 8:14 am

    “Beginning with the ‘Declaration of Independence,’ the recognition of full personhood in the United States has depended on privileges related to race, class and gender.”

    This conflates “personhood” with “full civic rights”—the eighteenth century did not deny that women or the poor were people (and they didn’t always deny it to Indians and blacks either), but rather did not think they should be full participants in the state.

    Withywindle, I note you don’t bother to defend the denial of full civic rights to poor (white) men. Also, the claim that women best achieve their personhood in the home doesn’t entail that prohibitions on their participation in public life are justified, which is the claim you need to defend.

    Your narrow reading of Johnson’s claim is quite implausible; the course readings include both legal and non-legal material, and he says that the course will examine both legal and social aspects of identity. It’s not at all obvious that Johnson is conflating personhood and full civic rights.

    Finally, it’s rather a surprise to find a Western Civ. buff such as yourself so set against personhood. It’s a concept with a long (since Boethius ?) history; there are some who’d consider it the central concept of Western metaphysics.
21. withywindle says:

    May 19, 2006 at 10:32 am

    1) The right to vote and the right of habeus corpus, for example, were not then considered as a seamless garment of “civic rights”; the right to vote was in many ways a duty and a privilege attendant on a certain (financial) status in the community. (Incidentally, children, prisoners, and many ex-cons, still lack “full civic rights”–we’re hardly at the seamless garment stage yet, or, for those categories of citizens, hopefully ever.) Talking about “civil rights” is less inaccurate than “human rights”, but it’s still a distortion of the debate and the ideas of the time.

    2) The question isn’t what I think, but what people at the time thought. For which the very use of the phrases “civic rights”, “human rights”, and “social identity” is likely to distort and skew proper understanding.

    3) I object to the word personhood, not the concept. I am not a Latin expert, but I pray to the angelic figure of Philology that whatever word Boethius used to convey individuality, humanity, character, and personality, does not translate best as the ugly “personhood.” My OED, incidentally, gives no examples of the word earlier than 1959, and all but one from the 1970s on. Boethius, nonsense!–it’s a jargony neologism.
22. withywindle says:

    May 19, 2006 at 10:52 am

    Note, incidentally, that I’m taking different tacks on “how to understand the 18th century mind” and “how to understand Timothy Burke’s mind.” To reconcile: for both, I would say that one should *start* with their self-understandings, and proceed to analysis from the outside. Both are necessary; neither sufficient.
23. Kathleen says:

    May 19, 2006 at 12:36 pm

    Alan Jacobs — by “we”, I more or less meant “professors who teach classes that ACTA or David Horowitz or conservative critics of liberal bias in academia might find objectionable”. And I meant it at the level of the collective “we”. It is true that some individual professors might have their lives made miserable by a concerted campaign to pick apart why they assigned, say, the “Israel Lobby” essay or a critique of Intelligent Design or whatever and it’s important to manifest solidarity with profs under attack. However, I just don’t think the entire enterprise of North American academia — which does include a lot of “liberalism” — is going to take on much water because of broadsides like the one Tim takes apart here. And I think this because William F. Buckley was making the exact same argument 50 years ago and his side *totally* lost: instead of the scholars that made him mad getting pushed out of Yale, ultra-conservatives have had to resort to founding their own marginal, purist institutions. I think “the public” is in fact quite reasonable about what makes for a good education, and they know it can be found at Duke University and not at Liberty University. I know that I am not a charlatan, and my colleagues are not charlatans, and that the results of our efforts speak from themselves. That’s why I think “we” should ultimately be rather sanguine about these attacks. I’m not saying we shouldn’t point out their flaws, be aware of them, etc. — I just think they are bound to fail.
24. kg says:

    May 19, 2006 at 1:24 pm

    I would like to add that there are plenty of disciplines (in the humanities and social sciences) with marked ambivalence to leftist politics. I am thinking of my own discipline where introducing feminism into the dscourse relatively late in the game caused a huge rift that I still don’t think has healed. I personally advocate for a plurality of political leanings because I think that it’s the only way to properly further the intellectual mision.

    I don’t think ACTA really understands Academia and it would be best if it stayed out of its rather incestuous politics. There are plenty of irresponsible professors out there who don’t understand professionalism or pedagogy on all sides of the political spectrum. Generally these same people find ways to avoid teaching undergraduates the further they advance. I am hoping that those of us who like to engage in difficult and unresolvable debates with our students remain in the game. But then again, many people describe me as a dreamer.
25. Bob Violence says:

    May 19, 2006 at 1:49 pm

    Boethius said:

    persona est naturae rationabilis individua substantia

    The person is an individual substance of rational nature.

    “Personhood” seems like a decent coinage to me. And yes, I am a card-carrying philologist.
26. CMarko says:

    May 19, 2006 at 2:14 pm

    Withywindle–
    This is a minor point, but the question of whether women, blacks, and others were “persons” in the United States is more complicated than you make it sound. As a quick example: the 14th Amendment prohibits the states from denying “any person” within their jurisdiction equal protection of the laws (among other guarantees). There is still a lot of argument about whether women qualify as persons under the 14th Amendment, since its drafters certainly meant to exclude women at the time. The fact that a woman was not a “person” in 1868 does suggest that there is more of a connection between civil rights and personhood than you allow. (I don’t really like the word “personhood” either, but it seems appropriate in this context.)
27. Alan Jacobs says:

    May 19, 2006 at 5:55 pm

    Thanks for the clarification, Kathleen. I take it, though, that one of Tim’s points is that there really are charlatans out there, and that ACTA, by painting with so broad and careless a brush, makes it less rather than more likely that those charlatans get identified and disciplined. And those of us who are not charlatans have an interest in making that distinction clear, even if ACTA doesn’t.

    Also, I am not as confident as you are of the powerlessness of ACTA and like-minded groups — at least, if we look at the relatively long term. History suggests that those who get to the top of any given heap don’t stay there forever.

    And (while I’m in a disagreeing mood) I would finally say that I don’t have as much confidence as you do in the wisdom of “the public.” If the richest and most prestigious schools have reached that eminence simply because they deserve it, doesn’t that suggest that the richest people in our society have earned their place, and that the most popular TV shows are the ones of finest quality? In fact, some of the noblest experiments in American higher education have been economically marginal or outright failures.
28. texter says:

    May 19, 2006 at 9:04 pm

    I’m not sure this is helpful, and it may be following a tangent rather than contributing to the core of the discussion, but I thought some legal theorists use the term “juridical personhood” or “juridical persons” as a way to talk about the stripping of especially slaves of any rights in the eyes of the state.
29. withywindle says:

    May 19, 2006 at 11:15 pm

    “This is a minor point, but the question of whether women, blacks, and others were “persons” in the United States is more complicated than you make it sound.”

    Doesn’t this support my point?–I was arguing that the course description simplifies excessively, from a 2006 viewpoint. If there are complexities undreamed of by yours truly, doesn’t this underline the insufficiency of the course description yet further?

    Incidentally, if I were doing my history course on this subject, I think I would add at least some sections on Genovese’s *Roll, Jordan, Roll*, which I recollect had some bits on the contradictory legal status of slaves in the antebellum south, evolving willy-nilly into a growing recognition of their capacity to bear witness, etc. Unless this has been supplanted by better research more recently?
30. Timothy Burke says:

    May 20, 2006 at 7:37 am

    Withywindle, I think it’s the POINT of the course that the question of the personhood of women, blacks and others was complicated, that this is what Johnson takes to be interesting about many of the texts he’s having the students read, that they’re struggling with that complication. Douglass is an educated man who thinks of himself as a person who is equal to, in the sense of the Declaration, the men who are legal persons. And yet he is not. It’s rather similar in some ways to the generation of African men who appear between 1870 and 1910 in Africa who respond to what they understand to be the promises of British liberalism. They keep saying to British officials, missionaries and so on, “I am a civilized man”, by which they mean that they’re educated, speak English, wear formal clothes, and so on. By which they also mean, “Aren’t I entitled to the same rights and capacities as British citizens elsewhere? Why is there a color bar?” . The texts they produce (novels, letters, memoirs) seem interesting both as literary and historical documents: I’d love to read them with a class. It’s not just that the questions these men are asking are pertinent, but also that they’re full of contradictions and tensions that can be interpreted in a variety of ways–including that it is liberalism which creates the possibility of these men asking, “Am I not civilized? Am I not entitled to rights?”

    The addition of Genovese’s Roll, Jordan, Roll is a nice idea: I get no sense that Johnson would object to that suggestion, in fact that it would be wholly compatible with the concept behind the class.
31. Timothy Burke says:

    May 20, 2006 at 7:42 am

    A simpler way to come at it: your criticisms of the course are ultimately fairly nuanced, Withywindle, or on fine points (and I’d remind you, we’re arguing about a course description, not even the full syllabus; I’m the only one in the room who has more information to go on, since I know Kendall Johnson). Don’t you find it a bit odd to be allying yourself with such a broad and aggressive attack on Johnson’s professionalism? Aren’t these the kinds of debates that could properly be said to lie within the magic circle of professionalism rather than outside of it? The kinds of critiques that we generate of each other as scholars and teachers which acknowledge our mutual professionalism and legitimacy? Is what we’re talking about here, fine-grained and particular questions about the history of personhood, equivalent to the professional practice of WARD CHURCHILL? Isn’t there something wildly unfair about even the vaguest sense of connection between this discussion we’re having now and the kind of discussion one should have about Churchill’s practices?
32. withywindle says:

    May 20, 2006 at 9:29 am

    No. Note, after all, that Churchill’s scholarly practices went unnoticed and uninvestigated until a ruckus was raised in the outside world, mostly by the sorts of people you find disreputable, and that the response of his peers since then has been to harrumph and do as little as possible. Under extreme pressure from the outside world he will most likely be suspended, not expelled. The instinctive response of the profession–in good trade-union mentality–was to say there was nothing wrong, to refuse even to investigate out of professional courtesy. (Note for parallel, that the AAUP’s main interest in the Sami Al-Arian case, was to defend the tenure rights of a man who has now confessed to sponsoring terrorism – http://www.aaup.org/Com-a/Institutions/archives/2003/USF.htm – is this a perfect example of the professional attitude?) He is, in any case, only facing the possibility of suspension for his activities as a scholar, not as a teacher. And you continue to have a cadre of “scholar-activists”, who do not only commit agit-prop by accident, but are ideologically committed to agit-prop in the classroom–who are ideologically committed to unprofessional behavior, but suffer no professional sanction.

    I’ve been mulling over this. Doctor’s and lawyers certainly face the possibility of extra-professional sanction for unprofessional conduct–not to put too fine a point on it, you can go to jail for doing surgery while drunk, or lying to a judge. By parallel, it seems to me that outside society ought to have some mechanism by which to fire a professor who misteaches–by agit-prop as much as by showing up to class drunk. (Whatever paper rights the administration has now are obviously ineffective–most administrations don’t want to bother going through the hellish and protracted proceess of revoking tenure.) But doctors and lawyers *do* have a system of professional censure, and professional expulsion, that seems less somnolent than what teachers have. (Pres. Clinton getting suspended from the Arkansas bar is an example thereof.) You think Ward Churchill is exceptional–but you argue this, and the profession argues this, while refusing to investigate how professionals teach, on the grounds of professional courtesy! You say there is no data–when the AAUP should have been collecting this data for decades!

    I propose that the AAUP set up an *active* committee, with branches in each teaching institution, to monitor the teaching of every teacher, to make sure that their teaching reaches a minimum professional standard–said standard to be set down in writing, and to include binding words to prevent agit-prop and “scholar-activism.” I propose a mechanism for censure, and that (repeated?) censure be grounds for administrations to start proceedings to revoke tenure. (Although it need not be automatic.) I propose these censures be publicized and made available to everyone, particularly students; I propose that nation-wide statistics of investigations and censures of teachers be annually published; I propose that students and teachers be able to complain to these monitoring committees and have a means of triggering investigations; I propose that the rigor of this internal monitoring be (at least) as rigorous as the most rigorous comparable monitoring institution in an American profession.

    Professionalism means self-regulation. The AAUP does not self-regulate the teaching of agit-prop in any meaningful way. Set up an effective institution of professional self-regulation, and you’ll have grounds to stand on. Otherwise, the regulation should be–and, I trust, ultimately will be–done by the outside world.
33. Timothy Burke says:

    May 20, 2006 at 10:09 am

    Ok, but this is a different point than what I raised above, which is that you’re casting aspersions on the professionalism of someone based on a reading of a course description which, in discussion, has been revealed to turn on very fine points of meaningfully scholarly distinction and argument. And then leaping to Churchill, who I agree represents an example of professional misconduct. This is a move that really worries me.

    I do agree, as I noted to Ralph above, that it would be worth having profession-wide standards of information collecting and transparency. Syllabi should all be posted, we should have a way of making teaching practices more transparent, there should be a relatively neutral professional body interested in observing and collecting data about classroom practices. (I do NOT want that body to be education scholars, by the way, because I do NOT want college professors to have their teaching be evaluated by ed-school jargon.)

    Though it’s interesting when you raise the point of comparable monitoring in other professions. For the most part, both law and medicine regulate and monitor in instances of breach rather than in the routine. E.g. you’re most likely to lose your license to practice law or medicine in the context of being caught in flagrant cases of misconduct: stealing from clients, disclosing privileged information, operating while drunk. Academic monitoring systems at present arguably resemble these systems: you’re likely to be disciplined in only when serious misconduct is publically revealed (having sex with a student you’re supervising and having that student complain to authorities, stealing funds, plagiarism, and so on.) Neither medicine nor law have the kind of routinely ubiquitious monitoring of standards that you propose here for academia.

    On the other hand, the difference is that what lawyers do is significantly transcribed into the public record or into contractual records, whether it is arbitration or litigation. There is a paper trail to misconduct. Similarly, if a surgeon operates on the wrong knee, there isn’t much that can be done to cover that up. What is public about academic misconduct is scholarship; what we do rightly or wrongly in our classrooms is very difficult to document. So I think there is a case for somehow letting more sunlight into classrooms. I’m really confident that in the majority of cases, that would provide reassurance about the profession’s standards (at least as far as “bias” or agit-prop goes). But to some extent, that also rests on what the standards are. If we were to use Withywindle’s standards for what is “agit-prop”, considering that he thinks “Legal Fictions in America” is agit-prop, then I would reject such monitoring as an unfair and unhelpful instrument.
34. Timothy Burke says:

    May 20, 2006 at 10:44 am

    Also on professional monitoring, by the way. ALL professions (law, medicine, academia, counseling, etc.) that have professional bodies, codes of conduct, regulated thresholds of expertise and qualification, and so on, see the loss of one’s license to practice the profession as a very, very serious punishment. As they should be: it is far more than simply being fired. If I’m in business, and my business fails, I can start a new one. If I’m a middle manager and I get fired for making a mistake, I can still start anew in another organization and do better the next time. If I lose my license to practice medicine, basically I’ve lost my entire livelihood and there is very little I can do to restructure my working life as a result.

    So this is another reason to not construct the bar for actionable misconduct in such a way that most professionals are defined as guilty of such misconduct UNLESS one has a sense that the entire profession is disposable, because that will be the effect of doing such. If, for example, one constructed a principle that said, “Any single incorrect diagnosis, no matter how trivial the illness, is sufficient grounds for loss of license to practice medicine”, and we routinely tracked all diagnoses and all later development of cases, most doctors would lose their license to practice.

    Consequences for misconduct have to be proportional to the harm of the misconduct. A course that has an emphasis that I professionally disagree with might be from my perspective a non-optimal course. But would I want to sanction or punish someone from failing to teach to what I see as the optimum? No, and not just because of consideration for the other person, but because I suspect that 95% of the profession (including Withywindle) would get caught in that net. So before we set up new monitoring bodies, we really need a good definition of potential harms, and a good sense of proportionality about them.
35. withywindle says:

    May 20, 2006 at 11:04 am

    1) Johnson’s course description isn’t itself proof of agit-prop, but the language itself reflects a likely soft-skew toward left-liberal assumptions. (And, yes, the entangling of left-liberal ideology with professional standards.) I don’t think you should get drummed out of teaching for that, but I think it needs to be recognized as a professional flaw, so that academia can be made self-aware, and, hopefully, more likely to self-correct. And I think that once the soft-skew is recognized, and taken as a deviation from the professional norm, you will be more able to recognize the Churchills and the scholar-activists as completely beyond the professional pale. Contrariwise, if you can’t recognize the soft skew at all, I don’t think you’ll ever get to the point where you can recognize and combat the hard, completely unprofessional skew of the Churchills.

    2) Compare and contrast your distrust of ed-school types with the average citizen’s distrust of professors in general. (Note I share your distrust of the ed-school types, but I think the implications of your distrust should be extended.)

    3) Note that none of your examples of serious misconduct include teaching. Misteaching should be considered as seriously as plagiarism, from a professional point of view.

    4) More light, more light. And new institutions: the profession’s institutions as they are now have failed.

    5) I did state that (repeated) censure would be *grounds* for a university to start proceedings for dismissal; not that it would be automatic, or that no lesser punishments could be assigned. Something less toothless than the present regime, but less toothy than Provost Lavrentii Beria, presumably can be devised.
36. Colin Danby says:

    May 20, 2006 at 1:59 pm

    Re:

    “1) Johnson’s course description isn’t itself proof of agit-prop, but the language itself reflects a likely soft-skew toward left-liberal assumptions. (And, yes, the entangling of left-liberal ideology with professional standards.) I don’t think you should get drummed out of teaching for that, but I think it needs to be recognized as a professional flaw,”

    Good grief. Tim has shown, by the most patient reading and reasoning, that the Kendall Johnson course description is unassailable — there is zero purchase in the actual text for the argument that the course is politicized as ACTA believes. Tim’s work is recognized in the most grudging, back-handed way possible in the first eight words of “withywindle’s” reply. Then “withywindle” goes happily back to the original charge, that the course description is evidence of politicization, evidence of a professional flaw. Except now the charge is positioned behind weasel words: “reflects,” “likely,” “soft,” and “skew,” with the vague “left-liberal” at the end, which clearly compasses everything “withywindle” doesn’t like. I conclude that “withywindle” (maybe the pseudonym was a clue) is not serious. There’s a generalized, highly politicized resentment on withywindle’s part, and that’s about it.

    It’s particularly interesting to see a debate over *this* course. One of the standard anti-academic lines is that we foist narrow concerns and obscure topics on our students, while the Great Questions of civilization and history are ignored. Yet the Johnson course takes up one of the most central questions of U.S. history. And it’s a problem central to political theory everywhere — what does personhood mean vis a vis the state. It’s a question incidentally on which genuine conservative thought (which is NOT just a lot of free-ranging resentment) has many smart things to say.

    Good history courses don’t just teach you one damn thing after another, they open up interesting and important *questions*,
    and go looking for the answer.
37. withywindle says:

    May 20, 2006 at 2:57 pm

    I also provided a close reading of the course description, explicating tendentiousness in the wording. If you will read what Prof. Burke and I wrote, you will notice that we are taking our stands on somewhat different grounds, which are not necessarily mutually exclusive. (At any rate, the good professor hasn’t yet explicitly countered my close reading.) I do resent being told that there is no tendentiousness or politicization in Johnson’s description. It may not be hard-core party line, but neither is it innocuous–and I am quite serious, though occasionally willing to use slightly softer language for purposes of persuasion. Incidentally, this is a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” choice you’re providing. If I make a straightforward accusation, it’s just resentment. If I provide some nuanced, granular adjectives, I’m weaselly. C’mon.

    Withywindle has a complicated history as a name choice; but it is basically accidental. (All the better-known LOTR names were taken.) I once would have preferred “Samwise”; at this point, “Faramir.”

    Some questions provide their own answers.

    If you would look at my analysis of Johnson’s course description, you could use it to write a new course description that covers an important subject in a less tendentious, less left-liberal manner. Though in a pinch, the course description, as written, inevitably skews: it isn’t merely a discussion of the debate then, but a focus on the radical fringe of the day. It tells us more about Frederick Douglass’ position in his tradition–then fringe, now mainstream–then it does about his position in the debates of his day.

    Looking at his list of authors, I note also that he cites Franklin and Jefferson only, not Adams or Hamilton. Again, a significant limitation on the range of thought at the time.
38. Alan Jacobs says:

    May 20, 2006 at 3:38 pm

    If you would look at my analysis of Johnson’s course description, you could use it to write a new course description that covers an important subject in a less tendentious, less left-liberal manner.

    Sure you could. You could use it to write a new course description that took any number of different paths. Rewriting one’s colleagues’ syllabi is one of the oldest of academic pasttimes. But Withywindle, how germane is that to the discussion? What I take you to be saying is this: that, in an imagined world in which the AAUP does what you think it should do, Johnson’s course description in itself constitutes sufficient grounds for an investigation of professional misconduct. You do not altogether rule out the possibility of Johnson being able to clear himself of such charges, but you think — on the basis of the course description alone, which is all the information you have — that a properly self-policing academic guild would undertake a serious and skeptical inquiry into his course. Am I right?

    (And if I’m not right, what is your point? If it is merely that if you taught that course it would not “soft-skew” in the direction that Johnson does, that’s really not much of a point, and certainly has nothing to do with professional standards and their enforcement.)

    Likewise, what about Tim’s course that you critique on the neighboring thread? Is his using Hobsbawm when he could have used Paul Johnson grounds for inquiry by a historians’ or academics’ guild? My guess is that you just think Tim is wrong-headed but not actionably so; it would be interesting to know where you’d draw that line.
39. texter says:

    May 20, 2006 at 4:31 pm

    1. “If you would look at my analysis of Johnson’s course description, you could use it to write a new course description that covers an important subject in a less tendentious, less left-liberal manner.” — [actually, I’ve been wondering when WW would provide us with this counter- course description.]

    2. “I note also that he cites Franklin and Jefferson only, not Adams or Hamilton.” — [ok, I suppose this is a beginning. so, are you implying that the very focus or emphasis on marginal subjects (texts by blacks, women, etc) is in itself problematic in the course? If this is so, then there is not much room for a productive discussion.]

    3. “the eighteenth century did not deny that women or the poor were people (and they didn’t always deny it to Indians and blacks either), but rather did not think they should be full participants in the state. Indeed, they claimed that women achieved their full “personhood”—awful word, PCish jargon—best in the private realm, separate from politics.”

    — ok, if, for the sake of argument, i agree with you here and say, yes, WW, you are right, separate realms were established and women of a certain background/status were recognized as persons within the private realm, then that still does not solve the problem that there were women OF THAT ERA who did not accept this as satisfactory, and wrote about it. Is it legitimate to read their work in a classroom setting?
40. withywindle says:

    May 20, 2006 at 6:27 pm

    To repeat myself:

    “I don’t think you should get drummed out of teaching for that, but I think it needs to be recognized as a professional flaw, so that academia can be made self-aware, and, hopefully, more likely to self-correct. And I think that once the soft-skew is recognized, and taken as a deviation from the professional norm, you will be more able to recognize the Churchills and the scholar-activists as completely beyond the professional pale. Contrariwise, if you can’t recognize the soft skew at all, I don’t think you’ll ever get to the point where you can recognize and combat the hard, completely unprofessional skew of the Churchills.”

    Surely I already answered your question?
41. Timothy Burke says:

    May 20, 2006 at 6:31 pm

    I guess I don’t see why what you call a “soft-skew” is a thing that needs correcting.

    As the computer people say, it’s not a bug, it’s a feature. That’s what passionate, interesting teaching is. If professionalism means suppressing what makes us distinctive, interesting, perceptive intellectuals, then what’s the point? I’d rather a world where you can teach classes that have a conservative “soft-skew” and I can teach classes that have a “timburkepropiatesleftistswhilecondeminingconservatives” soft-skew, and other people can have liberal, radical, libertarian or what have you soft-skews in their teaching. Because as long as people are open-minded, fair, and interesting, it’s all good.

    Do you really want to teach in a world where “soft-skew” is a thing that needs *correcting*?
42. texter says:

    May 20, 2006 at 6:54 pm

    My comment is in moderation!
43. withywindle says:

    May 20, 2006 at 7:15 pm

    The question is the relation of one’s subjectivity, one’s personality, to what and how one teaches. The way one teaches is meant to include an aspiration toward 1) conveying objective knowledge (long live Burckhadt (sp?) and the Renaissance); and 2) encouraging the varying subjectivities of one’s students. There has to be a *professional* dedication to subordinate–not to eliminate, but to subordinate–one’s personal, partisan passions toward that larger goal. When I say “soft skew,” I say that this needed subordination is failing. There is on the one hand a lack of interest in other points of view–whether on the subject matter at hand, or among the student body–and a growing ignorance (supported by the professional peer group) that other points of view exist, much less be given due weight. There is a conflation between “my partisan point of view” and “the breadth of reality”; even, consciously, semi-consciously, or unconsciously, a reworking of the material to present a history of heroes and villains around a narrowly partisan point of view. You prize yourselves on your distinctiveness and perceptiveness, but you are remarkably similar to any outside observer, and are quite unperceptive about the remarkable sameness you present. The impression given is of an 18th century professor of theology at Oxford, who cannot tell the difference between the history of Christianity and the history of the Church of England.

    I would add, Millianly, that where the vast majority of society inclines toward one belief, it is incumbent upon them to consider that their individual opinions, en masse, become the instruments of imposing conformity; that your affirmation of the self, in its social context, does not serve the cause of human liberty.

    And, ultimately, the judgment of your distinctiveness, interest, and perceptual competence cannot rest solely on your self-perceptions or your professional authority. The outside world has a right, even a duty, to contribute to that judgment, too. I would say that as professionals, you have a duty to listen to (if not submit as slaves) these outside judgments.
44. Alan Jacobs says:

    May 20, 2006 at 11:27 pm

    Surely I already answered your question?

    Not at all, Withywindle — in fact, it was the passage you quote that prompted my question, because of its reliance on the passive voice: “I don’t think you should get drummed out of teaching for that, but I think it needs to be recognized as a professional flaw” — recognized by whom? and recognized how? What counts, for you, as “recognizing”? Ditto with “taken as a deviation from the professional norm” — taken by whom? And what happens once someone “takes” a practice as a deviation? Thus my question: am I right in thinking “that, in an imagined world in which the AAUP does what you think it should do, Johnson’s course description in itself constitutes sufficient grounds for an investigation of professional misconduct”? I’d just like to know what, practically speaking, you’re recommending.
45. withywindle says:

    May 21, 2006 at 9:19 am

    Recognized by the professor, the profession, and the entire world as a professional flaw and a deviation from the professional norm. Therefore, the professor would try conscientiously to change his behavior. No, not grounds for firing, based on that course description alone. Just grounds to have it drummed into his head, day after day and year after year, by his conscience, his peers, and his fellow citizens, that he’s acting as a bad teacher when he settles too comfortably into his partisan limitations. Never to be let think he is simply a normal teacher, or even a virtuous teacher, when he embraces these limitations.
46. Timothy Burke says:

    May 21, 2006 at 12:33 pm

    That class is not a deviation from any vision of professionalism that’s worth a damn, Withywindle. The professionalism that would rule that class out of bounds would leave little of worth or interest in American universities: we’d have a science and engineering curriculum, probably even some losses there, and not a lot else.

    I wouldn’t advise any academic, regardless of their views, to accept for even one minute greater scrutiny if it came from such a loaded perspective. That’s not about insuring professionalism within generous boundaries that allow for creativity, pluralism, diversity, it’s as narrowly political and partisan as anything it seeks to complain about. With your reading of this course, you don’t convince me that you’re trying to open up spaces, just that you’re trying to advance a competing orthodoxy into a dominant position.

    We can’t possibly get to some kind of useful shared conversation about professionalism if it doesn’t involve some kind of consensus vision that is generously composed.
47. Alan Jacobs says:

    May 21, 2006 at 5:36 pm

    Withywindle’s model, it seems, is rather more fantastic than I had thought. Apparently what W. envisions is a completely self-policing guild in which formal investigations or censures are never necessary because the whole profession participates so consistently and enthusiastically in correcting any deviations from the (supposedly) apolitical norm. It’s a model that, aside from its impossibility, — and again, I speak as a conservative — I find frankly nightmarish. A model of the academic profession in which the ideal is that someone like Kendall Johnson (we’ve left the execrable Ward Churchill far behind at this point) would be subjected to a campaign of shaming simply because his syllabus contains statements about the Declaration of Independence that, on a decidedly uncharitable reading, could possibly be deemed critical. . . well, it out-Orwells Orwell. Pray you, avoid it.
48. withywindle says:

    May 21, 2006 at 7:30 pm

    Alan, I am extraordinarily puzzled by your reading of what I wrote. I presume you, and every other academic, has some sense of when you fail to do your best, or when other professors fail to do their best, and that you try by means short of drumming yourself or them out of the profession, to improve yourself and them. You use everyday critiques and social pressures to get them to live up to, to conform to, professional standards. I am simply saying that the ideal of teaching without agit-prop, of teaching beyond narrow partisan assumptions, should be part of the professional ideals of the professoriate, and that these everyday pressures, already in existence in relation to other professional goals, should be used by professors to move their colleagues toward the better practice of these ideals. Surely you can envisage something between complete social laissez-faire and Communist Party self-criticism sessions? Surely you can imagine that you could say to yourself that you (or someone else) isn’t acting up to the highest of professional standards–indeed, deviating from them–without saying you or he needs to be chucked out of the academy forthwith? Surely the achievement of minimal standards of professionalism in academia isn’t now an excuse for complaisance about aspiring to reach the highest standards?

    Leave aside Johnson for the moment: can’t you even commit to the idea that the academic professional ideal should proscribe agit-prop in the teaching of classes, and should aspire to presenting honestly and fairly the broad range of viewpoints on a subject at hand, and not only the professor’s own narrow views? Do you object to the AAUP stating this in its charter? Do you object to professors *ever* saying to each other, “You shouldn’t agit-prop, Bill. And really, that syllabus is a bit party-line. Shame, shame!”? Can you commit to this as a theoretical proposition?

    Tim, I didn’t say the class was out of bounds. I said that it deviated from the professional ideal–what I’ve just been saying to Alan I think should illustrate the difference. I do firmly believe that the course description is tendentious, and uses wording reading back modern assumptions to debates of the day; and that this makes it professionally flawed, and worthy of criticism, both from within and without the profession. If you cannot accept this critique as within the scope of professionalism; if you cannot see that I am genuinely aiming to open up the profession; if you are complaisant about the state of the profession and not willing to make any institutional change whatsoever to discourage agit-prop and encourage the aspiration to transcend narrow partisan views; then I suppose we do not have grounds for consensus, and with some regret, I must return to my support of ACTA and extra-professional means to regulate a profession that does not see any problem in its behavior and will not regulate itself.

    A last thing: “I wouldn’t advise any academic, regardless of their views, to accept for even one minute greater scrutiny if it came from such a loaded perspective.” Again, I trust you really have no objection to scrutiny from any source, or criticism from whatever source; but really mean to say that you do not wish academic behavior to be dictated by extra-professional organizations. This is the second time that your words have suggested that academics should be free not merely from outside dictation, but even from outside scrutiny or criticism. If you are being careless in your wording, I urge you to be more careful in what you are writing; if you genuinely believe that academics’ professional status grants them immunity from outside scrutiny or criticism, I urge you to consider the undemocratic and illiberal implications of your beliefs.
49. Alan Jacobs says:

    May 21, 2006 at 9:28 pm

    Surely you can imagine that you could say to yourself that you (or someone else) isn’t acting up to the highest of professional standards–indeed, deviating from them–without saying you or he needs to be chucked out of the academy forthwith? Indeed I can; nor did I accuse you of seeking to chuck Kendall Johnson out of the academy, either forthwith or at leisure. I said that your ideal would have his colleagues subject him to a campaign of shaming, which I think is a perfectly fair characterization of these comments of yours: “. . . have it drummed into his head, day after day and year after year, by his conscience, his peers, and his fellow citizens, that he’s acting as a bad teacher when he settles too comfortably into his partisan limitations. Never to be let think he is simply a normal teacher, or even a virtuous teacher, when he embraces these limitations.” (And if that doesn’t clinch it, the “Shame, shame” in your most recent post does.) And I said — and continue to maintain — that I find that idea appalling.

    This is also why I don’t want to “leave aside Johnson for the moment” — it’s the specific cases that matter. I loathe “agit-prop” as much as anyone (well, almost anyone), but if you think that Kendall Johnson’s syllabus fits that characterization as well as Ward Churchill’s writings, then I believe you could scarcely be more wrong. But on the basis of your most recent post you seem not to think that: “I didn’t say the class was out of bounds” — whereas presumably you do think that Ward Churchill’s work is out of bounds.

    So you leave yourself, I think, in the position of recommending, not just the repudiation of “agit-prop” and other practices that are clearly unprofessional (“out of bounds”), but also the ceaseless scrutiny of competent colleagues’ syllabi for signs of “tendentiousness,” or “wording reading back modern assumptions to debates of the day,” or who knows what else. Plus the attempted shaming of colleagues who don’t readily correct these errors. To me, that seems extraordinarily arrogant; I’ve had plenty of conversations and debates with left-leaning colleagues, but I’ve never wagged an admonitory finger in their faces (“Shame, shame!”), and if I had, they would have been fully justified in telling me to take a flying leap. It is also a recipe for the social breakdown of departments and even whole disciplines. I have enough trouble cultivating my own pedagogical and scholarly garden; I hesitate to think myself fully qualified to tell everyone else how to cultivate theirs.
50. withywindle says:

    May 21, 2006 at 11:59 pm

    OK, a look at the AAUP statement on professional ethics is fascinating. It does, I think, in somewhat different language support the idea that professors should not agit-prop or be narrowly partisan in their teaching:

    http://www.aaup.org/statements/Redbook/Rbethics.htm

    “As teachers, professors encourage the free pursuit of learning in their students. They hold before them the best scholarly and ethical standards of their discipline. Professors demonstrate respect for students as individuals and adhere to their proper roles as intellectual guides and counselors.

    They practice intellectual honesty. Although professors may follow subsidiary interests, these interests must never seriously hamper or compromise their freedom of inquiry.”

    You are right, however, that the statement does not include any sense of monitoring other professors; indeed, your laissez-faire assumptions reflect the AAUP statement:

    “Professors do not discriminate against or harass colleagues. They respect and defend the free inquiry of associates. In the exchange of criticism and ideas professors show due respect for the opinions of others.”

    But other professions do have monitoring aspirations:

    http://www.meddean.luc.edu/internal/profcomm/letter_colleagues.htm

    “Expectations of professional behavior should be explicitly articulated by clinical mentors and evaluated by all to whom physicians are accountable including mentors, peers, nurses and professionals of all health-care disciplines, and patients and their families.

    The positive role modeling behavior of residents and faculty should be explicitly recognized. Similarly, effective and realistic mechanisms for constructive feedback regarding the unprofessional behaviors of residents and faculty must be developed. The culture and values of professional self-regulation will only be taken seriously by medical students if their role models incorporate them as a routine part of their clinical teaching and practice.”

    http://www.txethics.org/resources_lawyerprofessional.asp?view=4Hilgers

    “I would add to those statements this further elaboration of the purpose of disciplinary rules:

    (1) to eliminate persons not entitled or qualified to serve the public;

    (2) to punish or admonish those who violate the rules and to warn those who might be inclined to do so;

    (3) to provide to the public an effective means of redress when their just expectations of professional conduct have been frustrated;”

    http://www.ku.edu/~kunrotc/battalion_regs/chap_6.htm#608

    “I am a member of a profession in which all members are responsible for the actions of each individual within the profession. Therefore, I do not tolerate unethical conduct on the part of my fellows.

    Cases of Ethical Misconduct. An act of ethical misconduct is defined as the commission of any act or practice of any habit or behavior which is contrary to the standards of conduct prescribed by the Code of Ethics or the Honor Code. Enforcement of the standards prescribed by the Codes are primarily the responsibility of the members of the Battalion. Therefore, any time a Midshipman observes an ethically questionable act on the part of another, it is the responsibility of the former to deal with the situation, normally by confronting the individual and inquiring about the questionable action. If the individual does not rectify the questionable situation, it is the responsibility of the observing individual to invoke the Ethics System and report the act of ethical misconduct. Failure to report such an occurrence constitutes an act of ethical misconduct in itself.”

    So, Alan and Tim: you are clearly reflecting the AAUP’s sense of professional ethics, which does not include collective monitoring, but I do *not* think you are expressing the full range of professional ethics in this country, which does seem to include admonishment, feedback, etc., and is taken as duty, not arrogance. (The unwillingness to be admonished, I confess, strikes me as far more arrogant than any admonishment could be.) It *would* be a change in the AAUP’s stance on professional ethics to include collective monitoring and admonishment, but (on first and rapid trolling through the web) it seems to me that it would bring you more in line with the ethics of your sister professions in America.

    Incidentally, the academy *does* assume that professors are competent to judge each other’s writing and research, and even allows that we can judge that Prof. Opus really shouldn’t take the kids on 30-minute dandelion breaks each day; it also assumes that we should submit to the judgment of our colleagues in these matters. Advice given to teachers during contract renewal before tenure is not considered unprofessional. The very existence of a common profession presupposes that you have an irreducible minimum of knowledge about what other professors do; and are minimally qualified to comment one upon the other. What you call “arrogance” is *the duty of mutual critique*, which helps defines the existence of the professional community.

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