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What's at Stake in Academia
Alan Jones, Dean of Faculty, Pitzer College
09/04/05
This summer, a colleague of mine, a president at one of the top liberal arts
colleges in the country announced to a national conference of her colleagues
that we, as a body need to recognize that "we are at war". She was
responding to a call from some quarters at the meeting for more civil discourse
and compromise on campus. What drove her to take such a radical stand in a body
not known for taking radical stands ? She had come to realize that there was no
choice, that people of conscience in the Academy are under attack and there is
no more room for compromise.
When someone is threatening to burn down your house, you can't politely suggest
to them that a workable compromise might be for them to burn down only the left
side of your house. You have to fight, and there is no bargaining.
What is at stake is at the very heart of what we do in the Academy--reasoned
thought and critical, independent thinking. Our process is not driven by
loyalty to any individual or tied to a particular religious or ideological
agenda. This commitment is to truth, and to the application of reason and
empirical methodologies to determine what is true, is unacceptable to the Bush
administration. In the words of a senior Bush advisor to New York Times
reporter, Ron Suskind, guys like you [Suskind] exist in "what we call the
reality based community", which he went on to define as "people who
believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernable
reality". When Suskind started to agree, the aide cut him off and said,
"that's not the way the world works anymore. We're an empire now. When we
act, we create our own reality, and while you're studying the reality, we'll
act again, creating new realities." The empire that George W. Bush
inhabits is becoming, in some ways, like that of the Imperial Pharaohs and
Caesars, a dangerous brew of narrow egocentrism and messianic delusion.
In the same article, Suskind informs readers that Bush, in speaking to Amish
farmers in Lancaster County, PA, said "I trust that God speaks through
me." In the fragile world constructed out of such absolutes, individuals
or institutions that question the President's fundamental(ist) vision or the
facts that support it, cannot be tolerated. As the bumper sticker says:
"God said it, I believe it, that's that". Truth is, after all,
directly imparted and the task of the true believer is not to question or
refine that truth but to maintain and assert it in spite of the overwhelming
evidence that contradicts it.
The contradiction between faith based and inquiry based epistemologies is
fundamental. Questions of justice and truth emerging from within the Academy
through a thoughtful process of empirical investigation and reasoned analysis
are at best, irrelevant to the President's reality and, at worst, hostile to
his vision for carrying out god's work. The objective fact that there never
were weapons of mass destruction and that Saddam never did pose a threat to the
American people is irrelevant. Their existence became a part of the reality
that allowed him to act on his vision of invading Iraq.
For followers of the President, the task is not to weigh the merits of his
decisions or to evaluate the facts that support his position. The task is to
have faith in him, despite the facts. So where does that leave the academic
community, firmly committed to the pursuit of truth through the mechanisms of
critical thinking, empirical research and the formal application of reason?
Inevitably, it plants us squarely in the camp of what his aide referred to as
the reality based community. Since members of the academic community have not
infrequently questioned the merits and rationality of his "received
wisdom" , our community has increasingly been viewed as disloyal to the
president's vision directly, and to god's plan, indirectly.
So, what does the administration do? With enormous financial support from the
Olin Foundation, The Scaife Foundation, and the Bradley Fund, and with the
political backing from Carl Rove and Tom Delay, David Horowitz and his Center
for the Study of popular culture have unleashed a vicious attack on higher
education in this country. Graham Larkin of the California AAUP and Stanford
University, describes Horowitz's techniques as "ranging from cooked
statistics, race baiting and guilt by association to editorial foul play".
(Inside Higher Education "Horowitz's War on Rational Discourse")
Evidence for this latter charge is reinforced by Michael Berube of Penn State
University. Berube describes an on-line debate that he had with Horowitz on
Horowitz's FrontPage Blog site. In transcribing the debate, Horowitz excised
large portions of Berube's comments (without informing him) in a manner that
rendered Berube's arguments incoherent. In a debate with Larkin, Horowitz
asserted that his ABOR bill had the backing of progressives like Stanley Fish,
Todd Gitlin and Berube. When Larkin contacted these individuals to confirm
this, they were incredulous. Horowitz had simply lied. The facts apparently did
not did not fit with Horowitz's rapidly developing reality. Even when Larkin
confronted Horowitz with the lie and cited their numerous objections to the
ABOR, Horowitz, more vehemently continued to assert the "fact" of
their support.
Although Horowitz carefully couches the language of his bill in the rhetoric of
free speech and academic freedom, principals no self-respecting academic could
resist, imbedded within this unctuous language however, is a Horowitzian
statement of "truth" that the academy is an unrepentant repository of
leftist bias, and that conservative students are the objects of unrelenting
politically inspired indoctrination - An accusation for which he can muster
only the most shameful form of anecdotal support. Horowitz goes on to assert a
second truth. Since Colleges and Universities are incapable of addressing this
issue themselves, legislative intervention is necessary - hence the Acaadeamic
Bill of Rights (ABOR)
These bills, although their form varies from state to state, guarantee that
whatever belief (truth) a student asserts (particularly if they are
conservative beliefs), they have a right to assert it. The unexamined truth
thereby becomes protected speech. Something is true simply because the student
believes that it is true. In this version of reality all such assertions of
truth have equal merit and are deserving of a faculty member's respect. A
faculty member, who challenges such a statement on the basis of failures in its
logical underpinnings, now runs the risk of having the student file a charge of
bias. This pernicious bill then, guts the ability of a faculty member to engage
and challenge students in the kind of rigorous logical debate that has
characterized the Academy for 400 years. It undermines the ability of faculty
to nurture and develop in students precisely the kind of critical thinking
skills that will be necessary to challenge the "received wisdom"
orthodoxy of the Bush administration.
Although Horowitz has continuously assured faculty in various venues that he
has no desire to impose outside oversight to what goes on in their classrooms,
bills have been introduced into legislatures in 18 states, and Horowitz nearly
did back-flips when HR177 (an ABOR-like resolution) passed the Pennsylvania
House in July. One passage in this bill is particularly noteworthy:
"Resolved that if an individual makes an allegation against a faculty
member claiming bias, the faculty member must be given at least 48 hours
notices of the specifics of the allegation prior to the testimony being given
and be given an opportunity to testify at the same hearing as the individual
making the allegation."
So, a select committee appointed by the Pennsylvania State Legislature will now
investigate all charges of political bias in the classroom - a select
subcommittee of the state legislature, a partisan appointed committee, will be
charged with insuring against political bias in the classroom. The ABOR has
nothing to do with insuring an open atmosphere for the free exchange of ideas and
the promotion of critical thinking and thereby enriching the Academy. It is
designed, in fact, to do exactly the opposite. It is designed as Horowitz says
"not to refute your opponent's arguments but to wipe him from the face of
the earth" (in The Art of Political War)
The Academy has been slow to recognize and to respond to the Bush
Administration's attack on rational discourse and critical thinking, but it is
coming around. The highly publicized and vicious attacks on University of
Colorado professor Ward Churchill, for his political views, were a wake-up
call. I and hundreds of my colleagues have been organizing to resist the
attacks on him and on the Academy in general. We have generated a petition of
support for Churchill that has thus far gathered over 600 faculty signatures.
We have a website and list serve to communicate with one another. We have
formed discussion groups to educate ourselves about the apparent war that is
being waged against us, and we are beginning to write about the fraudulent nature
of this attack. We are encouraged that, given the level of outraged vitriol in
the attacks on Churchill and calls for his dismissal, initially on charges of
sedition, by the Governors of two states and by David Horowitz, his students,
in the midst of this, voted him a distinguished teaching award. Perhaps they
have developed critical thinking skills after all.
Alan Jones
Dean of Faculty
Pitzer College
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