Maybe the aggressively simplistic, pushy tone I read in your writing was intended by you as patient, simple reasoning. You seem to feel that you have made an obvious point that everyone is ignoring. That feeling is the hallmark of a troll, as is your closing statement that the locals just won’t discuss the issue (after 70-some comments discussing the issue). However, your comments have too much substance to make me think you aren’t really looking for answers. If you feel it sincerely, I guess you aren’t a troll.

The one bit of arrogance I will confess is the phrase “come back in a few years.” Your rhetorical style led me to believe you were some young Horowitz devotee who had never done the job you criticize. Sorry. If you’ve done the job, you are aware of the multiple ways professors are held accountable.

Which leaves me mystified. What more would you want? You’ve helped me by clarifying that it’s standards of classroom decorum and grading you are concerned about. But the kinds of concerns Horowitz raises are along the lines of patient concerns that their doctors will kill them and sell their organs, or consumer concerns that Proctor & Gamble worships the devil. That is, H. promotes urban legends that never turn out to be true. Search his name at the Chronicle of Higher Ed., or search Berube’s blog archives. H. promotes anecdotes of classroom bias that, when examined, turn out never to have happened. One can’t provide counter-examples to a myth.

If you want me to argue by anecdote, I can say that I have never observed a teacher introduce material unrelated to the subject. I’ve observed bad teachers who didn’t explain things too clearly, or teachers who emphasized a part of the subject I don’t, or teachers whose subject-related material was uncomfortable or controversial and need to be handled carefully. I have only seen one teacher, ever, who harangued students with political stuff, and that guy lost his job. But even he could explain its relation to the class, and even he gave good grades to well-constructed conservative arguments. But he lost his job. So, anecdotally, I think there is enforcement of standards of classroom fairness. (This account excludes all the right-wing tirades I was subjected to by various K-12 teachers as a kid; I am only talking here of what I’ve seen in grad school or professional work).

I think your difficulty might be an extremely narrow idea of what is “related” to the course topic. Colin answered that at length in post 80. The op-ed you linked to doesn’t prove the case you think it does.

I think this thread has gone like this:—Berube mentioned some ways that Horowitz brings up valid points, even if H. himself argues in bad faith—A cast of commenters addressed those points by arguing several sides, and raised interesting questions—You asked “but what are the standards?”—Several people told you—You don’t consider their answers to be adequate. You insist that H. brings up some valid points, even if H. himself argues in bad faith, and insist that people address that.—And that’s when my drinking problem started. (Honestly, dude, “Airplane” is, like, totally a classic). –
It’s not that folks are ignoring your question, it’s that your premises are wrong. AAUP standards prohibit unrelated material and bias. But what you see as unrelated is usually related, and bias is usually corrected or punished. Professors are not granted a ridiculous freedom from oversight. (I certainly suspect that there are a lot of industries with less oversight than ours—pharmaceutical sales? corporate executives?—but I haven’t done their jobs so I won’t pretend to be sure). Professors do, in fact, constantly take student feedback into account, and administrators routinely follow up seriously on student grievances. (The scandal is the way harassment, assault, and rape on campus are not always taken seriously, not student complaints about professors). Please look for those actionable facts. I bet everyone agrees that students are legitimate stakeholders with legitimate concerns. But the evidence for any generalized problem just has not surfaced. Your op-ed is not it. If you think it is, we’ve reached the point where we acknowledge incommensurable mental worlds, and abandon the dialogue.

In any case, I have enough grading to do, and it’s late, so I am done. Good luck.

Go ahead and try, grandson, make my day.

Further, in another letter, Miss Manners makes it clear that when the eldest member of the family with the same name dies, everyone gets promoted:

Dude, my name isn’t April

Ouch. That was dumb. Sorry. ;-)

Incidentally, I wish you would lose the debate-club style and simply write in your own voice, from your own experience, with no more certainty in your tone than you actually feel in your heart. As an accredited rhetorician, I can assure you that you will get a better response from your audience if you do.

No offense, but I don’t think you are in a position to advise me on collegial rhetoric until you adopt it also. You’ve gone out of your way to poison the well. I write in the rhetorical style of my discipline, mathematics. I’ll just do my best to gather meaning from your style, and I do hope you’ll do the same for me. Since, I’m not an “accredited rhetorician” you may have to make allowances. That’s what collegial discussions are like.

On a more positive note, I do appreciate your direct engagement on my argument.

There are many yardsticks, each measuring different things, and every institution and discipline has a different mix of yardsticks…get some experience in evaluation, and come back in a few years and say that all professors are unaccountable

Yes, I agree with you that professors are measured on educational outcomes. I’ve participated in accreditation reviews myself at a large public university and at a small liberal arts college. I have never claimed that “all professors are unacountable.” I have written that it seems that professors cannot articulate standards, by which I mean classroom and grading standards of the type Horowitz concerns himself with. Even then, I’ve qualified the certainty of my views with rhetorical markers like “it seems” and “I get the feeling” and “If true.” But of course you know that. You’re an “accredited rhetorician.”

A while back, I examined several requirements and standards documents from several accrediting bodies—- none addressed the concerns that Horowitz raises. You could positively force me to conceed by producing a a few counter-examples. Why don’t you?

With all those years you’ve spent “in evaluation” surely you can address the concerns I’m raising. You see, I’m unmoved when professors wrap themselves in the mantle of intellectual superiority. If they are superior it will show in their arguments, not in attempts to shun critics by telling them to “come back in a few years.” LOL

As an aside, I work with both professors and commercial types. I’ve seen this same kind of rhetorical intemperance, really arrogance, produce humilitating results for professors, many times.

self-criticism is what we do, and if we didn’t do it we would lose accreditation, lose our share of the budget, lose our tenure or promotion bids, lose the respect of our students, lose our standing in our disciplines, and lose job candidates to better-run programs.

This is a good point. I conceed professors endure scrutiny; however, they are also granted a professional freedom and security from managment oversight unknown in any other occupation.

Will you conceed that that self-criticism may not be enough? That students are legitimate stakeholders with legitimate concerns about grading, harassment and unsupproted claims of fact in the classroom? That these issues ought to be formally studied to determine actionable facts?

I get the feeling that y’all don’t really want to discuss this issue, but rather shun the opposition. That’s OK with me. I’m not a troll. If you really think the issue is settled, we can stop the conversation. I’m not here to anger people.

If you grade student’s work, you translate comprehension into numbers all the time.

And April, my son! It’s so good to find you at last. Perhaps tomorrow we can unhook you from that iv.

I didn’t mean to imply that the fourth months of other years have not also been called “April,” or that the future fourth months won’t be “April” too. It’s really very confusing.

Professors are public figures who “endure” (sometimes endure, sometimes welcome) outside criticism of many kinds. It’s set by peer review. It’s determined in merit pay decisions and tenure & promotion decisions. Administrators are always holding us accountable and asking us to do more with less money, same as in any industry. The big new movement in academia is to devise more “measurable” ways of assessing the success of our programs. I put “measurable” in scare quotes because it’s hard for us in humanities to translate all of our “student learning outcomes” into numbers. (Congratulations, you achieved a 58% increase in average student comprehension of the themes of Romanticism!). But we do it, because that’s the only way our work can be compared to other programs around the nation. And accreditation reviews absorb a gigantic amount of our bureaucratic energy, which hopefully produces good effects because we have to document what we do and how well it succeeds. And we invite student evaluation of courses and teachers, and if we don’t respond productively to student criticism we face the wrath of the promotion/tenure committee. And AAUP censures departments or programs that do not meet standards. And the professional boards of each discipline set standards. If you wanted to measure “professors” by using evidence instead of anecdote (I dunno about you, but that’s how H. operates), you would do serious research into the kinds of documents I’ve just mentioned. And we are public figures whose classrooms are open to visitors, whose work is subject to public comment in the press and places like Rate My Professor or those admissions chat boards.

There are many yardsticks, each measuring different things, and every institution and discipline has a different mix of yardsticks.

My problem with your argument is that you are asking for one, simple, mythical Procrustean yardstick. Go to your databases and reasearch keywords like “higher education administration,” “accreditation,” “assessment,” “professional standards,” “merit review,” “promotion,” “tenure,” “course evaluation” and grasp what a complex thing evaluation is, and get some experience in evaluation, and come back in a few years and say that all professors are unaccountable, that we have no oversight, and that we reject outside criticism.

I’ll repeat: self-criticism is what we do, and if we didn’t do it we would lose accreditation, lose our share of the budget, lose our tenure or promotion bids, lose the respect of our students, lose our standing in our disciplines, and lose job candidates to better-run programs.

It’s hard to think of a profession that “endures” more outside scrutiny.

Incidentally, I wish you would lose the debate-club style and simply write in your own voice, from your own experience, with no more certainty in your tone than you actually feel in your heart. As an accredited rhetorician, I can assure you that you will get a better response from your audience if you do.

Though Jeff Younger’s posts are extreme, they’re a fine example of the way “discipline” is used uncritically, as a way to claim that discipline X has arrived at the truth and anyone in discipline not-X who disputes that truth is wrong, though this is the first time I’ve heard the accusation that disputing such alleged truths violates the AAUP’s academic freedom standards. But if it hinges on the “no relation” wording that’s pretty easy to deal with: I’m reading Adam Smith right now with a class, and we have to move between psychology, philosophy, political theory, history of science, and so forth to get a fix on what Smith was doing. Any rich text and just about any real-world situation is going to take you in transdisciplinary directions.

Standards are rigor, clarity, careful use of evidence, and learning the appropriate literatures; and the key remains peer-reviewed scholarship—this of course a very conservative statement of standards. Producing good interdisciplinary work requires that journals assemble interdisciplinary teams of referees, and I’m very grateful to the journals that have done that in my case.

It’s interesting to see Economics used in the disciplining way of the oped cited in 72. I’m trained in econ and am also, for what it’s worth, broadly sympathetic with commerce and letting folks do what they want, but I blanch at the first sentence of the oped, “As an economics professor for 30 years, I have emphasized free-market capitalism as the surest way to raise living standards for the masses.” I think I would like to let students come to this sort of conclusion on their own, and I would surely, in a course, want to open out questions rather than collapsing everything into capitalism versus communism as Happel’s oped does, which is the level of analysis I remember being taught in the sixth grade.

I do agree that there’s sometimes a tendency among folks who are not trained in econ to revert too easily to simplistic splits of their own, mapping econ|nonecon onto selfishness|caring, but Stephen Happel’s crudely ideological oped is unlikely to open up the kind of dialogue we need.

but since Horowitz isn’t able to ask them, professors will have to be their own honest critics and be careful and critical in what they do. Which we do anyway, because that’s our job and our training.

Just because someone is trained to do a thing doesn’t mean they actually do it. Moreover, there are many occupations that endure oversight from outsiders. Should law enforcement be exempt from public oversight because most people don’t anything about law enforcement? Should a builder be exempt from oversight just because city officials don’t anything about building?

I keep asking professors, what are the standards? Well, what are they, April?

No one is trying to set standards for professors, we’d just like them to tell us the standards, so we can conduct the normal, casual oversight every other profession endures. I’m getting the feeling that professors don’t want to articulate standards because they don’t want any oversight.

If true, it would be tantamount to an a priori rejection of outside criticism, and such rejection is wholly illegitimate.

They should ignore such a dishonest critic. That’s the point.

Not really. If we are to ignore dishonest people, we’ll ignore half the Western cannon in almost every discipline. The issue is not over the quality of the people, but rather over the quality of what they say. I’m not defending Horowitz as a person, but I think his claim that academics don’t follow their own standards, or worse they can’t articulate any standards, is generally true.