Discipline and puzzle

I disagree. You acheive universal assent with every post.

I think if you Google either “anti-intellectual tradition” or “post-intellectual tradition.” you find a copy of my college transcripts.

I’m in no way a Horowitz defender, but I think the question of credentials comes up when humanities professors apply, in the classroom, a very narrow understanding of another discipline to their own, without informing students that other perspectives are possible.

This is most often the case with economics and Marxism, but a case can be made that many women’s studies professors are not terribly “up” on the latest research from the hard sciences on biological differences between the sexes. The new literature department fashion — sovereignty studies — again draws on a very narrow range of sources (Agamben, Schmitt) with no attention to the sheer range of poli sci traditions.

At the same time, Horowitz and Anne Neal don’t have solid evidence of a professor’s expertise from course descriptions and syllabi.

if you look at academic careers, they include a certain amount of development and change. People’s interests vary and they become expert in a variety of new areas as their lives move on.

But isn’t the real problem — at least in our discipline — that most people hired as a Victorianists/medievalists/modernists end up 20th/21st century Americanists?

I always make sure that before I begin speaking, I thoroughly saturate the context. That way, misunderstanding and disagreement become impossible.

i just got off the phone with lizzy 2 and ben 16, and we’ve decided that you are too dangeral to our tungsten take-over just to be considered an amusing sideshow any more. if i were you, i’d start unscrewing your light bulbs.

“Is anti-credentialism really such a controversial stance in need of passionate defense?”

Apparently. I can only comprehend this argument in the context of the humanities/sciences academic schism; from the sciences side, the anti-credentialist position seems (in my opinion) to be absurd.

My relationship to this issue is complex. Although my education eventually came to be primarily classical liberal arts, my cultural affiliations and temperment are with the sciences. Yes, at St. John’s College, my alma mater, the faculty is expected to eventually teach throughout the curriculum. On the other hand, with the pedagogy being extremely Socratic and student-dominated, the expertise of the teachers in the subject matter is not even remotely as essential as in the professorial pedagogical mode.

I hate to agree with Horowitz in any way major or minor, but I must agree that therein lies the problem. Conventional higher education is professorial and lecture dominated, true expertise is assumed and essential. Anti-credentialism in the strictest sense is reasonable when it otherwise requires a procedural evaluation of expertise. But is this usually the case? From the sciences side of academic culture, I can attest that there is a strong awareness and ethos that sufficient comprehension beyond credentialed expertise is difficult and claims of such are implicitly suspect. All people routinely greatly overestimate their grasp of given subjects. There must be a mechanism for independent evaluation of such claims, very particularly in the context of professorial pedagogy. Merely being interested and moderately read in a subject is insufficient.

Lecturers don’t necessarily need professional credentials, but there must be some objective metric to evaluate expertise. Scholarly publication should suffice. Some will argue that this is too high a standard because it is difficult to be published outside one’s credentialed area. But that is as it should be. And if one truly is competent, then it shouldn’t be difficult to collaborate with a credentialed expert on a topic and thus attain published status.

Intellectuals and especially academics of all kinds notoriously overestimate their facility across all domains of knowledge. Mere self-claims of competency as a basis for teaching a course outside one’s credentialed expertise is rightly mocked as a trend undermining academic integrity.

I always make sure that before I begin speaking, I thoroughly saturate the context. That way, misunderstanding and disagreement become impossible.

aka delineating the territory — marking it, as it were. Hello Urinetown!

The AAUP statement makes no reference to expertise as a basis for academic freedom; instead, it is a necessary to perform as an ‘officer’ of a university. Moreover, the AAUP statement specifically excludes “controversial matter which has no relation to their subject” from academic coverage. In other words, a hypothetical math instructor who says “I saw the news and, boy, Pelosi sure is dumb” cannot defend his conduct by claim to academic freedom unless he was addressing her budget calculations.

I don’t agree that academic freedom applies only to professors. The AAUP is, of course, concerned about professors, but the principle of being able to inquiry freely should hold for students too. In cases like the MSU case that Stanley Fish opined on last week , a student who has paid or received a fellowship has the right to study freely. Requiring students to do book reports (I don’t) and then rejecting a book they select on the grounds that you don’t like that author or his ideas would seem to me to violate the student’s academic freedom (e.g., a Lakoff devotee rejects anything by Pinker in his linguistics course).

It seems that the expertise restriction for academic freedom is not a reasonable or necessary one.

It’s a good thing that Berube is a professor of literature, and not history, because his knowledge of the history of US intervention, as demonstrated in his critique of Chomsky… is less than impressive

http://redredbecca.blogspot.com/2007/03/polemicists-parry-cockburn-berube.html

And as for requiring students to read some books but not others: this goes on all the time. If you take undergrad economics, you cannot do a report on I.I. Rubin’s “Essays on Marx’s Theory of Value.” If you do you will fail. Your report might be brilliant and it might be about economics but it’s not what is being taught in the class. If you are taking a seminar in modernist poetry, and every day you keep talking about how only poetry with rhyme and meter is truly expressive and how Eliot, Pound and Stevens were charlatans, you will fail. Your papers might be brilliant and incisive but you are showing no grasp of the subject matter and you are disrupting the clas.

Life is just too short. Not every class can do everything. There is a certain amount of material, and students have to master it, and one or two of them just cannot keep derailing the course in the name of free inquiry. Students have free inquiry in their lives outside of class, but in class there is a curriculum.

Sebastian H- actually I think there are plenty of academics who don’t deserve academic freedom – dead wood, lazy or bitter or conformist or just old and tired – but if you don’t have academic freedom how are you going to get your Michael Berube’s? And Ward Churchill is ugly, all right, but he’s no uglier than say, Albert Butz, the Holocaust denier at Northwestern. We know about Churchill because he’s a terrific stick to beat the liberal professoriat with – never mind that he’s not remotely a liberal and that he hates liberals with a venomous passion.

Just so somebody makes the point…

The folks that attack Ward Churcill’s academic freedom routinely claim that he is unqualified or commits plagiarism or whatever, anything but what they are really unhappy about, his ideas. Meanwhile, those who make a more general complaint against academic freedom itself point to the dead wood that can be found in almost every department across the country as if what they really cared about was removing burntout profs in state colleges and not enforcing ideological uniformity. Yeah, right.

I worked for some years in an aerospace & defense industry research center. We hired a fair number of Ph.D.s, and beyond assuring ourselves that they knew some math, we didn’t much give a damn about their particular specialization in disciplines ranging from physics to physiology. We weren’t hiring specialists, we were hiring the demonstrated (by the Ph.D.) ability to go into a field and master it. When I was interviewing, one question that was asked was “How long would it take you to be an authority on X?”, where X was a subdiscipline in which I’d never had a course.

“as scholarly careers develop and scholars’ areas of expertise change, we need to do any substantial rethinking of the relation between academic freedom and disciplinary expertise.”

Well, no, since setting up any enforcement mechanism to limit academic freedom to within-discipline subjects would open the door to political abuses. In practise, once you have tenure, you (should) have a license to work on whatever you want to work on, and only your reputation will suffer if you chose to work on something that you don’t know anything about.

I do think that perhaps there’s something wrong with any discipline in which a large number of the practitioners do cross-disciplinary work, though. It seems like a sign that the disciplinary boundaries may have been poorly set up in the first place, or that they are a holdover from a previous era.

I think part of the issue is that, once you have an advanced degree, you should be more or less free to expound on any topic in which you can become versed.

Much of the academic tradition, particularly PhD work is proving that you can become a bona fide expert in something. After that, crossing disciplinary lines should be encouraged.

18: “I’ve been moving back in time for well-nigh five years now.”

Funny, I find that it always goes the other direction for me. If you haven’t gotten further back than the early 1980s, could you pick up some Microsoft stock? And if you’re progressing more quickly, what did happen to the Roanoke colony?

Maybe the disciplinary boundaries were originally drawn rather haphazardly and are intrinsically problematic. Even in the hard sciences they have needed to define fields like physical chemistry, biochemistry, and biophysics which straddle the original borders, and the further you move into the social sciences and humanities, the less inevitable the divisions become.

I think that the best analogy to disciplinary organization is the precapitalist guild system, which enforced monopolies and guarantees jobs, or tried to, to its restricted membership. The poaching that Rick and Scott have mentioned is thus a battle between guilds, with the Americanist guild struggling to establish itself versus other, already existing guilds, such as historians or Englishists. Berube’s Cultural Studies guild likewise is battling with the English guild.

If the boundaries are at all arbitrary, it’s trivially true that the most interesting new stuff will be found in the neglected hedgerows between fields, rather in the neat, intensively cultivated row crops. The guild dynamic of professionalism moves in the other direction, though, toward the definition of subspecialties rather than toward the crossing of boundaries.

Mmm – on a pedantic note, was Walt’s initial comment a conundrum or a paradox?

It’s a good thing I’m not a professor of literature, as demonstrated by my inability to spell “comments”.

Another: “Universities are supposed to be meritocratic institutions. The people who teach and do research there are supposed to know more than the rest of us.”

Posted by Sebastian Holsclaw: “The problem is when it is revealed that they don’t seem to know more than the rest of us. The cases may be rare (say Ward Churchill)—but when brought to the public eye they end up appearing really ugly.

Maybe there is nothing to be done about it.”

Sebastian, compared to the GOP leadership, academia is doing an excellent job of policing both competancy and morality. Compared to the ‘think tanks’ of the right, academia comes out at least 100 times better at both.

“I read Cary as arguing for a more rather than a less generous understanding of “expertise,” myself.”

In an ideal world, one in which political misconstrual of every argument by the radical right did not exist, then I’d say that expertise is irrelevant to the purpose of academic freedom. Academic freedom, like most of the negative freedoms in the Enlightenment tradition, is predicated on the idea that anything that can be abused politically will be. For instance, we don’t have free speech only for expert speakers — we have free speech because the power to regulate speech would inevitably be abused. For academics, the tenuring process is assumed to involve evaluation of expertise by peers. But if that is incorrect, or later becomes incorrect, you can’t regulate the academic freedom for those people to work on whatever they want to work on, because that would also be abused.

Of course the radical right would take this position as “Liberals say that professors can teach anything they want because truth doesn’t exist!” So people think that they need to defend a broader vision of expertise, for public relations purposes. But the radical right can be counted on to misconstrue anything, so I don’t see why we shouldn’t talk about the actual reasons in the freedom of a comment box.

I’d be delighted to have a student submit a paper saying someone we’d studied was a charlatan, as long as there was a real argument. Regurgitation is *not* what we aim for, most of us.

Horowitz is a dolt. But until American humanities departments begin to reform themselves, they will continue to feed his flame, to “enable” him, as we say in drug language.

An example: I studied race in American literature for four years of graduate school, in an Ivy League university’s well-respected Africana Studies program. My dissertation proposal was easily approved. And it wasn’t until I met Sean McCann and Scott Kaufman via The Valve that anyone told me I might challenge my assumptions about race and culture by reading Walter Benn Michaels.

So it’s not only “conservative” work that is ignored in the academy. It’s any work that potentially could challenge a professor’s assumptions. (Not all professors, of course, but the more “politicized” the academic, the more tunnel vision one encounters.) For example, Scott has done a great job showing the total ignorance among Lacanians of scientific research that challenges the Lacanian view of mind/brain function.

Ultimately, I think Horowitz’s critique could be circumvented best by addressing the educational methods of today’s academy. Beyond basic introductory lecture courses, I think all humanities courses should be structured around inquiry-based instruction. A professor might posit a period of study, a genre, an author or set of authors — but beyond those basic limitations, the class should follow the research interests of the students. Students should be forced to undertake weekly research and reading projects and report back on their findings. They might decide to collectively research a given topic each week, but this shouldn’t be enforced by a syllabus. A professor might design the evaluations and the rubric for assigning values to those evaluations (something too rarrely done in classes where professors just say, “Write an essay on *The Scarlet Letter*,” without defining what exactly they mean by an essay, what aspects of the essay they’ll evaluate, and how they will evaluate those aspects.)

“Discovery learning” and inquiry-based instruction don’t work for basic skills and low-level knowledge, but for learning high-level skills and knowledge, they are probably the best methods. In such a classroom, the professor cannot be held responsible for “indoctrinating” the students, nor could a professor indoctrinate a student in such a classroom. (Of course, this would mean that college professors-to-be might have to study pedagogy in graduate school, because few of us have ever experienced a truly discovery-based classroom.)

A decent college English curriculum might then mean big lecture courses on the basics: Shakespeare, English Lit I and II, American Lit I and II. After that, students should be learning through individual and group research projects. That would shut ACTA up too.

(On a separate note, I should add to Scott’s comment about me above that I only went on the job market once, and I wasn’t yet finished with my diss — without degree in hand, one shouldn’t expect too many interviews or job offers these days. It was my experiences teaching junior high and high school students that made me decide to get my secondary teaching certification and teach high school. If had to do it over again, I’d write a dissertation on English/composition pedagogy — but I’d still want to teach high school.)

C.L. Ball (43) I don’t know if it would be a violation of academic freedom for a guy to get fired for speaking at a rally. But it would certainly be a violation of his political right of free speech as a citizen, and he could sue on those grounds.

If he claimed to be speaking officially as a representative of his school, speaking on its behalf when he had no authority to do so, that might be different.

No, actually, Ballin Ben, I haven’t…..

I just figured there must be some reason you wanted us asking about tungsten….

Luther, I’m sorry that your grad school experience included no guidance in pedagogy. Mine was all about pedagogy. It was narrow in other ways, but there’s a sense in which any education is necessarily narrow. It should equip you to peer over the walls and to continue to learn, though.

I would say that most of the activities in the classes I teach are “inquiry based” or “project based,” but of course the inquiry can’t last more than 16 weeks and the projects have to be manageable inside of 3 credits. That’s an unfortunate concession to the corporate model of the university. I don’t blame that situation on humanities scholars or “the Left,” but on the relentless corporatization and privatization that the right wing has foisted upon us.

I’m noticing that sweeping judgments of what “academia” or “the humanities” are doing, as expressed in this comment thread, don’t hold up, but instead the judgment depends on the particulars. (Down with grand meta-narratives!) C. L. Ball is right on. Whether one is crushing the student’s academic freedom or rightly insisting that the student study the actual subject at hand depends on the details. If I assign a critical article and get a narrative, that’s bad, but there may be other classes where I assign a narrative.

As it happens, when I was a junior in college I did, in fact, write a paper where my entire aim was to justify saying “Ezra Pound is full of shit” within the bounds of valid critical commentary, and I think I succeeded, by way of the “hell Canto” (I don’t have the resources at hand to find what the number is, but it’s the Canto that has stalactites of shit hanging over London and — my favorite Pound line — “Profiteers drinking blood sweetened with shit,” which is the motto of the current Texan ruling class). I got an A, anyway. The point was that Pound sees his contemporaries as very literally full of shit in that poem, but he falls prey to the same sins, so he’s full of the same metaphorical shit. That’s what you get when you try to hijack Dante.

And Luther, if I had it to do over again I think I would have taught high school too, at least at first, to make more money.

Come now, Michael, we all know the ’48 Bollingen should have gone to Billy Collins. A ’48 Bollingen, when chilled, is always great with fish.

OK, Horowitz is a monster, and I’ve said so before in print. But that doesn’t mean academia doesn’t need serious reform. I feel like professors are taking a very Republican line defending an ontology of discipline that is clearly broken.

You can’t have it both ways. Either there is expertise or there isn’t. If there is, then a whole lot of current social science is worse than hooey…if there isn’t, then we can’t play the ivory tower game. Therein lies the sting that this guy elicits.

Luther, Why do you assume that scientific research on gender is immune from social critique of gender? In other words, if scientific research is itself performative how can it be used to “challenge a purely performative theory of gender?”

“Regurgitation is not what we aim for, most of us.”

Well, yes in-deedy-do it is what you aim for- at least, if you are doing your job, it is. Being a professor means teaching your students to manipulate complex abstract concepts within a framework of given methods of analysis. It is your job to have mastery of your field of study and to convey that mastery to your students. If they cannot master the field for whatever reason – perhaps because they have pre-conceived ideas that conflict with what you are teaching – well then, they fail.

Now that does not mean that your students cannot disagree with you or that they can’t have opinions on areas of controversy. Within the limits of the field, it’s a good thing for them to be learn to conduct argument, but only within those limits.

What is it about some professors that makes them denigrate their own fields? A civil engineering professor wouldn’t say that a student who learned the parameters of suspension bridge design had learned to “regurgitate.” A classics professor wouldn’t say that a student who could translate Virgil into supple and expressive English had learned to “regurgitate.” But some professors seem to have a horror that a student will actually learn something that has some content to it. Why is that?

Here endeth the lesson.

Fair enough. But I still don’t understand how they can buy eggs in Malta for seven cents apiece and sell them at a profit in Pianosa for five cents.

although Horowitz claims to abide by the American Association of University Professors’ definition of “academic freedom,” he is campaigning, as I have often argued, for a definition of “academic freedom” that extends the concept to students, thereby rendering it either incoherent or indistinguishable from some nebulous concept of “intellectual freedom” or “freedom from professorial haranguing.”

But this is wrong. If a student of discipline A presents material in accord with the prevailing academic standards of A, then the student’s work ought to be just as protected under academic freedom as any professor of A. Horowitz argues for using the same definition for students. Moreover, since the standards for students would be identical to standards for professors your claimed conflation of academic freedom with “ intellectual freedom’ or ‘ freedom from professorial haranguing’ ” is shown to be incorrect. Horowitz isn’t arguing for a change in the definition of academic freedom, but an extention of the same defintion to other people, namely students.

he’s always complaining that professor X doesn’t have the credentials to teach course Y, as if he is the Arbiter of All Scholarly Knowledge, and some of his beliefs on that score

This also is false, and it’s easy to see why. Consider this recent op-ed by an Economics professor. Horowitz doesn’t set himself up as an arbiter of scholarly standards; instead, he demonstrates that professors routinely violate the 1970 “interpretive comments” section of the AAUP statement on academic freedom, specifically citation 2.

The intent of this statement is not to discourage what is “controversial.” Controversy is at the heart of the free academic inquiry which the entire statement is designed to foster. The passage serves to underscore the need for teachers to avoid persistently intruding material which has no relation to their subject.

The persistent and routine violation of AAUP standards shows that professors are not adequately enforcing their own standards. Academic credentials are not necessary to notice and then to demonstrate this fact.

You seem to be impressed with Mr. Cary’s point about evolving expertise. I am not. I agree that lack of coursework does not disqualify someone from teaching in a discipline, and I would even go farther by claiming that even existing course work doesn’t qualify someone to teach in a discipline. To qualify as an authority one must show a reasonably adequate record of satisfying peer review in a discipline. That is the only way to determine if a professor’s work accords with the prevailing academic standards in his discipline. So, the purported problem of evolving expertise and interdisciplinary studies was solved by scholars long ago. It’s surprising to discover that professors are unaware of it.

It seems that your basic claims have fallen.

“Why, this is history, nor am I out of it.” Historicism rocks best both ways, so for me Luther’s and Fardels’s points cohere intellectually and pedagogically. Contextualizing the successes of Freud and Lacan (and, on the “hard science” side, lobotomies and [as Luther kind of mentions] atomic energy scientists and so on) can help clarify the workings of popular science in our own day. For example, how statistically unjustifiable attention to genetic and sexual correlations leads to an exaggerated (and profitable) belief in biological determinism, much as inordinate attention to violent crimes leads to exaggerated (and profitable) popular fears. Similarly, Walter Benn Michaels fits into a long American tradition of using racism and economic class differences as catspaws which stabilize each other: he’s found a way to extend that tradition while protesting it.

Oh, no. We have one of those “plain meaning . . . is easy to grasp” people. One minute it’s “plain meaning” on the surface, the next it’s “at essence” deep in the subtext.

Jeff, if Horowitz had any evidence for his claims, he would be listened to. You are asking for a cartoonishly rigid version of “standards” when you attack the liberal professor, but not applying any kind of standards at all to your reading of Horowitz. When two sides take up a debate, there is a basic contract in place that both sides are arguing in good faith. H. demonstrably argues in bad faith on the teevee screen. Then he pretends to make demands of teachers who are mostly doing their jobs fairly and professionally. They should ignore such a dishonest critic. That’s the point.

April, the two phrases of mine that you cite don’t reference the same object.

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.

Ah, that “Western cannon” reappears (78), and as ever, in the posts of people who really do want a cannon to aim at their enemies.

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.

And stop calling me Shirley.

Shirley, you jest.

It’s the fourth month of the year 2007.

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.

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!).

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

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.

Jeff, it’s one of the perils of computer-mediated communication that tone often comes across wrong. What I meant to be humor, you took for arrogance — for instance, in my professional world calling oneself “an accredited rhetorician” is self-evidently ironic, a false pompousness that conveys self-deprecating humor, and it functions in the argument as a signal that none of us should take ourselves too seriously. That’s also why I referenced the film _Airplane_ in the next breath. I never tried to poison the well, I tried to sugar-coat the pill.

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.