My Final Statement on KC Johnson's Until Proven Innocent; or, You Know You've Made It ...

(By the way, I lied .)

... when The Weekly Standard smears you:

And, just a few days ago, Group of 88 sympathizer Scott Eric Kaufman, a journalism instructor at the University of California at Irvine, posted an entry on his blog, Acephalous, calling for Johnson to be ostracized by the prestigious history website Cliopatria, even though Johnson has a doctorate from Harvard and is the author of four scholarly books.

I'm a what?  Group of 88 sympathizer?  News to me.  Also quite nice to be reemployed: I loved my time working in the literary journalism department, and wish that University of California regulations would have let me keep teaching in it. 

As for the (oft-repeated) claim that I called for KC Johnson's ouster from a group blog to which I don't contribute, I offer my (oft-repeated) explanation:

KC: I said nothing about how to manage Cliopatria. In this regard, I believe there must've be some context I've missed, as you and Ralph both think my criticism of you is a call for your removal from the roster. I said, quite plainly, that "keeping you on the roster does the rest of [the contributors] a disservice." I suspect—given the context I'm missing—that any comparable statement in which I distinguish between what you've written and what your compatriots have would've sounded like I was armchair managing Cliopatria.

Also:

Ralph, my point was that, in my opinion, the works he's doing at Durham-in-Wonderland isn't up to par with what I expect from Cliopatria.  I don't expect to see Horowitzian attacks coming from Cliopatria's contributors, and that's what I observed over at Durham-in-Wonderland.  The problem isn't that they're conservative arguments, but that they're bad arguments. 

So kudos to Charlotte Allen for landing her review of Until Proven Innocent in The Weekly Standard.  Perhaps next time she (or her fact-checkers) will verify the accuracy of her statements before they're published.  (Fact-checking is something of a sport at the Standard, after all.)

UPDATE: Ralph thinks I ought to own up to my words and admit I called for KC to be barred from Cliopatria.  As I meant nothing of the sort, honesty bars me from doing that.  What I can say is that I don't think KC should be barred from Cliopatria or otherwise ostracized by the academic community (online or otherwise). 

Comments

[Prof. Ethan]

Oops--that should be: "Their individual comments outside the group comment, individual comments condemning the LAX players on the basis of no clear evidence, were clearly ideologically-motivated and totally irresponsible." And, even more importantly in this context: "when in early 2007 a white girl was ALLEGEDLY raped in a black fraternity house..."

[Timothy Burke]

KC, again, my comments here have been focused on your profiles of the Group of 88 at DiW, not on the book, which I have yet to read.

I completely agree that the Duke lacrosse case is a very potent, important case of injustice. I also completely agree that the Group of 88 made a huge mistake. I even think it's fair to say that their mistake is partly a consequence of a particular failed ideological or intellectual conception of the relationship between collective identity, social structure and "guilt". All of this is true, and KC and Taylor appear to have written a powerful, important expose covering this ground. Good.

I just don't agree that this failure indicts the entirety of academia, or even overwrites the total work of the faculty who signed that statement. I just think life is more complex and messy than that--a view I hope I'm fairly consistent in expressing regardless of what the issue is. I'm concerned by some of the broad brushstrokes in KC's writing at DiW, in particular because I think he leads his readers into active error regarding aspects of academic life.

One of the things about this story that KC has consistently argued from the very beginning is about the importance of detail, of small facts, of keeping a tight and skeptical relationship between evidence and truth. So I'm just puzzled when he turns around and draws broad inferences from the titles of books, the membership of a university press editorial committee, the titles of courses, and so on.

----

The other point, about the history of disciplinary change, is a long and complicated one. (And one that KC and I have talked about before at Cliopatria.) I just think KC is drawing an unsupported asymmetry between past disciplinary history and the present, not the least in his claim that the powers-that-be in past departments were sympathetic to the new "usable past". If you look at the actual timing of the historical emergence of social history, followed by cultural history, this is simply not true, at least in the U.S--and a lot of social historians were mistreated in various ways by political & diplomatic historians as a result in the early days of this shift. Now it is true that social history arose in the US academy within a context of broad social transformation, and many young social historians looked to mobilize mass or student support for their intellectual project, with some success. But they weren't enthusiastically welcomed by the disciplinary "powers-that-be" until well after social history as a specialization had established itself within the discipline. There are differences in academic institutions between then and now, some of which are relevant to wondering about whether new (or old) specializations can establish themselves against current orthodoxies. But if anything, the contemporary environment almost seems more hopeful than the tightly closed shop of the history department circa 1955-1960. Not because current scholars are more open-minded, but because careerist pressures drive young scholars towards some kind of need for originality and individual distinction, producing a more rapid rise and fall of particular orthodoxies.

This is, I guess, a general issue I have with KC's arguments about academia: they seem tendentiously simplistic, inclined to see everything through a crudely "political" lens. At the very least, I'd like to see him think about alternative interpretations. Isn't that what a good historian does? Consider multiple ways to understand why things happen, multiple explanations of causality?

[Prof. Ethan]

I don't think KC Johnson's description of the Humanities Depts at Duke is at all tendentious or simplistic. He points to a larger problem if "one-party departments", and that is certainly a very real issue in certain areas of academia (e.g., in women's studies, peace studies, African-American studies, some Depts of English, and (ahem, Tim Burke), Anthropology, where Democrats outnumber Republicans 30-1).

The situation is now worsened, imo, by the decision of the AAUP to set up a policy that protects outright indoctrination in the classroom:

Here's the money-quote from the new AAUP statement:

Quoting first from Insidehighered.com: Even in areas where there is not as much consensus among experts, professors should not be punished or criticized for having strong points of view, the report says. “Indoctrination occurs only when instructors dogmatically insist on the truth of such propositions by refusing to accord their students the opportunity to contest them. Vigorously to assert a proposition or a viewpoint, however controversial, is to engage in argumentation and discussion — an engagement that lies at the core of academic freedom. Such engagement is essential if students are to acquire skills of critical independence. The essence of higher education does not lie in the passive transmission of knowledge but in the inculcation of a mature independence of mind."

Translation: you are free to present one and only one point of view as the truth, and to do so vigorously, and if it is a political truth, we can't discuss that. So we can have entire fields devoted to political indoctrination. Sure, there's some boilerplate in this statement about allowing dissent from students. But it will take a very formidable and self-confident student indeed to utter any dissent in such an atmosphere.

Thus Prof. Julie Kilmer in the most recent ACADEME (the AAUP journal) unselfconsciously gives faculty good advice on how to repress "resistance" to (in her case) feminist indoctrination. One of her suggestions: sic students on the dissenter in class and publicly humiliate that person. I'm not making this up, and it puts the AAUP boilerplate about protecting students' rights in the "vigorously engaged classroom" into the perspective of reality.

Kilmer's piece in ACADEME was paired with one by Pamela Caughie, which included the statement that while she does not enter the class each and every day to convert people, if, over the long haul, her students become feminist political activists "then I feel I have done my job well." That is, Caughie sees one of her GOALS in her classroom as the production of political "mini-me's." And, by the way, she's president of here local AAUP chapter.

Yep, I'd say KC Johnson is right that there's a problem here.

And I repeat, it's not just "one mistake" by the Duke 88. When a similar case of alleged rape happened a year later, but the races were "wrong' (black rapist, white victim), they kept silent--although their defense for the original "Listening Statement" had become by then that they were only interested in the GENERAL issue of sexual oppression, athletics and fraternities on the Duke campus. Right.

[Sisyphus]

Hahahahaha! I love that Prof Ethan writes that "I don't think KC Johnson's description of the Humanities Depts at Duke is at all tendentious or simplistic" and then goes on to produce a very tendentious and simplistic reading of departments that collapses all distinctions, academic and otherwise, onto politcal party registration.

I would have to say that, leaving aside the fact that party registration does not have any necessary correlation to what a professor thinks or teaches, if you want a diverse and wide representation of party registration in academic departments you should be calling for more members of the Libertarian Party, Reform Party, Peace and Freedom Party, Communist Party, socialist anarchist party, the Larouches, and Greens to be hired. (there are at least 6 parties on the ballot in CA but I don't remember them all.) (and what about Decline to State registrations?)

But really we know that this is all just code for "let's give Republican hacks who can't make it otherwise a little 'affirmative action' to get into academic jobs."

[Joseph Kugelmass]

With respect to Rich and Tim, who are both clearly trying to do their best to make informed and coherent comments, this discussion has become completely incoherent, for reasons that have everything to do with the structure of the argument that has been extracted from KC Johnson's book and used in its place, including by people sympathetic to Johnson and Johnson himself.

The media, the academy, and the legal system are vastly different. I can't imagine a more obvious statement, or one more necessary in the face of the paranoid logic at work here. Nifong acted wrongly, and was severely punished for doing so; far more severely, for example, than many of the people who profited from the gross abuses at Enron.

If the media chased a good story at the expense of objectivity, that is too bad. It might possibly belong in the same book at the story of Nifong's crime and punishment, but it's not part of the same phenomenon. Instead, the media's reaction to the Duke case is part and parcel with other cases of good but groundless stories, such as Saddam's weapons of mass destruction. As for the new allegation of rape at Duke's Phi Beta Sigma fraternity, we should all be thankful that it is being handled with more objectivity and due process. I'm sure commenters like Prof. Ethan will agree that this new case is being handled correctly; otherwise, I would be forced to conclude that they only oppose a fracas when the defendants are white, and support a media frenzy when a police report identifies a suspect as black.

Trying to leverage the "listening statement" in order to make Nifong's abuses apply to professors across the United States is completely unethical. KC, everyone, I have grown extremely bored of trying to sort out the fine details when the fundamental smear is so utterly lacking in integrity. The "listening statement" did not include the word "CASTRATE," it did not lead to the stories in the New York Times, and it did not violate due process of law. There is no connecting thread between these various spheres except the ongoing realities of racial tension and gender inequality in America, and, up to this point, Until Proven Innocent has done nothing to make American lives better. It is too late, and too compromised by a readily apparent and foregone agenda.

Jeffrey Rosen on the final chapters of Until Proven Innocent: "Here the book becomes a little hyperbolic and reads more like a blog than like the meticulous narrative that has come before." It is true, as KC Johnson writes, that the articles he cites are approving of the book, but that is primarily because of the discussion of Nifong's misconduct. The Chicago Tribune says next to nothing about academia, and Newsweek admits its own mistakes while making random demands of 500 faculty at Duke. Furthermore, as with the drastically irrelevant new allegation of rape, it appears that KC Johnson demands that we take a hard line with the politically correct media, right up until the moment when paragons of journalistic excellence like Newsweek begin to sing his praises.

[Timothy Burke]

Ahem yourself Prof. Ethan, I'm not in a Department of Anthropology.

Look, on the larger discussion, maybe it's best put in the simplest possible way. Among KC's arguments, I think, is that there is an argument prevalent among some humanists and social scientists that racial, class and gender identity in the United States constructs a prior collective "guilt" that outweighs or predicts individual guilt in certain kinds of overdetermined episodes of criminal or civil wrongdoing. I think that's a valid point, though I think it requires skillful handling to make well. I think it's also right to be quite critical of that argument or tendency.

That being the case, I think it's wrong to leap as thinly and tendentiously as KC does from the wrongdoing involved in the Group of 88's participation in the Duke lacrosse case to a collective indictment of "leftist academics". For the same reason that it was wrong to come to a certainty about the likely guilt of the lacrosse players based on much more abstract knowledge of the history of race, class and gender in American society. It's actually the strength of KC's claims about the specific intellectual and political errors of the Group of 88 in the lacrosse case that calls into question the leap he makes from the specifics of that case to a casually sweeping set of criticisms of a great many people who had nothing to do with the case.

[Prof. Ethan]

My apologies to Tim Burke, who is in a Dept of History.

By "one party depts" I did not mean the Democratic Party; my point about Anthro was the huge imbalance that exists in Humanities Depts towards Left politics, so huge that it really is like living in a one-party state (left-wing Democrats, Peace and Freedom, Green, etc.).

If the criticisms of the G88 by Johnson are valid, as Tim Burke says, then we need to face the fact that the attitudes of the 88 did not come out of nowhere, and they themselves not spring out of nowhere. Are they representative of a larger problem? It seems difficult to say that they are not.

To begin with, 88 professors is a lot of professors. Second, rather than being delegitimized by their conduct, two of those 88 have now gone on to plum jobs at prestigious places other than Duke: namely, Vanderbilt and Cornell, where they were greeted with fulsome praises from the administrations of those institutions. Further, as my posts on the current attitude of the AAUP shows, and as the essays published so astoundingly unselfconsciously in the most recent ACADEME show, there is an increasingly favorable attitude towards outright indoctrination in the classroom--the belief (even in Prof. Caughie's paper, which was less extreme than Kilmer's) that it is a LEGITIMATE GOAL in the classroom to produce political mini-me's of the professor. This is a position now explicitly defended, in turn, by the AAUP as "the engaged classroom". To defend such classroom conduct while simultaneously denying that it exists and is instead the product of fantasies of Horowitz (or Johnson) seems to me a self contradictory stance.

The second Duke rape case, finally, is hardly "irrelevant." The position of the defenders of the "Listening Statement" (a statement which, as I have said, I did not have any trouble with) has become that the authors were concerned about the GENERAL problem of male oppression of women, and the domination of athletes and fraternities on the Duke campus. Yet when the (alleged) rape of a (white) girl occurred in a (black) frat house a block from the LAX house in Feb. 2007, the Duke 88--so quick off the mark in March 2006--remained totally silent. Prima facie, this opens them to an accusation of hypocrisy, and to the charge that they were merely practicing racial politics in 2006 and eventually have in addition now come to lie about what they were doing then.

[Karl Steel]

Prima facie, this opens them to an accusation of hypocrisy

Or caution.

[Timothy Burke]

Simply put, in good cultural or social history, I think tracing the connection between institutions, social life, beliefs/attitudes and some specific episode of social action is the kind of thing that takes a lot of work, a lot of care and a lot of nuance. Particularly if one wants to make claims about typicality across a broad social category. It's not the kind of argument you make shooting from the hip--unless you're not interested in a scholarly argument and instead are just interested in rapid-fire polemics.

Which, I thought, was the thing that many critics of academia are complaining about: an overabundance of rapid-fire polemics. If you want scholarly judiciousness among scholars, try to embody that value in your own claims.

[Prof. Ethan]

Oh, I don't think Duke Prof. Grant Farrad, for one, was suffering from CAUTION, Karl. Here's what he was saying about the LAX case at his invited lecture at prestigious Williams College THIS SPRING, several months after the 2007 rape:

This past April 30, Williams College’s Africana Studies Program, in association with the Williams Department of English hosted a talk on the lax case by Group of 88 member Grant Farred. In the address, Farred accused unnamed lacrosse players of “perjury” and “arrogant sexual prowess.”

The flyer for the talk distributed by the Williams department featured a photograph of the Duke lacrosse team with "CRIME SCENE" plastered across it in yellow tape.

No, I don't think CAUTION is the issue here.

[prof. Ethan]

Again, my apologies for putting Tim Burke in the wrong Department.

But I don't think I'm shooting from the hip. I've got lots of facts here. Tim Burke seems to be arguing that the Duke 88 are an isolated group and that we can't draw larger conclusions about certain attitudes in Humanities Departments from their behavior. I repeat: 88 is a large number of faculty; these people have NOT been shunned (as the example of Grant Farrad, one of the most extreme of them, shows); and in view of the new official AAUP statements on "the engaged classroom", and the essays advocating political prosyletizing in the classroom and even on how to deal with "resistance" to it by students which appear in the latest issue of ACADEME, it is reasonable to assume that the 88 are repressentative of a much larger and very problematic group of faculty.

[Timothy Burke]

If that's how you make reasonable assertions about the connections between institutions, beliefs, and social groups, Prof, I can't say as I think much of your scholarly abilities.

1. A publication!
2. A talk! (and the inference that talking on campus, with a poster, makes you generally approved of by the faculty. David Horowitz spoke at Swarthmore a few years ago. Guess we approve of him.)
3. 88 people!

equals

The political beliefs and professional practices of most people in a particular profession!

[Rich Puchalsky]

Joseph is right about the inutility of chasing down details when confronted with a smear like this. So far as I can tell, both KC Johnson and Ralph Luker have implicitly admitted that the "listening statement" does not in fact assert that a rape occured, and neither seems to think that this calls for some explanation of why KC Johnson asserts that it did. Nor does KC Johnson see fit to retract his indignation at being called a Horowitzian after having the six articles he's written on Horowitz' site linked to.

As for Prof Ethan, he apparently thinks that the Group of 88, to prove their sincerity, must learn nothing from their earlier experience and issue the same kind of statement again. To quote Joseph: "they only oppose a fracas when the defendants are white, and support a media frenzy when a police report identifies a suspect as black."

But I expect nothing better from the politicized academic groupthink of historians. Judging by the 88 to (n) people in the Humanities ratio, 3 of them must surely suffice as representatives of all people in History Departments.

[Prof. Ethan]

Farrad was asserting, as of April 30, that the LAX 3 were GUILTY; that was the point of his talk, which was sponsored by the Africana Studies Program at Williams, and the English Dept at Williams, and was advertised as such. I therefore DOUBT very much that he had "learned his lesson about drawing conclusions" and that THAT is why he (or any of the other 88) was silent about the second rape case. But of course you're free to drink the Koolaid if you wish.

Horowitz may have appeared at Swarthmore, but my bet is that it was NOT at the formal invitation of an academic department, but of a student group. If it was, the fact remains that Horowitz is only very rarely formally invited to a campus by an academic dept. Crazy Farrad, by contrast, was invited by two of them. Get the difference? Farrad has gone on to be welcomed with open arms by the English Dept at Cornell; Houston Baker, who emailed the mother of one of the LAX players that she had raised a rapist and a "farm animal" (this was in January 2007--gee, I guess HE hadn't learned "caution" yet either), is now ensconced at Vanderbilt where he too was officially welcomed by the president as one of the deepest intellectuals of his generation. Get the difference?

Of 97 faculty who spoke out against the lynch mob at Duke, only 9 came from the Humanities (two from History). Combine that with the 88, most of whom came from the Humanities, and you get a consistent picture. You can find the list on Johnson's website. If you think it is inaccurate, I'm willing to listen.

The "publication" referred to by Tim Burk appeared in the national journal of the AAUP, one of the writers was President of her local chapter of the AAUP, it was followed by a statement by the Acting Legal Council of the AAUP attacking outside inquiries into teaching method and teachers' ideology (with a specific attack on Horowitz), followed by the AAUP official stance protecting "engaged teaching"--the kind of behavior in the classroom that was advocated in those articles and which, however, most of the people here deny is happening on a wide scale. These AAUP incidents are neither ordinary publications nor ordinary events.

[Prof. Ethan]

Based on my own personal experiences, and on the facts such as the ones I have presented above, do I think many faculty in the Humanities are rigid leftist ideologues who are tempted to impose their view of the Good on their students right in their classrooms? Yes, I do. Do I think this is in fact true of entire programs (e.g., peace studies, feminist studies--its official name at UC Santa Cruz)? Yes, I do. Do I think this is true of everyone in the Humanities? No, of course not. Do I think that every English Dept is the equivalent of a one-party state? No, of course not. But I wouldn't want to be a conservative looking for a position in English, or History--read Mark Bauerlein in The Chronicle of Higher Education in Nov. 2004. Can I cite a percentage of faculty involved in this behavior? No, I can't cite a percentage. Do I think it's a problem MUCH larger and more pervasive than a nutcase here or there, and larger than the Duke 88, and that it is, in general, a serious problem for the Humanities, and that the Duke 88 are a fair symbol of the problem? Yes, I do. Am I shocked to find the AAUP lending support to "the engaged classroom"? Yes, I am. Do I think you guys simply don't want to look at some uncomfortable facts? Yes, I do. That's all I'm saying.

[Steven Horwitz]

Let me put in a word for the "engaged classroom." I have no problem at all with faculty making clear their own views of their subject matter and the world in their classrooms, at least in so far as it's relevant to the subject matter of the course. I would much rather that we, as faculty, do so honestly, openly, and self-consciously, and make real pedagogical use of it, than pretend to take on a neutral voice that we can never achieve, either in the classroom or in our choice of readings. And I say this as a libertarian, not a conventional leftist.

What IS a problem, of course, is when we evaluate our students based on their agreement with our views. Punishing students who disagree with us or treating with kid gloves and not intellectually challenging those who DO agree with us is when we fail in our job of cultivating students who can think critically. We also fail at our jobs if we permit a classroom environment where students with minority views are attacked, as distinct from challenged intellectually, by their peers.

We are professors; it is okay to profess. It is our job to cultivate students who know content, can think critically, and can express themselves in the written and spoken word. In that sense, we should be "creating mini-mes." We should not imagine our job to be creating students who agree with our substantive views of the world.

[Prof. Ethan]

I'm sure you're all very tired of me by now. But allow me one last comment:

Steven Horwitz writes, "We should not be imagine our job to be creating students who agree with out substantive views of the world." Agreed, SH!

Yet that is exactly what the two articles in the recent AAUP journal ACADEME advocated, and one (Caughie's) was by the president of her local AAUP, and these two articles were followed by a statement from the acting AAUP Legal Counsel urging that such positions be protected, and followed by an official statement from the AAUP President which went along the following lines:

Quoting first from Insidehighered.com: Even in areas where there is not as much consensus among experts, professors should not be punished or criticized for having strong points of view, the report says. “Indoctrination occurs only when instructors dogmatically insist on the truth of such propositions by refusing to accord their students the opportunity to contest them. Vigorously to assert a proposition or a viewpoint, however controversial, is to engage in argumentation and discussion — an engagement that lies at the core of academic freedom. Such engagement is essential if students are to acquire skills of critical independence. The essence of higher education does not lie in the passive transmission of knowledge but in the inculcation of a mature independence of mind."

Translation: the AAUP position is that you as a teacher are free to present one and only one point of view as the truth, and to do so vigorously, to (yes) intellectually coddle those students who agree with you, and if it is a political truth you are engaged in prosyletizing, we cannot discuss that. Sure, there's some added standard boilerplate in this statement about allowing dissent from students in the class. But be realistic: it will take a very formidable and self-confident student indeed to utter any dissent in such a classroom atmosphere. That's the problem I see.

Meanwhile, over on Insidehighered.com, Michael Berube has ended up DEFENDING the right of professors to turn their students into POLITICAL mini-me's. Specifically he defended Professor Caughie's statement in ACADEME that she thought she had "done her job well" in the classroom if her students became "committed to feminist politics." Berube is certainly no isolated or marginal figure. Take a look at what he wrote under "Freedom to Teach".

[Steven Horwitz]

Translation: the AAUP position is that you as a teacher are free to present one and only one point of view as the truth, and to do so vigorously, to (yes) intellectually coddle those students who agree with you, and if it is a political truth you are engaged in prosyletizing, we cannot discuss that.

Sorry Ethan but I do not see that "translation" in the AAUP position statement. What you have quoted there simply says that it's okay for professors to profess. When "professing" becomes "indoctrination" is when students are not allowed to disagree or are punished for that disagreement. I will gladly admit that the word "allowed" allows for some ambiguity and I will also argue that presenting only one side of an issue is bad pedagogy. But I do not see in the AAUP statement the translation you have given to it.

[Prof. Ethan]

Steve, my problem is also with the following statement: “Indoctrination occurs only when instructors dogmatically insist on the truth of such propositions by refusing to accord their students the opportunity to contest them."

It's the "ONLY" that bothers me. I think that indoctrination is more likely to occur in somehwt more subtle ways than this very narrow definition, for not everyone will be as overtly fascist as Julie Kilmer is in her article in Academe. I think that on the kind of pedagogy allowed here, while the opportunity to students to contest a vigorously asserted proposition by a faculty member may THEORETICALLY be allowed, the likelihood of any undergraduate student actually contesting openly in class such a vigorously asserted proposition is very small. And it should not in any case be left to STUDENTS to have to be the ones to come up with and offer to the class alternatives to a faculty-member's vigorously asserted beliefs. What poor pedagogy that would be.

Here's an example (I realize that it is one that will make people here gag, or sigh with irritation). For years, Ward Churchill vigorously asserted in his classes that the U.S. Army was intentionally responsible for the Mandan smallpox epidemic of 1837. This was part of his overall view of the fundamentally white-genocide nature of the U.S. But this Mandan accusation, though Churchill fervently believed it and vigorously asserted it, is a false accusation. The Army was not involved at all, Churchill misunderstood the "forts" he was reading about in his sources as U.S. Army forts when they were the private forts of the American Fur Company and the owners of that company had no desire to kill off the Mandan, for the Mandan were their best customers, and crucial middlemen to the Plains tribes. Fine. But how many undergraduates do you think actually contested Churchill in his class? How many had the time to research the problem and then dared to write on their final exams that the U.S. Army did not intentionally cause the smallpox epidemic? Does it matter under these circumstances that, let's say, THEORETICALLY it was possible for an undergraduate to challenge a 50-year old full professor who is utterly convinced of his ideologically-loaded interpretation of history and is in control of that student's grade?

Do you think you, if you were an undergraduate, would like to contest in class, say, Houston Baker's understanding of the Duke scandal--even if that was THEORETICALLY allowed?

I'm sure you see my point. It is the FACULTY which is in the parental position here, and it is the FACULTY that must abide by the boundaries traditionally placed on its egotism--boundaries that the AAUP is now officially jettisoning. It shouldn't be up to the STUDENTS to have to be the ones to offer alternatives to "vigorously held faculty beliefs." That is bad pedgagy, and likely (not certain but likely) to lead to an oppressive situation in the classroom.

[Timothy Burke]

Prof. Ethan:

There's an interesting news item at Margaret Soltan's site about a professor at McGill who requires students taking a philosophy course on Plato to get a 100% score in ancient Greek early in the course or they fail and must withdraw. If you follow the link from that item to her Rate My Professor page, there are quite a few comments from students that you pretty much have to agree with the professor about everything or give up.

The point being that this is a general kind of problem with pedagogical failure. I'm comfortable speculating that it's found throughout the academy, though I have no way to say how common the problem is. I'm also comfortable saying that sometimes it's a "political" kind of pedagogical failure. But the point is to identify the nature of the failure: it's not that a professor has a politics, or that this politics is expressed in the classroom in some fashion germane to the topic. It's with a pedagogy that discourages exploration, disagreement, dissent. That kind of teaching failure is pretty old in the modern university, I think. It wasn't invented by liberals or leftists, and it's not exclusive to any given politics. I can think of professors I've had (or colleagues I've known) who have strong views where I wouldn't hesitate as a student to disagree with them, because they welcome that, practically require it. I can think of professors I've known where I wouldn't dare to disagree (if my grade were important to me) and the people I can think of who fall into that category aren't easily pigeonholed as a particular kind of political faction.