Sherman Dorn

The difference between being wrong and being fired

Aaron Barlow has it on the nose when he discusses Academic Freedom and Yoo. Fundamentally, once UC Berkeley's law school hired John Yoo as a tenured faculty member, it owed him due process in any disciplinary proceeding, both substantive and procedural due process. The fact that his actions as a government lawyer are obnoxious and antidemocratic does not change that obligation.

One of the arguments against torture is that the United States needs to operate even a war on higher moral grounds, and torturing prisoners injures that national interest. So how would violating John Yoo's academic due process be gaining the higher moral ground by those of us who think he was wrong?

Turnitin.com, students' intellectual property, and fair use

Eric Goldman has the latest news and commentary on the high school students' lawsuit (and the suit's dismissal) against having to submit papers to Turnitin.com (hat tip). It's a fascinating and complicated issue, and Goldman's discussion explains at least some of the tangles involved (though I wouldn't be surprised if there were more).

Teaching about what humans do

I've been tagged by Craig Smith, who asks, Why Do You Teach and Why Does It Matter? after reading Dr. Crazy's explanation of why she teaches literature. This comes on the heels of Stanley Fish's boldly hedonistic Epistle to Philistines and the expansion on this, last night's Epistle to Dumb-Ass Colleagues. (Okay, the posts were properly called The Uses of the Humanities, parts 1 and 2, but I agree with Margaret Soltan's reading of Fish Epistles I.) Fish's essays are in his typical eliding style, with just enough of substance to frustrate me when he misses the obvious.

And here is one part of the obvious: an academic education requires the study of a variety of disciplines, including science, math, and also what humans do. Understanding "what humans do" requires behavioral sciences, social sciences, and humanities. While the configuration of disciplines is not carved in stone, a student will get a pretty good education in the culture that humans produce within the humanities. One way to think about the value of any discipline or area is to think about the institutions that leave out the area.

Here is the other part of the obvious: you don't learn how to think in the abstract but in bumping up against ideas in specific contexts. That "bumping up against" phrase is important to me, because you don't learn anything if you are not challenged. Some subjects appear easier to you or me than others, but that perception is about subjects that are under a threshold of difficulty, not the absence of new ideas and challenges. Teachers can make learning easier, but that fact doesn't eliminate the need for challenge. And the specific context matters. As my favorite high school English teacher told us at the beginning of AP English, she taught writing, and she did it in the context of teaching about literature. She also taught us an enormous amount about literature in the course of that year. Even philosophers talk about topics. Care for a casual game of penny-ante Ontology?

In my case, I teach social-science and humanities perspectives on education, with a focus on history and sociology. The majority of my students come to me to fulfill exit requirements or in the midst of pre-professional training that reinforces psychological assumptions, and I have most of them for only one semester. I provide students with an additional set of views, humanities and social-science perspectives to examine schooling. When students leave my classroom, they should be able to explain how people fight over the purposes of schooling and the different models of how schools function as organizations (or don't).

In many ways, I am lucky to be in a field where I get paid for navel-gazing. My neighbors and fellow citizens should want me to teach students who want to teach that the world may not agree with their reasons for teaching or their view of the purpose of schooling; that the world's range of schools includes places that provide a very different education from their own experiences as they grew up; and that the job of teaching involves more than going into a room, shutting the door, and letting the gorgeous lesson plans unfold without interruption or difficulty. That's a fairly practical purpose. There is also the specific example of the argument above: Formal schooling is what humans do today, and studying the social context of formal schooling is a reasonable way to study what humans do.

In addition, when students are in my course, they have to write extensively and coherently about schooling. Over my career, I have taught over 2,000 students. I have taught most of those students at USF, where I have never written a multiple-choice final exam and where I have always required that students write papers. Before my colleagues and I agreed to craft a single paper assignment across all of the undergraduate social-foundations sections, I assigned a "perspectives" paper where I collected sources on two or three recent "hot topics" in education and told my students, "This is not a research paper. I've collected all of the background you should need. Your job is to apply the concepts you have learned in the course to these hot topics." (I gave students the ability to propose a topic of their own choosing, as long as I approved it in the first month of the course. Almost no students took me up on the offer, and as a result, I stopped having students propose topics that focused more on psychology than the topics in my course.) In most cases, the common readings for the course never directly addressed the hot topics, so they couldn't just regurgitate ideas. I was mean! (See the bit about challenges above.)

Some of these assignments were more successful than others. I am still aghast that a few years ago, the majority of students who wrote about the "intelligent-design" controversy in Dover supported teaching it alongside evolution in a science class. I graded them on the merits of the assignment (which is not synonymous with the question of what should be in the curriculum), and then explained my point of view in comments separate from the grading. But I challenge students' beliefs about education, no matter what they carried into the classroom, and I push students to  justify their conclusions with plausible arguments.

And to continue this meme, I tag...

• Margaret Soltan
• Timothy Burke
• Miriam Burstein
• Profgrrrrl
• Kelly in Kansas
• Mark Grimsley
• Jose Vilson

One more for the distorted reading of course titles and descriptions

In 2006, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni wrote a screed, How Many Ward Churchills?, based entirely on superficial catalog analysis and ripped to shreds in many places, including Timothy Burke's blog.

It looks like the let's try to suss what happens in a course from hundreds of miles away "method" is live and well in the hands of Jay Greene and Catherine Shock. See the straightforward explanation of why this is wrong in the blog entry of Eduwonkette's friend skoolboy.

Isn't this what Matt Drudge does for a living?

Students and Youtube

A Palm Beach County middle-school student has been expelled from a magnet school after recording her teacher in class with a digital camera and posting a satirized form of it on Youtube. In Palm Beach as in many other districts, students are not generally allowed to have electronic devices on during the school day, but according to the article she had been allowed to use it for the yearbook. So in almost all other cases, the issue would be cleaner-cut: the student violated the prohibition on electronic devices without clear cause for it (such as catching a crime in process).

Florida's laws on electronic privacy provide another wrinkle: under Florida Statutes (934.03 to be precise), it is illegal for private individuals to record someone else who has an expectation of privacy. (There are exceptions for law enforcement recordings and for public meetings, obviously.) I don't know whether a classroom provides that expectation of privacy for teachers (one Panhandle prosecutor dropped a case in 2001 against a student who had recorded her chemistry teacher's lecture), but I worry about the recording of other students.

The question of what is public behavior is also behind the question that Morse v. Frederick (aka the Bong Hits 4 Jesus case) left open: how much can schools respond to behavior that is off school grounds, especially when it concerns speech? Most analysis hinges on the question of disruption, arguing that schools can respond to student behavior off campus that disrupts the educational environment. Disruption is so vague, however, that it could cover all sorts of ground, and there is no bright-line standard for it. Like disrespect, the term is a conclusion rather than a description of concrete behavior.

We could begin to draw bright lines by defining disruption as behavior that either constitutes a "true threat" (see Virginia v. Black, 2003, for a definition: hat tip), encourages the breaking of bona fide school rules, or targets individuals as individuals in a context where they could expect some privacy. Spreading rumors about other students as individuals clearly falls in that definition, as does spreading rumors about teachers' or other school officials' private lives.

But in the public sphere, such protections start to fall away. If a student has the right to disagree with school policy or public conduct (something I think most courts would support), she or he also has the right to parody school officials' public conduct under the umbrella of such criticism, even if the parody is harsh. While I am not a lawyer, I suspect many cases of online behavior will hinge on whether the student is addressing such public behavior.

But what counts as public conduct? Behavior in a class of 25 or 30 isn't that private, and certainly not if you look at sites such as ratemyteacher.com. Teachers in elementary, secondary, and college classes are at a structural disadvantage because we cannot ethically discuss the behavior of individual students, and the inevitable response to public comments about classroom events has to be, "I cannot respond, because doing so would violate the confidentiality of individual students."

Here is the reasonable tradeoff: we know students will have the freedom to criticize what educators do, as long as it does not meet a fairly strict definition of disruptiveness, if teachers are insulated from outside pressures that could endanger academic freedom. My students are going to talk about my teaching, but as long as my institution avoids ad-hoc investigations and I have academic due process, I can live with the apparent paradox. Or, to put it in another way, if students can suddenly turn my work into a fishbowl environment, the right response is not to cover the fishbowl but to make the glass unbreakable.

Brandeis faculty defend academic freedom and common sense

Kudos to the Brandeis University Committee on Faculty Rights and Responsibilities, whose report on allegations of discrimination by Donald Hindley essentially ripped the administration from head to toe on procedural and substantive violations of academic freedom (hat tip). To wit:

• Brandeis's investigation failed to engage in a bona fide investigation of how more than the complaining student responded to the alleged comments of Professor Hindley.
• Brandeis's investigation failed the sniff test when it came to giving Professor Hindley a chance to respond to alelgations: Hindley was the last person interviewed in month-long process, he was not provided an opportunity to have a colleague present, and the report was submitted one day after his interview.
• Brandeis's investigation failed to respect the 2003 guiding letter of the U.S. Department of Education Office of Civil Rights, a document that stipulates that discriminatory environment "must include something beyond the mere expression of views, words, symbols or thoughts that some person finds offensive."

I think I'm going to repeat this until I retire and afterwards: Ad hoc investigations of teaching are inevitably flawed. Congratulations to the Brandeis faculty on standing up to the provost on this.

Being thankful for the Supreme Court's protection of free speech

As FIRE's William Creeley notes, not only can we be grateful for Supreme Court decisions protecting speech, such as the 64-year-old West Virginia v. Barnett case on the pledge of allegiance, but we also have an interesting retrospective on the case, including the two children (now much older, of course).

I need to finish editing and uploading an MP3 for an online class presentation, and then it's time for me to head home. If you're in the U.S., have a great holiday tomorrow!

Who will defend faculty on a non-ideological basis?

Erin O'Connor  has rightly criticized the assignment of an associate provost to watch a class in a blog entry titled How to destroy a teacher. She frames it as "a caricature of how the campus thought police destroy the learning environment for both students and teachers."

In a comment I left on the entry, I had asked her whether she would similarly criticize an administrative observer if the case had been a faculty accused by teachers of political indoctrination. She hasn't made my comment public, nor has she responded to the issue. Let me be clear: it's her blog, and she can follow a screening/moderating policy if she wishes. I just think it's a fair and relevant question: are we going to criticize administrative interventions based on the political issues of the day, or are we going to have some basic principles that we follow regardless of the issues du jour?

Update: In a comment, O'Connor notes that software sometimes eats comments. True enough, and I'll try posting the comment again.

Assistant provost, or ad hoc class observer

When I wrote a few weeks ago about the dangers of ad hoc investigations of student complaints, I didn't know that I would have a specific case from Brandeis to illustrate my concerns. Accordingto the IHE article, an assistant provost is sitting in on Donald Hindley's political science class (or maybe classes) after students complained that he had used the term wetback in a pejorative sense (rather than in the sense of describing historical racism, which is his claim). Hindley made the investigations and observations public, the faculty senate expressed its concern about procedures, and the department chair was clearly on the defensive when called by the reporter.

The lesson I take from this: folks, you have to talk about what to do before allegations surface, or you will be forced to invent investigation procedures that are inherently flawed because they are ad hoc.

A twofer on Delaware student program and social justice, or "Let's not confuse institutional prerogatives with students' propensity to make mistakes"

I normally don't waste bytes just to point to someone else's blog and say, "What (s)he said!" In this case, though, Timothy Burke's engagingly garrulous entry on the University of Delaware student orientation controversy serves double-duty to describe the obvious about the University of Delaware program and also help explain my discomfort with official statements by colleges of education that they want students to foster social justice:

... with the Delaware residential life program, there's nothing wrong per se with asking straights when they first realized their orientation or when they came out as straights. That is, nothing wrong if that's a sly or mischievious aside in a personal conversation about sexuality, or a subversive question directed at a public figure who is intensely anti-gay, or as a way in an intellectual discussion about the history of sexuality to illustrate what the ten-dollar word 'heteronormativity' actually means. Turning the question into a set part of a pseudo-mandatory workshop (there's some confusion at Delaware about how strongly students are encouraged to attend) takes everything valuable out of it. It turns something sly into dogma.

Burke is putting this observation in the context of a nuanced discussion of the institutional context of resident student activists and the role of college as a place where young adults learn by being bold and frequently making mistakes. What makes sense for student activists or activists engaged in civic life often becomes self-parody when oversolemnified in an institutional context.

Such oversolemnification is all too typical in the debate over dispositions and social justice in teacher education. In several contexts, I have heard colleagues in social foundations or my institution upset at the attack on the demand that students display a disposition towards social justice... a term now closely associated with the National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE). Because NCATE referred to social justice in a glossary item that mentioned it as a potential disposition that colleges might assess students on, and because some colleges did some patently stupid things when students expressed dissenting political views, that term became a magnet for critics of college policies that appeared to infringe on students' rights to political expression. Respondents in education have sometimes interpreted that attack as a neoconservative attack on teacher education more broadly.

The truth is that the attack on social justice and dispositions is both a floor wax and a dessert topping. Some of those who have attacked teacher education's and NCATE's move towards dispositions have been social conservatives upset with the nature of teacher education. At a June 2006 hearing in front of the National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity, critics of NCATE included the National Association of Scholars and the American Council of Trustees and Alumni. But that's not the entire picture. Critics also have included the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (see FIRE's statement on NCATE and dispositions). FIRE's staff and supporters have included conservatives, but they have also included people from across the political spectrum, a group of those who are reasonably described as academic libertarians.

Academic libertarians focus on campuses as a site of debate, where the job of a university is to encourage a discourse of disputation. In this environment, assessing the alignment of one's thoughts with any template with ideological overtones strikes academic libertarians as obnoxious, an affront to students' freedom of thought. While many defenders of assessing dispositions point to the evaluation of behavior rather than thought and the interplay of that behavior with professional expectations, critics are skeptical, especially when some places (such as LeMoyne College) have been caught with their hands in the cookie jar... or the brains of their students.

The vulnerability of teacher education to such criticism is not just the visibility of a few outrageous idiocies by specific teacher education programs. To some extent, the coalition between social conservatives and academic libertarians has focused criticism in a way that often dissipates when the criticism comes from just one quarter. But the internet is also partly responsible, because that copper or fiber-optic cable is a double-edged sword, bringing visibility in both good and bad measure. In addition, teacher education is more vulnerable because of the historical disrespect for teachers in general and for teacher education within colleges and universities.

But there are a few other issues to consider, issues that schools and colleges of education control. One issue under the control of teacher education programs is the way faculty and administrators address the inherent tensions of trying to stuff a professional preparation program into a relatively short period, at most three or four years in an undergraduate program. We'd like teachers to leave college with a fantastically well-rounded liberal-arts education, professional information about educational psychology, historical and social-science perspectives on education, professional ethics, assessment, teaching the methods of their field, content expertise in their field, something about the practical matters of running a classroom, field experiences while learning everything else, and a capstone experience with a final internship and structured feedback and reflection.

To put the problem bluntly, if you can do all that for all students in undergraduate teacher education, I also want a pony. The telling choice is what you give up in professional programs, more than in almost any other type of education. That's not even considering the newer demands in areas such as special education, where "highly qualified teachers" now have to demonstrate content expertise in every curriculum area. So the curriculum discussions in teacher education inevitably revolve around the desire to somehow stuff more into less. If someone could extract the essence of half of our curriculum and put it in a pill, I know a bunch of education deans who would be very happy.

In the midst of this perennial stretch, teacher education stakeholders and institutions talk about accountability as outcomes. Outcomes? Sure. We'll be responsible for what happens with our teachers. So what does that mean, in an era when tracking graduates is a bit tough? Well, we'll certainly be responsible for the passing rates for graduates on state exams, and their meeting our state standards, and ... hmmn... something else. Someone must have suggested dispositions (the history of that would be a great dissertation topic!), and the idea met multiple needs. Stakeholders in the NCATE orbit were reasonably satisfied that teacher education programs were at least addressing accountability. Within teacher education, dispositions met several needs, and it could be used both to justify keeping some things in and removing others out of the curriculum, depending on how one phrased one's goals and preferred dispositions.

Dispositions have also neatly coincided with a psychological approach to education. Kurt Danziger has explained how the history of psychology is intertwined with the bureaucratization of public schooling in the early 20th century U.S. That psychologization continues, far beyond the knowledge of educational psychology that is the bread and butter of my department colleagues. (As my fellow historian Erwin V. Johanningmeier has noted, there is some considerable irony in the fact that one of the most well-known educational psychologists, David Berliner, has written more about the social conditions of schools in the last 15 years than educational psychology.) I am not sure if any professional field outside education or social services would ever frame their competencies as anything close to dispositions -- do business, legal, medical, engineering, or architecture programs have anything similar? Part of the difference is the much shorter formal apprenticeships that teacher education has, but some is due to the role of psychology within education.

Both the University of Delaware residency program and the existence of dispositions border on a therapeutic approach to education, implying that part of the job of college is the reconstruction of behavior and personality. I am not one to believe in the fairy tale that education only touches the intellect; college is a life-changing experience, no matter the outcome. Yet there are reasons to be very cautious about how we engage in the deliberate process of social engineering that is inherent in education.

To some extent, I am sympathetic with part of the idea of dispositions: it is extraordinarily hard to assess the fit of a student with professional expectations, and at some level one has to find proxies for professional competence while people are still in the program. The notion of assessing dispositions is an attempt to find some proxy for that fit apart from course grades. And given the relative flexibility of dispositions, some colleges of education do a much better job of treating them reasonably than other teacher education programs. But there is a foundation of psychological assumptions behind them, and the same flexibility that allows reasonableness also allows LeMoyne and its ilk.

Given that set of psychological (and almost therapeutic) assumptions, a set of dispositions geared to social justice is an oxymoron. Any definition of social justice I have seen talks about the social context, the broader structures of society. To imagine that one can accomplish social justice by changing the personalities of teachers ignores the theoretical arguments involved in social justice. To change the broader structures of society, you have to change the broader structures of society, and teacher goodwill doesn't really enter into it (though teachers' acting ethically towards their students does matter, just in a different sense). Mandating that students demonstrate a disposition towards social justice is likely to be a sloppy description of an institutional mission at best and an effective generator of cynicism at worst.

There is some other stuff that needs to be said here, about how an ethic of teachers' being at the heart of social justice is a potential form of exploitation. (Brief form: those who think KIPP schools are the solution for education and those who want teacher education programs to revolve around social justice have the same assumption about the broader role of teachers.) But this entry is far too long as it is, and I should just finish with this: I desperately want the world to have more justice, and I work towards that end, but I am a better teacher if I model those beliefs than if I try to get my students to parrot them.

Horowitz at Emory

Inside Higher Ed's blurb about the heckling at David Horowitz's Emory University speech has a link to the Emory Wheel article. Thus far, that looks to be the best reporting on the event.

Poor teaching != indoctrination

The response to the AAUP's statement Freedom in the Classroom (released September 11) has been fascinating, from Peter Wood and Stephen Balch's tendentious attempt to fisk the report (thereby burying the legitimate criticisms) to Erin O'Connor's more focused criticism to Stanley Fish's column this Sunday, where he takes the statement (rightly) to task for an inane example. First, let me quote Fish's distinction between teaching with controversial subjects and indoctrination:

Any subject -- pornography, pedophilia, genocide, scatology -- can be introduced into an academic discussion so long as the perspective from which it is analyzed is academic and not political.

This is Fish's "academicizing" (see the end of an August 2006 article about Kevin Barrett), and apart from the suggestion that properly teaching a subject requires anaesthetizing the student, it is one reasonable slice at the definition of indoctrination.

The AAUP subcommittee made its largest mistake in choosing a horrible example of teaching that should be protected from political scrutiny:

Might not a teacher of nineteenth-century American literature, taking up Moby Dick, a subject having nothing to do with the presidency, ask the class to consider whether any parallel between President George W. Bush and Captain Ahab could be pursued for insight into Melville's novel?

In contrast with Fish, I think that this choice of examples should be protected from claims of indoctrination, because faculty should be allowed and even encouraged to insert passion into the classroom, even when an attempt fails. But a teacher using such an example should not be protected from claims that this is simply an awful instructional choice. One of my college teachers claimed that Dostoevsky's portraits of psychological imbalance predicted Hitler's rise and the Holocaust. I suspect that he was trying to enliven the class, not indoctrinate us (and what would he have been indoctrinating us into, the Cult of Heterodox Dostoevsky Social Criticism?). We stared at him, mouths agape, wondering what he had been smoking. Great books, mediocre class.

So, like Timothy Burke (both in talking about ACTA's "How Many Ward Churchills?" screed and in discussing teaching in general), I am more concerned with inept teaching than indoctrination, in part because I strongly suspect that most students read crass political didacticism as incompetence as well as or rather than indoctrination.

The practical question is what no one (including the AAUP) has addressed. Suppose that a student complains about the Ahab/Bush comparison. What do we do? I agree with Stanley Fish that the comparison is not professional. Does that mean we toss the professor out on his or her ear? The AAUP statement refers vaguely to academic due process:

When that [allegation of improper conduct] happens, sound professional standards of proper classroom conduct should be enforced in ways that are compatible with academic due process. Over the last century the profession has developed an understanding of the nature of these standards. It has also developed methods for enforcing these standards that allow for students to file complaints and that afford accused faculty members the right fully to be heard by a body of their peers.

That's all fine and pretty but while the statement seems to imply that universities have developed ways of addressing improper instruction, such a conclusion is simply unwarranted. We know how to handle allegations of research misconduct (or at least we think we do until politicians get involved), there are reasonable guidelines from the AAUP on extramural utterances and behavior, and I suspect most universities have formal academic grievance procedures (where a student can appeal an academic decision), but we professors don't have a clue how to handle allegations of teaching misconduct except where there are bright-line standards such as showing up to class and not hitting (on) students.

I don't mean that faculty always stand idly by when they observe or discover a peer's teaching behavior that they find troubling in a variety of ways. But in terms of formal investigations -- what warrants special attention apart from annual reviews and how to gather and evaluate evidence -- I suspect most institutions have absolutely no procedural guidelines. And therein lies the problem: without procedures set down somewhere, administrators under pressure will resort to ad-hoc decisions and processes, which will inevitably violate academic freedom and erode institutional integrity.

The first line of defense against ad-hoc-ism is some proactive evaluation of teaching, the type of thoughtful peer observation and probing that Timothy Burke advocates. Yes, that requires some time and resources. Many good things do, and in many places (such as my institution right now, under enormous budget pressures), that ideal is unlikely to evolve quickly. Most institutions have some annual evaluation, which has an indirect evaluation of teaching through student surveys and materials submitted by the faculty member. This is better than nothing from a variety of perspectives and much worse than the ideal.

The second line of defense is a procedure for screening and evaluating allegations of serious teaching misconduct and incompetence. Here is where most institutions are susceptible to pressures. While most institutions have established procedures when students gripe about a grade, no one has thought through all the other grievances and griping. Even the vaunted-by-ACTA University of Missouri-Columbia Ombudsman program has "Under Development" as the entire content for the Grievance Procedures of Academic Units page. The world will have to see if and how such procedures develop or if they remain largely ad-hoc.

The third line of defense is a system to coach students on reasonable assertiveness, how to raise issues in a course that expand discussion and educational opportunity. This coaching is necessary both for the shy and the brash student. I try to give students opportunities every semester to give me early feedback on a course in an anonymous way, and while I provide that structure and generally try not to bite students' heads off, some students will not tell me their concerns until long after they become worried about an issue (whether it is instruction or assignments or grades or something else). Other students are simply brusque, either with me or other students, and while (I hope) I'm fairly easygoing about criticism, some faculty are thin-skinned or may misinterpret student expressions of concern. There are right and wrong ways to point out that a class omitted an important perspective, and we do students a disservice in assuming that they come to college knowing the right way to criticize class.

This need for education starts with the usual front-line "ears" in a university: chairs and the secretarial staff of university presidents. My chairs have always tried to redirect the student back to me and also let me know when a student raised a concern with them. Presidents' secretaries don't often have the professional experience to tell students to go back to the professor, and when the presidential staff sends a "here's a heads-up" message down the line through a provost, dean, and chair back to the faculty member, sometimes carelessness with the wording and inevitable gaps in communication turn an intended "here's a heads-up" message into an assumption that the message is really "you better deal with this or else."

The fourth line of defense is a bright-line standard for when administrators should even be thinking about intervening in the middle of a term, in contrast to gathering evidence about an allegation at the end of a term. Starting an investigation in the middle of a class is a serious step that can interfere with the learning environment as much as many of the practices that students might complain about; think about what would happen if the Proper Instruction Police interview students in a class regularly, asking what they thought of the politics of the instructor and the assignment du jour. I don't think any administrator would ever imagine that could happen, but starting an investigation about classes in the middle of a class always carries the risk of educational iatrogenesis. Here are my suggested standards:

• Investigate when the allegation is of behavior that is dangerous to students.
• Investigate when a prudent and yet reasonably thick-skinned person would agree that a student's right to education is jeopardized by the alleged behavior (e.g., screaming at students, racial discrimination, etc.), if allegations come from several sources that are credible. Thus, if the majority of a class complains that the instructor is swearing a blue streak and failing to teach physiology when the course is a required part of the nursing sequence, someone needs to look into those allegations, but one student's complaint should not trigger a full-blown set of interviews with all students in a course.
• Gather evidence passively during a term if the allegations are serious but the claims come from isolated sources. By passive data collection, I mean planning how to gather evidence at the end of the semester and waiting to see if there are other complaints from other credible sources.
• Refuse to use evidence that is gathered illegally or without provenance. For example, Florida law prohibits audio recordings of people who have a reasonable expectation of privacy without the permission of recorded students--thus, I have been told that surreptitious video on Youtube of Florida classrooms would almost always be illegal unless the faculty member agreed to such guerrilla recording and the student used a shotgun microphone so no fellow student's voice was picked up.
• In all cases, the faculty member must be told promptly of student concerns and, where the administrator has decided no immediate intervention is required, that should be specified (i.e., in the vast majority of cases).

Comments are most welcome on this sketch.

Duct tape and sand

From Stanley Fish's blog today, disapproval for Lee Bollinger's comments last week at the Ahmadinejad speech: 

The obligation of a senior administrator is to conduct himself or herself in such a way as always to bring honor and credit to the institution he or she serves. Just what this general imperative requires will vary with the particular situations an administrator encounters, but at the very least we could say that an administrator who brings attention of an unwelcome kind to a university is probably not focusing on the job.... as a general rule what an administrator should do when a controversial speaker comes to campus is lower the stakes and minimize the importance of the occasion. Not minimize the importance of the issues, but minimize the role of the university, which is not a player on the world stage but (at most) a location where questions of international significance can be raised in an academic manner.

Duct tape and sand: this is the essence of Stanley Fish's vision for a university administrator, to go around afraid to speak for fear of giving offense and to establish the university as the equivalent of a generic public facility, no greater or worse environment for a public speech than a beach (except that university lecture halls have better sound reinforcement and considerably worse views). If followed faithfully, Fish's principles would reinforce the unfortunate tendency for administrators to fear standing up for principle. If administrators and faculty are better off silent than making mistakes, then what use is a faculty? If the best environment for a controversial speaker is an anaesthetized audience, what use is a university as a forum for public speech?

Fortunately for the Duke University English Department and Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Fish had no such external restrictions on his own actions as an administrator, frequently speaking about public discourse either in his debates with Dinesh D'Souza or in his columns in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Fish's outspokenness was an advantage for both institutions, even when he was being outlandish and even where many of us disagreed with him. He had a right to speak wrongly, and he still does!

A far healthier description of the key issues with administrators and academic freedom is in last Wednesday's blog entry from Dean Dad.

Academic freedom and administrators

Dean Dad has an important dissent from the oft-expressed views that administrators ain't got no academic freedom, as Stanley Fish might claim. DD points out the legitimate restrictions on what administrators can say:

---

• Confidentiality: What the rumor mill paints as “the administration knows about this, but is covering it up” is often really “the administration knows this rumor is crap, but can't reveal why it's crap without violating confidentiality” (the best sentence of the post).
  
• Institutional discretion: ...the 'ambassador' or 'public face' function of administrators...To the extent that there's an argument in there, I think, it's that it can be difficult to separate, say, a dean's personal views from the views of the college for which he works..

Of those limits, the first is far clearer than the second. If something doesn't fall within the bounds of confidentiality imposed by one's role, an administrator should be free from that type of institutional restraint. The second question is trickier. I have a first slice at it, but not having been an administrator, this may not be realistic: if the issue concerns the welfare of the institution in a specific context, and if someone higher in the bureaucratic food chain has the authority to speak for the institution, then there is some obligation to refrain from speaking for the institution about an issue... and an implied obligation not to contradict the institution's position.

That first slice implies that institutional discretion requires a few components:

• The question of a specific institutional interest: So while deans and chairs are bound not to contradict an institution's president when speaking publicly about things like state budget allocations for universities, someone is perfectly free to talk about all sorts of general issues with state budgeting.
  
• The question of what constitutes "speaking for the institution." I suspect there are different methods to finesse a way out of saying, "I think my university president was bonkers to take this position," generally consisting of acknowledging internal debate and also ways of confirming the right of an institution's leadership to make decisions.

So what about whistleblowing? Regardless of legal issues (which vary by state and which I'm not competent to discuss), the following is my gut sense about institutions with even a modicum of shared governance: the administrator who resigns on a matter of deep principle will eventually return to administration, because institutions need people with conscience and because a critical mass of faculty will usually respect administrators who stand on principle even if individual decisions are matters of disagreement.

Thoughts?

Icons and beacons

Eric Rauchway has the best short commentary on two recent University of California idiocies:

In the Chemerinsky case, UC threatened Chemerinsky's academic freedom; in the Summers case, UC threatened mine--and that of everyone else who teaches here.

Nice bon mot, but I wish Rauchway had explained it more clearly: UCI Chancellor Michael Drake was violating Chemerinsky's individual rights as the primary consequence of his attempt to un-hire Chemerinsky as the new law school's founding dean. There were certainly other consequences (chilling speech and doing inestimable damage to the reputation of the new law school), but the primary academic-freedom consequence was individual.

When the UC regents uninvited Larry Summers, they damaged the environment of the UC system as a forum for all sorts of ideas. By pressuring the regents to withdraw the invitation through a petition protesting the speaking engagement, some UC Davis faculty were violating the principle that a university welcomes a broad variety of voices. While you could argue that the regents damaged Summers's reputation in some way by the disinvitation, and they certainly damaged their own reputation, the greater violation is to the university environment writ large.

I am guessing that some commentators will jump on the actions over the last week as evidence of an institutional double standard. They are seeing Summers as some icon of academic rectitude from his battles at Harvard. I'm not sure it says anything other than the weak-willed nature of the UC regents as a body, something made evident by their inability to oversee the extravagance of two UC presidents. While they're not as incompetent and corrupt as Auburn's trustees, they're not exactly watching the store, and the UC system suffers in the meantime

Andrew Meyer, disruptions, and free speech

The news has been flying on the tasering of Andrew Meyer at a University of Florida speech of Senator John Kerry. The best serious commentary is from former Florida Alligator editor Ron Sachs:

Stephen Colbert has his own take on events:

 

ACTA'n up

It took four days for ACTA's blog to respond to the Center for Responsive Politics' report on political giving within higher education. And, true to form, the entry attempted to link contributions to classrooms:

Intellectual diversity is not, of course, reducible to party affiliation, and the professoriate's campaign contributions do not themselves tell us what happens inside college classrooms. Still, the numbers are suggestive, and they do indicate cause for concern.

I'm glad there was at least some caveat about the implications, but my prediction that someone would overgeneralize came true: there was no acknowledgment that the data is unrepresentative of faculty as a whole. When you do that, it's simply cherry-picking data to suit your preconceptions.

Political involvement, proxies of

A new report on political giving by higher-education employees is sure to provoke more fallacious arguments about politics and academe. Some things to keep in mind:

• The report includes data on all higher-ed employees, and is about all giving. Without more information (which the Center on Responsive Politics wouldn't have), we don't know how much of the giving was by faculty, how much by administrators who used to be faculty, and how much by adminsitrators who never were faculty. My guess (but it could easily be wrong) is that a slight majority of the giving was by current faculty but that administrators were more likely to give larger amounts.
• Employees in the top 10 giving institutions account for about 20% of all giving. That's 10 out of hundreds... or 19, if you include the fact that the U.C. system has 10 campuses. Wow. The disproportionate giving suggests that at most colleges and institutions, a much lower proportion of employees contribute to political campaigns at all. (I.e., this data is not representative of most faculty across the country.) If you just count Harvard, U. of California, William and Mary, and Columbia, that's 11% of the total giving. More than 10% of all political contributions this cycle are coming from just 13 institutions. It's still an amazing statistic, and it's even more amazing that the other three individual places outdo the U.C. system.
• The top 10 giving institutions are also disproportionately favoring Democrats, 87%-13%. The rest is closer to 73%-27%, which still favors Democrats, but there's a clear difference in patterns.
• What political contributions say about teaching and research is ... very little. But watch for the giant gaps in reasoning that make such assumptions.

Update: And the first fallacy award goes to ... David French. As John Wilson notes, the key question on the size of contributions by industry is the contribution per employee.

Ward, not redux

So Colorado's Regents have fired Ward Churchill. I've written about this at other times, but let me summarize things briefly:

• The beginning of the investigation was political.
• There were legitimate challenges to Churchill's research record, some identified before and some sent to Colorado after the political furor began.
• The charges tied to Churchill's speech rights were thrown out and were not part of the formal investigation of Churchill's research.
• Faculty who looked at Churchill's record said he had engaged in a systematic pattern of research misconduct.
• Churchill has neither acknowledged nor expressed regret for the serious problems the faculty panels identified.
• Faculty panels have been fragmented on the appropriate response to Churchill's research misconduct. Some recommended suspension for various periods, some recommended dismissal.

I'm not a lawyer, but given the procedural due process, I'm guessing the only leg Churchill has to stand on is the question of whether dismissal is an appropriate sanction. That is, while several faculty committees have decided that he committed research misconduct, Churchill's lawyer might argue that dismissal was disproportionate punishment and was clearly motivated by politics, even if the factual findings weren't. (Let me be clear: Churchill's lawyer is sure to argue that the findings are wrong, too, but I don't think that claim has a chance of a snowball in West Palm Beach.)

The first question is whether there is a record of sanctions in previous cases in Colorado where there has been a finding of research misconduct. Local precedents can be powerful, and that will depend on the evidentiary record. If you're gazing from the peanut gallery, you might look for findings of research misconduct reported by the Department of Health and Human Services. I've found one, about Wei Jin from Colorado State University (2007), but Jin was a doctoral student, so that case does not provide a precedent. There may be others, but I'm not sure they would be available online. (That would be part of the discovery process for a lawsuit.) If there are multiple cases where tenured faculty members found guilty of serious research misconduct have been given multi-year sanctions but not fired, Churchill's lawyer will have a field day, arguing that firing Churchill is disproportionate to the factual record within the university or the state's public institutions.

If there is no such record, Churchill's lawyer could look at the national record of cases. Where there is evidence of multiple problems, in what proportion of cases is the result termination, resignation, or a lesser sanction? And is there any way to gauge what determines the sanction from the record?

The last resort of Churchill's lawyer would be to claim that Hank Brown and the Regents had specific intent to punish Churchill disproportionately. If someone can dig up a smoking-gun statement of intent, that might be persuasive, but if the claim in court is that circumstantial evidence points to an ideological intent, you'll know that Churchill's lawyer either is incompetent or couldn't find favorable evidence in the record of research-misconduct sanctions.

Update: Read the legal filing by Churchill's lawyers. Greg Lukianoff has more on Churchill's legal prospects.

Salute to Chris Perez

A Fishy View of Education neatly skewers the flawed reasoning of Stanley Fish, for Fish believes in a very narrow view of free speech and academic freedom. Bravo.

Wrong questions on Ward Churchill

Yesterday, Aaron Barlow asked the political questions about l'affaire Churchill at Free Exchange on Campus. To Barlow, the central issue is the public perception of higher education. In responding to "those on all sides who try to make Churchill and his presumed guilt or innocence an emblem for their greater argument about academia," So he cites ACTA's "How many Ward Churchills" screed and the ACLU letter released over the weekend. But Barlow then repeats the error:

If nothing else, the Churchill case points out the fact that we need to seriously consider the question of whether we academics are doing enough to police ourselves. The next time those attacking academia come up with a particular person to attack, will we be confident that our defense of that person will not open us up to further accusations of protecting the unqualified or dishonest?

Barlow is right that the symbolic politics are important in some ways. But the critical question in each individual case is academic due process, not public perception. Should we warp academic due process to match what we think should happen, or what those outside academe think should happen? I haven't seen that in the actions of faculty at Colorado, but Barlow appears more concerned with perception than due process. And that is worrisome.

Objectivists objected to?

FIRE's Tara Sweeney succinctly describes the problems with Ashland University's denial of tenure to classicist John Lewis.

Ashland University was perfectly happy to take a $100K gift from the Anthem Foundation for Objectivist Scholarship. When institutional leaders are willing to take the money and run, claims that special institutional missions trump lay notions of academic freedom ring hollow. (This was only one of the problems with the tenure denial.)

Lewis eventually received tenure, contingent on the perverse condition that he resign. He's at Bowling Green State University for a fellowship next year.

Ward Churchill and the politicization of research misconduct

The procedural conflict in l'affair Churchill is between the need for any institution to investigate serious charges of research misconduct and the need for colleges and universities to be buffered from political pressures that interfere with academic freedom. In most cases, outside political pressures raise issues that are easily dismissed (at least by serious faculty) as inappropriate reasons to discipline or fire anyone. But in the case of Churchill, the internal processes stripped away the political charges and focused on serious, substantive charges of research misconduct. That fact doesn't completely satisfy the discomfort that many on and off the Boulder campus felt about the investigation, something that the investigating committee noted in its May 2006 report:

[T]he Committee is troubled by the origins of, and skeptical concerning the motives for, the current investigation. The Committee's disquiet regarding the timing of these allegations is exacerbated by the fact that the formal complainant in the charges before us is the Interim Chancellor of the University, despite the express provision in the Laws of the Board of Regents of the University of Colorado that faculty members' "efforts should not be subjected to direct or indirect pressures or interference from within the university, and the university will resist to the utmost such pressures or interference when exerted from without." Nevertheless, serious claims of academic misconduct have been lodged and they require full investigation and responsible and fair treatment. (p. 4)

The committee then chose a horrible analogy, a sloppy comparison that I hope its members now regret:

The Committee has attempted to provide that investigation, keeping the background and origins of this particular dispute out of our consideration of the particular allegations. To use an analogy, a motorist who is stopped and ticketed for speeding because the police officer was offended by the contents of her bumper sticker, and who otherwise would have been sent away with a warning, is still guilty of speeding, even if the officer's motive for punishing the speeder was the offense taken to the speeder's exercise of her right to free speech. No court would consider the improper motive of the police officer to constitute a defense to speeding, however protected by legal free speech guarantees the contents of the bumper sticker might be. (p. 4, immediately following the above excerpt)

This analogy has been repeated and discussed ad nauseam, from the University of Colorado Silver and Gold to The Rhetoric Garage blog and beyond. As Eugene Volokh noted at the time, the committee had the law wrong and the situation wrong. But I'm not going to attempt to correct the metaphor, since I agree with Howard Becker that metaphors are inherently dangerous in social science writing and other nonfiction. The committee made this mistake in an effort to cleanse its own work of the polluting allegation it knew would come with publication, claims that the investigation was only proceeding because of the political pressure from the outside.

The analogy failed to convince skeptics because it couldn't, even if it had been correct in the interpretation of the law. A university research-misconduct investigation is not a court proceeding, and even the most careful, scrupulously-clean procedure is still vulnerable to political interference. That is one of Ellen Schrecker's points in No Ivory Tower: The fact that universities often paid meticulous attention to procedural niceties when investigating allegations in the McCarthy era did not absolve them from having responded to outside pressure and having dismissed faculty for political reasons. Given our history, who could expect faculty to pass over the political context of the Churchill investigation?

At virtually every step, the faculty involved in Colorado have taken pains to acknowledge that context and say they did their best to address the substantive charges fairly. After racking my brains to find some way that the University of Colorado could have addressed the substantive charges without the political shadow over an investigation, I have failed; there is no way around the political context, no way to purify the process.

Having said that, I find the investigating committee's report persuasive in its argument that Churchill engaged in a long-term, unrepetant pattern of unprofessional research misconduct. Are the delay between the political pressures and the investigation, the faculty-centered fact-finding, and the processes enough to make the recommendation for firing Churchill reasonable? Unless someone can suggest another way, my answer is yes, or at least, this is the best that can be done.

That entirely ad-hoc answer doesn't mean that I am happy with the way that politics was deeply involved with setting the investigation in motion. It does mean that the university had the obligation to respond to the substantive charges, and unless Churchill's remaining defenders can suggest an alternative procedure that would have been better (and I haven't yet seen such a suggestion), the faculty-driven fact-finding process used was reasonable.

Having made that judgment, I am well aware that there could be politically-motivated allegations of research misconduct lodged regularly against faculty. Of course that's a possibility, but a few facts should put this concern in perspective. First, external, politically-motivated allegations against faculty are rarely about research integrity. Historically, they have been about extramural statements or activities (or teaching, more recently). Second, I would guess that there are politically-motivated allegations of research misconduct every year, but I would also hazard a claim that they are generally filed by other academics. Third, some argue that universities do not pay enough serious attention to legitimate allegations of research misconduct. None of these are salutary, but the larger point is that all investigations require attention to both procedural and substantive due process and the facts of a case. There is no magic formula for guaranteeing either integrity or academic freedom.

Update: Sometimes, I should look up what I've written before. In this case, it's useful to compare my entry today with one written May 18, 2006. I was more concise last spring. But no one has answered the question I raised then, as well as today: If the University of Colorado's process here was inappropriate, what would have been better?

Scimus quae legis, et non dicimus

There is now a t-shirt for the (thus far fictional?) Guild of Radical Militant Librarians.

Oh, I guess I'll have to translate: "We know what you read, and we're not telling."

Under scrutiny

In this morning's IHE article on Ward Churchill, we read one of the two serious arguments put forward by Churchill's defenders:

James Craven, a professor of economics at Clark College, in Washington State, said that Churchill was subjected to a level of scrutiny that few professors have ever faced or could withstand. "How many scholars could have their own work vetted as his was?" said Craven.

Without addressing motives and the horrible traffic-stop analogy that has been floating around the blogosphere in the last day or two, we can look at this as a separate issue, or rather two: as an empirical question of whether all scholars' work is as flawed as Churchill's and as a more general question of what type of scrutiny is appropriate when questions arise about any scholar's work.

First, to the empirical question: Could my work or that of most of my peers withstand the type of scrutiny that Churchill's had? I think the answer is easily. The problems that the peer reviews found at the University of Colorado were not matters of the occasional citation flub or typographical error, the missing acknowledgment of a peer or the "why don't you look at X's work?" question that is common in article manuscript reviews and in book reviews (if conjugated in the latter with the regretful past indicative instead of the suggestive imperative interrogatory). Churchill's errors were crucial to his intepretation, repeated, deliberate, and uncorrected.

Above all else, the last quality is what separates you and me and the birds from Mr. Churchill. If someone points out a mistake to me, or if I see it myself, I've tried to find some way to acknowledge and correct the error. If someone is truly after my hide, I will trust that my various attempts at errata will protect me from allegations of misdeeds if not criticism. And that's the difference between a legitimate investigation and a witch-hunt: a witch-hunt doesn't care about the evidence.

More generally, I'm not sure we can say what level of scrutiny is appropriate when conducting investigations, except to say that such an investigation is necessarily going to be broad-ranging and, er, um, usually will rely on published sources, material that we academics have written and sent out there to be read. Yes, boys and girls and grad students, the published work of academics is public. Despite some lingering doubts in the occasional subspecialty with 2-3 experts in the entire world, we generally write stuff that we want people to read, perhaps even understand. Under most circumstances, we would be highly flattered if someone read every one of our writings carefully.

The consequence of this small but important fact of academic life is that we have no complaints when our stuff is read closely. Apart from the occasional typographical error introduced by typesetting, the flaws in my writing are my fault, and I have no one to blame if someone actually reads it.

Ward, redux(ionist)

University of Colorado President has drafted a letter that would recommend that the university regents fire Ward Churchill. I'll admit that the comment on IHE's story by "Frizbane Manley" is hilarious, far better than any of Churchill's writings. I hereby recommend that Manley get tenure as a IHE commentator.

Oh, wait. You probably were expecting me to comment on the situation, right? Churchill fabricated, falsified, and plagiarized. Firing him wouldn't be awful, nor would a 5-year suspension without pay or a 2-year suspension without pay combined with stripping him of tenure and returning him to assistant professor status where he'd have to earn tenure just like he did origi— Oh, wait.  Right. End that last sentence after he'd have to earn tenure.