Teaching and Learning at Oberlin College (Oberlin, OH)

The following article appeared in Inside Higher Ed on March 2, 2009. It suggests that for some Republicans, the best way to respond to their electoral defeat is to stoke up the fires of the culture wars and to attempt to drive its opponents off the stage by declaring them to be “traitors.”

The article from Inside Higher Ed:

When Bill Ayers visits a local campus these days, it’s become common for a local politician or two to denounce the appearance. But Republican lawmakers in Pennsylvania are pushing particularly hard at Millersville University, demanding that a lecture later this month be called off. The Intelligencer Journal reported that Republican legislators have issued repeated statements and called for meetings with state higher education officials about the matter. Millersville has defended the appearance by Ayers, noting that he is coming to the campus in his role as a noted education expert at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and that there are no plans to use tax dollars for the visit. But Republicans keep talking about the Weather Underground, of which Ayers was once a leader, and suggesting that there could be economic penalties for the university if it lets Ayers appear. One legislator told the newspaper: “”I mean, this guy probably committed treason, and why Millersville would want to give him a forum is really beyond my understanding.” Another said: “At the end of the day, the institution does utilize tax dollars…. So there has to be a measure of accountability.”

—

Random House’s publicity for its forthcoming publication by David Horowitz and Jacob Laksin, “One Party Classroom: How Radical Professors at America’s Top Colleges Indoctrinate Students and Undermine Our Democracy,” carries on in the same vein by employing its own overheated rhetoric. From Random House’s publicity blurb: “In page after shocking page, Horowitz and Laksin demonstrate that America’s colleges and universities are platforms for a virulent orthodoxy that threatens academic ideals and academic freedom. In place of scholarship and the dispassionate pursuit of truth that have long been the hallmarks of higher learning, the new militancy embraces activist zealotry and ideological fervor. In disturbingly large segments of today’s universities, students are no longer taught how to think but are told what to think.”

Excuse me, but he who casts the first stone and all that, and this is Random House, don’t forget, the spawn of Bennett Cerf, not Regnery Publishing. We who inhabit the academy often like to think that we’re on the front lines of whatever struggle is going on whereas we’re often very far from the conflict; maybe this time around we’re much closer. What do you think?

Jack Stripling, Inside Higher Ed, Feb. 10, 2009.

As budget woes deepen, lawmakers in two states are painting faculty as sex-obsessed liberals and environmentalists who won’t get on the “Drill Baby Drill” bandwagon. The attacks, which have a familiar refrain, signal what may be another surge of debate over areas of study that have long drawn conservative critics.

In Georgia, State Rep. Calvin Hill has questioned whether the state should pay faculty with expertise in “oral sex” and queer theory. In Alaska, State Rep. Anna Fairclough has taken shots at professors who place environmental interests ahead of the very development projects that help fill university coffers.

The culture wars started long ago, but the current economic crisis is provoking new skirmishes. Cary Nelson, president of the American Association of University Professors, said the cycle is predictable and unfortunate.

“What’s sad about it is that each time this happens it’s yet another assault on the principles of academic freedom, and the right of the faculty to shape their own research agendas,” he said.

[Read more →]

By FERNANDO REIMERS

Chronicle of Higher Education (http://chronicle.com)
Section: Commentary
Volume 55, Issue 21, Page A29

The recent terrorist attacks in Mumbai raise four questions for those of us who work in higher education.

First, in what ways did the education of the perpetrators bring them to take the lives of hundreds of unarmed civilians not engaged in combat? Second, how were the many people who enabled those perpetrators educated — those who turned a blind eye or supported the terrorists during the many years when their intolerant views developed and as they trained and planned their attacks? Third, the responses of ordinary citizens to the attacks, both in India and in Pakistan, appear to constrain the options for their governments’ leaders to pursue negotiated avenues of cooperation, thus increasing the risk of military conflict and political instability in the region. In what ways did the teachings of history and geography in India and Pakistan shape such prejudiced and xenophobic views of their neighbors?

Finally, and most important, to what extent has the education of people around the world prepared them to understand the sources of such terrorist attacks and their potential consequences — and to think about the best courses of action to deal with them?

The answers to the first three questions require — and should receive — further study. But the answer to the last question is clear: Schools and colleges around the world are not adequately preparing their students and other citizens to understand the nature of shared planetary challenges like international terrorism, regional and global conflicts, and global warming.

[Read more →]

Chronicle of Higher Education, Jan. 23, 2009 (Section: The Chronicle Review
Volume 55, Issue 20, Page B7)

By TIM CLYDESDALE

Popular epistemologies are funny things. The latest one slipped into our party unannounced, slowly replaced all the food and decorations, and then stared back blankly when we asked how our Mexican fiesta had turned into a country-western barbecue. Only after the tequila wears off and we piece together the evening do we realize, with embarrassment, that the change has been a long time coming.

For decades, we professors and administrators drank deeply of notions like “knowledge for knowledge’s sake” and “the transformative power of the liberal arts,” paying little heed as the American populace shifted from widespread respect for the academy to considerable skepticism of it. Today our students occupy the leading edge of that popular shift, with no real interest in the elitist notions that we consume so readily. But they are wise enough to keep their views private, given the economic necessity of attending our party.

Our students arrive on our campuses with years of experience in observing disputes about what is and is not known, and with well-established ways of handling such things. For example, should they view Thomas Jefferson as the brilliant author of the Declaration of Independence and a “founding father” of the United States, as a political hypocrite who owned slaves and impregnated them, or as a dead president irrelevant to their own lives but important to their history teacher? Similarly, how should they view global warming, illegal immigration, and evolution?

[Read more →]

Chronicle of Higher Education, Section: Commentary
Jan. 23, 2009 (Volume 55, Issue 20), Page A34

By KAREN GROSS and ANNE MYRKA

No major social problem can be solved within any single field of study, yet traditional academic silos often fail to demonstrate to students the interdisciplinary nature of our world’s problems — and, unfortunately, many students rarely cross those invisible lines between disciplines. While some institutions have developed bold and creative multidisciplinary courses and majors, such programming can be difficult to carry out at institutions that lack abundant resources, especially in an economic climate that dictates frugality.

In an effort to find a feasible way to provide quality interdisciplinary teaching on a small campus, Southern Vermont College has introduced a program called Roving Professors. A select group of professors — the Rovers — visit multiple classes across the college’s five divisions, and each one integrates his or her specialty into each course visited, illustrating how subjects interrelate and how different disciplines are synergistic. Roving differs from team teaching in that it does not occur regularly within a single course over the semester, and the Rover is not a contributor to overall course planning or grading.

How the program works: Professors chosen for interdisciplinary roving must be excellent teachers in addition to having broad-reaching understandings of their fields. They have to be comfortable leading classes that are not their own and able to show students the sometimes hidden connections between seemingly disparate concepts. Rovers must be flexible and well-rounded, capable of responding to questions and material outside their primary fields of study, and able to navigate classroom skepticism of the relevance of interdisciplinarity.

[Read more →]

Stanley Katz, Chronicle of Higher Ed – The Chronicle Review – Brainstorm, Dec. 4, 2008
I wrote in my last post about the downside of specialization, and one of the commenters quite rightly responded that whatever the virtues of a more general orientation, generalists have a hard time finding academic employment these days.

Quite right. I am, alas, sure that the trend to subdisciplinarity will not disappear anytime soon. But the problem is even more profound. Luke Menand, one of my favorite commentators on higher education, recently gave a paper at Princeton on interdisciplinarity, a much ballyhooed style of scholarship and pedagogy these day s. Luke’s main point was that what we normally call “interdisciplinarity” is really better described as hyperdisciplinarity, since it depends utterly upon disciplinary knowledge: “It is not an escape from disciplinarity; it is the scholarly and pedagogical ratification of disciplinarity.” Or, “Interdisciplinarity is the ratification of the logic of disciplinarity. . . . [It] actually rigidifies disciplinary paradigms.” Luke goes further, and claims that interdisciplinarity is a symptom of anxiety about professional status (which has traditionally been created by the disciplines), an attempt to shake free of the constraints imposed by the disciplines — but it cannot go far enough to do the job.

[Read more →]

Inside Higher Ed – Dec. 4, 2008

“You can’t measure what we teach.”

“The results [of what our students gain in the classroom] won’t be known for 10 years.”

“You’re just going to use the information to evaluate us.”

Those are just a few of the responses that Orin L. Grossman, academic vice president at Fairfield University, said he has heard from faculty members — especially in the humanities — who resist the notion that they and their colleges must find ways to measure how, and how much, their students learn in the classroom. “Their view tends to be that we should simply trust the faculty, and that the role of the administration is to keep scrutiny of them at arm’s length,” Grossman said.

His comments came Wednesday during a session on assessing student outcomes in the humanities at the annual meeting of the New England Association of Schools and Colleges, the regional accrediting agency for that part of the country. The meeting took place in Boston.

[Read more →]

Inside Higher Ed, Oct. 9 – Scott Jaschik

The latest generation of adults in the United States may be the first since World War II, and possibly before that, not to attain higher levels of education than the previous generations. While white and Asian American young people are outpacing previous generations, the gaps for other minority groups are large enough that the current generation is, on average, heading toward being less educated than its predecessor.

These data are among the most dramatic in “Minorities in Higher Education 2008,” which is being released today by the American Council on Education as the 23rd annual status report on the diversification of American colleges and universities.

Most of the data in the report are not themselves new, and come from the various reports issued over the year by the U.S. Education Department and other government and private sources. The educational attainment data, for example, are from census figures. But the report groups various statistics together in ways that are designed to promote a fuller understanding of the way demographics are changing — or not.

[Read more →]

From: “Brainstorms” – the blog of the Chronicle of Higher Education (on-line forum, October 3, 2008)

By Stanley Katz

Last week I attended a seminar on the history of general education with a number of other people who are trying to think how general education might best be presented to college students. Many of us are familiar with the larger outlines of the story, which begins with the World War I efforts at Columbia University and travels through Robert Maynard Hutchins’s University of Chicago to James Bryant Conant’s Harvard.

The standard story, of course, ignores many interesting and promising developments at less well-known institutions, and in any case becomes too complicated to follow in the post-general-education era of the 1970s and beyond — multiple versions of “core” curricula, and much more. But the larger idea of a more general education persists, even though it means many different things to many different people.

I have been asked to carry on a “conversation” on the subject at the annual meeting of the American Association of Colleges and Universities in Seattle this coming January — I suppose because many of us committed to liberal education (whatever we mean by that phrase) cannot get it out of our heads that we owe our students something more than disciplinary (or professional) education.

But we also know that students are voting (by selecting majors) for the practical — The Chronicle reported on September 9 that the number of majors in economics at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, has risen from 183 to 442 over the past decade. I believe that economics is currently the largest field of concentration at my own liberal-arts university. And in larger universities, such as Wisconsin, the School of Commerce probably attracts as many or more concentrators. Overall, of course, the problem is not so much the decline in enrollments in the humanities and social sciences, as the flight from the arts and sciences. Physics and math are hurting too, and for the same reasons.

[Read more →]

From: The Chronicle of Higher Education – Issue Dated Oct. 3, 2008.

Is tenure related to academic freedom? Does it come at too high a price? Should we be thinking past tenure? Here’s what Roger Bowen, former president of the State University of New York at New Paltz and general secretary of the American Association of University Professors from 2004 to 2007, has to say. What do you think?

By ROGER BOWEN

The historic institution of tenure is rapidly becoming history. The American Association of University Professors, for which I served as general secretary, has for almost a century advocated for tenure as the chief guarantor of a faculty member’s academic freedom. But today tenure and academic freedom are viewed less and less as crucially intertwined.

Academic freedom has widely been embraced as the central value of the academy because it is correctly regarded as a necessary condition for developing new knowledge. Tenure, on the other hand, has been gradually eroded, for largely economic reasons. Tenure is, in fact, expensive, while academic freedom is not. Awarding tenure can be a multimillion-dollar commitment for a college, with no guarantee of a financial return, while endorsing academic freedom costs no money at all.

I have enjoyed earning tenure at three institutions. At the first one, I regarded tenure as my guarantee of job security. In the second and third instances, I viewed it as an appropriate reward for an academic who happened to be holding administrative positions. Not once did I think at the time of winning tenure, “Ah, now my academic freedom is ensured!”

Only on the third occasion did I fully appreciate tenure’s promise of guaranteeing academic freedom — not because my own was being threatened, but rather because the academic freedom of the faculty I served as president was being attacked. That I was in a situation where academic freedom was threatened even once is unusual. The AAUP annually receives about 1,000 claims that the academic freedom of a faculty member has been abridged, but that number is modest, given that a half-million or so professors teach nationwide. While it may be assumed that many professors who believe their academic freedom is under assault do not report the problem, it may also be assumed that, generally, most colleges embrace the principle of academic freedom as essential to their educational missions.

[Read more →]