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?

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.

“I think that in this kind of financial crisis people will be looking for opportunistic victims left and right,” he added. “A crisis is an opportunity for genuine community and collaboration to arrive, and a crisis is [also] an opportunity for the body politic to tear itself apart. We’ll probably see both. But one has to take something like this as a teaching moment.”

Hill, the Republican vice chairman of the House Appropriations Committee in Georgia, said he alerted his constituents about some faculty whose research interests he considered questionable in hopes that they would voice any complaints to the state Board of Regents. Along with a local radio address, Hill sent out a mass e-mail that began “Sit down and buckle you seat belts! What I am about to tell you will shock and disgust you.”

“Do you know that your tax dollars are being used at our state universities to pay professors to teach your children classes like ‘Male Prostitution’ and ‘Queer Theory’? Yes, even in tight economic times like we are facing today, our Board of Regents is wasting your tax dollars to teach these totally unnecessary and ridiculous classes.”

Actually, there are no classes titled “male prostitution” in Georgia, according to university officials. There is, however, a sociology professor at Georgia State University who is listed in a media guide as an expert on the subject of male prostitution. The professor in question, Kirk Elifson, studies risk factors involved in the spread of HIV/AIDS, among other public health issues. As for courses on queer theory, there is at least one offered at the University of Georgia, according to a Board of Regents spokesman.

Hill’s e-mail goes on to proclaim that a class entitled “Oral Sex” is offered in Georgia’s system. Again, there is no such class, but there is a Georgia State faculty member who was identified in a campus media guide as an expert on the subject. The faculty member, Mindy Stombler, is a senior lecturer who has studied whether popular culture and other factors have led to an increase in oral sex among teenagers.

Hill says his only goal is to tell taxpayers how their dollars are being spent, and encourage them to contact the regents if they have concerns. About 10 of them have done that, and their e-mails reflect both anger and misinformation. Several repeated the inaccurate assertion from Hill’s e-mail that Georgia offers “classes” about male prostitution.

“I am shocked and dismayed that our universities are paying professors to teach subjects like ‘male prostitution’ as reported in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution,” one Georgia resident wrote to the Regents. “I have not worked nearly thirty years in education and paid taxes to fund such as that.”

As for what the regents should do in response to such concerns, Hill said Monday that they could “redirect” the faculty.

“I would assume someone that has those credentials can teach something else that is more worthwhile,” he said.

In his e-mail to constituents, however, Hill didn’t talk about redirecting anyone:

“Now that we need to cut the state budget, I think I know where we can eliminate a few highly paid professors and get rid of these classes,” he wrote.

Stombler draws an annual salary of $63,480, and Elifson makes $58,975, according to state records. The state is trying to address a budget deficit of about $2.3 billion.

Neither faculty member responded to interview requests, but a Georgia State spokeswoman provided a statement:

“University researchers study everything from cancer to corporate finance for the good of the public,” Andrea Jones, a spokeswoman, said in a statement. “Teaching courses in criminal justice, for example, does not mean that our students are being prepared to become criminals. Quite the opposite. Legitimate research and teaching are central to the development of relevant and effective policy. The argument to limit or eliminate certain areas of research and education is flawed.”

Chilly Relations in Alaska
While specific faculty members haven’t been singled out in Alaska, at least one lawmaker has voiced a general objection to environmentalist faculty views at the University of Alaska. Fairclough, an Eagle River Republican, used a committee meeting last week to complain to Mark Hamilton, the university’s president, about soft faculty support for oil and mining industries in the state.

“If I ask university staff, the people who are educating our future leaders, if they support the Chukchi Sea development, the Red Dog Mine or the Pebble Mine or any type of industry along those lines, a stereotypical response is they are in opposition,” Fairclough said, according to the Juneau Empire. “I found it amazing there was a large disconnect in where the dollars for the State of Alaska come from on a regular basis as far as production of oil on the North Slope goes, and how it is turned into revenue for the State of Alaska and in turn is invested in the university system,” she said.

Hamilton responded by suggesting, “We probably have the most conservative faculty and the most conservative student body you’ll ever meet. Thank goodness you are not representing Berkeley.”

Carl Shepro, who heads a union that represents faculty members in Alaska, said Fairclough speaks for a “minority of the Legislature.” That said, her criticisms are the kind that tend to feed on themselves, particularly if lawmakers are looking for targets in tight budget times, he said.

“As long as you have legislators in other states that are making similar kinds of comments, it may be that it encourages or supports people in the Alaska Legislature,” said Shepro, president of United Academics and a professor of political science at Alaska’s Anchorage campus. “It’s kind of a shift in political culture, if you will.”

Shepro said he was particularly concerned about any backlash professors may feel for speaking out in opposition to lawmakers like Fairclough. Alex Simon, an assistant professor of sociology on Alaska’s Juneau campus, said he feels like he’s already under scrutiny for speaking critically about Fairclough in the media.

“After that article appeared [in the Juneau Empire], I received a voice message from our public relations officer saying that the chancellor was sensitive about these issues and she wanted to meet to discuss that with me,” said Simon, an untenured faculty member.

Simon explained that he would take a meeting directly with Chancellor John Pugh only in the presence of union representatives, prompting an e-mail response from Pugh that noted: “I was not concerned about your statement to the press. I am a strong supporter of freedom of speech.”

In his e-mail, however, Pugh said he had indeed spoken with a public relations staff member about Simon’s comments in a news story, but said the employee “did not accurately reflect my statement to her.”

“I indicated to her that your statement that universities ‘generally strive to present all viewpoints’ might be questioned by the Legislature,” Pugh wrote. “Nationally, there have been concerns from conservatives that public universities do not present ‘all viewpoints.’ ”

Simon said he “would rather bag groceries or something than to be a professor without academic freedom,” but expressed concern that threats from lawmakers or objections from administrators might intimidate some faculty.

“What it does result in is obviously self censorship among some faculty,” he said, “and certainly for administrators they’re trying to walk the line of at least the appearance of supporting academic freedom and trying to placate donors and the Legislature.”

— Jack Stripling

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.

According to a recent report of scenarios prepared by the National Intelligence Council, the next 15 years will bring significant global changes, including the transformation of the international political system built after World War II, an unprecedented transfer of wealth from the West to the East, enormous pressure on natural resources resulting from continuing economic growth, and increased potential for global conflict, particularly in the Middle East. Given the growing interdependence among nations as a result of trade, increased communications, and migratory flows, it will be crucial for people to develop the skills to understand and help resolve such urgent challenges.

Today those skills are necessary for most of the world’s population, not just a few people. Since the end of World War II in the United States, political leaders have agreed that college programs that educate a cadre of experts in foreign languages and area studies should be supported to serve the perceived needs of national security, and more recently, provide a competitive advantage for American businesses. But at the request of Congress, the National Research Council recently evaluated those programs and concluded, in International Education and Foreign Languages: Keys to Securing America’s Future (2007), that they should be redesigned to serve a broader segment of the college population — not just a few specialists. Recent studies of the American Council on Education have also documented that very few higher-education institutions demonstrate a significant level of internationalization.

Students need “global competency” — the knowledge and skills that help them cross disciplinary domains to comprehend global events and respond to them effectively. Global competency has three interdependent dimensions. The first is a positive approach toward cultural differences and a willingness to engage those differences. That requires empathy with people with other cultural identities, an interest and understanding of various civilizations and their histories, and the ability to see those differences as opportunities for constructive, respectful, and peaceful transactions. That ethical dimension of global competency also includes a commitment to basic equality and the rights of all persons — and a disposition to act to uphold those rights.

The second dimension of global competency is the ability to speak, understand, and think in several foreign languages.

The third dimension involves broad and deep knowledge of world history, geography, and the global aspects of health care, climate change, economics, politics, international relations, and other issues. It also requires an understanding of the process of globalization itself and a capacity to think critically and creatively about complex international challenges, such as the Israeli incursion in Gaza, its antecedents, and its aftermath.

Colleges are particularly well situated to contribute to the three key dimensions of global education. They can do that for their students by placing those objectives squarely in the middle of their mission. A recent report of the Committee for Economic Development shows that less than 1 percent of American college students study Arabic or other “critical languages” that are vital to national security, and only about 9 percent study any modern foreign language. More colleges should establish such foreign-language requirements. They should also create offerings in area studies and international comparative studies in different fields. In addition, they should provide broader opportunities for study abroad and for faculty development in international studies.

Colleges can also prepare instructional materials and deliver professional-development programs for elementaryand secondary-school administrators and teachers to help enhance global values, foreign-language skills, and globalization expertise — much in the same way colleges took a leading role in supporting science education in high school in the 1950s and 60s. A recent report on developing international competence in teacher education noted that although Title VI of the Higher Education Act provides resources for internationalizing the curriculum, those resources have seldom been used for programs to educate elementary and secondary teachers. Yet some institutions exemplify how colleges and universities can contribute to international education in schools. At Indiana University at Bloomington, for example, the School of Education provides professional development in international education to elementary and secondary social-studies teachers. Michigan State University’s College of Education also offers such programs for local teachers.

It is also well within the special responsibility of higher education to educate the public in issues related to globalization. Colleges can produce the body of knowledge about global affairs that the general public needs access to. For example, Harvard University’s David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies produces a magazine, ReVista, widely distributed and available on the Web, that covers contemporary issues about Latin America and U.S.-Latin American relations. The Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University routinely posts on its Web site information on its core research topics: global security; poverty, inequality, and development; and global governance. Other higher-education institutions should pursue efforts along those lines.

Finally, colleges and universities can evaluate the different programs that exist or can be developed to support global competence at all education levels — thus creating a scientific knowledge base that helps discern what works well, with what effects, and at what cost. The creation of an empirically based body of knowledge about global education is an opportunity for schools of education to take a central role in their colleges and universities, as well as for interdepartmental collaboration between schools of education and international and area-studies centers. Encouraging such collaboration will require leadership and commitment from presidents and provosts.

As top administrators, trustees, faculty members, and students work together and with schoolteachers and school districts to prepare all American citizens for a global world, they will enhance their own international competencies. They will also demonstrate their commitment to serve the public at a time when the economic and security challenges that our nation faces only heighten the need for such solidarity and public service.

Fernando Reimers is a professor of international education and director of the International Education Policy Program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

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?

One of my students put it this way: “It is imperative that someone studying this generation realize that we have the world at our fingertips — and the world has been at our fingertips for our entire lives. I think this access to information seriously undermines this generation’s view of authority, especially traditional scholastic authority.” Today’s students know full well that authorities can be found for every position and any knowledge claim, and consequently the students are dubious (privately, that is) about anything we claim to be true or important.

Contrast that with 50 years ago, when students would arrive in awe of the institution and its faculty, content to receive their education via lecture and happy to let the faculty decide what was worth knowing. Even 25 years ago, that pattern still held among most students. But it holds no more. While students often report satisfaction with their institution and its faculty, after interviewing some 400 students on 34 campuses nationwide, I found few in awe of their institutions or faculty, many averse to lectures, and most ambivalent about anyone’s knowledge claims other than their own.

Of course, this new epistemology does not imply that our students have become skilled arbiters of information and interpretation. It simply means that they arrive at college with well-established methods of sorting, doubting, or ignoring the same. That, by itself, is not troubling. Many professors encourage students to question authority, and would welcome more who challenged and debated ideas. But this new epistemology carries some heavy baggage — indeed, it is inseparably conjoined with personal economics. Short of fame or a lottery win, today’s students recognize that a college degree is the minimum credential they will need to attain their desired standard of living (and hence “happiness”). So this new epistemology produces a rather odd kind of student — one who appears polite and dutiful but who cares little about the course work, the larger questions it raises, or the value of living an examined life. And it produces such students in overwhelming abundance.

This is where many begin the blame game, and where I part ways with them. Polite, dutiful, and disengaged students deserve neither blame nor scorn. They have become exactly what one would expect of those born during the information age and reared in America’s profoundly pragmatic culture. They are, moreover, not all that different from the population as a whole. Aside from adopting new technologies more readily and accepting new familial patterns more quickly, they are very much America’s sons and daughters. Pinning a generational label on today’s students is unhelpful at best and a disservice to all.

A better and more productive response begins with us — faculty members and administrators. We cannot expect a skeptical populace to reverse course of its own accord. The onus is on us to better convey the value that a robust intellectual life adds to the public good. And we need to begin by respecting our students (and the wider public) not just as persons but as the arbiters of knowledge that they have become. Specifically, we must respect students as thinkers, even though their thinking skills may be undeveloped and their knowledge base shallow. Moreover, our respect must be genuine. Students have keen hypocrisy sensors and do not like being patronized.

Respecting students as thinkers means we need to reveal, not hide, the intellectual journeys we have taken, and make transparent the intellectual transformations we have undergone. Respecting students as thinkers thus involves a number of changes, including meeting students where they are, so that they trust us to develop their intellectual skills and expand their knowledge base; balancing our elitist values with democratic and more widely achievable goals; and, perhaps hardest of all, lowering the lofty opinion we hold of ourselves and accepting the public obligation that our privileged position entails. To return to my opening analogy, rather than complain about the disappearance of our fiesta, we need to put aside our sombreros, don cowboy hats, and let our guests teach us a few line dances.

Fiesta traditionalists might start screaming: “You’ve got to be kidding! I didn’t climb to the top of the educational ladder to put on cowboy boots and starting dancing for a bunch of disengaged, consumerist students!” So let me be perfectly clear: I am not asking for more entertainment and less substance in our classrooms. I am asking for a paradigm shift in how we approach our students that parallels the paradigm shift in the broader culture. I am asking instructors to see the two questions that the new epistemology emblazons across the front of every classroom — “So what?” and “Who cares?” — and then to adjust their teaching accordingly.

Back when students held us in awe, sat willingly for lectures, and assigned us the work of deciding what knowledge was worth knowing, we organized our classes around our disciplines. We chose what knowledge needed to be conveyed to students in what order. Now that our students assign us no more authority than anyone else, show no patience for lectures, and decide what’s worth knowing themselves, we need to reorganize our classes. We need to teach as if our students were colleagues from another department. That means determining what our colleagues may already know, building from that shared knowledge, adapting pre-existing analytic skills, then connecting those fledgling skills and knowledge to a deeper understanding of the discipline we love. In other words, we need to approach our classrooms as public intellectuals eager to share our insights graciously with a wide audience of fellow citizens.

Perhaps an example would be helpful. Take the survey-of-dance course, offered nationwide as a way for students to satisfy fine-arts requirements. Instructors traditionally organize this course the way the discipline is structured, beginning with prehistoric dance, following with the diversity of tribal and folk dances, then moving on to the emergence of dance as high art, and so forth. All of those topics are important, mind you, but I can see students nodding off from here.

By contrast, an instructor who respected students as arbiters of knowledge in their own right might begin with the forms of dance students know or do themselves. Next, the instructor could encourage students to articulate the criteria by which they decide which dancers are better than others, and which dance forms are more appealing. From there, the instructor could demonstrate how the dance forms that students already know have evolved out of prior forms and genres, and have a dancer demonstrate evolving styles within a genre or two. Next, the instructor could take the whole class through a dancer’s workout, lest the students think good dancing requires little effort. From there, the instructor could go in a number of directions, such as introducing students to the art of choreography, showing video clips to demonstrate how different choreographers stage the same piece, and illustrating how some of the most innovative choreography is rooted in deep historical and cultural knowledge of dance.

Personally, I prefer the dentist’s chair to the dance floor, but I would look forward to such a class, and so would most students. More important, students enrolled in such a class would sharpen their analytic skills, gain a wider knowledge of dance, and develop respect for both dance and the study of dance that would stay with them for decades. Some would say this is simply good pedagogy — I wholeheartedly agree. Good pedagogy is the product of instructors who respect, understand, and creatively engage their students.

The problem is that too many professors see good pedagogy as optional, as something only for teaching “superstars,” rather than as a set of learnable techniques that critically support our wider purpose. Perhaps those professors assume that an absence of complaints indicates that their pedagogy is “good enough.” But an absence of complaints may indicate only how accomplished students are at appearing polite and dutiful (especially when the professor’s grade distribution suits them).

A slice of humble pie is in order: Just 19 percent of Americans with bachelor’s degrees express “a great deal of confidence in education,” and only 31 percent express the same about “the scientific community” (compared with 28 percent and 43 percent, respectively, among Americans as a whole), according to the 2006 General Social Survey. It is time we disabuse ourselves of the view that obliging and dutiful students are engaged and transformed students.

By respecting students as thinkers and meeting them where they are, we set the stage for good pedagogy and take a critical first step toward rebuilding the public’s trust. But we must be realistic about what good pedagogy can accomplish. It is not a panacea — it will not create a society of lovers of learning in which our social ills will finally be cured. (A well-known pedagogy expert came to my institution and ended his talk with that very claim.) Even the best teachers will not convert every student into a lifelong learner who embraces knowledge for its own sake. That is a commitment that must come from within; it is an intentional decision to swim against powerful cultural and economic currents.

We need to understand that college students with an intrinsic love of learning, an appreciation for complexity, and a drive for discovery almost always possess those traits before they report to our campuses. Though we can fan into flames the sparks that these future intelligentsia bring with them, except for the occasional late bloomer, we fail miserably at creating sustained intellectual fires among the vast majority of our practical, credential-driven students.

A better and more widely achievable educational goal should therefore be to inculcate a respect for learning and the pursuit of knowledge. I doubt anyone can teach another to love learning, and the attempt frustrates students and professors alike. (Imagine a dance instructor trying to turn every student into a season subscriber to the local ballet company.) But I do believe effective teaching can instill respect — specifically, respect for the critical work we do as scholars and educators. Such respect is the seed from which the public’s trust in us will grow.

Sowing that seed is essential, but seeds also need water, soil, and sunlight to flourish. Likewise, the work of public intellectualism must go on outside the classroom as well. Others have made that case eloquently in these pages, so I shall simply underscore their appeals with a few suggestions.

First, I applaud the efforts of leaders of scholarly associations to promote and reward the work of public scholarship, despite membership pressure to preserve the status quo, and I encourage those associations to continue that work. Second, I respect the efforts of many agencies that support academe to promote general dissemination of research results and encourage other sources of financial support to do the same. To be sure, there is a place for highly specialized research programs; I simply ask program officers to ensure that each call for proposals includes a question about how results will reach a general audience and that responses to that question be considered in the proposal’s evaluation.

Third, some of us need an attitude adjustment. It is not just residential-college students who live in a bubble — many faculty members do as well. We take for granted our privileged status, become consumed by petty controversies, talk only to ourselves, and ignore the wider public that makes our work possible. It is tempting, I know, to want to curse the culture and withdraw into like-minded enclaves. But neither catharsis nor retreat will satisfy those who demand accountability, raise financial support for public higher education, or generate more students who cherish college as an opportunity to learn and think.

Even though our interests often diverge from those of the general public, we remain beholden to it. With a few adjustments at our end, we can begin to rebuild trust among a critical mass of fellow citizens: our students. Our fiesta is clearly over, but a Tex-Mex party has the potential to please guests and hosts alike.

Tim Clydesdale is a professor of sociology at the College of New Jersey and author of The First Year Out: Understanding American Teens After High School (University of Chicago Press, 2007).

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.

Given our large and growing institutional focus on health care, we began with a Rover with expertise in pharmaceuticals, seeking to demonstrate the connections between drug and related health-care issues and other disciplines. For example, the Rover demonstrated the use of electronic medical records to an information-technology course, and discussed the impact of recreational drugs on juveniles in a juvenile-justice course. During the spring 2008 semester, our Rover visited 14 classes across the curriculum, teaching one class per week on subjects that encompassed nursing, abnormal psychology, juvenile justice, information technology, and business ethics. During the semester, the Rover taught 150 students, which was approximately 41 percent of our then total student population.

Nonroving professors participate actively in classes taught by the Rovers through classroom discussion and interdisciplinary debate. For example, in the abnormal-psychology class, the Rover and the course instructor posed the questions: Is depression better treated through psychoanalysis, with drug therapy, or using some combination of the two?

We plan to adjust and improve the program based on feedback from student and faculty participants. This academic year, we hope to raise student awareness of the program and help Rovers adapt more varied teaching techniques to capture the interest of a diverse student population. We also hope to create better ways to integrate Rovers into existing courses.

Benefits: Student response to the Rover pilot project has been strongly positive. Almost three-quarters of the students taught by a Rover thought the presentation enhanced their overall understanding of the course, and more than 80 percent felt they had something to learn from a professional outside their own major. This type of inquiry between disciplines can create within students the cognitive dissonance that leads to deeper learning.

From an institutional perspective, a Roving Professor program is advantageous and economically feasible, as just one Rover can reach many students. On campuses with limited resources, a Rover program can be a cost-efficient way to provide critical bridges among diverse schools of thought, helping students experience firsthand the interplay among the academic disciplines and how that interaction broadens our thinking and approaches to problem-solving.

Karen Gross is president of Southern Vermont College. Anne Myrka shares a joint faculty appointment at Southern Vermont College, where she chairs the division of science and technology, and Albany College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences.

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.

You should read the paper yourself, for it is quite provocative. Today I simply want to use it to ask fellow academics to think harder about the relationship between their disciplinary orientation and their pedagogical responsibilities. The common criticism of undergraduate major fields (normally disciplinary) is that they are increasingly constructed of a series of narrow, highly focused courses taught by faculty who are unwilling (or unable) to teach subjects beyond their specialized research interests. I think that is too often the case. But the critique does not hit the central problem, which is how specialized knowledge (the major) contributes to the overall (liberal) education of the undergraduate student? In an era in which faculty commitment to “general education” is unsure and uncertain, the major (and hence specialization) has come to dominate undergraduate pedagogy.

This is the question that the Teagle Foundation recently put to a series of disciplinary organizations, among them the National History Center (related to the American Historical Association). Jim Grossman (Newberry Library, Chicago) and I worked with a task force of historians to think through the problem of how the History major might be reworked to contribute more directly to undergraduate liberal education. We produced a paper which, along with those of several other disciplinary groups, is now posted on the Teagle website. I think the papers are suggestive of the sorts of things disciplines might do to recover their responsibility for the broader goals of undergraduate education. We didn’t say so in our report, but among the questions I would ask each member of a disciplinary department to ask him/herself would be, “Is what I am teaching serving the liberal goals of undergraduate education? Can I do this differently and better? How can I convince my departmental colleagues to think again about our responsibilities for undergraduates?”

“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.

The session featured a panel of three humanists with views that were widely divergent in some ways: Grossman, a Gershwin scholar and senior academic administrator who believes higher education needs to get with the program on accountability for student learning outcomes; Ellen McCullough-Lovell, president of Marlboro College, which uses several measures of student learning but has an educational philosophy that makes its brand of assessment virtually impossible to transfer to other colleges; and David Scobey, a historian at Bates College who acknowledged being a humanities professor who has “said every one of those whining comments” that Grossman recalled, “and believes them.”

Despite those diverging starting points, the discussion revealed quite a bit more common ground than any of the panelists probably would have predicted. Let’s be clear: Where they ended up was hardly a breakthrough on the scale of solving the Middle East puzzle.

But there was general agreement among them that:

• Any effort to try to measure learning in the humanities through what McCullough-Lovell deemed “[Margaret] Spellings-type assessment” — defined as tests or other types of measures that could be easily compared across colleges and neatly sum up many of the learning outcomes one would seek in humanities students — was doomed to fail, and should.
• It might be possible, and could be valuable, for humanists to reach broad agreement on the skills, abilities, and knowledge they might seek to instill in their students, and that agreement on those goals might be a starting point for identifying effective ways to measure how well students have mastered those outcomes.
• It is incumbent on humanities professors and academics generally to decide for themselves how to assess whether their students are learning, less to satisfy external calls for accountability than because it is the right thing for academics, as professionals who care about their students, to do.

“It’s in our hands — nobody is forcing us into overly prescriptive models or any one particular way at this point, and it’s our responsibility to respond to the public’s interest [in learning what value they’re getting for their tuition and tax dollars] by doing it ourselves,” said Grossman. “But the longer it’s delayed,” he warned, “the more over time the public will start saying, ‘What is really going on?’ and start pushing for the kinds of measures that nobody really wants.”

Wednesday’s session was part of the New England accreditor’s assessment forum, an event that has been attached for the better part of a decade to the annual meeting of the association’s Commission on Institutions of Higher Education. That fact alone, noted Barbara Brittingham, the commission’s president and director, challenges the frequent assertion by critics that colleges aren’t paying attention to how effectively they are educating their students.

But it is also true that the idea that colleges must measure the extent and depth of student learning is far from a fully embraced concept in higher education, and at this meeting. That is far more true, the University of New Hampshire’s Bruce Mallory said in introducing the panel, in the humanities, which are characterized by qualitative and analytic approaches, than in the sciences, which are “characterized by objective measurement, have more bounded notions of truth and fact, and for which the way we represent those bounded notions of truth and fact have been more quantitative.”

Fairfield’s Grossman, after provoking laughs with his litany of the humanists’ standard explanations for why measuring student learning is impossible in their domain (the ones that began this article), expressed frustration at the tendency of faculty members, “in extremis,” to pull out the mother of all reasons why they shouldn’t be assessed: academic freedom. He said he had taken to urging faculty members who define academic freedom to mean complete autonomy to re-read the American Association of University Professors’ 1940 statement on the concept, to realize that academic freedom was not a free pass from professional responsibility.

“It is not some kind of iron curtain faculty can draw around themselves to protect themselves from scrutiny or accountability,” Mallory, New Hampshire’s provost and executive vice president, said in reiterating Grossman’s argument.

McCullough-Lovell, the Marlboro president, distanced herself from her faculty members most skeptical about assessment, who — she said — believe that most assessment is “antithetical to the humanities,” which is designed to develop the almost unmeasurable skill of “discerning judgment.” She also cited the multiple ways that the tiny (330 student) Vermont institution measures its students’ learning, both through commonly used measurements like the National Survey of Student Engagement, participation in experiments like the Wabash National Study of Liberal Arts Education, and through requirements like the Clear Writing Program, which demands that all students submit a portfolio within their first two semesters to prove that they can, well, write clearly.

But McCullough-Lovell also said that she was not convinced that the type of assessment in which Marlboro engages would apply almost anywhere else, given that so much of it takes place in one-on-one settings between professors and students. If assessment is, as some believe, about trying to find ways to compare colleges and hold institutions accountable, Marlboro’s version of assessment probably wouldn’t qualify. “I think we could describe it, but what I’m worried about it how transferable it is to other places,” she said. Her implicit question: Would that disqualify it from some definitions of valid assessment?

Though he described himself at the start as “a bit of a skeptic and a Luddite” on the question of assessment, David Scobey, who directs Bates’s Harward Center for Community Partnerships, did not fall neatly into the pigeonhole of humanistic faculty member who rebuffs any effort to hold colleges accountable.

He agreed with the assertion, frequently put forward by the Spellings Commission and by many other observers of higher education that “the public needs all kind of good information about colleges, and we have obfuscated it.”

But on the matter of measuring student learning, especially in the humanities, he expressed reservations. Partly that grew from his nuanced and complex definition of what the humanities seek to impart to students, from the ability to engage in “meaning-making,” to a degree of “cosmopolitanism,” to a reflexive ability to assess themselves and the quality of their own learning. Those and many other “outcomes” of the humanities are difficult if not impossible to measure in “any form of high-stakes knowledge,” Scobey said, “even rich high-stakes knowledge like the Collegiate Learning Assessment,” which has become the test du jour in many circles.

Ultimately, “the question ‘How well are we doing educating our students in the humanities?’ is much closer to ‘How good is our marriage?’ than it is to ‘How good is this hotel’s service?’ ” he said. In other words, it tends more toward the subjective than the objective, is better assessed over the long term than in snapshots, and is difficult to compare, among other things.

The question probably can be answered, but with “thick description” rather than concise data, Scobey said.

Despite those reservations, the panelists seemed to agree that the days were past when humanists, or colleges generally, could say, ” ‘It’s a little too complex and nuanced for you to understand — just trust us, and write us your checks,’ ” as Mallory put it.

As the issues of cost and affordability continue to mount, Grossman said, “the public will be asking more critically than in the past, ‘What are we getting for our money?’ ” If the answers aren’t forthcoming, politicians or other will offer their own prescriptions for how to gauge that.

But right now, he said, it is still in the hands of professionals in higher education to define for themselves what their students ought to be learning and how that might be measured. “Professors don’t want a model that will trivialize the humanities. Well, what do humanities professors think is important? What do we want them to know, what do we want them to learn? They have power to shape this analysis as they like, as they wish.” For now.

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.

“We are at a tipping point in our nation’s history,” Molly Corbett Broad, president of the ACE, said in reference to these findings. She said that “the alarm bells should be going off” all over the country over this analysis, given the historic pattern of successive generations outperforming one another.

Educational Attainment: Percentage of Adults With Associate Degree or Higher, 2006

Broad noted that the data also point to a growing gender gap in educational attainment, which is consistent with all of the reports about gender gaps in enrollments. For black and Latino women, for example, the most recent generation outperformed the prior ones, but the opposite is true for men. And across racial and ethnic groups, women are achieving a higher educational attainment than men.

Percentage of People Aged 25-29 With At Least An Associate Degree, 2006, by Race and Gender

For much of the report, evidence of some progress alternates with evidence of stagnation. Some of the other figures:

• Total minority enrollment increased by 50 percent, to 5 million students, between 1995 and 2005. White enrollment increased by 8 percent, to 10.7 million, a gain of 8 percent.
• Following those enrollment trends, minority students make up about 29 percent of all students.
• Enrollment gains have been uneven. In 2006, 61 percent of Asian Americans aged 18 to 24 were enrolled in college compared with 44 percent of whites, 32 percent of African Americans, and 25 percent of Hispanics and American Indians respectively.
• In a key indicator that black enrollments may not be about to boom, the high school completion rate has remained relatively flat over the last two decades, at around 76 percent. (By comparison, the rate for Asian Americans is 91 percent.)
• The increase in Hispanic enrollment led all racial/ethnic groups, up by 66 percent to more than 1.7 million students. Hispanic enrollment grew faster at four-year institutions than at two-year institutions.
• Asian-American enrollment increased to more than 1 million over the 10-year period between 1995 and 2005, up 37 percent.

— Scott Jaschik

The original story and user comments can be viewed online at http://insidehighered.com/news/2008/10/09/minority.

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.

One emerging response to this situation is a growing emphasis on “asking the big questions,” as President Robert Connor of the Teagle Foundation has been suggesting for the past couple of years. Another is the grant program recently initiated by Chairman Bruce Cole at the National Endowment for the Humanities, “Enduring Questions.” The program will provide small grants for “pre-disciplinary” pilot courses that address “the most fundamental concerns of the humanities.” Yet another version is the movement by politically conservative funders to (according to The New York Times) attempt “a different approach on college campuses.” While one of the conservative funders is quoted as saying that he desires courses that “work against the thrust of programs and courses in gender, race and class studies, and post-modernism in general,” most of the grant recipients seem to be creating very traditional Great Books courses of one sort or another.

I will come back in another blog to the political question raised by these explicitly conservative-funded programs. What interests me for the moment is a small but growing emphasis on seeking underclass (freshman and sophomore) curricula focusing on universal questions. This was explicitly one of the goals of traditional general-education programs, after all — when I was an undergraduate, one of our general-education choices was a humanities course on “Good and Evil and Western Culture.” But can we turn the clock back to such courses? Is such a move necessarily political? If not, how can we integrate such courses into the mainstream of undergraduate education so that economics majors in Madison will enroll in them and benefit from them? Is there a better way to resurrect general education?

Stanley Katz teaches public and international affairs and directs the Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies at the Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School. He is a past president of the American Council of Learned Societies, the Organization of American Historians, and the Society for Legal History. He comments frequently on policy issues relating to higher education, particularly liberal education, and on the humanities and social sciences, philanthropy, scholarly relations with Cuba, and the interplay of civil society, constitutionalism, and democracy. And on his beloved Cubs. [Who don't seem to be doing too well at the moment...]

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.

The 1940 “Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure,” jointly written by the AAUP and the American Association of Colleges and Universities, and today endorsed by more than 200 learned societies, states that academic freedom and tenure are inseparable, and that tenure guarantees teachers the freedom to teach, conduct and report on research, and be active as citizens without fear or favor. A key sentence reads: “Freedom [of teaching and research and extramural activities] and economic security, hence, tenure, are indispensable to the success of an institution in fulfilling its obligations to its students and to society.” Tenure, in other words, is the best way to achieve the academy’s most important value — academic freedom — and to give faculty members economic security. Tenure, in brief, is a means, not an end.

Since 1940, and most particularly over the past 15 years or so, tenured positions have been on the decline, as more colleges have relied on less expensive part-time and non-tenure-track faculty members — even as those same institutions professed fidelity to the principles of academic freedom. The reason for the change is simple, and brutal: To enhance their own economic security as institutions, colleges have enhanced the economic insecurity of professors by hiring more and more contingent faculty members — that is, cheap, part-time laborers who enjoy few prerogatives of the profession while suffering low pay, few (if any) benefits, and flimsy contractual rights. Today two of every three new faculty members hired across the nation are not on the tenure track, up from about 50 percent in the early 1990s. The trend is clear.

Yet according to the AAUP’s data, the number of faculty members who have alleged the violation of their academic freedom over the past 20 years has not risen. In fact, as a percentage of all faculty members employed, academic-freedom violations have probably decreased over the past two decades. Despite the changing economic conditions of academe — changing for the worse for most faculty members, and in often problematic ways for many institutions — higher education’s allegiance to academic freedom seems nonetheless strong. As common law and as an essential condition of teaching and learning, academic freedom is usually honored even as the institution of tenure is gradually diminished.

That does not mean that threats to academic freedom coming from outside the academy have disappeared. Supreme Court cases like Rumsfeld v. FAIR (2006) — about the right of law schools to decline to play host to military recruiters because the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy violates the universities’ nondiscrimination policies — not only have overlooked the relevance of academic freedom, but also have certainly not treated it as a settled constitutional issue.

Such rulings have very likely emboldened the federal government to impose on higher education noxious regulations that squarely assault academic freedom and institutional autonomy. For example, the Department of Homeland Security has denied colleges the freedom to hire certain foreign scholars, and the newly reauthorized Higher Education Act requires international-studies programs to “reflect diverse perspectives.”

Court rulings and government regulations change over time, and not always for the better. Academic freedom is, at best, a “general norm of academic practice,” writes William W. Van Alstyne, a law professor at the College of William and Mary — “soft law,” whose protection is not “reasonably secure.”

One reason recent federal government actions have not been reliably supportive is that, outside academe, academic freedom is viewed more as an idea or aspiration than as a certain right. Indeed, were academic freedom to describe an undisputed condition of faculty work or a legal guarantee, I doubt that the professoriate’s need for the AAUP, or for the inclusion of this crucial principle in the contracts bargained by faculty unions, would be as compelling as it is today.

Just as government can threaten academic freedom, so too can a public that does not understand the centrality of academic freedom to higher education — and that holds values that disregard the 1967 Supreme Court ruling in Keyishian v. Board of Regents, which asserted that “academic freedom is a special concern of the First Amendment.”

For example, the Freedom Forum’s First Amendment Center, at Vanderbilt University, reports that annual surveys of American attitudes reveal an incurious public, wed more to religious certainties than to critical thinking.

The 2007 survey discovered, for instance, that 65 percent of Americans believed that the founders intended America to be a Christian nation, and that 55 percent believed the Constitution actually established a Christian nation. Only 56 percent believed that the freedom to worship extends to all religious groups, and 74 percent would have prevented public-school students from wearing T-shirts with slogans that might offend others.

Right after September 11, 2001, an ABC-Washington Post poll found that 66 percent of Americans would willingly surrender civil liberties to combat terrorism; a year later nearly half of all Americans in another survey said “the First Amendment goes too far in the rights it guarantees.” It is no stretch to assert that few members of the public know that academic freedom is a “special concern” of the First Amendment.

Closer to home, a public-opinion survey conducted by AAUP and sponsored by the Spencer Foundation found two years ago that 76 percent of Americans who self-identified as “conservative” believed that professors who were Communists or supported Islamic militants should not be tenured, and in fact should be fired. The same survey showed that 85 percent of Republicans (compared with 25 percent of Democrats) believed that ideological or political-party restrictions should be imposed on faculty members; and that 68 percent of the public believed liberal faculty members dominated our colleges.

The survey concluded that the opponents of academic freedom tend to be the elderly, those with low levels of educational attainment, conservatives, and Republicans. Is it any wonder, then, that in a recently completed study, Neil Gross, an associate professor of sociology at the University of British Columbia, and Solon Simmons, an assistant professor of conflict analysis and sociology at George Mason University, found that one-third of social-science faculty members in the United States believed that their academic freedom was threatened? Gross reminds us that only 20 percent of faculty members felt that way in 1955, during the height of McCarthyism.

The real threat to academic freedom today, then, generally comes from outside academe, not from within it. How can we secure academic freedom when its guarantor — tenure — is on the wane, and the public is indifferent or even hostile to it?

Several years ago, at a Unesco conference in Berlin, I debated a former British-university vice chancellor — what we in America would call a university president — on the topic of academic freedom. He lauded the decision of British faculty unions to trade away tenure for a parliamentary guarantee — in a law passed in 1988 — of academic freedom.

The outcome, he said, was that British faculty members had been divided into two categories: a minority with virtual tenure, and a majority who can be dismissed on grounds of “redundancy” because their short-term contracts are always contingent on enrollment. But, he insisted, the trade-off in giving up tenure for the state’s guarantee of academic freedom was a fair one and, moreover, the academic freedom of all faculty members, including the most vulnerable, now had a basis in law. He mistakenly referred to the trade as the de facto “American model” and urged the rectors of universities in Serbia, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, and other former Soviet colonies who were in the audience to adopt the scheme.

I countered the vice chancellor with more passion than savvy by arguing that even if a class system within the professoriate was a fair description of the “American model,” it was nonetheless destructive of academic freedom. I conceded that two-thirds of all faculty appointments in the United States went to non-tenure-track teachers, and that the economic security demanded by the authors of the AAUP’s 1940 statement had become pure chimera — to wit, tenure lines were disappearing at an alarming rate. But I added that worthy organizations like the AAUP were fighting, sometimes successfully, to defend academic freedom. And I assured him that academic freedom had gained some First Amendment protection.

In the fullness of time, however, I have thought more about the seemingly Faustian bargain cut by the British government and the faculty members. I recalled that immediately after World War II, several New Deal lawyers drafted the basic law of the land for a defeated Japan that included in that nation’s bill of rights a clause guaranteeing academic freedom. It turns out that what happened in Britain under Margaret Thatcher had, in one respect, a 40-year-old precedent set by the United States.

I do not believe in cure-alls or magic bullets. Apart from the question of feasibility, even if the U.S. Constitution could be amended to include a right of academic freedom, lawsuits and constitutional challenges over alleged violations of academic freedom would continue. But the educational effort that would go into mounting a campaign for a genuine “academic bill of rights,” which guaranteed academic freedom, would, if nothing else, educate the public about why that aspiration is crucially important to sustaining democracy.

Constitutions, of course, are not easily amended; equally obvious, just causes for constitutional amendments can fail — consider the Equal Rights Amendment. Educating the public about higher education is always difficult, if only because many people have not been exposed to higher education and tend to be opposed to what they see as the special privileges enjoyed by members of a certain profession. Add to such depressing observations the public antipathy toward the values of the professoriate, as the poll numbers I shared earlier indicate, and the notion of a constitutional amendment at the federal level seems highly unlikely, if not downright silly.

But wouldn’t such an amendment have a chance of being passed at the state-constitution level? Instinct tells me that mobilizing faculty members, legislators, and friends of higher education on a state-by-state basis could result in establishing academic freedom as a basic right at the state level.

Yet I recognize that even with a basic constitutional right to academic freedom, the growing reliance on non-tenure-track faculty members, and the prevalence of external intrusions, will no doubt continue to threaten academe’s core values. Indeed, as conditions stand, I have given up hope that the trend to replace full-time, tenure-track positions with non-tenure-track, part-time ones can be arrested, let alone reversed. Tenure, it seems to me, is bound to be eventually scuttled.

Yet asserting a possibility is not the same as passively accepting its inevitability. The 1940 statement began by saying that its purpose was “to promote public understanding and support of academic freedom and tenure.” Almost 70 years later, it is evident that this purpose has not been fulfilled. Decoupling academic freedom from tenure just may be, as my British colleague asserted, the best way to protect academic freedom.

Elevating that ideal and aspiration into a legal right, possibly into an enumerated constitutional right in certain states, with a force equal to the First Amendment, may be a Faustian bargain, but also, alas, it may be the very best deal that America’s faculty members can cut. Tenure, after all, has always been a means to an end — securing academic freedom. Perhaps the time has come to rethink the best way to preserve academe’s highest value.

Roger Bowen is a former president of the State University of New York at New Paltz and author of Japan’s Dysfunctional Democracy (M.E. Sharpe, 2003). He was general secretary of the American Association of University Professors from 2004 to 2007.

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Section: Commentary
Volume 55, Issue 6, Page A36