The University and the Specter of Horowitz
(x-posted to The Valve)
They say in Harlan County
There are no neutrals there
You’ll either be a union man
Or a thug for J. H. Blair
-Florence Reese (lyrics), “Which Side Are You On?”
In an ongoing series of posts at Acephalous, Scott Kaufman has been linking to and collating instances of the ongoing war against progressive thought in the academy. First, as some of you probably know, Scott took up the subject of Until Proven Innocent, a book co-written by KC Johnson, who teaches at Brooklyn College and CUNY. Until Proven Innocent attempts to pin the scandal surrounding the Duke lacrosse rape case on the politically correct culture of liberal academia. While Scott was napping, Smurov linked to a piece by Mark Bauerlein, who is an English professor at Emory and who titled his essay “Indoctrination in the Classroom.” Finally, Scott and Smurov both linked to this reaction, via the National Review’s blog Phi Beta Cons, against those professors whose reading assignments make students feel “spoiled or privileged.”
I use the phrase “ongoing war” advisedly: this is a war, albeit one being conducted discursively through periodicals, campus organizations, and websites and blogs. At some point, the leader of the anti-intellectual, anti-academic crusade was David Horowitz, founder of Students for Academic Freedom, a “student” organization created with the express goal of sabotaging university teaching by mounting pressure campaigns against left-wing professors. The most affable representative of mainstream academic opposition to Horowitz was Michael Bérubé; with incredible patience and argumentative cunning, Bérubé defended academia and tore hole after hole in Horowitz’s shoddy research. He debated Horowitz live, and wrote a book (What’s Liberal About The Liberal Arts?) that was the subject of several vibrant conversations at the Valve (book event archive). Although Bérubé was incredibly successful at mimizing Horowitz’s efficacy, the movement against the liberal arts has taken on a life of its own, falling back on the same rhetorical tactics that the American right-wing employed against welfare and in support of the Iraq war.
It is time that we examined where the logic of these attacks on the academy leads, and how the right-wing doublespeak of “academic freedom” is structured.
The Agenda
Here is what right-wing critics of the academy would like to see implemented:
- Pay cuts for all scholars in the humanities, including reduced funding for research and travel.
- Elimination of tenure.
- Public access to all courses, particularly lecture courses.
- Public hearings for faculty hires and dismissals.
- Public or student-led selection of assigned texts.
- Guidelines for hiring based on candidates’ political beliefs; establishing a quota for conservative academics in all disciplines within the humanities. (Yes, this would be quota-based hiring for registered Republicans.)
- Replacing content-based courses with skills-based courses; in particular, replacing instruction in English with formalistic instruction in writing.
The underlying assumptions are as follows:
- There is no difference between a lay person and a tenured professor when it comes to evaluating the quality of a text.
- In the humanities, there is no difference between knowledge and belief, and all beliefs are equal. There is therefore no justification for challenging students to re-examine inherited beliefs.
- Skill is independent of belief; in expressive practice, this means that form (ability to write) is independent of content (statement of belief).
- Public interference in the process of education is justified by democratic and consumerist principles in a way that public interference in the private sector is not. For example, students are justified in suing professors, but consumers are not justified in suing corporations.
- The market value of writing skills should largely determine the salary of a humanities professor.
The rhetoric goes like this:
- Professors are out-of-touch with American values.
- Professors are hypocrites who criticize luxury while living in its lap.
- Professors are lazy.
Living in a Rhetorical World
Our thoughts are our own; our language is not. Whatever we say or write enters public discourse in the context of the assumptions and debates of its time, and, in the reader’s mind, it does not necessarily link up with our entire worldview or with our own private struggles and motives. I’m reminded of the moment in Philip Roth’s The Counterlife when Nathan Zuckerman tries to convince his brother to abandon an Israeli settlement in the occupied territories. Zuckerman tries to make his brother admit to Freudian motives, and the brother responds that his motives really aren’t important any longer, because he is now part of a movement, the historical meaning of which is greater than the sum of its parts. It is essential for us to see the rhetorical context of contemporary debates about the academy, and neither to exempt our own speech from its likely misuses, nor to treat disputants as rhetorically naive.
You can already see, in Bérubé’s account of working with a student named John (cf. the book event), that it’s not merely a question of having the right to speak, or earning a sufficiently high grade, which are personal concerns — John feels a political concern for himself and the other students in the face of possible “indoctrination.” His personal concerns are understandable and admit discussion; his political concern does not, since it is necessarily based on a series of judgments about the relationship between politics and pedagogy that John isn’t qualified to make and which exceed his right to fair treatment.
Similarly, in the comment threads that followed Scott’s posts on KC Johnson, there were a series of individuals (particularly an anonymous commenter named “Professor Ethan”) who tried to inundate Acephalous with canned rhetoric about the failings of academia. Trying, as several commenters did, to get a personal account from Ethan of how he suffered in the classroom, and how such mistakes might be avoided in the future, is a mistake: Ethan is trying to create change, not come to terms. When Ethan quoted NPR, in the comment here, the point wasn’t just that he attributed to NPR something actually excerpted from Until Proven Innocent. He was quoting NPR in the first place because it’s “liberal media,” and he figured Scott’s readers would feel bound to respect it. This is all made possible by National Public Radio, which has been under siege from the Bush Administration for years, and so runs a piece on Until Proven Innocent as an easy way to seem balanced and not indefensibly liberal.
That’s how the feedback loop works when an issue gets pushed to the right: progressive intellectuals and media outlets are shamed into re-defining objectivity and balance as more centrist or rightist, and then skimmed for whatever admission can add fuel to the fire, without ever beating the charge of bias. Right now, any English professor who lends the credibility of a position and a doctorate to the conservative anti-academic agenda is guaranteed a lot of attention and readers.
Even the most well-meaning pieces can end up making odd syntheses, not out of impure motives, but simply because the rightist agenda is circulating everywhere. This is what happened, I think, with Tim Burke’s piece on academic freedom in the Minnesota Review. Burke is a great blogger and a thoughtful respondent (including on Acephalous with regard to Johnson’s book), and I think his article (mentioned by John Holbo here) was motivated by sincere concern for continued innovation in the humanities. Burke’s solution to over-cautiousness and paralysis in the humanities is, potentially, eliminating tenure, though he does not make an explicit demand.
From the standpoint of academic freedom, though, the demand doesn’t make any sense: expanding the population of professors without real job security is guaranteed to produce more cautiousness, not less. Whether or not the professors on a hiring committee have tenure, they will still want intellectual diversity, they will still desire to be fair, and they will still walk in to meetings and interviews with a set of firmly grounded attitudes and ideological allegiances. The real questions are whether the candidate can expect to get a tenure-track position or a year-to-year lectureship; whether that position will come as soon as graduate school is over, or after years of tutoring high school students preparing for the SAT; whether or not funding is available for summer research, and for dissertation research in lieu of teaching. That will determine how much capacity for innovation will be manifest in new generations of scholars. There is an analogy here to the situation with elementary and secondary public schools: first you starve them for funding, then you blame the teachers and the curriculum when students do poorly.
The Three Basic Criticisms of Academics
Professors are out-of-touch with American values.
I respect those authors, including Richard Rorty and Walter Benn Michaels, who have tried to define what “achieving our country” or “our America” might mean in progressive terms. That said, I believe that American scholars in the humanities might as well stand up for the truly international community that constitutes their field, as American scientists and businessmen have done. Nationalism has left a lot of scars, here and elsewhere, in the past few decades; the principles that found institutions of learning are universal. Otherwise, one sits in an IKEA chair, working on a computer made in China, trying to achieve our country.
Professors are hypocrites who criticize luxury while living in its lap.
This is really just a customized version of the argument about liberal hypocrisy: if you’re so idealistic, why aren’t you poor? It is pathetically literal to criticize professors for teaching about inequality. One may as well ask how able-bodied Congressmen could vote the ADA into existence. It is not necessary to believe that selfishness is the premise of all action.
Professors are lazy.
This is a groundless claim without a shred of hard evidence besides the existence of summer “vacation.” It is like calling apple growers lazy because the fruit appears in September. At UC Irvine, the summer is divided into Summer Session I and Summer Session II.
***
The fact that scholars like Johnson and Bauerlein are doing what they can to harm the reputation of the humanities does not make us unfree, and neither does the existence of an organized attack on the humanities. We remain free in the only meaningful sense of the word: free to determine our relationship to the humanistic traditions of scholarship and pedagogy, and free to determine our politics accordingly.
I already commented on this at the Valve; should I also comment here? Why not.
When I finally got tired of the deceptions and misrepresentations of fact by these people at Acephalous, I decided to parody them through a version of Ludacris’ Roll Out. One of the things I’ve discovered during the Bush years is that the unconscious can be thought of as knowing things that the conscious mind does not — well, at least if one wants to flatter oneself, and who does not in these dismal days? Specifically, one’s choice of parody reveals something that one has picked up but not consciously realized about the parodied. In this case, it seems to me that the academic right-wingers trying to attack academia are wannabes, coming in at the end of the Bush regime, unlikely to succeed, just like the wannabe gangstas that Ludacris characterizes in his song are unlikely to ever make it. They are asking what is in Bush’s bag, wanting to be as destructive as he is, and they share a common blame for his motivation without even the equivocal justification of his success.
I don’t comment at The Valve, so I hope you don’t a mind comment here. One person attacked you for using the word “war” in reference to this. The word “war” strikes me as absolutely correct. Given the recent Hobbes kick on The Valve, Valvites might consider taking a look at Chapter XIII of the Leviathan where Hobbes discusses the difference between war and peace. The exact same point, in inverted form, is found in Chapter III of Locke’s Second Treatise.
The more fashionable may want to consult Foucault’s 1975-1976 lectures. While the more traditional might want to consult Marx.
Contrary to the point made on The Valve, not using the word “war” does a complete disservice to the idea of war.
There’s a lot to like in what you write. But it doesn’t address issues that are real:
1. Can there be accountability at universities that mirrors open and opening standards in other fields?
2. Where is the line between teaching and indoctrinating?
3. Should universities have the right to construct teaching and administrative cliques?
4. When are university costs excessive, and what mechanisms should be deployed to lessen costs?
5. Is any rational, open, and transparent version of faculty review feasible? If so, of what sort?
6. What standards should exist for tenure? Who should decide and why? What is a peer? Do we believe peer review largely works? What evidence do we have?
No one, I dare say, reasonably argues that the academy has most of what it is doing right. Is it thus wrong? Well, that’s the stuff of debates over schools in general.
You’ve got to have some standards of accountability that people understand, can participate with, and see as somehow just–from all the stakeholder perspectives–students, faculty, graduate students, funders, governments, and citizens. Few organizations do have such standards. Higher education has an opportunity to lead, follow, or get crushed not responding if they don’t try harder to convey that these challenges are being met with reasonable effort.
At some places they are more than met, but who would or could know this? It has the feel of a secret society–not unlike medical doctors but without the malpractice issues.
Rich:
In this case, it seems to me that the academic right-wingers trying to attack academia are wannabes, coming in at the end of the Bush regime, unlikely to succeed
Let’s hope so; honestly, I risked an overreaction in the hopes of unsettling the quieter phenomenon of the chill, to which we both referred over at The Valve.
Craig,
Contrary to the point made on The Valve, not using the word “war” does a complete disservice to the idea of war.
Quite right.
If any of you out there haven’t read the Valve thread yet, I recommend it. It is on fire, with terrific contributions by Karl Steel, Rich, and John Holbo, among others.
I understand that the present debate goes to the very heart – or tries to, at least – of the idea of liberal education, but I thought that generally the idea of elimination of tenure was around for a while, and not necessarily as a kind of ultra-rightwing hysteria, am I right? I mean a university can still fire a tenured professor – as it happened with Ward Churchill – only it will cost it. I know that tenure is a great idea, but from my own experience it seems that it has its problems as well, doesn’t it?
1. Can there be accountability at universities that mirrors open and opening standards in other fields?
Yes; actually, that already exists.
2. Where is the line between teaching and indoctrinating?
It is the difference between teaching knowledge, and teaching belief in place of knowledge. Students are not “indoctrinated” into believing in gravity; a similar standard applies in the humanities.
3. Should universities have the right to construct teaching and administrative cliques?
Yes, just as corporations work to construct “corporate cultures.” A university may want to focus its scholarship on problems of medieval culture, or on the history of race relations in America.
4. When are university costs excessive, and what mechanisms should be deployed to lessen costs?
This I would leave to people with greater administrative experience. Certainly, the kinds of justifications academics produce for their expenses continually outstrip the requirements that obtain in the world of business.
5. Is any rational, open, and transparent version of faculty review feasible? If so, of what sort?
Internal; this exists already. It takes into account things like student evaluations.
6. What standards should exist for tenure? Who should decide and why? What is a peer? Do we believe peer review largely works? What evidence do we have?
Probably a question that deserves to be answered by someone experienced with tenure decisions.
And yet it shouldn’t feel that way. You can find most of the controversial “theorists” in the “Philosophy” and “Psychology” sections at Borders; you can find oft-assigned writers like Toni Morrison even in some airport bookstores. Most of the prestigious speakers who visit UC Irvine, such as Stanley Fish, Gayatri Spivak, and Alain Badiou, make their lectures free and open to the public.
Beyond that, a book like Michael Bérubé’s What’s Liberal… offers a glimpse into his classroom, and so do academic blogs, which return obsessively to questions of pedagogy.
The secret is that there is no secret, and this is a relatively new development, one that largely springs from new media technologies.
Mikhail,
I’m not convinced that tenure creates the problems usually attributed to it, but I’m not unwilling to consider the possibility. I imagine you’d have to frame it differently from Burke, since I am certain that the problems Burke describes have to do with an excess of insecurity rather than the opposite.
What problems do you think tenure creates?
Joseph,
I do not think that tenure creates problems that would call for its eliminitaion, let me just preface my response with that assertion, but the justifications for tenure, as far as I can tell, are mostly gathered around the area of the “freedom of expression,” or am I misinformed? That is, I would like to have a certain secure position from which I can express my views without the fear of being fired by the administration. In view of my mention of Ward Churchill, that is not necessarily the case as a tenured professor can still be fired if s/he is too outspoken (I supposed in CU case this is judged by the “community” since it is a public school). Now as someone coming from an educational system that does not, and very likely never will, offer tenure I ask myself several questions, not at all related to the job security issue:
1. How will my future job security affect my performance at my job if the main motivating factor in the graduate student and junior faculty culture is to get tenure? That is, once I reach the desirable point of tenure, what should motivate me to even try to be good at what I do? I mean primarily teaching – I have seen some professors who should not be standing in front of the classroom, but because they have tenure and published a book a long time ago, they continuously torture students with their boring lectures and turn many away from humanities. I know this is more of a personal view, but wouldn’t some job insecurity, motivate these people to try harder or lose the fight and disappear into the oblivion? Are there any standards that would allow the institution to fire a professor for inability to teach?
2. If I understand the reality of the academic world in the US, more and more schools are moving away from offering tenure-track positions and hire more adjunct faculty, i.e. act like businesses trying to save money (say Walmart and Co. hiring people for two part-time jobs instead of one full-time job and thus not paying them benefits)? I mean this is, in a sense, a capitalist reality – if a university, especially a private one, is becoming more and more like a business, then tenure is certainly in the way and thus does not allow a school to be flexible – this is just an observation, I am not suggesting this tendency is either good or bad.
3. There must be a third point as well, I am very fond of things coming in 3s, but I cannot think of it now – thanks for your posting though, it raises some excellent questions, maybe I will distract myself from my morning routine and do some quick research about this whole “tenure” business.
Cheers
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Wow, this is some scary stuff going down in the US. I’m not entirely sure if the same things are afoot here in Australia, but as I begin to find out a bit more about academia I think it possibly might. In the Communications department, where I’m doing research assistance, recent restructuring has led to more ‘skills-based’ emphasis in courses – a unit on media, protest and terrorism has been deleted and they’re initiating an entire stream on media policy. Don’t get me wrong, I believe it’s important to understand and interrogate policy, but not at the expense of theory.
I think the scholars of the future, among which I hope to be, will have a lot more mitigating against them if the system heads this way, especially if they are politicised.
Thanks for the interesting commentary and discussion.
Hi, Joe, this is Dave Mazella from the Long 18th.
While I watched this discussion unfold on the Valve, I was a little surprised at the tone of the 90 or so responses. It seemed a little much, considering how close you and Burke were compared to Horowitz et al.
Today, while I was reading Frank Ankersmit’s essay on “Politics and Metaphor” from his Aesthetic Politics (Stanford, 1996), I finally realized what has bothered me about both Burke’s “Everything Studies” and his comments about politics and academia: what Ankersmit calls “political solipsism” (272). He says:
Political solipsism tends to paralyze our instincts and intuitions about demarcations . . . . In other words, political transcendentalism has the tendency to create a discourse in which one can move around with surprising ease. The really amazing amount of political positions that have been developed in the western world since the 17th century, and the fact that individual people have sometimes moved from the extreme left to the extreme right without blinking an eyelid, can perhaps be explained with an appeal to the solipsism of political transcendentalism. Similarly, if the anti-transcendentalism that has recently become fashionable will also affect political thinking, the broad spectrum of political opinions that we used to have may be expected to become much narrower (272-3).
So I think in both cases, Burke has taken up a proudly solipsistic position that allows him to “move around with ease,” but which fails to satisfy our intuitions about demarcations.
DM
Dave,
It’s been a difficult, fractious week of academic blogging, and in the midst of that, this comment was really a godsend.
I was really disappointed by the vitriolic way Burke responded to my post and comments. It seemed like a case of “buy in to my particular version of moderation or I will scream your bloody head off.” It bothers me when I sense that somebody views their gentle tone as a perpetual favor, one deserving of gratitude.
Perhaps a useful distinction can be made between political solipsism as a phenomenon throughout the West, and the version that is pre-eminent in the United States. In places where you have a parliamentary system of government, diversity is a means of governance: whatever ad hoc alliances are needed to pass a particular measure do not endanger freedom of thought.
On the other hand, in the United States, the enfranchisement of two political parties, and the hostility towards class consciousness, produces a solipsism that is more delusion than diversity. For example, if somebody says “I don’t really belong to a political party, I’m an independent,” which plenty do, they are basically Republicans who occasionally cross party lines. A solipsistic ideology is incompatible with a structure based on narrowing political efficacy down to the binary decision of the vote.
In response to Mikhail:
As far as I know, there are a number of different justifications for tenure. For one thing, universities have an interest in retaining professors of quality. Having a settled teaching staff enables them to build up the reputation of their department, and to consolidate strengths.
The tenure system is alive and well for professors in the sciences, who, naturally, do not need their freedom of speech protected in this way. The idea is that professors who can be trusted to do their jobs will work better if they’re not continually on the chopping block. They do their work because it is their passion.
By and large, at this level of abstraction, the debate repeats many other debates about the value of privilege. It is an American tradition to valorize adversity while enjoying all the benefits of ease. To my mind, ease is a blessing, and intellectual freedom — not just freedom of expression, but freedom of inquiry (longer-term goals, not bound to publish-or-perish), and so on — is a pre-condition of the greatest intellectual work.
Those standards already exist. In terms of teaching quality, a much bigger problem than tenured laziness is the phenomenon of graduate students teaching courses for which they are insufficiently prepared, because universities would rather pay less for teaching.
So then the question becomes whether the imperatives of capitalist labor markets produce the conditions that lead to valuable intellectual work. I doubt that a Wal-Mart model is going to give us the works of critical theory, imaginative literature, and social imagination that we truly need.
“It seemed like a case of “buy in to my particular version of moderation or I will scream your bloody head off.” It bothers me when I sense that somebody views their gentle tone as a perpetual favor, one deserving of gratitude.”
Welcome to the ranks of the shrill, Joseph. I think that a faculty position is opening up at Miskatonic U that you might be interested in.
Really, what I found interesting about that thread was the way that it replicated all of the buzzwords that Atrios et al use to describe the current political era in the U.S., through replication of the attitudes that have led to it. Loath though I am to agree with Adam Kotsko about anything, I think that he’s right in his annoyance with Burke’s entire attitude — what I’d describe as a kind of valorization of the middle.
I mean, if you want to vomit, check this out — it’s Burke’s self-set task to speak only on issues that have not coalesced into blocs. It may be possible to do that in a politically honest sense, but only if you then get out of the way of the people who speak to the bloc that you support, in that awful harsh and partisan language, and nternalize the fact that you can express yourself however you like, but when you do so in a public and political context, you take responsibility and open yourself up to criticism from people who don’t share your strategy and/or tactics.
But, to be fair, it’s possible that Burke only went off on you because he wanted to do so to me and figured that including you in would only be fair, or something.
Joseph, thanks for your informative response, I don’t think we disagree on this particular point, I suppose I am not that well informed when it comes to tenure – I would say, though, that you make it sound very much like there would not be any results or valuable intellectual work without a job security guaranteed by tenure. As for graduate student teaching, I do think it is a growing issue as well as an adjunct teaching (not for the same reasons, of course) – again, it is not necessarily a Walmart option but very much a move that is motivated by finances – graduate students/adjunct are cheap labor…
It is several weeks since the last post on this thread. I just now linked here from a Medievalist’s blog, and would like to add my perspective if anyone is still reading.
I got a B.A. in 1970 majoring in European Social and Intellectual History. If I had been born at a different time I might have pursued an academic career, but it was the 60s, and I went elsewhere. At that time I was involved in the New Mobilization to End the War, the Teach-In Movement, SDS, etc. etc., that range of political activism. I knew Weathermen, but was not one. I knew 4 of the Chicago 7.
Many years later at an auction I bought a painting on a board that turned out to be 17th Century Dutch. Although I had taken many classes in European intellectual history, I had not been guided to explore Renaissance Humanism as much as I had been directed to The Enlightenment and the early Socialists, to name just two areas.
After buying the painting I began reading widely in Renaissance and Early Modern studies, and I came across an episode about the scholar Paul Kristeller, who had fled the National Socialists (bringing his library) going first to Yale and then Columbia. He was at Columbia at the time of the student protests and barricades. These events were so similar to what he had previously fled, the he felt the need to escape New York City in the middle of the night, again with his library which he moved to a barn in upstate New York! It happens that I was at Columbia at that time, and reading in 1998 about 1968 I shuddered to think that the scholar whose works I was reading with such appreciation was almost a victim of the student movement of which I was earlier a part.
I offer Kristeller’s story as a way of saying that many who wish to preserve all the western heritage so that it will be there for the research and exploration of future generations (and not just the western heritage, by the way, but all the human heritage), that many who are dismissed as conservative, right-wing, and reactionaries, actually have motives which run deeper than those common attributions.
Thomas,
The intention of my post was never to understate the ways that “conservatism” can be used as a charge against legitimate academic work. Your story about Kristeller reminds me of the fate of Theodor Adorno, who was badly upset by student movements and by abuse directed specifically at him. In some ways, my new post on criticism and Ratatouille is very directly concerned with the value of aesthetic conservatism in the preservation of art.
That said, there is very little reason to compare the student movements of the sixties with either European fascism or contemporary lobbying allied with Horowitz. The students — a tiny, almost microscopic minority — who work with Horowitz and his friends are working indirectly with the vested interests of the Right: their money, their ideas, their political leverage. It is a movement of career politicians masquerading as a student movement.
I presume that Kristeller had to flee Europe in order to save his life; he left New York, and moved upstate, in order to have more peace and quiet. He was traumatized by his experiences in Europe, and interpreted the student protests according to that trauma. I understand his fears, and do not quarrel with his choice; in fact, I count it among the costs of that earlier tide of hatred.