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5 comments - Last on 08/01/2008
"Big Argus" Meets the Playground Bullies
Scott Jaschik, editor-in-chief over at Inside Higher Education, knows his audience. Yesterday he threw the cat among the pigeons by running a piece titled, “Big Argus Is Watching You,” which purports to describe the National Association of Scholar’s “Argus Project.” Jaschik gave the facts just enough spin to set the dervishes of the Left in motion. “Academic McCarthyism!” “Ideological!”
“National Association of Snitches!” "Conservatives!” “Surreptitious!”
Ouch! Ooof! Arrgh! Please don’t hit us again…we’re sorry…(not really)
Just to be clear, for those critics who composed their responses before they finished Jaschik’s article, the Argus Project is a call for volunteers to examine publicly available sources to report and document what’s happening on college campuses. We reached out to volunteers because colleges are many and we are few. Whenever NAS ventures a criticism of some development in higher education as evidenced by a program at, say, the University of Delaware, we immediately hear back from defenders of the status quo that we are generalizing from too small a set of examples.
We have done in-depth studies of a dozen institutions, systematic examinations of several dozen institutions, randomized surveys of hundreds of institutions—it doesn’t matter. The academic establishmentarians demand the ever-expanding data set. OK. We’re persuaded. American higher education is big (N= 4,276 institutions, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education’s count.) NAS has eight professional staff. We thought it was time to ask for some help.
Of course, the “big brother” reference in Jaschik’s title suggests that we plan some national surveillance system, complete with classroom spies. “Unapologetically Tenured” jeers at “Mr. Balch and his secret police network.” Maurice Isserman calls us “snitches.” Don Langenberg, Chancellor Emeritus of the University System of Maryland, demonstrates yet again the lumbering inconsequence characteristic of the snidely self-satisfied state bureaucrat:
Many complex organic molecules have helical (screw-like) structures, which may be either right-handed or left-handed. Assuming that our Big Argus monitors will investigate science courses just as they will humanities courses, what political conclusions might they draw when they discover a professor teaching that most of the organic molecules found in nature are of one helicity?
Where does Chancellor Emeritus Langenberg get the notion that we are going to monitor courses? Certainly not from Jaschik’s article. Jaschik raised the question with Steve Balch, and reported:
Will the efforts to identify “politicized teaching” include sitting in on classes? Balch said that “if people can walk in on their own, they can do it, but it’s not something we would encourage.” He added that “my own notion of etiquette is that if you are going to go to someone’s classroom, you should get permission.”
But let’s not let the facts get in the way of a good jest, Chancellor E. And we have “dundermuffin” who refers to conservative students as “hitler jungen.”
It is madness to attempt to reply to all this nonsense, but it is probably folly as well to ignore it entirely. So here goes.
Caricature: The Argus Project is a “big brother” operation.
Reality: We take no inspiration from Orwell’s 1984. We’ve asked for some volunteers to help us with a research program that makes use of publicly available documentary sources such as course catalogs and websites. We may on occasion pursue freedom of information requests. We do this routinely. We have declared our intention to publish nothing that we can’t double-check. We are focused on institutions, not individuals. We have neither the capacity nor the interest to snoop into private lives. We promote transparency, and we have a long history of being open and public about our own work.
Spin: The NAS is an ideological partisan organization that is pursuing the Argus Project as part of a right-wing agenda.
Fact: NAS is politically centrist and non-ideological. To ideologues, anything other than congruency with their own views appears “ideological.” Since NAS is manifestly not part of the campus Left, we must, in this logic, be ideological partisans of the Right. But we are not. That leaves our critics scrambling for evidence of their thesis. We’ve been around for 21 years, publishing a quarterly journal, issuing research reports, and distributing our analyses in many media. If the evidence were there to be found, shouldn’t someone have found it by now? One recurrent “proof” of our right-wing outlook is to list some of the foundations that have given us financial support. JP Craig helpfully points out:
For those disinclined to hit the wiki, this organ is funded by “the Sarah Scaife Foundation, the John M. Olin Foundation, the Bradley Foundation, the Castle Rock Foundation, and the Smith Richardson Foundation.[6]
We’re happy to have received their support, and would be just as happy if the Ford Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the Gates Foundation and others chipped in. What Craig’s list really proves is that conservative foundations see the NAS as an honest dealer in non-partisan analyses of higher education.
This is not to say that NAS attempts to practice neutrality on issues we take as central to higher education. We are an advocacy organization. We advocate for academic freedom, for merit-based academic appointments, for responsible institutional governance, for transparency in higher education; we advocate against racial preferences, identity politics, politicization of the curriculum, and manipulation of students for political ends. That’s not a comprehensive list, but it is also not what fair-minded observers would call a political list.
The possible exception is our stand against racial preferences. On this we line up with a large majority of ordinary Americans, such as those who passed the civil rights initiatives in California, Washington, and Michigan. But we certainly recognize that the publicly avowed view of many faculty members is that opposition to racial preferences is a right-wing cause. This is a mistaken opinion, as demonstrated by the liberal political views of the many opponents of racial preferences. Yet mistaken as it is, the assumption remains.
NAS has no foreign policy positions; no positions on non-academic domestic issues; no party affiliation; and no connection whatever to the numerous “culture war” litmus tests that typically define “right” and “left” in America. We don’t have official positions on abortion, gun control, immigration, or global warming. Yet by the slap-dash logic of the academic Left, because we oppose racial preferences, or because we have received grants from conservative foundations, we are “right wing.”
The Argus project welcomes volunteers whatever their political views. Our hope is to gather people who have the energy, intelligence, patience, and time to do good work. If we are so non-partisan why do we seek volunteers through Townhall.com? It isn’t the only place we seek volunteers, but we go where we think we can find people who are skeptical of how higher education today operates. We are not going to find many of those skeptics among the orthodox defender of the campus status quo, which happens to be on the Left.
Balderdash: The NAS wants to “deprive students [of] the opportunity to discover, in depth, different ways of seeing.” (Karin Foster)
Plain English: The campus left has evolved a patois to talk about indoctrination as though it were in fact liberating. Ms. Foster provides a neat instance of this doubletalk, in which outrageously one-sided, immune-from-evidence declaration of “theory” is justified as giving students “informed frameworks to think through.” We’ll stick by our Enlightenment rationalism on this matter. Theories that are self-contained and self-justifying worldviews that shrug off contrary evidence and treat thoughtful criticisms as “offensive” are the stuff of indoctrination, not “informed frameworks.” The NAS aims to foster opportunities to pursue the truth, including intellectual discovery.
As I said, I’m not trying to answer each and every jab, skin-kick, and eye-gouge offered up by the excitable dundermuffin and his friends. Perhaps there are some rules-of-thumb to be learned from Scott Jaschik’s decision to frame the Argus Project as a Big Brother operation and for the instant cries of “McCarthyism!” that he provoked from the bleachers. Clearly any publicly announced effort to hold colleges and universities accountable is an exercise in secrecy. Clearly any use of publicly available records is a violation of the privacy of others. Clearly any initiative that seeks to gather well-documented facts is a low attempt to bully the professoriate.
In short, if anyone is borrowing the totalitarian techniques imagined by Orwell, it isn’t the NAS. It’s the folks who are trying to stigmatize candor, transparency, and accountability applied to the university. To be sure, the effort to stigmatize attention to campus goings-on is highly selective. When Scott Jaschik and staff do so, they call it “journalism,” and hold their heads up high. When NAS mounts a journalistic inquiry, however, Jaschik suggests we're Big Brother. (By any measure, Inside Higher Education’s investigations are far more intrusive than anything NAS has contemplated. ) Last fall, the College of William and Mary introduced a “Bias Incident Reporting Website,” which really does invite students, faculty, and staff to snitch (with a promise of confidentiality) on each other. FIRE has inveighed against it for violations of free speech and due process, but the chorus of folks who accuse the NAS of “McCarthyism” for looking at public records seems utterly unmoved by William and Mary’s efforts to create a Cuban-style spy-on-your-neighbor system.
They call what we do McCarthyism; we call it journalism and an exercise of First Amendment rights.
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Let me quote what I wrote in response to the Inside Higher Ed article:
"In defense of NAS, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with monitoring what colleges do, and protecting the rights of students and faculty is a good thing. I wish that progressives had some organization that did this, now that NAS, FIRE, Students for Academic Freedom, NoIndoctrination.org, and many others are monitoring campuses.
"However, what makes the monitoring by NAS wrong is the ideological nature of it. Note how they proclaim that they will be scrutinizing “politicized teaching” or “slights to conservative students.” Neither of these are violations of student rights (and, of course, slights to liberal students will be ignored). Indeed, it is the attempt to banish “politicized” teaching that threatens academic freedom and free speech on campus.
"As I argue in my book Patriotic Correctness, it’s time for progressives to form an activist organization that will monitor violations of liberty on campuses (especially the campuses ignored by the right-wing groups), and protect the intellectual freedom of right-wingers, left-wingers, and everyone in between. If you’re interested in helping with this (whether you’re conservative or liberal), please contact me at collegefreedom@yahoo.com."
As for Peter Wood's assertion that "NAS is politically centrist and non-ideological," that doesn't even pass the laugh test. I'm not sure what's "non-ideological," but the NAS certainly isn't. Let's see: it's funded by right-wing foundations and contacts members of a far right website to recruit volunteers for a project to stop "slights to conservative students." That might just be a teeny bit ideological.
It is interesting that Wood brings up the College of William and Mary's disturbing bias reporting system. But Wood doesn't explain why the NAS "slights" reporting system is any better (indeed, since "slights" aren't illicit at all, unlike actual bias, it seems much worse).
I'd encourage the NAS to change the Argus project so that they will monitor and oppose violations of rights (not "slights") of all students and faculty, not just conservatives.
In response to my posting, one reader pointed me to a Nebraska group, AFCON: The Academic Freedom Coalition of Nebraska (afconebr.org), a group that I'm told includes the Nebraska chapter of NAS. I wish there could be a national academic freedom coalition that would unite serious defenders of academic freedom from the left, the right, and the center to organize debates and discussions about intellectual liberty, urge policy reforms on campus, and unite to condemn the many cases where everyone agrees that a terrible censorship has occurred.
by JohnKWilson Posted on 08/01/2008
Liberal students deserve as much protection from abuse as do conservative ones, though given the overall state of academe, the latter are typically in a far more exposed position than the former. We’re glad John Wilson would like to be a collaborator in the effort to defend academic freedom, but he needs to attain greater conceptual clarity before he’s likely to be a useful one.
Steve Balch for the NAS
by Ashley Thorne Posted on 08/01/2008
All the NAS proposes to do is what other groups, such as the NAACP, NOW, & ACLU have been doing for decades. "Vision 2000" - a feminist agenda which went even further with institutions agreeing to be monotored for infractions against feminism, was the rage a decade ago.
I think that the reason why the NAS is getting people concerned is that they know that (a) they have been doing the exact same sort of thing for years and (b) they fear that the NAS is going to go beyond just identifying extremism to instituting it -- as they themselves have done.
From control of professional associations to the search firms that help select campus leaders, from admissions policies to curriculum committees, various ideological groups have established secret shadow governance outfits that control academia today. NAS isn't trying to do this - I don't think - but they have caught the attention of those who are/do.
Why else are they protesting so much?
by Ed Posted on 08/02/2008
Putting the 'Arrrrrrgggg' in Argus
Steve Balch's reply to me is an example of much of what’s wrong with contemporary discourse about academia. Balch has an odd idea of conceptual clarity (apparently it means agreeing with him). I'm very clear where I stand (I've written numerous blogs and two books describing it, see collegefreedom.org). I strongly support the right of everyone to intellectual freedom, which includes the right to "politicized teaching" and the right to make "slights." If NAS only plans to criticize these activities, and not urge any attempt to punish faculty or students for their political speech, then that's perfectly fine. However, I wish they would explicitly reject David Horowitz's approach of institutional grievance procedures for disagreements with a teacher's political views or syllabus, and also devote their resources to addressing the more serious problem of individual rights being violated by administrators at public and private colleges of all kinds.
I never engaged in any kind of "stereotypical guilt by association." I mentioned other conservative groups, both good (FIRE) and bad (Students for Academic Freedom), and wished that progressives created the same. I criticized NAS not for their associations, but for their explicit promise to protect "slights against conservative students" without mentioning any other students. But I believe there are useful collaborations that can be made without embracing the ugly idea that we all have to agree or silence our critiques of each other. I wish the NAS felt the same way.
by JohnKWilson Posted on 08/02/2008
I am profoundly skeptical of Mr. Wilson's call for a monitoring project that would unite "serious defenders of academic freedom" and eventually condemn the many cases where "everyone agrees" that censorship and genuine "violations of rights (not 'slights')" have occurred. Ironically, Mr. Wilson’s own words – undoubtedly meant to convince the reader that he is fit to judge such matters – flatly disqualify him as a fair arbiter of what constitutes an unbiased and truly liberal academy. A few examples must suffice.
In his quest to find an organization that would be fair towards faculty and students of all political stripes, a reader pointed Mr. Wilson to the Academic Freedom Coalition of Nebraska (AFCON) – a group which Mr. Wilson immediately dismissed. Why? AFCON – horror of horrors – includes the Nebraska chapter of the NAS! "I wish there could be a national academic freedom coalition that would unite serious [italics mine] defenders of academic freedom from the left, the right, and the center", he laments. Translation: the NAS is not a serious defender of academic freedom.
How arrogant – not to mention hypocritical – a position to take for someone who fancies himself the protector of liberty for "right-wingers, left-wingers, and everyone in between." Mr. Wilson does not have the courage to engage the NAS in a debate on specific issues, but he does have the chutzpah to dismiss its standing on grounds of being "ideological" (he, of course, is not) and having conservative backers. Sorry, but that does not pass MY laugh test!
Finally, let me say that I read one of Mr. Wilson’s books, "The Myth of Political Correctness: The Conservative Attack on Higher Education." As the title states, the author’s core belief is, and probably always will be, that the enemies of "progressive" education are conservatives. What’s more, conservatives are engaged in a conspiracy to "distort the facts in order to pursue an assault on liberal ideas." Yet, there is a myriad of problems with this silly generalization, easily demonstrated by using the example of group identity – an issue so central to the contemporary ivory tower. Defending individual rights over group rights is, after all, not an assault on liberal ideas. It’s called "defending the Constitution." But I apologize to Mr. Wilson, for I seem to suggest here that he engage in reasoned discourse on a specific issue, when he’d rather dismiss the NAS as irrelevant. His posting makes abundantly clear that he prefers the latter.
Sylvia Wasson
August 3, 2008
by ivorytowerreform Posted on 08/03/2008