Wood blames me for “the relentless perversity of its interpretations of the issues before the faculty senate.” To the contrary, I think my analysis is still on target, and here is my point-by-point rebuttal.

Contrary to his claims that he’s not proposing to ban controversial activities, Wood proclaims, “a university should not have any ‘programming,’ as Res Life conceives it, at all.”

Wood claims, “If university staff want to bring speakers onto campus they may do so, and students do it all the time. Faculty may also do so. But those events are not university programs that have been awarded the imprimatur of the university.” That’s not true: most events on campuses are organized as part of university programs. Freedom must apply to university programs, not just those organized on the side.

Wood writes, “When a faculty senate approves a course, it is not given an official sanction or status by the university itself in the way that the Res Life curriculum has been.” However, it Is not clear why a Residence Life program represents the official position of a university any more than a course does.
 
According to Wood, “it is absurd to think that non-faculty staff at the university should be able to teach anything they want without the approval of the faculty.” It’s not absurd at all. In fact, the opposite is absurd. Anybody can “teach” anything to voluntary groups without the approval of faculty.

Wood argues, “it is the responsibility of the faculty to terminate programs in the dorms that in its considered view are inappropriate for a university.” Actually, no, the power of the faculty to terminate programs is primarily limited to the power over the curriculum. No one imagines that the faculty actually have the power to eliminate the entire Residence Life program, and the administration would overrule them if they tried. Faculty don’t have the power to ban this program, and they particularly don’t have the power to ban certain aspects of it because they’re deemed controversial.

In response to my question, “Why can't a residence hall have intellectual activities and engage students in serious ideas?” Wood replies, “It can. If it wanted to, it could ask the faculty to organize such activities. It could also ask the University itself to pay for such activities.” The problem is that faculty are not experts at organizing student activities, as Residence Hall staff are. Nor do faculty usually have the time or interest to organize such activities. Nor can most universities afford to hire faculty to work organizing these activities. I wish that universities hired faculty for Residence Halls, and I wish that most faculty volunteered to organize extracurricular activities. But until that happens, we have the university as it is, not the dream university where anything short of some ideal can be banned.

Of course, even if faculty were truly in charge of Residence Hall activities, Wood would still object to controversial programs. So it is clear that the “faculty control” issue is a mere convenient tool utilized for this case, and not a true argument.

I am glad that Wood admits that compulsion and the particular flaws of the past Delaware programs are not at issue: “Even if a program like U Delaware’s is offered on a voluntary basis, and there are students who might want it, it still shouldn’t be offered by a university, because a university should not itself support such ‘programming.’”

Wood claims, “dorm residents can arrange for ‘intellectual activities’ that ‘engage …serious ideas’ on their own. But their having the right to do this doesn't mean that Res Life should be able to run its own programs at the university’s expense.”  But if a faculty member was banned from mentioning politics in the classroom, would we say that this protected academic freedom on the grounds that students would still be free to speak? That, in fact, is David Horowitz’s approach, and it proposes a tremendous restraint on intellectual freedom.

Student freedom is not sufficient for a free university. Nor is faculty freedom. A free university must have freedom for everyone, and it must include freedom to organize activities relevant to the duties of the individual. If the job of Residence Hall staff is to add to the enjoyment and education of students (and it is), then they must be free to develop those plans. Selective bans on political or controversial speech are never allowed, and that’s what Wood is demanding.

Wood quotes me writing, “The quality of the ResLife program is entirely irrelevant to the question of whether it should be banned” and declares, “This is absurd. It is entirely relevant to the question whether the proposal should have been rejected—as in fact it should have been.”

Of course, quality always matters at a university—but not to the question of whether freedom is allowed. When a program is bad, you might fire the employees or seek to make it better; but you must never declare a ban on controversial or political views from being expressed. Wood doesn’t object to Delaware’s educational program being badly done; to the contrary, he objects to the entire concept. An effective and well-done program might be even worse to him.

Wood argues. “Staff members at a university do not teach. That is the function of the faculty…There are widely recognized norms and standards for faculty instruction in the academy, such as those adopted by the AAUP….Because teaching is not the responsibility of staff members, there are no comparable norms or standards for them.” That’s not true. Staff members do have norms, standards, and qualifications. One of these norms is that staff should seek to educate students through extracurricular activities. Some people may not like the choices staff make in educating students, but they should seek to criticize, not prohibit, those choices when the rights of students are not being violated.
 
According to Wood, “Students pay tuition and attend college in order to be treated as students not global citizens.” Who decided that? And what does it mean? Why can’t the education of students include informing them about the world? Of course, students are perfectly free to ignore anything about being a “global citizen” and concentrate solely on their studies. But for students who want to be global citizens, why can’t staff be allowed to organize programs that inform them? 

Some of John K. Wilson's disagreement with my essay seems to involve disagreement about facts, and some of it appears to be about values.

As for the facts:

My essay is built on a number of claims that I regard as factual, including the following:

(1) Curricular programming is, and has been presented by the University of Delaware and its Res Life division as, part of the educational function of the university.

(2) Res Life's curricular programming differs from the education offered by the curricular sector of the university proper--i.e., classroom instruction by the faculty--in a number of significant ways, including:

(a) The "programming" is not taught by faculty, but by staff members, who report directly to the Administration, not to the faculty.

(b) It is intended to be "transformative" in ways that are not typical of the classroom. Its aim is not simply (or even principally) to transmit knowledge or develop critical skills. Its principal aim is to make students understand their responsibilities as global citizens (as defined, of course, by Res Life), and all the goal setting--which has been very detailed and specific--is about getting them to think and act accordingly.

(3) Since Res Life's "educational" programming, according to the university's own organizational charts, bypasses the faculty senate, it is not subject to the constraints and rules protecting academic freedom, the conscience of students, and other vital matters that have been the concern--in fact the articulated concern-- of the professoriate for decades.

(4) Res Life itself has no articulated norms of a similar character, either at U Delaware or anywhere else. (Nor is it clear--given its overwhelming commitment to "transformative learning" and its wholesale commitment to attitudinal goal setting and behavior modification--that it could have such norms.)

(5) The University of Delaware, like any other university, public or private, is a corporate entity. It is run by the President, who is selected by the trustees of the university and remains in office only so long as he or she has their confidence.

But a university differs from most corporate entities because a university has shared governance: educational matters are in the hands of the faculty. When the faculty senate approves a course, its approval does not mean that the faculty itself approves of the views taught in that course: it simply means that the faculty deems that course to have met its academic standards. It follows that when a faculty member teaches a course, the university itself is not committed to the views taught in that course.

Because there is no tradition, and because there are no rules, for shared governance with non-academic divisions like Res Life, the same cannot be said of a Res Life program, whether it is purportedly educational, or simply involves pizza parties or other kinds of entertainment. These are "owned" by the university in a way that no course taught in the curricular sector of the university is.

There are other facts that lie at the bottom of this dispute that I could enumerate, but perhaps this will do, because it is clear that Wilson isn't comfortable with even this set of facts.

The principal problem with his response to my paper is that he seems to want to have it both ways. Half the time he wants to defend the "programming" that I have just described. At other times, when the facts make him squirm, he wants to deny the facts.

It might be possible to have a discussion with Wilson once he has gotten clear with me and with himself about when the disagreement is over facts, and when it is over values.

As for some of the factual disagreements:

<<According to Wood, “it is absurd to think that non-faculty staff at the university should be able to teach anything they want without the approval of the faculty.” It’s not absurd at all. In fact, the opposite is absurd. Anybody can “teach” anything to voluntary groups without the approval of faculty.>>

This misses the point. Wilson, apparently, would like to think of Res Life staff members as free agents on campus, teaching anything they like to voluntary groups, like Socrates in the public square (agora) of Athens. This is absurd, and a simple denial of the facts. Res Life is a division of the University. Its staff members are paid by the University and are legally responsible agents of the University (and are even so in important ways that a faculty member is not).

If we cannot reach agreement about this simple fact, then we cannot have agreement about anything else, because we will not be able to agree about the implications of having the University committed to "transformative" educational programming of the kind that U Delaware is running in its dorms.

<<Wood argues, “it is the responsibility of the faculty to terminate programs in the dorms that in its considered view are inappropriate for a university.” Actually, no, the power of the faculty to terminate programs is primarily limited to the power over the curriculum. No one imagines that the faculty actually have the power to eliminate the entire Residence Life program, and the administration would overrule them if they tried. Faculty don’t have the power to ban this program, and they particularly don’t have the power to ban certain aspects of it because they’re deemed controversial.>>

No one has questioned the existence of the "entire Residence Life program." What has been questioned is only that new and innovative part of it that implicates and diminishes the rights and responsibilities of the faculty—i.e., the part of it that claims to be educational.

Does the faculty have the power to "ban" this program? Well, here we find Wilson using the term "ban" again. The faculty can't and shouldn't ban the views expressed in U Delaware's Res Life program, but it certainly can and should bar the University itself (i.e., its paid employees and staff) from running the curricular program.

As I have pointed out in my essay, we know that the faculty does have this power because President Harker submitted the Res Life curricular program to an up and down vote before the faculty senate this spring. This was not a gratuitous act of generosity on his part: it was a simple recognition of the fact that Res Life itself insisted that its curricular programming was educational, and that it therefore needed the approval of the faculty senate.

These are simple facts about university governance, and so far as I can tell, Wilson is simply in total denial about them.

<<Of course, even if faculty were truly in charge of Residence Hall activities, Wood would still object to controversial programs.>>

The point is that if faculty were truly in charge of the purportedly educational Res Hall activities, they would be subject as faculty to the norms that apply to classroom instruction. As it is, Res Life is not subject to these norms--and as I have suggested above, it is not clear, given the goal-setting and other aspects of "transformative education" that Res Life has established for itself, that it ever could be.

<<Staff members do have norms, standards, and qualifications. One of these norms is that staff should seek to educate students through extracurricular activities.>>

I ask: what are these norms? Where and when has it ever been established in the university tradition that "staff should seek to educate students through extracurricular activities" outside the purview of the faculty senate and the academic norms of the professoriate?

I am convinced that all that is required to stop the nationwide Communitarian Res Life movement is a clear description of it, and an agreement and understanding about some of the simple, undeniable facts about it on the part of faculty and administrators--and perhaps even of a lot of Res Life professionals themselves. Wilson clearly does like such "programming," though the weakness of his position comes through clearly when he feels compelled to dispute some of the central and most obvious facts about it.