Academic Freedom

(cross-posted at Liza's suggestion, from Cocking a Snook!)

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

—Voltaire

Whether or not you ever watched his game show, if you're a Thinking Parent you probably know that the anti-science, anti-human sophistry of Ben Stein is now a movie called "Expelled", on its tightly controlled private propaganda tour prior to its actual "public" opening in the US April 18. [THAT'S DAY AFTER TOMORROW, folks!] My Sunshine State's whole [bible-thumpin'] legislature was invited [to the sneaky preview] but not reporters.

Don't you love it when American right wing nutjobs start crawling even further right and bump right into their avowed enemies?

Iran's hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called Tuesday for a purge of liberal and secular teachers from the country's universities, urging students to return to 1980s-style radicalism.

"Today, students should shout at the president and ask why liberal and secular university lecturers are present in the universities," the official Islamic Republic News Agency quoted Ahmadinejad as saying during a meeting with a group of students.

David Horowitz, publisher of FrontPage magazine, and whose archive of articles is available online, has long advocated for something he calls "an academic bill of rights." Essentially, the academic bill of rights argues in language that would make the sophists blush with pleasure, that universities are not teaching, they are indoctrinating, and therefore, "intellectual balance" should be brought to bear. It's carefully worded to indicate that no professor should be hired or fired based on political views. It all sounds so reasonable. And then, when you click on Professor Horowitz's blurbs for his most recent book, The Professors, you find this:

Home education & other stuff– a libertarian-leaning edu-blog

On this site you will find bloggers bringing you up-to-date homeschooling information, news and views, free online newsletters, networking lists, and selections from Home Education Magazine, including articles, interviews, columnists, resources, reviews and more!

The PDE website was founded by JJ Ross and Nance Confer. It contains a variety of opinions and information on various aspects of education -- all designed to assist parents in making informed choices. In parent-directed education, there usually isn't a "right" answer that fits everyone because it all depends on one's personal thought process.

Ministry supervisor Dolores Umbridge in Harry Potter's Defense Against the Dark Arts classroom made the difference between School and Education crystal-gazing clear.

[quote=JK Rowling in Order of the Phoenix]- "This is School, Mr. Potter. Not the Real World," she said softly.

- "So we're not supposed to be prepared for what's waiting out there?"

- "There's nothing waiting out there . . .
who do you imagine wants to attack children like yourselves? If you are still worried, if someone is alarming you with fibs, I would like to hear about it. I am your friend. Now kindly continue your reading."[/quote]

I had to blog this while the Stupid Girls debate is on, because I consider JK Rowling's cultural smarts to reach far beyond Stupid Girls and the Tyranny of Thin. Having read every Harry Potter book at least once, I'd argue that the Culture of Schooling is a specialty of Rowling's. I'd argue that Order of the Phoenix would make a first-class focus for modern citizenship education throughout all worlds muggle and magical, in any language.

Are we just a pretend world of fashionable thought, obsessed with trying to look and feel smart for each other, neglecting and perhaps unable to actually BE smart and DO smart?

What a week for trying to walk, talk, learn and think at the same time!

First, our 10-year-old son is listening to NPR in the car when he's riveted by news of an important fossil discovery linking fish and land creatures, a so-called tetrapod, lifeforms that left the water to walk on land.

He isn't interested in the news or politics, although he just
discovered Stephen Colbert and gets some of the comedy. He likes the
split screen where the contradictory wisecracks are on the right as
Stephen pontificates on the left. It reminds him of the wisecracking
moose commentary on the Brother Bear DVD.

But yesterday in the car, he suddenly wanted us to turn it up, so
he could hear all about the new fossil link. That was the first really
interesting "news" worth hearing, he proclaimed, but there wasn't enough
to the story. (He actually said this, exactly that way, pronouncing
judgment like a seasoned media critic.)
Intense investigation ensues when we can get online, after which my little boy, who has never been made to think about anything, hugs me with a goofy grin and says, "Hello, my fellow tetrapod!"

I do work that I love. Of course, there are parts of being an academic I'm not too fond of (does anyone like department meetings?), but teaching provides real pleasures for me. It's not something I do, but something I am. And I get to make a living doing it. I'm lucky.

This is one of those weeks where I'm reminded of why I do what I do. I've had a hard time getting into a groove this semester. I'm teaching three classes at two schools, and no two days of the week have the same schedule, so I spent the first couple weeks of the semester constantly asking myself, "Am I on the right campus? Which room am I supposed to be in right now?" (Plus, I'd quite simply forgotten how much work and time this three class/two campus thing takes.) I'm still not comfortable with my schedule (I'm a creature of habit, and the lack of routine is making me a little crazy), but I've gotten used to it enough that this week I finally really hit my stride in the classroom. Things (including me figuring out each group's personality) have finally fallen into place enough that I've got my flow back in the classroom.

In two of my classes, we were discussing Vilma Santiago-Irizarry's Medicalizing Ethnicity. It's a tough read for some of my students (highly abstract and theoretical, which can be difficult for students not used to consistently reading that kind of language), but asks what I think are some important questions. One of the points she raises is that in the implementation of the three bicultural, bilingual Latino psychiatric programs the deployment of "culture" served to actually erase certain forms of cultural difference (indeed to pathologize them). In other words, cultural sensitivity worked to maintain a certain form of normative cultural dominance. One of the things I'm asking them to do is to take a look at how certain cultural sensitivity/awareness programs on campus deploy "culture" to see if similar processes are at work.

Students don't want to be there.
Teachers don't want to be there.

So what's not working in schools (everywhere) is the bribery, coercion and behavior modification? No surprise then, that the expert solution is better compulsion and manipulation, invest our national treasure in more carrots and sticks! -- the teachers and kids of America are a pesky breed of surly mules to be driven to market any way we can get them there. Otherwise, institutions can't make money on them!

[Raising my hand obediently, because I spent a couple of decades being socialized in school myself] --
As a free-thinking individual, may I ask a couple of questions?

For the moment let's leave aside the Alfie Kohn issue of carrots and sticks not "working" in learning and education. Apparently they work in schooling, to at least keep the parking lots full every day and the money flowing.

What's free, open, democratic, progressive, or academic (much less creative culture-fostering) about all this again? Are even liberal-leaning school thinkers now satisfied to equate "something that works" to keep staff and students at school despite their compelling desire not to be there, with something that works to create an educated populace?

Liza's been telling me to introduce myself to the kitchen. I should have obeyed promptly, because it just got harder to be simultaneously factual and fascinating about one's own truths, at least without being shot as a liar over the best bits. I could break Mr. Frey into a million littl-- oh. Too late.

So here's my single shot, and I'd better not hear from Smoking Gun about any of this. . .

Last time I bothered to write a personal intro was pre- 9/11, nearly five years ago. I know walking, talking, reading, joke-making humans younger than my last intro, but as far as it goes it's still true, and still here. It is factual regarding 90% of my life, with nearly 100% candor, and the last 10% hadn't happened yet. (Numbers and percents make human qualities seem so definite and well-documented, don't they?)
And now you can factually if roughly figure out my age, though I'd swear before any judge it won't tell you much about who I really am.

I fancy myself privately complex, full of difficult ideas and language, unfathomable, like Eliot.

***********
Literal Language Moment - "fathom" is a measurement of depth, so when one is said to be unfathomable, which truth is meant: depth merely unmeasured, or unmeasurable? I suppose the former would be called "unfathomed" instead-- as in, we have the right tools but we just haven't gotten around to passing a federal No Child Left Unplumbed law yet. So let's say it's the latter. Can we be sure it means too deep to chart? Couldn't it just as well mean too shallow to show up, not even registering, virtually non-existent?

Blogging with Lorraine about truth and lies, and whether we have the wisdom to know the difference, I commented that moms understand how children construct meaning that is both truth and lie, or to be more accurate, meaning for which the labels "truth" or "lie" have little or no meaning!

. . .just ask a child who ate the last cookie, or why his dog suddenly has a bald patch and where are the scissors?! The answers will depend (most passionately!) on what the child believes you may believe, and what he or she WANTS to believe, and not much on evidence, objectivity or looming jurisprudence.

Then this morning, I came across a book review of "Real Kids: Creating Meaning in Everyday Life" in which Susan L. Engel apparently pleads with us to be at least as interested in the ways that children think, their thought processing if you will, as we are in their outcomes or achievements.

(And JJ pleads with citizens everywhere to reject the lie that society's Job One is to label the natural thinking processes of children as some unnatural problem or other, the better to impose years of professional intervention in the name of national security and all that is holy.)

In what seems an eternity ago, I wrote about Minnesota State Senator Michelle Bachman's attempt to pass an "Academic Bill of Rights" and some of the issues I had with her, and the silly movement she was acting as a figurehead for. This issue is a big concern to those of us who teach for a living. My main concern in that post was that students, parents, and legislators often aren't the best judges of what's relevant course material. Those of us hired to teach (and research and write) are expected to have some kind of expertise in our subject matter. After all, why spend a career studying something if it means you still have no more understanding of it than someone who's never engaged in such study?

Michael Berube has posted an exceptional article on these attempts as they relate to the topic of academic freedom more generally. For anyone who takes knowledge production and teaching seriously, this is a must read. (Yeah, it's a bit long--well, for a blog post; for those of us who are consistently reading 30-to-60-page articles and 300-page books, it's not so bad.) Just go read it.