Student journalists at Miami University are not the only ones who aren't allowed to criticize the faculty. The editors of Reed College's student paper Quest have resigned after a satirical send-up of the English department chair's Afrocentric teaching led to accusations of racism and widespread outrage among students and faculty.

According to a column in yesterday's Oregonian, the February 4 issue of Quest (which is not, alas, online as far as I can tell) featured a centerfold spread modelled after hotornot.com, a website dedicated to determining, well, who's hot and who's not. Entitled "Academic or Not?", the centerfold focussed on five Reed professors, inviting readers to judge the quality of their work. Reed English department chair Pancho Savery was one of them: "Incendiary afrocentrist with alarmist concerns? Enlightened intelectual (sic) with informed opinions? He preaches multiculturalism, but is his agenda unscrupulously Black and White?", the Quest spread asked. "You Decide!"

Every year, Savery delivers a lecture entitled "Black Athena" to the students in Humanities 110, a core course all freshmen are required to take. Savery's lecture presents the familiar--and discredited--argument that Greek culture has African origins; it also challenges Reed College to design a more "diverse" curriculum. Savery gets standing ovations for his lecture--but he doesn't convince everyone. One student described it as "more inflammatory rhetoric than earnest scholarship." Another wrote that "While exiting that lecture, I had the same reaction expressed in the satire: Alarmist incendiary afrocentrism . . . I thought his argument lacked merit because it was entirely reactionary, and made significant logical leaps that I believe would be indefensible if challenged."

But the unspoken rule appears to be that students should keep such objections to themselves. Quest's suggestion that Savery's lecture may be more sensationalistic than scholarly, that it smacks of an agenda, and that as such it might not be the most ethical or responsible pedagogical performance Reed has ever seen, caused a collective campus meltdown. There were cries of racism and calls for the resignation of the student editors responsible for the spread. The Reed student senate threatened to withdraw funding for the paper. The poor timing of Quest's unwarranted display of racial insensitivity was loudly lamented: February is Black History Month after all. The communal pain was such that the Multicultural Resource Center held "a meeting for students who need support and a safe place."

The letters poured in, and many made their way into the pages of Quest. Since Quest isn't online, we can't look at all of them. But some select excerpts have made the Oregon papers. Among them were some intellectually dishonest gems from faculty. They accused Quest of ad hominem attack--as if criticizing a professor's pedagogy were the same thing as personally attacking him. They argued that the paper had violated community standards of civility, thus damaging "the trust and respect we share as members of an academic community"--as if the free exchange of ideas were not the lifeblood of an intellectual community; as if trust could be born of hypocritical silence and respect could come from sham displays of tolerance. They argued that Savery was targeted because he is black--as if questioning a professor's extreme ideas is akin to hate crime when the professor happens not to be white. As Jacqueline Dirks, who chairs Reed's American Studies Committee, opined, "It is in the assertion that simply addressing race makes a black professor 'less academic' that the racism lies." Student leaders concurred. The message was clear: Savery was not to be criticized because he is black. And because Savery is black, criticism of his questionable pedagogy is racist.

There were voices of dissent: one student wrote that "What constitutes 'latent racism' ... is the assumption that Pancho Savery, because he is black and teaches about African American-related issues, should be immune from criticism. ... This expression of unacceptable paternalism (often manifested in 'white guilt') holds minorities to a lower standard -- intolerable in an academic community such as ours." And as Quest co-editor Jesse Hoffman wrote before he resigned, "It is this kind of hyperbole and self-fabricated threat that disrupts an intellectual community from engaging in productive debate."

But those dissenting voices are less likely to surface at Reed from now on. Reed elects its student editors; according to the student body president, the editorial board of Quest has an obligation to reflect the values of the student body; its members can be recalled when they fail to live up to that obligation. Quest has a greater duty to conform to campus orthodoxy than to seek the truth;it might more properly be named Mirror.

More disturbing than the prior restraint under which Quest must operate, though, is the failure of Reed faculty to provide a voice of reason and to model how citizens of a free society ought to behave. If events at Reed show nothing else, they show how invested faculty (not just at Reed, but across the country) can be in creating and maintaining an illiberal, anti-intellectual campus atmosphere (all in the name of inclusion and tolerance, of course). They show how willing faculty can be to encourage their students in the ways and means of censorious ignorance. Levelling spurious charges of racism rather than teaching students how to dissect ideas, assemble cogent argument, debate fairly, and give and receive criticism, the professors who condemned Quest's satirical spread as racist without, apparently, addressing the substance of its critique--that Savery is disseminating ideology as history--are themselves guilty of the very racism they are so eager to decry in others: after all, to suggest that a professor's ideas should not be challenged because he is black is to suggest that this professor can't handle criticism and that his work cannot stand up to scrutiny. It is to suggest that the chair of Reed's English department is a second-class citizen, one who cannot be held to the same standards as everyone else because he cannot measure up to them.

That this class is required is the same as "believe the lie or else". It would be one thing if it was an elective course, but that Reed indulges this guy and his faulty scholarship is another. DO they require a "creation science" course as well? One more school my son won't be applying to.

I had to chuckle about the latest turmoil at Reed. My mother, who passed away 6 years ago, would have laughed out loud and commented along the lines of "the more things change...." When she attended Reed in the late 30's, it was a hot bed of student communist activity. My mother was, however, in the peculiar world that was (and apparently still is) Reed, a geek. She liked to dance, listen to jazz, smoke and keep as many guys on a string as possible. In short, she would have been a great gal and a popular coed almost anywhere but Reed. She regarded most of her classmates as stuffy, puerile and ultimately laughable. And many of her professors childlike and credulous. (She wasn't a frivolous party gal, though. She enrolled at Reed at the age of 15 and was a straight A student.) I don't doubt she would have a similar reaction to Mr. Pancho and his acolytes. I haven't related this to downplay the seriousness of the matter to those who are being tyrannized. But rather to put it in some perspective. It's just Reed--although it is apparent from your diligent and insightful reporting that the foolishness has spread to far too many campuses. Keep up the good work.

Larry Dempsey
Modesto, California

Could you please remind me why we even need colleges? People used to do just fine with apprenticeships. If someone can learn to design and make a watch that way, why not every other (useful) thing learned in college? How do these cranks improve anyoneís life anyway?

Re AB: how do colleges improve anyone's life? Two words: earning potential. Baby. Okay, three words.

Seriously, though, if you're serious... People "used to do just fine" with horses and buggies, minimal dental care, and Pentium 286's. But how much fun is that, and for how long? Ideally, a university and/or college should pool the best intellectual and financial resources in the area to create improvements in society. Right? Ideally.

Ms. O'Connor, your write up was again outstanding.

Wm Duffy

Liam:

Re AB: how do colleges improve anyone's life? Two words: earning potential. Baby. Okay, three words.

That seems to be the main defense. A college degree is required for many jobs, and almost all well-paying ones. Too often college is not so much a place to learn as to get your ticket punched.

Some economist wonder if that is the case that there is an economic benefit. A student who spends four years at college could, if earning $20,000 per year at another job, earn $80,000 in the same time. Add that to $120,000 in tuition and the cost of college is $200,000. It has to really boost your income to be worth while.

Unlike modern dentistry or computers, college does not seem like an improvement over what went before. The greatest expansion in wealth in this society occurred when fewer than 5% of population went to college.

The answer to the apparent paradox posed above (college increases earning potential?)is I think easily resolved. Once upon a time college graduates had a distinctive edge over everyone else when it came to basic skills such as writing, reading, and quantitative reasoning. Moreover, four years of meeting deadlines, learning how to take criticism, following detailed instructions, and generally being intellectually harassed was an excellent preparation for the real world.

But in the last twenty years, this edge has gradually eroded. The other day I saw one of my former advisees and students, putting her degree to good work in a coffee shop. Alas, this is not an isolated example.

So in her case the counter argument is definitely true. Why did she bother (and please don't bring up the idea that she's a better educated person, most the courses she took--was encouraged to take--are the equivalent of knitting or welding, but without the skill benefits)

Like an enormous number of students, she went through a system which has long since discarded any sense of rigor, and thus any real competitive advantage, so it sort of makes sense she's waiting on tables. I wish it didn't.

Hmm... randomly came across this post. Well, here's what a current Reed student thinks.

First off, Poncho's not taken too seriously by most students I know; he's seen as more entertainment than scholarship. This particular lecture, while part of a required course, is not mandatory, and one can easily skip out on it and the following conference with no real impact on one's grade.

Second, although the AcademicorNot centerfold acted as a trigger for the recall, it wasn't the only reason. To put it bluntly, the editors did a piss-poor job, not even bothering to proofread the articles they posted. Furthermore, they published some rather obscene and unnecessarily inflammitory articles by a character named Adam Zuniga that made a great many people on campus angry, and irritated almost everybody else (including me). This in and of itself isn't necessarily actionable, but then they published a response of his to a letter complaining about his being published *in the same issue in which the letter was printed.* His response was about the same length and maturity level as Norman Mailer's response to Dennis Miller. There was no good reason to publish it, and no reason to give him special access to the paper. In all, the editors were not fulfilling their duties.

Third, the Quest has not historically been a blunt instrument of campus orthodoxy. No one really cares enough about it to give what it says any weight. In any event, even a conservative like myself has been able to get published in the Quest simply by hitting "send."

So the situation at Reed isn't quite as dire as it might seem. It's simply a product of a few people who like to complain taking advantage of the Reed "bubble" to grab attention.