Fjordman of Gates of Vienna has written a long, reflective, and funny post on the politicization of higher education, using Ward Churchill and ACTA's report, How Many Ward Churchills? as starting points. Fjordman begins by noting what many of the ACTA report critics have strenuously denied, that there is a logical connection between the fact of the Ward Churchill scandal and the question, "How many professors like Ward Churchill are there?": "His notoriety focused attention, not just on his outlandish views and alleged fraudulent activities, but also on the entire "tenured radical" phenomenon in the modern academy. How many other Ward Churchills are there? Is it likely that he toils alone in his tower of radical pedagogy?" He then goes on to describe what reading the ACTA report was like for him: "Reading the ACTA report makes me glad that my son, the future Baron Bodissey, is a chemistry major. Mathematics and the sciences are largely exempt from the ugly cant that infests the humanities courses," he writes; "One of the notable features of the classes listed by ACTA is how much alike they all are. ... They all sound alike, and after a while the litany of transgressive gendered oppression whiteness colonial racism community activism imperialism social change blurs into a meaningless background drone. ... After reading a few of these, you say to yourself, "You can't make this s**t up!" These course listings are like lefty Mad-Libs, with a predictable script and blanks to be filled in."

Fjordman concludes with a quiz:

Below are four course listings. Three are real courses from major universities funded in part by your tax dollars. One is a Gates of Vienna creation. Can you tell which is which?

SOC 31: Prisons: The American Way of Punishment. Prison as a place of confinement, punishment and rehabilitation is the focus of this survey of the history, philosophies, structure and operation of corrections in the United States. The course critically examines the concept of prison as a total institution and its panopticism as a model of social control that extends to other social contexts. The course will explore the world of inmates and their strategies of subcultural adaptations to and resistance against incarceration; as well as the role of the prison staff. Particular attention will be paid to how gender, race, economics and politics structure prison policies and dynamics. Specific topics may include cultural representations of prison life, implications of current sentencing practices, privatization and the prison-industrial complex, incarcerated mothers, capital punishment, juvenile justice, and alternatives to incarceration.

ARHI 186wBK. Whiteness: Race, Sex, and Representation. An interdisciplinary interrogation of linguistic, conceptual, and practical solipsisms that contributed to the construction and normalization of whiteness in aesthetics, art, visual culture, film, and mass media. Course questions the dialectics of "blackness" and "whiteness" that dominate Western intellectual thought and popular culture, thereby informing historical and contemporary notions and representations of race, gender, sexuality, and class.

English 341: The Etymology of Oppression. This course examines the development of the English language as an instrument of the Anglo-Saxon power structure. Topics include: the removal of gender from English nouns, and how this process accelerated the suppression of the Feminine in thought and discourse; the Great Vowel Shift, and how the replacement of diphthongs with monophthongs helped enforce oppressive masculine power-oriented language structures by removing the softer and more intimate vowels; the development of eccentric, irregular, and inconsistent word forms and spelling, which created a despised and subservient class of "ignorant" and "illiterate" people, ripe for capitalist exploitation.

Sociology 384b: Black Marxism. The growth of global racism suggests the symmetry of the expansion of capitalism and the globalization of racial hierarchy. In this context, global racism works to shatter possibilities for solidarity, distort the meaning of justice, alter the context of wrong, and makes it possible for people to claim ignorance of past and present racial atrocities, discrimination, exclusion, oppression, and genocide. By concentrating on the works of Black Marxist intellectuals, this course examines the discourse of confrontation, and the impact of Black Marxist thought in contributing to anti-racist knowledge, theory, and action.

That said, I find Fjordman's quiz to be at once funny (in a depressing sort of way) and highly apposite. If you want to make the point that at some crucial level academe's pedagogical commitment to politically engaged teaching has become a hollow and imitative exercise in striking certain once radical but now overly ritualized poses, if you want to make the point that teaching with "liberal conviction," as Michael Berube describes it, can and does degenerate into teaching according to an increasingly hackneyed and predictable script, then there are few better ways to do it than Fjordman has done it. Berube himself notes that some sort of attempt at a balanced perspective is central to truly responsible, committed pedagogy of any stripe: "legitimate, well-founded beliefs ... should be presented--ideally, along with legitimate competing beliefs--in college classrooms." I agree with that. But I also can't help but notice that this is an ideal that too often fails to be realized in practice.

Timothy Burke insists that this failure is more a symptom of bad teaching than of ideological intention; this is part of his broader argument that the real issue with academe is careerism, not politicization, and that attempts to bring political issues to the fore only really amount to unhelpful and damaging distortions ("Zeroing in on and correcting the intellectual and institutional sins of academia is an important conversation, but increasingly I think the public version of it is malformed beyond repair"). I take Burke's point; careerism is a huge factor in the shape of current academic scholarship and teaching, in more ways than I can enumerate here. But at the same time, I feel strongly that Burke is drawing a false dichotomy between critiques of careerism in higher education and critiques of higher education's politicization. These things go hand in hand--if only because careerists cynically morph into the sorts of scholars and teachers the academic zeitgeist requires. At this point in time, that means they morph into scholars and teachers who deplore conservatism (without often having a clear sense of what that term means, or of how many kinds of conservatism there are), and who embrace the fashionably progressive tenets of current academic style: diversity, multiculturalism, interdisciplinarity, and so on. That this embracing may in fact be less owing to true conviction and more the result of careerist conniving only makes the situation sadder to contemplate. An academe filled with ideologues is an unpleasant enough prospect. An academe filled with convictionless bounders who are masquerading as politically committed scholars and teachers is worse.

There is much more that could be said here; I regard this post as an exploratory sketch rather than a definitive set of claims. Comments, as ever, are more than welcome.

Thanks for this. This is the kind of exchange I've been seeking. I hope you can see how this is a completely different point of departure than the one ACTA's most recent report offers.

It's certainly true that there's a kind of generic raceclassgendersexuality language that appears in course descriptions, and that's worth criticizing. But it's worth criticizing for what it is: not "political" language, but empty language, a posture, not a politics. And it's worth criticizing not because it is a consistently useful guide to what happens in the classroom, but because it evacuates or makes meaningless scholarly language and scholarly debates, including the way that those debates enter into the classroom.

It's also worth being precise, as I've insisted in these discussions. The brush of "emptiness" is being applied way, way too liberally, so that wholly legitimate courses with very little boilerplate language are being tagged simply because a keyword search found race, class, gender or what have you somewhere in the description. To go to one of the recent posts at the ACTA blog, Anne Neal appears to be defending a characterization of George Fredrickson's book Racism as unacceptably "biased" merely because it contends that modern racism is strongly rooted in the Western tradition. That's a serious empirical and critical argument, made carefully in Frerickson--it's not empty polemic or mere "politics". The defining characteristic of scholarship is a certain careful respect for craft and detail. I think before we're going to go around questioning individual people's professionalism, some basic respect to them is due. Criticizing someone's ideas or arguments or claims is one thing; suggesting that they're unprofessional in some substantial way is another, more serious accusation. You shouldn't just view that kind of criticism as "simple", or equivalent to writing a detailed argumentative response to someone's argumentative claims. Reputation capital is the only capital that academics have, in many ways.

Anyway, that empty language is worth criticizing, but with a sense of proportionality. Just as it's worth criticizing, in the same manner, an academic who casually uses racial or gender stereotypes in publications or official contexts. Again, with a sense of proportionality, with a scrupulous sense that one is not saying that there ought to be institutional or regulatory consequences for such speech, or attempts to supress its occurance. I just haven't seen those scruples reiterated as a matter of foundational principle in the latest round of criticisms, and I wonder why, given your (and other critics') previous clarity about how important those commitments are as a matter of first principle.

I suppose I would insist on zeroing on issues like careerism, over-specialization or bad pedagogy because it disaggregates a range of complaints that I think have been sloppily confused for one another in the recent discussions. If, for example, we're concerned about the emptiness of a kind of obligatory rhetoric in course descriptions and scholarly writing, what we're worried about really is careerism, not politics. If you tell people to stop being political, but fail to address the underlying incentive system that rewards academics for conformity to perceived fashion, all you'll get is a replacement of raceclassgendersexuality descriptions with studiously "neutral", positivist or some other kind of empty language. I think you and I have both had something of the same experience of feeling that we were "remade" in certain respects by our graduate training, and then struggling to reclaim our voices later on. The problem there is not politics, it is a kind of academic sociology that allows dominant figures to produce and enforce their favored orthodoxies as the price of entry to the academy. That would not change if you somehow got people to "depoliticize". So when I hear your concern, or Mark Bauerlein's concern, or ACTA's concern, for these kinds of problems, I want to hear how you're going to live and act and practice in an academy that is more open to pluralism, more joyful, more passionate, in a word, freer than it is. And what I hear instead is a kind of dourness--nothing MORE than the criticism, nothing more than a complaint, and no model of how to be a scholar and academic beyond the replacement of one orthodoxy with another.

If, on the other hand, we're concerned with misconduct in the classroom, then surely we're concerned with something wider by far than "politics". And the subset of people who may concern us because they enforce orthodoxies on other scholars or set careerist targets is not necessarily at all the subset of people who are poor teachers in some substantive fashion. I'm keen to have both conversations, but I'm not keen to have them mashed together and confused for one another.

Thanks for the link!

I'd like to say that I wrote the essay, but I didn't; it's by the great Norwegian blogger, Fjordman. He has chosen not to be a contributor at Gates of Vienna, which means that he sends his guest-posts to me, and I post them for him. That's why they have my byline, although I credit him at the top of the post.

I wish I could claim credit for such fine work, but I can't!

If you could change your post to attribute the piece to Fjordman, we'd both appreciate it.

I keep thinking that these problems have something to do with the vast expansion of academia over the past couple of decades. There is probably a pretty limited set of people who have both the talent and the disposition to be good university professors, and at some point in the expansion, perhaps we began pulling in people who really didn't have all that much interest in the creation and propagation of knowledge, but rather were drawn in by perceived "lifestyle" or because they couldn't think of what else to do.

I don't think anyone with a burning interest in any particular discipline, be it medieval French poetry or quantum mechanics, would be inclined to the kind of politicization we are seeing, regardless of their private polical convictions.

David, one thing that is very clear to me about the generation of scholars who retired in the 1990s, who came into the academy before its baby boom expansion, is that not that many of them could be described as people with a fierce, abiding, burning interest in a particular discipline. A lot of them drifted into academia in an era when the salaries were very poor and when relatively few Americans went to college. In the humanities in particular, academia had a kind of genteel, amiable, almost amateur character. There were certainly people who were passionately, almost monastically, dedicated to their scholarly work in those years, but I don't think you could say that once we were dedicated and now we pull in lots of people who would be better off doing something else.

There's another thing that I think could be talked about instead of politicization in the way that it's being loosely and hazily invoked in some of these discussions. Namely, what the benchmarks of significance have become in intellectual life. Now here I think the critics of politicization have a potentially potent argument, but they need to come at it from another angle, and respect some of its implications. To some extent, the academic humanities were drawn into making "political" claims for their significance because almost everyone, right and left, started imagining the significance of knowledge in terms of its applications. The right had one way of seeing that, the left another, but in the late 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, applicability, usefulness, and so on, became an increasingly universal demand made of people producing knowledge. It got encoded into grant applications, into the language of job searches, into the conceptual framework of disciplines.

So to that the answer is not "depoliticize". It is "Promote the uselessness of the academic humanities. In fact, treasure their uselessness." I think a lot of scholars would welcome having to forward everything they write with weighty pronouncements of its grand importance, of having to play for all the marbles at every moment. This does mean accepting an asymmetry between applied disciplines (engineering) and those that are not necessarily so (literary criticism, history) and not always making that asymmetry a comparative disadvantage in terms of support and rewards and implied importance. It also means redefining the mission of the scholarly humanities less as an intervention and more as an explanatory, inspirational, interpretive mission, with a large public component. But if someone wanted to suggest that this kind of redefinition is a proper response to "politicization", that would make good sense.

"a lot of scholars would welcome having to forward everything they write with weighty pronouncements of its grand importance"...I think you meant *not* having to forward everything they write with these weighty pronouncements?

Re your comment about people in the humanities pre-baby-boom...why would individuals have chosen to "drift in" to the field, given relatively low salaries, unless they had a pretty serious interest in what they were doing? I can imagine that this might be the case for those who had an inherited income of some kind, but doubt if this category represented a significant proportion of the professorial population.

To some extent, the academic humanities were drawn into making "political" claims for their significance because almost everyone, right and left, started imagining the significance of knowledge in terms of its applications. The right had one way of seeing that, the left another....

What are the purposes toward which the Republicans on this nation's English and Art History faculties are making their research and teaching instrumental? Who and where are they?

Really, Art, as a historian who is a Republican, I don't think you're doing much to further this discussion if you think its aim ought to be the creation of an eeop for Republicans in academe. That just creates another set of the identity-based job descriptions that Erin has been mocking.

Really, Art, as a historian who is a Republican, I don't think you're doing much to further this discussion if you think its aim ought to be the creation of an eeop for Republicans in academe. That just creates another set of the identity-based job descriptions that Erin has been mocking.

I neither stated nor implied that that was my aim, Prof. Luker. My challenge to Prof. Burke was to state the signature ways that academic humanists of a conservative bent seek to use the humanities instrumentally. That is what he implied was occurring. I also challenged him to name any academic humanists of a conservative bent.

At the liberal arts institution I know best, there might be seven or eight faculty who dissent from the Official Idea in this manner, on a campus of over 200 professors and lecturers. They range across four academic disciplines and not one is under fifty (while three are over sixty). Two are political theorists (whose work is by its nature 'relevant' to some degree) and one is an architectural historian. Given their age and numbers, they cannot do much to distort and disfigure the humanities in the manner described, even if that were their purpose. This is on a campus where the literary scholars remain interested in imaginative literature (not garage sale sociology) and Queer Studies has yet to come to town. There are likely proportionatly fewer such people elsewhere.

Again, where are the rafts of literature and film studies courses aiming to promote in students a radical critique of the abortion-and-divorce culture alongside those which promote a particular take on race relations, the lives of women, and sodomy? Prof. Burke's professed concern with the parallel depredations of the 'left' and 'right' is misplaced.

A mulligan for you both:

Christendom College likely does teach the humanities as a component of advancing the Catholic faith, and their decisions on the contours of their curriculum likely reflect that. They employ no artifice and are quite transparent about their (otherworldly) purposes, which sets them apart from both secular and faux-Catholic institutions. Institutions like Christendom are too small, too few, and too odd to cause a systemic problem in humanities instruction in this country, even if their progam were troublesome.

One other thought: it seems like, in all disciplines, there has been a much greater emphasis on *methodology*. And those who are interested soley in methodology rather than in substance tend, in general, to be more emotionally-detached and may well have a higher probability of being "convictionless bounders."

Art: You misunderstand the point I made above. I was describing a general turn towards demands for applied knowledge from the 1950s onwards, a sense that the value of all knowledge, in any field, was measured by its applied usefulness. The humanities were encompassed by that and affected by it. But if you want a specifically conservative example of the way that logic works in reference to the humanities, certainly one possibility would be the demand that knowledge in the humanities serve either moral or nationalist functions, e.g., that the study of the humanities promote moral or ethical character or that it work to instill national or civic spirit. That's a specific kind of logic of "application". What I'm thinking of more is simply that as as society we came to value more and more the proposition that knowledge be useful and have application, and it became harder and harder to talk about a practice of the humanities that did not have any immediate application to social or political problems and issues as a consequence.

David: again, the turn to methodology is actually a pretty old thing in the social sciences and the humanities. It doesn't start after 1968; it's in full flower in the 1950s, in fact. And much of its initial thrust came from people who were not leftists as we presently commonly understand the term.

Timothy...here is the kind of thing I have in mind when I refer to the excessive focus on methodology. Were things really as extreme as the Professor X / Professor Y anecdotes, way back in the 1950s?

I agree that "the turn to methodology" is not exclusive to the left; indeed, it can be found in the business schools, which are probably among the least-leftist departments on campus. A recent HBR article mentioned that right after WWII, a manufacturing course at Harvard was taught by a guy who actually ran an auto assembly plant. Today, it is much more likely that the course would be on "mathematical decision-making tools for manufacturing" and would be much more focused on the elegance of the tools than on their actual value on the plant floor.

It's been said that "when the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail," and I think our society is full of people trying to use hammers to fasten screws and saw planks.

Timothy,

The professors may not be leftists as we currently think of them. The question is whether back in the 1950's the professors you are talking about were leftists as leftists were thought of in the 1950's. You need to remember that the 1950's was the heyday of the communist/red scares and there were a lot of professors who were torn between the communist/capitalistic viewpoints. I attended a liberal arts university of the Oberlin stripe at that time and I know that my professors would mark you down if you did not preach the socialistic point of view and that was in the Endlish classes and the political science classes. Gender and race were not yet the paramount subjects they are now but even then we were told that The Invisible Man was great literature and we were forced to read Strange Fruit which are the forebearers of the racial studies we have now. All reports on readings in English had to be couched in the anti-capitalistic mode to get good grades from most professors.

There were a few who did not follow this philosophy but not many and they did not get tenure. My absolute favorite of the literature classes was the one where we studied American History through the reading of current literature from Jonathan Edwards and Cotton Mather through de Tocqueville, Trollope, Dickens, Mark Twain and John dos Passos. The professor was very good at getting discussions on these works from all sides and we never really knew what his opinions were. He was also very good at seeing how you arrived at your opinions and the class was small enough that we got into some very good discussions in analysing these methodologies. I always thought he was a throwback to the way professors should teach. I don't know where he ended up but his students were lucky to have him.

Actually, David, since you mention business schools, one of the great examples of a methodology-driven academia is management studies from Taylor onward, and that goes all the way back to 1911 and has been a major part of business education since the 1920s. Methodological rigor was what distinguished "legitimate" academic studies of management and workplaces from non-academic advice about business in that field, and especially in the 1950s.

Another 1950s example would be Parsonian sociology: intensely methodological, almost obsessively so, and extremely intolerant of any other approach.

Northrup Frye, 1957, argued that literary criticism should be considered a "science" that needed to operate systematically--he was all about methodology, and had a very serious influence on literary critics of the time, even his opponents.

The turn to methodology wasn't an even or smooth sort of thing, but it did lead to the increasing insistence across a wide array of fields that the thing which distinguished academics from general intellectuals was the rigor and consistency of their methods, not their quality of mind or superior creative or imaginative insight. I really don't think you can hang "methodology" on the current generation, or ascribe it to politics: many of the people who originally insisted on the methodological turn were anything but leftists.

Good point about Taylorism. Although wheareas Tayorism was largely concerned about very tangible things (best way of attaching a door to a car, for example) more recent business methodologies often tend more to the abstract and even to the mushy.

The whole "conglomeration" boom of the 1970s was to some extent a phenomenon of methodology run wild: too many people assumed that if you knew how to calculate a discounted cash flow (and a few other financial things) you could run business for which you had no intuitive feel whatsoever. Usually dind't work, at least for long.

Art: You misunderstand the point I made above. I was describing a general turn towards demands for applied knowledge from the 1950s onwards, a sense that the value of all knowledge, in any field, was measured by its applied usefulness. The humanities were encompassed by that and affected by it. But if you want a specifically conservative example of the way that logic works in reference to the humanities, certainly one possibility would be the demand that knowledge in the humanities serve either moral or nationalist functions, e.g., that the study of the humanities promote moral or ethical character or that it work to instill national or civic spirit.

I certainly hope study of the humanities does not promote moral degeneration, or we would be duty bound to stop doing it.

The conservatives to which you are referring exist largely in your imagination, so an appeal to contemplate the parallel ways in which 'left' and 'right' are engaged in disfiguring the humanities is an appeal to make a suboptimal allocation of one's time and effort. If you wait a dozen years, the remaining conservatives on the rest of this nation's liberal arts faculties will have retired, whether they have been promoting moral behavior, civic spirit, or the consumption of pot roast.

That aside, the purpose of undertaking any activity (including the study of imaginative literature) is to improve one's state in some regard, so the study of the humanities may be regarded as 'instrumental' to that degree. Is the problem truly that people render the humanities an 'instrument', or that they conceive of educational institutions (and the humanities faculties within them) as agents to solve problems whose source is something other than a deficit of intellection?; and that those on these faculties will not admit, even to themselves, what their architectonic purposes really are?

All of this discussion of the problems of excessive emphasis on methodology just seems a diversion.

We doctors know

a hopeless case if --- listen: there's a hell

of a good universe next door; let's go

-- E. E. Cummings

But you doctors haven't figured it out yet; 'next door' is the web, and the Academy is simply sputtering its way to irrelevance.

Art Deco..."All of this discussion of the problems of excessive emphasis on methodology just seems a diversion"...that's an assertion, in support of which you offer no logic or evidence. The "methodology" point was originally raised by me, not by Timothy, and no one who reads by blog or my comments on this one could reasonably consider me an apologist for the current state of affairs in academia. So, what motivation might I have for creating a "diversion?"

We can (and usually do) bitterly enjoy mocking the all-too-numerous Churchills...but meanwhile they continue to "flourish" and our undergraduate students continue to be ,at least, cheated or, at worst, brain-washed. IF the right of tenure were to be put aside (pace the AAUP!) and if there were serious Presidents and Deans in place (rather than older tenured radicals) it all might be turned around. But, of course, that won't happen. The expedient of urging your child or grandchild to avoid the leftist bilge-purveyors by majoring in one of the serious sciences (or even taking a "business degree") becomes evermore attractive...as does sending the young person to the best university in a country (is there one?) whose university system has not gone through the same degradation.

With all due respect, 1) Ward Churchill was hired, tenured, made full professor and chair of a program in which he has no graduate school training or professional experience; and 2) the charges against him go to his publications, not to his teaching. When ACTA makes a charge that Ward Churchills abound, it ought to document that charge with many examples of other faculty members who fill that profile. Professor Rosenberg assumes that it has done so. Unfortunately, that's a false assumption.

Art Deco..."All of this discussion of the problems of excessive emphasis on methodology just seems a diversion"...that's an assertion, in support of which you offer no logic or evidence. The "methodology" point was originally raised by me, not by Timothy, and no one who reads by blog or my comments on this one could reasonably consider me an apologist for the current state of affairs in academia. So, what motivation might I have for creating a "diversion?"

I am not and have no interest in imputing ill motives to you and was giving no thought to your motives. I found your discussion of the excessive attention given to methodology perplexing in context. If economists devote to much attention to the possibility in of heteroskedasticity in their regression analyses, that might impinge on their efficiency. I cannot imagine it is more than a minor problem in academic life today, given what else is occurring. Your and Dr. Burke did seem to be amusing ('diverting') yourselves, which is your privelege.

Art Deco..."I cannot imagine it (excessive focus on methodology) is more than a minor problem in academic life today, given what else is occurring"...I guess that's where we disagree, then, because I think excessive focus on theory and methodology is a huge issue in our society, including but not limited to academia.

Anyone interested in this topic might want to read these excerpts from Prof Henry Mintzberg, and also this from Peter Drucker.

If I understand the point you are trying to make it is that there is an excessive reliance on the sort of knowledge one might garner in formal schooling as opposed to an apprenticeship, and that in the study of the liberal arts the use of stereotyped approaches to study may addle a discipline and affix it to an unprofitable vector. I think Peter Berger's complaints about the position of quantitative methods in sociology ("ever more sophisticated models addressing ever more trivial questions" I think he said) are in this vein. However, he does not object to quantitative methods per se (or even see that as the principal problem within sociology), merely there use in manner and degree that they begin to inhibit inquiry into social processes. No community composed of fallable human beings is ever gonna get it quite right.

I certainly do not object if you want to make a point about how little migration there can be between the academic world and related realms. Some years ago I was pondering graduate study in Economics and in a guidebook I consulted found a strong directive for the aspirant graduate student: make up your mind to be an academic or a corporation economist. Migration (at least from the corporate to the academic realm) is not possible. I have heard that the same sort of hiring policies operate on law faculties. Is it truly an excessive emphasis on methodology, or merely professional conceits that lie at the root of these sorts of things?

You will have to excuse me, but I can think of a loooooong laundry list of things about academic life that bother me more than methodology fetishism (for what my bothers are worth).