I've been watching the Deb Frisch and Kevin Barrett cases unfold with something I would not quite call interest--having followed such cases for years now, I can say with jaded certainty that these cases are too typical, too hackneyed, too--it's bizarre to say so, but it's true--usual, to be what you'd call interesting. But they have to be watched all the same, and they have to be assimilated into some sort of big picture.

Too often, cases like theirs are reported and analyzed in isolation, a practice that makes sense, given the topical nature of reporting and the transient nature of blogging, but that also works to keep these cases disconnected from one another. The result is an almost steady stream of cases that are treated as anomalies instead of as instances of a broader pattern with serious implications for how we understand what higher education really is these days. (This tendency, by the way, was on full display in responses to ACTA's recent report, How Many Ward Churchills?. Critics of the report relied heavily on the idea that the report's assemblage of example after example of politically charged course descriptions was not an assemblage of anything at all, but was rather a collection of isolated instances and anomalous cases--or, in other words, a collection that was not a collection. The doublethink of that argument still makes my head spin; I attribute it in part to the broader pattern of not allowing repeated instances of self-discrediting academic behavior to add up to anything. See commentary on the response to the report in ACTA Online's May archive).

Margaret Soltan makes a most welcome stab at moving Barrett and Frisch beyond the individualized status of intellectual train wrecks (which is how most of those who are following their stories seem to regard them--as almost obscene examples of academic leftism, best handled by staring and offering the odd disgusted comment). Soltan sees Barrett and Frisch as signs of an academy that is woefully given to making truly misguided and damaging hiring decisions--and that exacerbates this problem by failing to realize that it has this problem:

What matters isn't the particulars--this Kevin Barrett, that Deborah Frisch, that Aphrodite Clamar-Cohen. What matters is that, in an age of new technologies flushing out the very worst among America's professors, we focus upon the betrayal of our students by our universities.

Our students come to the classroom at places like the excellent public universities where Barrett and Frisch taught naively. Very naively. They don't know and don't care about our articles and professional associations and conference presentations. They care about our knowledge and our teaching ability. They assume--they have every right to assume--that the person they meet at the front of the room on the first day of class has the full faith and credit of the university behind her.

It's heartbreaking to read the comments that students who've been betrayed by their universities write at Rate My Professors. These students almost always begin by mentioning their excitement about taking the course, their interest in the subject. They then flatly state that exposure to this professor has killed forever their interest and excitement. A series of questions usually follows. Why is this person teaching? Why does this person get paid to teach? Why is a university classroom like this one? I thought it would be different, going to a university...

It's not about the professors themselves apologizing or quitting or whatever -- the sort of people we're talking about are incapable of understanding what they have done. It's about the universities that hired them making formal apologies to their students, and vowing to do everything they can to avoid appointing people like them again. Universities unable to distinguish between academic freedom and academic malfeasance need to do some thinking. The technology of exposure isn't going anywhere.

" these cases are too typical, too hackneyed, too--it's bizarre to say so, but it's true--usual, to be what you'd call interesting"
I've read your blog for some time now, but haven't read anything that shows that the Deb Frisch incident is typical. So if you could be more specific, it would make for riveting reading.

Would have thought that the Deb Frisch situation was way over the top. On the other hand, maybe her phone is ringing off the hook with job offers. We'll see if she ends up at Brown or in the Duke English Department.

Reading the course description for Barrett's Intro to Islam class, one would not know that the content was anything out of order. Indeed, it seems perfectly reasonable. Based on the description, this class would not have been spotted by the ACTA report methods as I understand them.

Much of the criticism of the ACTA report is that misreading of the course descriptions led to false positives - courses that are perfectly reasonable but are described in ways that seem biased.

The Barrett course serves as an example that is likely to be much more common - the false negative. It is unlikely that this course is the only biased course veering from the academic content that has a reasonable description, then ACTA has underestimated the depth of the problem.

But, apart from the fact that its title would lead one to believe that all the cases cited in it were about misrepresentation of evidence in published work (which is what Churchill was charged with), isn't the problem with ACTA's report precisely that its method is as likely to produce false positives and false negatives? It did point to some dubious-appearing course descriptions, but no course taught by an adjunct (as in Barrett's and Frisch's cases) is likely to have a course description drafted by that or any other adjunct.

I think your argument actually suggests that false negatives will outnumber false positives.

If adjuncts don't write their course descriptions and teach nominally standard courses, then courses taught by adjuncts will have more neutral, standard descriptions, no matter what the content of the course. Courses taught be full professors are the most likely to be written by the professor. These are most likely to express the professor's plan both because the professor writes the description and because a full professor (with tenure) is the least likely to suffer consequences of a course that is biased by design. Assistant and associate professors fall in between, having different degrees of oversight and risk involved.

An argument that false positives outnumber false negatives requires that those who write course descriptions deliberately make them seem more biased or involved in advocacy than they actually are. This seems unlikely, unless the culture is such that the consequences of not having such a seemingly biased course are worse than of having a biased course. In other words, the biased course description is either an indication of a biased course, or an indication of a culture in which the prevailing bias is expected and lack of it is punished.

Of course, with enough effort, these ideas are actually open to empirical testing. Instead of just checking course descriptions, it is possible to check descriptions, syllabi, reading lists and exams (with their grading) across departments.

Kevin Barrett is only scratching half of the truth.
The rest is here:
http://911tvfakery.blogspot.com

http://911closeup.com/nico/911bio.html

I think it's a mistake to treat these two cases as indicative of something typical about scholars or academia or "the left", particularly given their marginal status within the profession. (Frisch was denied tenure, which might in fact suggest that some of academia's quality control mechanisms *work*.)

But I do think it's fair to hone in on what Margaret Soltan points to, namely, that these cases do suggest some uncomfortable things about how teaching at many large research universities, especially below the top tier of selectivity, is thought of as a kind of disposable, how little interest in or attention to delivering a consistent quality of instruction there can be. A lot of universities just sort of expect good teaching to happen osmotically: they have no real substantive or nuanced instruments for keeping track of what happens. They know in many cases that students don't really have any options but to endure low-quality teaching, so there is little pressure to invest the effort. The faculty logically are the people who should be paying attention to consistent quality of instruction, but they largely don't, for a host of complicated reasons.

In the context of the professional culture of academic life, Frisch and Barrett strike me as highly aberrational--I think 75% of my colleagues would not know how to find a website like Protein Wisdom, or how to comment on it, and all of them, whatever their politics, would find Frisch's comments and behavior appalling and disgusting and totally lacking in professionalism. But I think every large university has a kind of trailing edge of adjuncts and occasional labor who are kind of unpersons to the tenure-track faculty and administration. The core of the institution doesn't know when those adjuncts are superb, dedicated teachers and scholars (as they often are) or when they're raving lunatics who deliver worthless instruction (as they can be). So this at least I think is a lesson to work through from these cases.

Erin, you're confused. If what matters in a faculty member is his support for a certain political position, then university hiring decisions are not bad at all. Barrett and Frisch are unusual only in their lack of control--in their violation of certain unspoken canons of circumspection. Ask yourself, where do you think they came from? What was their training? What do you think the coffee conversation of their academic advisors is like? The fact is, Ward Churchills and Kevin Barretts and Deb Frisches are being manufactured purposely like pseudo-intellectual android shock troops in universities everywhere, with the full knowledge and to the continuing pleasure of the haters of the West who make up the largest part of their faculties. (Whew, do I sound bitter. I didn't know I was going to sound that way when I started typing.) It's suicidal, of course, but the androids don't know that.

To Stewart Home: I have deleted your comment. Ad hominem attacks are not welcome on this website.

A reminder to commenters: please stick to the issues being discussed, and refrain from attacking the people discussing them.

My apologies to all readers and commenters who don't require such a reminder.