A couple of comments from my last post on Kevin Barrett, Deb Frisch, and lack of quality control in academic hiring deserve highlighting.

The first is from Brown University professor Michael McKeown, who writes,

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.

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.

... 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.

The Barrett case strikes me as a case that is particularly about how departments use adjuncts; though he has been treated in the media as a university professor, I think it's important to remember that he was hired on very different terms, for very different reasons. What's interesting is that the university has been caught out in what is a widespread academic hiring practice (60% or more of all college courses are taught by non-tenure track instructors). UW has now issued a boilerplate endorsement of academic freedom, because it had to. But UW is also clearly embarrassed that has to defend someone like Barrett, which amounts to an embarrassment at having hired him. If UW wants to avoid that sort of embarrassment in the future, it will need to rethink its relationship to adjunct teachers.

UPDATE: More from Brian Ulrich and KC Johnson.

Why exactly did Frisch resign from her position at the university? Isn't speech made outside the boundaries of her professional responsibilities protected by the First Amendment, unless it's somehow criminal?

Isn't Frisch the sort of free speech martyr this libertarian blog generally celebrates?

If Frisch were The Jack Bauer Professor of Torture Studies at Sunnydale Conservative U and she wrote a blog comment about how the Supreme Court should be killed, FIRE would be up in arms if Sunnydale's administrators called for her resignation.

Not saying Frisch's comments weren't stupid. But what she does in her free time, provided it's legal, is of no concern to her employers -- especially her part-time adjunct employers.

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).

I think this hits it right on the nose.

Stewart,
The First Amendment doesn't prevent you from resigning and it doesn't prevent an employer from accepting your resignation .

As for Deb Frisch, the 'free speech martyr", you might want to check her blog to see why she resigned. I thought one of the problems, at least according to the reports, was that at least one of the comments that was described as threatening, was identified as coming from a University computer. But then she just might have wanted to move back to Oregon. The First Amendment doesn't prevent her from doing that.