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January 9, 2009
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English, heal thyself
At the Chronicle of Higher Education, Liz McMillen observes that David Horowitz' recent appearance at the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association confirms that the culture wars are alive and well--at least in English. She also suggests that academics have a lot to do with that--and that they really do need to do better, for the sake of their own credibility and for the sake of students.
Anyone who needed evidence that the culture wars are far from over could find it here at the annual gathering of the Modern Language Association last week. As the response to David Horowitz's appearance on an MLA panel showed all too plainly, the culture wars haven't ended; they've just reached an ugly stalemate.Mr. Horowitz, of course, is no stranger to the MLA. His campaign for an "academic bill of rights" and his criticism of what he says is classroom indoctrination have earned him the enmity of many scholars — not just in literary studies, a frequent target of his barbs, but in other disciplines as well. But to hear him tell it, the extreme attacks on him have blocked any real discussion. In fact, Mr. Horowitz's appearance at the MLA meeting, he said, is the first time that he has defended his views in person before a scholarly group.
And that was either cause for dismay, as some here viewed it, or a step forward for the MLA. Mr. Horowitz appeared on a panel called "Academic Freedom?" along with Mark Bauerlein, Norma V. Cantú, and Cary Nelson. It was a tightly formatted event, complete with security guards stationed at the front of the room. The speakers were given 12 minutes to make their comments, and audience members 30 seconds afterward to raise questions — limits that were actually enforced, even if it meant audience members shouting out "Your time is up!" to Mr. Horowitz as soon as his 12 minutes had passed.
Mr. Horowitz may have a point about the absence of real discussion, since the two camps seemed to talk past each other. He and Mr. Bauerlein each criticized the professoriate for not acknowledging real problems in the classroom or the ways identity politics can infringe on academic freedom. "The danger to academic freedom comes from within, not from David Horowitz, Anne Neal, or Stephen Balch," said Mr. Bauerlein, a professor at Emory University. In their remarks, Mr. Nelson, a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Ms. Cantú, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, did not respond to the supposed problems described by the other panelists; instead they offered defenses of academic freedom as essential for higher education, especially as rising numbers of adjunct faculty members lack customary protections.
But members of the audience weren't having any of it. They wanted to challenge the panel about one thing: why Mr. Horowitz was there in the first place.
"Are you now proud that you are the only organization to invite Horowitz to speak?" an angry Barbara Foley of Rutgers University at Newark asked. "Did you do your homework" about Mr. Horowitz's blog, FrontPagemag.com? she continued, to audience applause. Grover Furr of Montclair State University and a self-described "victim" of Mr. Horowitz's book The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America, said he objected to Mr. Horowitz's being invited "not because of his views but because he is a liar." Another audience member complained that out of thousands of MLA members, the organization had picked "two FrontPage columnists" for the panel.
"You have to have a modicum of respect for people," Mr. Horowitz responded. "I was in the civil-rights movement before Barbara Foley was even born."
At one point, a member of the audience could be seen giving Mr. Horowitz the finger. Brian Kennelly of California Polytechnic State University at San Luis Obispo, who presided over the event, wrote on The Chronicle's Web site that he observed an audience member repeatedly mouthing an obscenity to Mr. Horowitz — behavior he called "troublesome" and "repugnant."
Even before the session began, members of the MLA Radical Caucus handed out a statement protesting the organization's decision to invite Mr. Horowitz to speak. Mr. Horowitz "consistently misrepresents the views of academics whom he wishes to discredit," the caucus said. "He is not a scholar but a liar of the Goebbels school." Later that day, the Radical Caucus fought a resolution by Mr. Nelson to have the MLA express solidarity with scholars of both Israeli and Palestinian culture--rather than just the latter group--saying that it was "imperialist."
That kind of rhetoric may have been what Mr. Bauerlein had in mind when he said that certain professors on the left deny to Mr. Horowitz and other critics "any decent or honest motive. They don't grant them the impulse to care about young minds and the curriculum. They cast them as partisan hacks, and that's wrong."
It took the president of the MLA, Gerald Graff, a professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago, to bring the meeting back to substance. "The charge is whether professors are bullying students," he said during the question period. "I agree with Bauerlein and Horowitz that we need to have more curiosity about what's going on."
Graff is right. Curiosity is the key. Defensiveness and posturing of the sort McMillen describes here serve no one well. They paralyze debate while ensuring that the problem fossilizes into something that not only gets harder and harder to address, but also becomes a piece of academic culture. No professional culture--or academic discipline--should organize itself in any way around group pathology. And academe's reaction to the criticisms of folks like Horowitz has resolved itself, at least in some quarters, pathologically. Hence the security guards at this panel (arrangements were also made, in event of disruption, to hold the panel discussion in a secure undisclosed location and to broadcast it to a remote audience). Hence the hostility of those who spent the panel flashing the bird and mouthing "f**k you" to Horowitz (McMillen does not specify the obscenity, but reports elsewhere do). Hence the MLA Radical Caucus' flyer comparing Horowitz to Goebbels. Hence, too, the contention of audience members and the MLA Radical Caucus that Horowitz should never have been invited--because of course the last thing you would want to do with one of your most prominent and effective critics is actually engage with him, debate him, and, if you believe in your cause and you really are better than your detractor says, prove him wrong.
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Comments:
What a shock. MLA members acting like children.
It's kind of like the Intelligent Design quagmire, actually, and anthropogenic global warming. If you think you're right and the other guy is wrong, you ought to have arguments that you think will hold up. "Your an idiot" is not an argument. "F**k you" is not an argument.
Sorry. Horowitz has so abused his public position in this situation -- from exaggerating the situation in the classroom to outright lying about scholars like Michael Berube, who have called him on it several times -- that he ought not to have been invited. Bauerlein is a respected scholar, and he was treated like one. Horowitz has acted like a clown too often not to be treated like one.
And people like Luther minimalize the situation in the classroom. As do members of MLA's Radical Caucus.
Perhaps they should not be allowed to speak, either.
I'm not sure that it is really possible to "engage" with Horowitz. As Luther has pointed out, he doesn't seem to play by the same rules as the rest of us. But neither does the Radical Caucus, who has managed to make Horowitz seem reasonable. How ironic...
But the rules "we" play by are not all that different from the rules of the Radical Caucus.
I've been in this field for almost two decades now, and I've seen the classroom used as a political soapbox more often than not.
There are always "intellectual" excuses offered for why it is necessary to hammer home leftist points in literature classrooms, but they are disingenuous at best, and are really just less radicalized versions of the crap spewed by the Radical Caucus.
I don't agree with everything Horowitz says, and I don't agree with some of his methodology, but his general observation that there is rampant abuse of professorial power is right on target.
And this is what people like Luther refuse to acknowledge. It's always just isolated anecdotes. I'm not sure how many isolated anecdotes it takes before someone like Luther will admit that there is a problem. But because he won't, and because the vast majority of literature professors won't, there is zero chance of a dialogue happening, whether or not Horowitz is involved.
John, I do recognize that there is a problem with indoctrination in the classroom.
However, I think there's a ton of wolf-crying and bad faith on all sides of the debate. Anyone who thinks that one can teach literature without addressing political issues is wrong. Anyone who thinks that it's evil to address issues of race, class, or gender in literary studies is wrong. And anyone who thinks that left-wing indoctrination is the only kind going on in the classroom has never seen a business school, an econ program, many political science classes, and some law school classes. (I'm also fascinated by attacks on left-wing indoctrination in private colleges that fail to also go after private Christian colleges for their biases.)
Finally, I think that a lot of what looks like political indoctrination is caused as often by a wrongheaded view of education as by misguided political beliefs. That is to say, the professor who thinks that education means telling students what to think about *anything* is in bad shape, whether it's how to think about abortion or how to think about Shakespeare. (Of course, basic skills and unequivocal facts should be directly taught. But when it comes to high order thinking, professors should stick to *how* to think, not *what* to think about.)
I largely concur with Luther. I am convinced, though, that students are part of the problem. Too many students either want to be told what to think (so they don't have to think for themselves) or are convinced that their "opinions," however unreasoned, deserve "respect." Much of the hand-wringing about bias in the classroom can be reduced, I suspect, to two factors: students not liking what they hear and students unhappy with their grades. Having opinionated instructors is not such a bad thing-as long as the students are equipped/encouraged to fight back and as long as they are not punished for reasoned dissent. There's a difference between telling students "what to think" and telling them "what you think." It is the instructor's responsibility to help students understand the difference.
I suspect that the "rampant abuse of professorial power" John speaks of is a lot like some of the other things supposedly running rampant in this country. The left has a lot to say about rampant police brutality on our streets, and rampant prosecutorial misconduct in our courts, and rampant born-again proselytizing and antisemitism and anti-atheism in the military--and these claims are backed up by at least as much anecdotal evidence as that cited by Horowitz and FIRE against the professors. (Actually, most of FIRE's cases involve academic administrators, about some of whom...well, don't get me started.)
The professional organizations representing the police, the prosecutors, and the military are not doing any more about their own respective problems than the MLA is doing about its problems. Maybe that's because these professions are all as corrupt as their critics say. Maybe it's because the anecdotal evidence gets blown out of proportion by various interest groups and there really just isn't that much of a problem, and the professional organizations correctly conclude that existing procedures are sufficient to deal with whatever problems do exist.
Obviously, when cops and courts and college classrooms number in the tens of thousands, there will be no end to instances of misconduct. Just as obviously, interest groups will continue to highlight those instances, whether in the interest of some genuine concern with justice, or for political reasons, or both. That's a good thing: anyone with power should constantly be held accountable for it, and sometimes the only people interested in doing so are partisan hacks like Horowitz.* I'm not saying Horowitz is right about the magnitude of the problem--in fact I think he's way off base--but I am saying that, without him, whatever problem does exist would probably be worse. Bauerlein expresses his concerns soberly and politely, but commands no mass audience. Horowitz expresses himself ludicrously but at least gets some attention. His behavior is a product of a contemporary culture that rewards flamboyance and hyperbole.
So I don't really mind Horowitz, even though he is both obnoxious and wrong. Also, people who say "Horowitz is wrong and therefore should shut up" neglect the possibility that maybe, were he to shut up and take the pressure off, he might turn out to be right. It's kind of like arguing that because crime goes down we need fewer police, which is silly if the reason crime went down was the presence of the police.
* If writing a book like The Professors (which finds something terrifying in the prospect of someone teaching "peace studies" at a Christian college) doesn't qualify someone as a partisan hack, I sure don't know what does.
It's true that Horowitz causes no small annoyance and inconvenience to some academics, and especially to culture warriors of the left like Berube, but I'm not sure on what Luther Blisset bases his assertion that Horowitz is a "clown" who doesn't merit inclusion in debates over academic politicization and the scope of academic freedom. At the MLA session at which Horowitz spoke it seems the crude circus buffoonery issued from the MLA Radical Caucus (led by the Stalinist crank, the truly laughable Grover Furr) and their supporters. I'm with MLA president Gerald Graff and Erin on this issue: present the conflicts fairly and include your most incisive critics.
Luther, the problem is that race, class, and gender are always taught with a leftist agenda--the very assumptions made in the theories behind the movement toward a focus on these issues are leftist in nature. Students are regularly programmed to respond to these issues with rigidly leftist answers--any other answer is dismissed a priori by the theory itself.
Eveningsun, you can believe what you like, but the lack of outside oversight in the classroom allows professors to abuse their authority in ways impossible for the police and the court systems. It's not as if there are students filming professorial abuse with cell phones in the way that police abuse is regularly caught on film. And the media rarely if ever sticks its head into the classroom, save for organizations like FIRE.
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? In Pennsylvania a few years back, it was the state legislature. If you haven't already, you might want to check out the "Report of the Select Committee on Academic Freedom in Higher Education Pursuant to House Resolution 177," available online. I think the testimony recorded therein bears out my position that, while there's a problem, it's nowhere near as bad as Horowitz claims (and that the proposed solutions would be worse than the problem itself). Like other forms of professional misconduct, it exists on a scale that reflects basic human weakness rather than systemic corruption.
Also, you're basically right, John, that "the very assumptions made in the theories behind the movement toward a focus on [race, class, and gender] are leftist in nature." But so what? Maybe the corresponding rightest assumption (that questions about society are best answered from a perspective that assumes we're all just individuals whose circumstances are explicable in terms of agency and virtue rather than group categories) has been found to be crap and thus quite rightly abandoned. Maybe there's so little right-wing sociology for the same reason there's so little born-again evolutionary biology in the science building and so little Marxist economics in the business building.
Precisely the sort of answer I'd expect from someone with your ideological blinders on, Eveningsun.
No one has proved anything about "right-wing" sociology, because it's not allowed a seat at the table. And when it is introduced into academia, it's introduced by leftist professors who assume that right-wing ideology means racism, sexism, and classism, thus providing a lovely straw man to be knocked down.
As for legislatures, they aren't really watching anything. They are passing relatively meaningless laws asking us to put stuff on our syllabi about fairness and such, but these are toothless.
As far this select committee's report, conservatives and libertarians among faculty keep their mouths shut, for the most part. Students say very little because they just want to graduate without hassle.
Leftist professors are all about speaking truth to power. Except when they are the power. Too many ways to ruin your career by speaking up too loudly against their abuses.
But you go ahead and rebury your head in the sand. You seem to like it there.
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