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Saturday, February 14, 2004
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14 February 04
A VALENTINE..... TO: Robert Brandon Chair, Philosophy Duke University FROM: Janice Sidley Chair, Women’s Studies Someplace Similar [for details and background, see University Diaries, Nov. 30 2003, and Jan. 19, 2004] Hi Bob (hope it’s okay if I call you Bob)! Janice Sidley here. You don’t know me -- unless you know my work! My latest book (Menopause, Andropause, The Academy: A Volatile Mix) is coauthored with other women who’ve been victims of harassment in the academic workplace. But I feel I’ve come to know you through your recent remarks about the mysterious but undeniable link between successful university professors and, as you put it, “left- leaning political views.” As you may know, Women’s Studies in particular among academic departments has long been singled out for ridicule and denunciation by right-leaners for low grading standards and mushy course content; and beyond spending a lot of my time trying to right grading wrongs throughout my university (many of my colleagues routinely give psychologically damaging grades), I unfortunately also have to spend a lot of time fielding complaints from parents, fellow faculty, the public at large, and even occasionally our own students that Women’s Studies courses are ideological tripe. I’ve always had trouble finding words to defend what we do and the way we do it. We do, for instance, give A’s to all of our students. A B in Women’s Studies is considered failing, and in order to fail... No one has failed. But I’ve had trouble formulating for skeptics the ground of our enterprise, the reason we do what we do in the classroom and on the grade sheet. Your comments not only help me answer questions specifically about Women’s Studies; they help me more generally answer people when they ask Why grade inflation? Why are students at Duke and at my institution overwhelmingly likely to get A’s in whole swathes of subjects (English, Philosophy, History, Psychology, Education, etc.)? Let me, if I may, quote you to yourself [italics mine]: "Maybe I'm missing something, but it seems to me that the only viable hypothesis left is something like the following: There is a statistical association between the qualities that make for good academics and those that lead to left-leaning political views. Said another way, a larger proportion of academics are likely to be liberal, but certainly not all, and this may also vary by field and subfield because of the nature of knowledge, learning and the advancement of knowledge in that field. But, stated this way the hypothesis still remains incredibly vague. What qualities, what traits are we talking about? What causal relations underlie these statistical associations? These questions are worth exploring, but I think the hypothesis is right headed." It’s precisely the left-leaning qualities that go into making a good academic that I’d like to talk about. I’d submit that one of those qualities is a politically-grounded sense of the sort of students you have in your class, the sort of homes they come from, the sort of tuition their parents are paying, etc. I’ll give you an example of what the absence of this quality looks like - here’s a letter a professor at Boston University wrote a few years ago to the New York Times: "Professors award high grades most often, I believe, to avoid having to deal with angry and self-righteous students and their parents. Over my strong objections one semester, the chairman of my department changed a student's F (32 out of a possible 105 points) to a passing grade. The justification? 'Both of his parents are lawyers.'" [Wohlberg, Janet W. "Grade Inflation Demeans Good Students. The New York Times (Jul 7, 1995) Sec: A P. 24. ] This professor has a lot to learn! She is clearly a woman of the right. In her univocal way, she has failed to look holistically at the situation of her student - something people on the left have learned to do routinely. You see, what you’ve helped me understand about the environment out of which students considered intelligent enough to attend universities like ours emerge is that that environment has created in them a basically unanswerable, unalterable, infallible intelligence - again, we can never satisfactorily account causally for this quality of intelligence, but our admissions committees have recognized it and awarded it with admission to our universities. Our job as professors is to understand that the very concept “failure” fails to pertain to this particular highly intelligent student/parent population. Some of us understand this, and some don’t. If we come from the left side of the political spectrum, as I think is implicit in your argument, we are better equipped to have these understandings. Our “qualities,” our “traits” as thinkers are suited to the contemporary American university; whereas conservatives, with their fussy value distinctions and insufficiently critiqued devotion to historically canonized cultural expressions, lack the flexible adaption to the fast-changing academy - and the larger culture it mirrors - that left people tend to have. We are trained to think not in narrow intellectual content terms but in broad sociopolitical terms about our roles as teachers and our students’ roles as students. We see the larger position of the university in society; we see our students as living, breathing, hurting human beings who are doing their best under all sorts of traumatic conditions - fear of nuclear holocaust, anxiety about sexually transmitted diseases, gender insecurity, etc., etc. - just to get up every morning and attend class. We derive our pedagogical inspiration from left thinkers like Paulo Freire - and I know I’ve gone on too long for a Valentine but let me just quote from a textbook we use at our university in teacher-training our graduate students in English for the classroom “dialogue”: >"This dialogue-a model inspired by Paulo Freire-makes teacher and >learner equals engaged in a joint practice that is '[l]oving, humble, >hopeful, trusting, critical'.This is contrasted with the unequal power >relations in the authoritarian classroom, a place where the teacher >holds all power and knowledge and the student is the receptacle into >which information is poured, a classroom that is '[l]oveless, arrogant, >hopeless, mistrustful, acritical.'" I’m sending you this Valentine on Valentine’s Day to thank you for helping me see all of this more clearly: I shudder at the thought of any classroom of mine being arrogant and - especially on this day of all days - loveless. You have had the courage to say what we all feel about ourselves and our students, and for that... i luv yu!xxxxxxx Love, Janice |