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UD is...
"Salty." (Scott McLemee)
"Unvarnished." (Phi Beta Cons)
"Splendidly splenetic." (Culture Industry)
"Except for University Diaries, most academic blogs are tedious."
(Rate Your Students)
"I think of Soltan as the Maureen Dowd of the blogosphere,
except that Maureen Dowd is kind of a wrecking ball of a writer,
and Soltan isn't. For the life of me, I can't figure out her
politics, but she's pretty fabulous, so who gives a damn?"
(Tenured Radical)

Friday, July 01, 2005

GOOD THINGS,
AND HOW INSTITUTIONALIZING THEM
FUCKS THEM UP.


UD would like to bring three recent academic controversies together - involving collegiality, diversity, and historical understanding - in this post. The general point she’d like to make about all of them is that the troubles these excellent behaviors and ideas are running into comes from the tendency of institutions to corrupt and trivialize cultural goods. It just seems to be the nature of institutions to want to incorporate complex cultural goods into reductive bureaucratic structures. Yet the more they do this, the more people become cynical and resentful about these goods, or the more people exploit them for illegitimate ends.

Let me be more clear by listing the excellent social and moral ideas and behaviors that I have in mind:

1. Collegial relations with other people.
2. The ability to educate students who come from a lot of different cultures.
3. An understanding of one’s racial history.

These are all obvious goods. We all want them, for ourselves and for others. They are also complex and sensitive goods -- there’s a lot of wriggle room within each of them, and each of them can easily be damaged or destroyed. Culture, to quote Lady Bracknell on the subject of ignorance, is like a delicate rose -- dry and press it and the bloom is gone.

Here’s an example of wriggle room. Christopher Hitchens’ idea of collegiality is profoundly different from, say, that of the college president in Randall Jarrell’s Pictures from an Institution (“His voice not only took you into his confidence, it laid a fire for you and put out your slippers by it and then went into the other room to get something more comfortable. … He wanted you to like him, he wanted everybody to like him… .”). Hitchens, with his love of conflict and his relative indifference to your comfort level, would not be considered at all collegial by many people. But in fact Hitchens is just the sort of serious intellectual serious universities should want to have around, warts and all. That’s why Berkeley invites him there for visiting stints.

Once institutions start telling you in more and more rule-bound ways what collegiality must be, you begin to lose Hitchens and gain President Robbins.


I

15 Pro-Collegiality Rules


There are always a few news stories floating around about people like Robert K.C. Johnson, an impressive scholar at Brooklyn College. Johnson’s for the most part less impressive colleagues, citing collegiality, almost managed to fire him. He has a post up at Cliopatria on the subject, from which I’ll quote:

As someone with a painful first-hand experience with the criterion, I oppose the use of collegiality in personnel matters. In theory, of course, it's better to have a department peopled with professors who work well together. But in practice, I don't see any way to structure a system that can ensure that the criterion won't be abused.

A couple of recent articles in Inside Higher Ed illustrate the point. The first, by Mary McKinney, a clinical psychologist who advises academics, proposes 15 pro-collegiality "rules" an untenured person should follow. McKinney's piece, it should be noted, doesn't take a position one way or the other on whether collegiality should be used; rather, it's a "how-to guide" for untenured faculty working within an institution that uses the collegiality criterion, either formally or informally.

A lot of McKinney's rules (i.e.--don't whine, look for a mentor, be a good listener) are common sense. Others strike me as more off-putting: "the rules of collegiality are similar to the rules of dating"; "sometimes, make your concrete, focused compliments in front of a third party (such as right before a faculty meeting begins)"; "if there are 10 people at the meeting, make sure that you speak less than 10 percent of the time"; "avoid campus when you’ve got to write and reserve tasks that require less focus for your office."

McKinney sounds like she's quite good at what she does, and I have no doubt that someone who followed all 15 of her rules would be likely to get tenure. That said, McKinney's rules also offer insight on why the use of collegiality is such a dangerous criterion.

First, several of her rules amount to advice to suck up to figures in power and show deference, whether appropriate or not, to those in authority. Obviously, no one, junior or senior, should go out of their way to attack people. But the principle of academic freedom depends on the argument that faculty self-governance is the best way for the academy to function. Will someone who has spent six or seven years of his or her life as an untenured professor following McKinney's collegiality rules suddenly be likely, upon receiving tenure, to function as an autonomous unit within a self-governing structure? …

[T]he personnel difficulties of William Bradford offer further insight on the anti-research bias inherent in the "collegiality" criterion. Bradford is the IU law professor who received only a 10-5 vote for his third-year reappointment--a sign of long-term trouble--even though his performance was rated as "excellent" in teaching, scholarship, and service. His problem? Several senior members deemed him "uncollegial," on grounds that seem transparently political.

But Bradford seems to have done something else very uncollegial--he's outperformed some of his senior colleagues in publishing. One of Bradford's leading critics is a law professor named Mary Harter Mitchell, whose website discretely declines to provide a link to her publications. This 1978 graduate of Cornell Law School, who has been on the IU faculty since 1980, has published one book, Legal Reference for Older Hoosiers, put out by a press called "The Foundation" in 1982; a search of Lexis-Nexis reveals no law review articles published by Mitchell in the last decade. Bradford, on the other hand, has a forthcoming book, The Laws of Conflict in the Age of Armed Terror, and has published four book chapters and 20 law review articles in the last six years.

Is there any way to ensure that Prof. Mitchell's judgment of Prof. Bradford's "uncollegiality" doesn't consistitute anything but professional jealousy? And shouldn't that fact alone suggest that universities might want to dispense with the criterion?




UD doesn’t much care about motives here - professional jealousy, politics, whatever. She cares about outcomes. Any university should want to encourage interesting and productive scholars, not drive them away. Formalized collegiality criteria allow departments to look away from what matters - good teaching, interesting writing - and toward what doesn’t -- being liked by everyone. More than that, rule-bound collegiality criteria, as Johnson suggests, make for cozy departments with unchallenged students. There is a direct line between collegiality mandates and grade inflation.


II

“The workshops and events listed in this announcement offer important opportunities for faculty and staff to have a better understanding of how to interact appropriately and respectfully with others on campus.”

All university professors should be insulted by this childish language in the University of Oregon’s announcements of seminars they can take to learn how to communicate better with a diverse range of people. The intellectual content of seminars like these is often little higher than an episode of Barney. They share with Barney the assumption that you are a moral moron who must be led in small slow steps, with much smiling encouragement, around the basic building blocks of human life in groups. Blown up, these seminars become the University of Oregon’s notorious Diversity Initiative.

Teach your students. Do your best with all of them. Concentrate on the content you want to teach rather than the personalities in front of you. Tell your students that who they are is, for the purposes of classroom instruction, less important than what sort of brains they have and how responsive their brains are to new and challenging ideas and forms of mental discipline. Assume your students are as smart as you are - or smarter - and act that way. If they respect you, they’ll want to rise to your assumption about their intelligence. The worst thing you can do pedagogically is get everybody all self-conscious about themselves. The best thing you can do is free them from themselves so that they can enter different worlds.

Diversity mandates corrupt the impersonal pursuit of knowledge by making professors as well as students self-conscious about irrelevant and trivializing elements of the classroom theater.

[Joanne Jacobs also talks about Oregon's diversity mess today.]


III

Understanding One’s Racial History


UD’s initial response to the Philadelphia high school system’s decision to mandate courses in African-American history
was positive. She still thinks that it’s a good idea, actually. She’s keen on requirements generally, and this particular history is central to our understanding of ourselves as a nation.

So she was a bit surprised to read Timothy Burke’s hesitations about the idea:


You might think I’d be enthusiastic about the proposal. All the Africanists in the region could certainly contribute a lot of pro bono assistance in the development and implementation of the program, and if they go ahead with the plan, I’d certainly be willing to pitch in.

But I have some real misgivings. Anthony Appiah made an important observation yesterday in the Inquirer: the relationship between any history requirement and actual learning outcomes is pretty hazy at best. It’s not very clear that the courses which are commonly required in high schools produce a great deal of historical literacy or understanding of the uses and importance of historical knowledge. Just stacking another requirement on as if it will produce useful consequences, whatever those might be, seems to skip some major necessary steps in reform.

You could argue that such literacy will best be achieved with courses that are more focused than the generic survey of US history, and more relevant or sharply drawn. That’s possible. But I already sense that this course is so freighted down with competing and contradictory missions from consciousness-raising to self-esteem improvement, to being a subject aimed at producing critical thought in all students to being a subject intended to do identity work for only the African-American students, that I suspect this justification won’t play out in practice.

…You could say it’s got nothing to do with Philadelphia per se, that this is a topic that every educated American should know something about. I agree, but the overly casual or less thoughtful kinds of celebrations of the proposal leave themselves little room for saying why African-American history ought to occupy a year of high school but Latino or Native American history doesn’t qualify. There’s only two clear ways to make that cut: privileging the history of the local or arguing that African-American history is just plain more important to understanding what it means to be American and to be a modern person. I might venture a ways out onto that plank and at least contemplate diving off it, but I doubt Maya Angelou and Jesse Jackson and the other familiar figures to celebrate the decision would.

Good intentions, definitely. A subject I think is important, no doubt. But I wonder if this is the wisest way to deal with it.



Note the basis of Burke’s reservations: “But I already sense that this course is so freighted down with competing and contradictory missions from consciousness-raising to self-esteem improvement, to being a subject aimed at producing critical thought in all students to being a subject intended to do identity work for only the African-American students, that I suspect this justification won’t play out in practice." Burke is suggesting what I began this post with -- when bureaucratic institutions get hold of cultural goods (in this case, serious historical self-consciousness), they tend to dress them up in trivializing and personalizing ways (self-esteem, identity work, consciousness-raising). They freight them down and lose precisely the primary goal of schooling -- to convey significant content in a way that produces dispassionate, analytical, open-minded intellects. You do not derive a sense of your own value from hagiographic versions of your past. You derive a sense of your own value from being able to understand nuanced and uncompromising presentations of the truth of history.