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Sunday, October 08, 2006
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A Few More Scraps From the ACTA Roundtable...... ...which, if you haven't been following this, is the discussion on the future of the university, held at Harvard's faculty club, from which UD just returned. The rest of my posts about the event -- all of them live-blogged -- are just below the brief post immediately after this one, about the University of Georgia. Scroll past that and you're there. Oh, and if you've been sent here by Inside Higher Ed, welcome. Feel free to look around. A certain vagueness of purpose, and a certain internal conflict, presented itself at the meeting. This is a group primarily composed of trustees and alumni who care about things like serious core curricula and high standards for faculty teaching and conduct. The group attempts in a variety of ways (having a greater voice on boards of trustees; publicizing faculty misconduct, etc.) to influence universities in the direction of greater intellectual and moral rigor, as well as greater intellectual diversity. Yet to an outsider (moi-meme), it wasn't always clear where the main intent lay. There was lots of beating up on faculty for caring only about what President Trachtenberg called "the eternal superego of their disciplinary peers," rather than about doing their share of teaching, and being willing to teach core courses, and this is fair enough. But there was an absence of faculty in the audience, and I felt throughout that some ACTA speakers were demonizing us in a rather silly way, as when the head of the organization went on about Ward Churchill and called him "so typical." He's not at all typical, and it's a distraction from what matters to fuss overmuch with him and Annie Sprinkle and the 9/11 deniers. Sure, blogs and organizations like ACTA should rail against these idiocies; and they've done so to great effect. They'll continue to do so with each eruption. But, for instance, it seems to me it'd be a better use of ACTA's time to invite some truly typical faculty members at American universities to discuss -- maybe to defend -- the complex ethos by which many of them live. This is not as irresponsible, selfish, and madcap an ethos as some at ACTA believe (though there's plenty wrong with it), and it'd be helpful for the organization to gain some nuance about it. As for the internal conflict: As is often the case at conservative gatherings, there was a libertarian/conservative split at this one, with Dershowitz believing, as does UD, in what he called "ism-equity" on the issue of campus speakers. "The university must be neutral" in regard to invited speakers; it must be willing to pay for security when controversial people appear, and it should never reject any speaker invited by a duly constituted campus group (although I can imagine extreme circumstances in which a university would be within its rights to put intense pressure on student groups to change their minds about this or that monster). Speech codes should function in fact to keep university administrators from acting arbitrarily in the matter of punishment; in principle, such codes should never be used. "We need speech codes to prohibit the punishment of students. We need speech codes precisely to deny discretion to administrators." But this laissez-faire attitude was in the minority at this gathering; though they protest the left-liberal aspect of many speech codes, many in the audience, I suspect, want speech codes rejiggered in favor of right-conservative points of view. The question is whether they're willing to condemn (it was a question asked in his talk by John Wilson, of collegefreedom.org) places like Patrick Henry College when they purge faculty whose speech is insufficiently fundamentalist. ********** Mark Bauerlein, a skinny stooped Ichabod Crane, also went after the tenurati, wondering why "one of the most pampered, protected, elite groups" in our country shows "so much conformity, timidity, and bullying." He thinks it has to do with the way we're "socialized," but regular readers know that UD has a different take. I think that by and large the people who are attracted to academia were born nerdy and frightened and then generally overparented to within an inch of their lives. The rare toughies you see among academics often represent post-nerd triumphs inside the nerd asylum. The bespectacled friendless slob who discovered in himself a genius for economic theory and now reigns as uber-nerd at MIT is never going to be a bold nonconformist. He will wield power in a very small setting, and his bullying will be revenge for his years being bullied because he was a nerd. People don't start being bold non-conformists once they get tenure if being a bold non-conformist was never in the most tenuous sense an option for them.... And think about it. What sort of person is going to be attracted to one of the few jobs in America that grants you lifetime job security in the form of academic tenure? As to the risk in going up for tenure itself -- the overwhelming number of people who go up for tenure in the United States get it. At some schools, the rate is around 95%. Of course there are exceptions to what UD is describing here. Most of them are in the hard sciences. ************ A few pleasurable linguistic moments: -- Someone used the phrase "seminal probe." -- Trachtenberg talked of his ideas for change at GW "perishing in live burial." I think this a very beautiful phrase, and wonder if it comes from a poem. Trachtenberg's accent is a delight, as when he talks about how trying to work with faculty is "doowanting...the word is doowanting." -- I was convinced the very old Harvard hand sitting next to me wouldn't know the word "blog," let alone its meaning, but because he asked why I was taking notes, I told him I'm a blogger. "Great blog stuff, eh?" he said after one particularly adamant speaker. "Oh, I know all about blogs. My grandchildren all have them." -- Jack Ackerly, a trustee at U. Va., is the compleat Southern gentleman, with another rich accent. "Ah don't want to convey the impression that we're doing everathang raght and everyone else is doing everathang wrong... Ma fraternity's not in biznus eny moah because we had a sex scandal every ten yeahs...." |