The AAC&U's Stealth Brigade

by Cliopatria

During the last four years, liberal critics of President Bush have divided in their attacks. Some have focused on what they see as the President’s hypocrisy, others on the evils of his policies.

I’m reminded of this dilemma when I write about the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U), as I did last week for Inside Higher Education. Through initiatives heavy with educational jargon and code words, the AAC&U wants to reorient college education away from the traditional disciplines of the liberal arts and toward an emphasis on teaching skills and appropriate behavior in a “diverse democracy,” through courses loaded with a one-sided political message.

The agenda is troubling enough. Yet, in many ways, the group’s hypocrisy is even more indefensible. The AAC&U describes its approach by employing banal, often laudable, terms such as “excellence,” or “rigorous,” or “student-centered learning,” but then defining these terms in the exact opposite of their commonly accepted meanings. In the AAC&U’s world, day is night, hot is cold, academic freedom is indoctrination, excellence is watering down content. The expectation: busy Trustees, parents, alumni, and journalists won’t look past the rhetoric, allowing the AAC&U to impose its curricular agenda by stealth.

I first encountered this pattern a couple of years ago, when I delved into an AAC&U-sponsored program called the “Arts of Democracy.” Funded by a federal grant totaling more than $600,000, the “Arts of Democracy” claims to expose undergraduates to “global studies” and teach them about the foundations of American democracy and how to make intelligent choices about international relations. Sounds perfectly reasonable—until you realize that each of the 11 schools with an “Arts of Democracy” cluster teaches students that “democracy” entails a fidelity to a multicultural political agenda. Most people—and certainly not the funders in the U.S. Department of education—would not accept that definition of “democracy.”

But the AAC&U never describes the United States as a “democracy.” It always employs the term “diverse democracy,” with the implication that a fundamental difference exists between the two types of government. In the former, a broad range of issues are debated, and students train for citizenship in part through an understanding of government structures and the history of political participation. In the latter, only those opinions that reflect a “pro-diversity” approach are considered legitimate, and change occurs through social activism, not by working through the system.

In response to my criticism, AAC&U president Carole Geary Schneider wrote to Maryland senator Barbara Mikulski, claiming that the “Arts of Democracy” project demonstrated the AAC&U’s position as a “vigorous champion of academic freedom.” Well, if you define academic freedom as the freedom to agree with the AAC&U’s ideological agenda, I suppose that statement is true. But, as with the AAC&U peculiar definition of “democracy,” most people don’t define academic freedom in that manner.

Geary Schneider takes a similar approach in yesterday’s Inside Higher Ed, when she responds to my column. How, she asks, could criticism be leveled against a program subtitled"Excellence for Everyone as a Nation Goes to College”? The academy, she proclaims, “stands at a crossroads,” with “an extraordinary opportunity to provide an entire generation with the kind of life-enhancing, horizon-expanding education that was once available only to a fortunate few.” This emphasis on “more ‘engaged’ forms of learning have particular value for first generation students and students who are not in a position to benefit from a residential college education.” Who could object?

Just a guess here: schools that cater to the “fortunate few” have never offered such examples of “more ‘engaged’ forms of learning” as those of AAC&U institutions such as IUPUI, which requires all freshmen to enroll in an interdisciplinary class teaching such"skills" as"a survey of campus resources" and"time management,” or Portland State, which features a 6-credit “senior capstone” in such topics as"Empowerment of Youth on Probation--Girl Power" or"The Spirituality of Being Awake." Geary Schneider and the AAC&U seem to truly believe that first-generation and commuter students aren’t capable of handling more challenging fare, and so we all should use pretend rhetoric and claim that such offerings provide exciting new examples of “more ‘engaged’ forms of learning.” This is paternalism—class bias—of the worst sort.

Geary Schneider also denies that the AAC&U favors politically one-sided courses, since “liberal education, by definition, introduces and examines diverse perspectives on any subject. A good liberal education further teaches students how to evaluate competing claims and different perspectives while learning to form their own judgments.”

I wonder in what specific ways Geary Schneider and the AAC&U consider the courses at one of the most prominent AAC&U institutions, Washington's Evergreen College, to “introduce and examine diverse perspectives on any subject.” As I pointed out in the Inside Higher Ed piece, a typical Evergreen course is “Inherently Unequal, which teaches U.S. history since the Brown decision. The course’s description states -- as unquestioned fact -- that at the end of the 20th century,"racist opposition to African American progress and the resurgence of conservatism in all branches of government barricaded the road to desegregation." Multiple Evergreen courses reflect a similar viewpoint; I’ve been unable to find even one that offers another, or even a seemingly neutral portrayal of subjects relating to diversity.

In her response, Geary Schneider invites readers to sample AAC&U reports, such as "Greater Expectations: A New Vision for Learning as a Nation Goes to College”. I’d do the same, especially for people late at night having trouble falling to sleep: the report is even more jargon-laden than the usual AAC&U document. But, as with all AAC&U material, occasionally items slip through the code.

For instance, the report chastises colleges and universities for privileging scholarly research in hiring and tenuring faculty—part of the organization’s furious opposition to encouraging research in traditional academic disciplines, an approach that reflects “20th century,” as opposed to “21st century,” institutions of higher learning. Moreover, instead of evaluating candidates’ scholarship or ability in traditional lecture-and-discussion format teaching, the organization has advocated employing new “faculty with qualifications different than the past”—i.e., professors who agree with the AAC&U’s ideological agenda. Astutely, the AAC&U has realized that “faculty hiring is one opportunity to acquire the talent and values essential for institutional change”—and to exclude professors who refuse to embrace the AAC&U vision.

As for scholars who already possess tenure, the group’s 2004 conference included a panel exploring “cooptation strategies for professors with a high need for research achievement who oppose reform.” In the AAC&U’s academic universe, no connection exists between the creation of new knowledge from scholarship and what professors teach in the classroom. To the contrary, scholars are the enemy, figures who need to be “coopted” so colleges can focus on teaching “diversity skills,” in classes where “new knowledge” is created by students and professors having in-class discussions about anti-diversity acts they themselves have personally experienced.

The AAC&U’s philosophy represents little more than a warmed-over version of failed 1960s educational pedagogy, but one concealed behind high-sounding rhetoric—the AAC&U leadership recognizes that in an open debate, its agenda would have little chance of adoption. In this sense, hypocrisy is a vital component of the AAC&U agenda.

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Robert KC Johnson - 2/11/2005

As I noted in my previous response, some of the topics (12 of the ~30 courses) are clearly non-ideological, either public (education, juv. justice) or quasi-public (boy scouts). Of those that tend in one ideological direction, however, they all tend in the same direction.

On immigration, there are, no doubt, grassroots anti-immigrant groups that a service learning program could support. Do I think they should do so? No. And personally I support substantially liberalized immigration laws. But I don't want such a thing taught in colleges. Schools like PSU can't have the academic freedom issue both ways, saying that academic freedom protects colleges from outside influences and then simultaneously running required courses that seem designed to end with students sympathetic to one side of a hotly contested political issue.

As to the statement "Often, immigrants and refugees come to America as the indirect result of American foreign policy": that is at best a debatable point, and it certainly can't be asserted as a fact--in the second sentence of the description of a course that ostensibly is on immigration, not US foreign policy. In terms of addressing the explanation for immigrants coming to the US, the indirect result of American foreign policy is almost never considered of such importance that it would appear with such prominence in a course description. That the professor would place such a line in the description suggests (at the very minimum) a highly unusual approach to immigration history.

As can be sensed from my comments, I'm skeptical about service learning programs in general: I think they're rip-offs for students, forcing students to pay (in tuition credits) to do work for which they really should be paid. But if a college is going to structure its curriculum around required service learning (much less call this "intellectually cumulative"), the college at least should have some type of ideological balance. This isn't a case of an academic department, where the debate often is over intellectual developments in the discipline. In this case, these courses (except for the courses on various aspects of US social justice history) are explicitly non-disciplinary. So it's the college's obligation to make some pretense of intellectual balance.

Timothy James Burke - 2/11/2005

Let's look at the service learning category, which is where my discomfort with your reading of "ideology" is most acute.

First, it seems to me that you simply read out or cast aside as exceptions courses which do not fit your sense of the hidden agenda. Business Outreach, for example, is offering support for "businesses in general", something you say is lacking from the curriculum. It's not. The courses on the juvenile justice system and the criminal justice system commit themselves largely to extremely ordinary, non-prescriptive kinds of empirical tests of effectiveness common to social science--and the criminal justice system isn't generally thought to be a particularly left-wing enterprise. Studying watersheds isn't left-wing unless you think that anything that deals with environment is intrinsically so, which would be a pretty strange view. The Boys and Girls Club is not generally regarded as a hotbed of liberal political sentiment.

You pose a hypothetical: why not courses on service-based learning that work with homeland security, and yet so many dealing with immigration issues (which you characterize as ideological merely by saying they're "hot-button" in the West; to say something is a subject of intense social interest and strong opinion doesn't make something which focuses on that subject ideological merely by its choice to focus on it)? Here I think you're not being particularly thoughtful about the practicalities of building a service-based or practice-based curriculum if you set out to do it. What groups, institutions and interests are going to readily have a need for senior undergraduates to assist them, are going to have a reliable and structured need for this kind of high-level volunteering? It's going to be well-established non-profits that can't afford to hire a staff big enough to service their program, or areas of municipal and state activity where the budgets are equally tight AND the opportunity for service-based learning comfortably exists. Ask yourself your question again with some sense of the concrete realities. Is homeland security likely to be an area where the people working in it would welcome and readily know how to accomodate an annual turnover of senior undergraduates working as high-level interns who can do meaningful hands-on practice? Is the Portland police force likely to say, "Sure, we can accomodate 10 students who want to ride in our cars with us and help us with arrests?" You're attributing the particular distributions of service-based learning courses to some kind of underlying slant or agenda when in fact they're likely to be largely practical responses to the available possibilities. Every single one of those classes needs to be built around a domain where: a) there is a need for semi-skilled assistance that is otherwise unfulfilled b) a way to accomodate interns or students in such a fashion that they can do challenging work rather than just be go-fers with relatively little prior experience in the area of study. That eliminates a whole range of civic and governmental institutions at one go. It eliminates those like medicine that have high skill barriers (not to mention more interns than they know what to do with, and an established relationship to colleges and universities.) It eliminates those where the work is too sensitive to readily permit a rotating group of senior undergraduates to participate meaningfully every year. It eliminates those groups that do not have particularly structured programs--I mean, you could offer a capstone in "Helping The Neighborhood Church" or some such, but most such capstones would be horribly amorphous. It eliminates those civic groups which don't *have* programs of this character per se: I suspect that even if you asked the NRA if students could have a capstone in outreach on gun safety, they wouldn't know what to do with the request.

Let me call attention to some of the other places that you "read into" in a way that I'd frankly think you'd be much warier of doing, given that this is to a very significant extent what your colleagues did to you in their attempts to construct you as a figment of their own imaginations. Take the statement in "Global Portland" that "Often, immigrants and refugees come to America as the indirect result of American foreign policy". Are you seriously trying to tell me that you think this is an inaccurate or wildly ideological statement in and of itself? You may hear it as code for some other far more ideological statement that concerns you, and perhaps it is. But I don't think you're permitted, with due diligence, to make that claim on just the statement alone. Think of all the entirely unobjectionable things that statement accurately describes. US policy covering agricultural migrant labor in the West has a foreign policy component. US policy covering asylum most definitely has a major foreign policy component: Cuba is a different case in our asylum policy than Somalia. The status of different nations in general within US immigration policy is a part of our foreign policy towards those nations. US foreign policy may encourage immigration in an entirely positive way: the operations of the USIA over many decades were designed to communicate the attractions and strengths of American society. And I'm sure you'd agree that in specific cases--as in the focal point of this particular Global Portland capstone, Somalia--there's some kind of meaningful relation between US foreign policy and immigration about which one is not required to have any set political or ideological point of view. It's simply a fact.

Robert KC Johnson - 2/11/2005

I strongly suspect that if Tim were provost of PSU, I wouldn't object to this program (though I'd still doubt that it should be called a "capstone," because there's nothing intellectually cumulating about it).

For a local public university to sponsor internships with municipal government programs seems to me perfectly appropriate--CUNY has such a program, in which I participate as a factulty mentor.

That's not, however, how I interpret the PSU program. Of the 33 capstone courses, 13 involve some sort of partnership with government, mostly public education (6), or quasi-public agencies, like the Boy Scouts. I would describe these as all ideologically neutral, although they're obviously not culminating.

The remainder of the courses, however, fall into three catgeories:
1.) Fluff (3):
Girl Power: Women's Oral Narratives I and II (6 credits)
The Spirituality of Being Awake (6 credits)
Meditation for Global Healing (6 credits)
[Family Math, which is usually offered, isn't being offered this term.]

2.) Service learning courses (12) involving work with groups representing only one side of a controversial social issue (usually immigration, environmentalism, left-leaning magazines, or supporting non-profits):
Oregon Community Visions (6 credits)
Immigration and the Workforce (6 credits)
Grant Writing for Non-profits (6 credits)
Creative Industries: Creating a Literary/Arts Marketing Campaign (6 credits)
Design, Development and Delivery of Interactive Media and E-Learning Products (6 credits)
Bilingual Education (3 credits)
Business Outreach Capstone (3 credits)
Global Portland: Somali Refugees (3 credits)
Immigrant and Refugee Educational Concerns (3 credits)
Public Relations for Non-Profits (3 credits)
African Outreach (6 credits)
ESL Conversation Partners (6 credits)

3.) Courses without a service learning component that seem to send a political message (5):
Us and Them: A History of Intolerance in America (6 credits)
Social Change through Music (6 credits)
Gay Rights, Television, and Social Change (6 credits)
Hunger in the City (6 credits)
Global Portland: Politics of Immigration (3 credits), which operates under the stated truth that "often, immigrants and refugees come to America as the indirect result of U.S. foreign policy."

The fluff courses have no business being offered, especially as "senior capstones." Almost all of the other courses are appropriate for a university that allows service learning (a concept of which I am skeptical).

Yet taken together, they all skew in one direction ideologically. What is the rationale, for instance, in including courses on gay rights, intolerance in America, and social change through music; but not, say, American religious or intellectual history? What is the rationale for choosing service learning courses involving work with pro-immigration groups (an enormously hot-button political issue on the West Coast) and not, say, "homeland security" groups? Why are support mechanisms supplied only for non-profits or left-leaning e-journals, and not businesses in general?

This is where--to get back to where we started this discussion--administrations do matter. This is a required, 6-credit program--not a department or electives that students can avoid. The PSU administration has established a mechanism by which there are 17 courses that left-leaning students would find ideologically comfortable. There are no courses that moderate or conservative students would find ideologically comfortable. Yet by the ostensible guidelines of the program, I can imagine a variety of such offerings (faith-based grassroots organizations, for instance, or myriad business ventures). Perhaps promoting a one-sided ideological vision is not PSU's motive, but it seems like the most likely explanation for the specific type of course cluster that the university has established.

Timothy James Burke - 2/11/2005

Again, this is where I think you read ideology in others in a way that's somewhat unfair.

If you're going to have a curriculum that's centered on community work, that has an "applied" or practice-based focus, what are the opportunities to do that work? What kinds of institutional contexts are there for students to interact with community work? Well, homeless shelters, K-12 schools, the penal system, and so on. Criticizing that content as an ideological choice on the part of PSU is partly a category error: if you have a problem with it, you actually have a problem with the nature of municipal and state government, from a somewhat libertarian direction.

In the sense that you mean it, what's ideological about the following capstones:

Homeless Shelter
A Community-Based Tutoring Program For Middle Students
Asset Mapping With GIS: Empowering Communities
Bilingual Education
Business Outreach

and so on down the list. Sure, a lot of the courses have buzzwords like "empowering" or even just the trope of "community", which I suspect you hear as being instrinsically ideological. I think that over-reads to a significant extent. Even courses in the program that probably do have a fairly strong political point-of-view, such as "Global Portland", go out of their way in the course description to be fairly neutral. Of the courses in the program, it seems to me that only "Girl Power", "Gay Rights, Television and Social Change", "Hunger and the City", "Meditation and Global Healing", and "Us and Them: A History of Intolerance in America" make what seem to be clearly ideological statements, and pretty modest ones at that.

Robert KC Johnson - 2/10/2005

On the PSU capstone courses--they seem to me divided between one-sided offerings "History of Intolerance in America" and fluff offerings. (I disagree that I included the two worst--I think the course called "family math" is by far the fluffiest!)

In theory, I'd have no objection to a curriculum directed at practical or applied work of various kinds in the Portland community. In practice, as PSU follows it, I have two objections.

1.) This isn't a 'capstone' experience. There's nothing intellectually cumulative about this program--all of these courses could be taken by incoming freshmen. PSU therefore misrepresents the program.

2.) The "various kinds" of work in the PSU capstone all fall on one side of the ideological spectrum--and this is a required, 6-credit, program. I think public colleges should be exceedingly careful about promoting specific political activity. I don't see how the academy can credibly say academic freedom should be maintained if colleges themselves become involved in various partisan or ideological crusades.

On the top down or bottom up approach, the AAC&U seems to me critical here, in that they give an institutional heft--and provide a language that seems acceptable--to those intent on doing curricular harm.

Richard Henry Morgan - 2/10/2005

That was poorly written. The Moses brouhaha predated KC's time at Brooklyn. And the outcry was over her appointment to CCNY.

Richard Henry Morgan - 2/10/2005

Tis is before Prof. Johnson's time, but I was in NYC when Yolanda Moses was hired to run CCNY. She had published an article saying that colleges and universities put too much emphasis on scholarship, and not enough on community-building skills.

She was, coincidentally, for 10 years the chair of the board of AAC&U. I remember the outcry at the time. When Badillo, who had been the lone dissenting vote of the CUNY board in hiring her, became head of the board, Moses was shown the road (but not until she had put in 6 years). I've tried to find the original article, but can't. So these issues aren't something that has just popped up in the last year or so.

Timothy James Burke - 2/10/2005

To amplify a bit more on assumptions. Looking at the course description for "Being Awake", well, it's obviously not my cup of tea, as it's basically a kind of spiritual workshop. But even from the description, I wouldn't want to hazard of guess of how it's taught, of what it does for its students, of its rigor or pedagogical character.

More importantly, looking at all the Portland State senior capstones, there's a way in which you misrepresent the whole program as being Mickey Mouse by quoting the two most possibly Mickey-Mouse titles. They're not very reflective, just sticking at the level of titles and descriptions, of the whole curriculum. More importantly, that curriculum seems to me to have a really profound pedagogical coherence in that it's entirely directed at practical or applied work of various kinds in the Portland community. What's wrong with that? If you think it's classism for community colleges and some public institutions to concentrate on coursework that has a practical, hands-on or applied nature, that every academic institution has to have an equally intellectualized and scholarly conception of what it does, that strikes me as being a cure far worse than the disease, as a dictum or agenda which is very seriously overconstrictive.

Timothy James Burke - 2/10/2005

I'm concerned that you're making assumptions that are unsupported, as you sometimes do in these critiques. Once again you're making assertions about the content of courses based on evidence as thin as their titles--I don't know what "The Spirituality of Staying Awake" is, I suspect you do not either. But to assume it's Mickey Mouse just because you think the title is Mickey Mouse is potentially a big mistake. One of the undergraduate courses that taught me some of the most profoundly challenging things I've ever learned about history, historiography, methodology, and so on, was "Law in Medieval Iceland", taught by Steven White. I could easily see a careless person doing surveys of college curricula assuming that was a trivial course. I'm concerned about the same in the way you read the nature of "global studies" as being inevitably political and one-sided in narrow ways. I've had many courses that would fit under that rubric--and teach some now myself--that I would very strongly insist are not one-sided or narrow ideologically, and which do profoundly and open-mindedly take up the question of what democracy is and how we should know it.

I also think you persistently assume that problems you see in the implementation of programs like this reflect a coherent and consistent agenda, that they are "top-down" and the result of well-coordinated intentions. I simply think it's not so, for the most part--that the problems you're concerned about, and some concern me too, are much more "bottom-up". Large grants and projects in academia, whatever their ostensible ideology, tend to have a disconnect between well-meaning, vaporous, pleasant language in the overall proposal and the kind of uncoordinated, improvisational, hodgepodge implementation within actual curricula. Maybe it's because I'm due to hear him speak in an hour, but I think Gerald Graff is very good on this point; Ross Douthat's article about Harvard in this month's Atlantic is the same. You don't need an agenda or conspiracy or coordinated intent to get to one-sided or Mickey Mouse curricular projects. In fact, the current nature of currcular planning in most universities almost guarantees that ANY curricular project funded by the government or foundations is going to lose coherence and coordination in its actual implementation across a range of institutions.

Robert KC Johnson - 2/10/2005

The AAC&U agenda, it seems to me, tends more toward the latter. In an AAC&U keynote address envisioning students receiving academic credit for “self-discovery,” the IUPUI provost championed a university in which “librarians, technologists, advisors, clinicians, researchers, and outreach specialists take on duties that overlap with tenured faculty.” Of course, if the goal of a college education is to teach not content in the traditional disciplines of the liberal arts but instead "diversity skills"--essentially how students must behave as citizens of a "diverse demoracy"--there's no reason why colleges would need someone with a PhD in the classroom. Indeed, from the college's standpoint, taking this approach saves $$.

Oscar Chamberlain - 2/10/2005

I have not delved into your links, but your summary suggests two agendas. One is the political one. Here I reserve judgement--in part because you and I often interpret the same things differently.

The second agenda, on changing the focus from research to teaching, is very real and concerns me more these days.

There is, on one hand, a fairly salutary movement going on in the two and four year campuses focused on teaching about being more systematic in evaluating what one does in the classroom. The usual heading is SoTL: scholarship of teaching and learning. Although the jargon level can approach the toxic, I have seen good results and benefitted personaly by learning from my more eager colleagues' activities.

However, there is also a related push to reduce university teaching to a standards-ridden formula base. It is real, it's being pushed by accrediting bodies, and, most sadly, I think it may discredit the good that can come examining more carefully what we do and how we determine if it is effective.