Hmm . . .

by Cliopatria

I see my Brooklyn colleague Ed Kent (Philosophy Department) is finally onto me . . . :)

Kent’s comments are nothing compared to those of David Benfell, who speculated in Kent’s “academic freedom” group that my critique of dispositions theory was comparable to “attacks that have led to crimes against humanity, hate crimes, and discriminatory attacks.” It’s unclear whether Benfell’s comments also apply to other recent critiques of “dispositions” theory, such as Stanford professor William Damon’s perceptive recent essay; or FIRE’s successful effort to have repealed a Washington State dispositions requirement that essentially required students to give a loyalty oath to the academic majority’s definition of “diversity.

It might be that we should individually assess, as NCATE’s dispositions requirement holds, all prospective public school teachers for their “disposition” to “promote social justice.” Remarks such as Kent’s, however, illuminate how confident defenders of the status quo are in the moral superiority of their position. Of course, on a campus where your views are never challenged, it’s easy to engage in such moral superiority.

Along with many others at Brooklyn, Kent seems particularly disturbed about the fate of Timothy Shortell, who withdrew his bid to become chairman of the Sociology Department in light of public criticism of his deeming all religious people “moral retards,” his comment that “on a personal level, religiosity is merely annoying—like bad taste,” his comparing Karl Rove to a Nazi war criminal, and his celebrating the alleged political effects of older people’s higher death rates. Although I disagree with it, I could understand a free speech absolutist position holding that anything a professor says should not block him from assuming a department chairmanship (though I wonder what Kent and his supporters would have done had Shortell’s remarks been about, say, gay people rather than religious people). But Kent doesn’t take such an approach. Instead, he hails Shortell’s comments as “quite valid critiques of much of modern religion with its bitter and murderous attacks on others.”

At the core of the intellectual diversity movement is a belief that ideologues representing the current campus orthodoxies have abused the inherently subjective nature of the academic personnel process to ensure the hiring of like-minded colleagues. If Kent considers an essay deeming religious people “moral retards” an example of quality thought, what kind of Philosophy work would he be looking for among job applicants? Or if, say, a Grover Furr can accuse FIRE’s Greg Lukianoff of “dishonest” writing in a Lukianoff essay replete with examples of his thesis, how could Furr be expected to evaluate fairly the scholarship of applicants for a position in his department?

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Janet Rose - 4/7/2006

Sherman Dorn--is it true that the leadership of the CUNY faculty union, the PSC, led by Steve London and Barbara Bowen, "misplaced" about $10,000,000 in welfare fund monies by comingling the retiree prescription drug plan funds with the active employees' dental plan? Is it true that they then "solved" the shortfall by eliminating the CUNY faculty's group life insurance plan and then drastically cut back on dental benefits? In tandem, is it really true that they proceeded to hold a demonstration in front of the chancellor's home that became a joke around CUNY? Is all this true?

Timothy James Burke - 9/28/2005

I'm saying that before I accuse someone of <em>deliberately</em> hypocritical practices (because almost no one cops officially to "ideological hiring practices") I owe them some consideration of what they're doing in the terms they offer.

Yes, calling someone a vicious SOB in public is vastly worse from my perspective, but the point is, if you're already on record as being basically uninterested in what other academics say about their own work, uninterested in the details of the things you criticize, there's less ground on which to protest the uncollegial views of another academic as long as that academic is scrupulous about firewalling those views away from any kind of academic freedom. Not no ground whatsoever, merely less of it.

I have said it before, but there comes a point where I think you have to go beyond reading the boilerplate of others and criticizing it as a deep guide to their institutional practices. In fact, no sensible historian would do that with a historical document of any kind, assume that the rhetoric of a particular document was a reliable guide to what was actually done on the ground. (Especially not a political historian!) I think KC needs to take the next step on a lot of his critique. If he wants to complain about the uses and meaning of "social justice" in education curricula, he needs to do (or at least cite) substantive intellectual and political histories of the term, of education programs, and so on--or some kind of ethnographic inquiry into what actually happens on the ground that goes beyond what a few students he happens to know tell him. If he wants to complain about the relationship of social history to political history, the time has come to actually offer a substantive critique of social history's role within the discipline over the past twenty years that focuses in part on what social history does in scholarly practice, where it comes from as a form, and the nature of its relationship to political history as a form of historical writing. In this context, that's what I would say collegiality requires: not any modification of the pointedness of the critique, but moving to some deeper engagement. If that happens, the asymmetry between his views and someone who tosses off a public dismissal of him in personal terms is substantive rather than a matter of degree or emphasis.

Mitchell B Langbert - 9/28/2005

I took part in the dialogue that KC is describing and the deterioration of universities saddens me.

Van L. Hayhow - 9/28/2005

I don't know. It seems to me that saying you don't think you would enjoy eating with someone or calling someone a vicious SOB is much worse than saying someone engages in ideological hiring practices.

Timothy James Burke - 9/28/2005

KC, the problem in part is that you haven't left yourself a lot of room in which to complain if someone judges you with the negativity that Kent does as anything but an exercise of free speech parallel to your own. The difference lies primarily in tone and in whether one judges the complaint reasonable based on one's prior sense of values and political commitments.

Kent is extremely clear in the entry you link to: in his judgement a faculty member is allowed to argue that religious people are moral retards, or to question a "social justice" requirement, or whatever they like. Obviously his extremely negative remarks about you personally sting, or at least they would me if directed at me, but even there, if he firewalls those opinions from anything substantive, there's no grounds for a substantive complaint by the very standards you've promoted in the past.

The only grounds for a complaint would be a collegial one: that people who work together, or even share the same profession, should be judicious in their public remarks about each other, that the public sphere ought to exert important constraints and responsibilities about us. Obviously in this respect Shortell's "moral retards" remark or even Kent's remarks are different from your critiques. And yet, I remain troubled, because you increasingly are not particularly curious about or collegially engaged by the things which you critique. You have an assumption about what "social justice" is, or about what the particular syllabi you read online mean about a colleague in a distant institution, or about what the distribution of particular specializations in another department signifies. All of which may or may not be warranted assumptions, but you never (to me) seem to take the next investigatory step. What you do as a historian seems at times evidentiarily very divorced from what you do as a critic of academia.

I've been involved in judging grant applications for an institution that funds graduate student research abroad. One of the basic commitments that I took with me is that you first judge applicants in terms of the discipline within which they're studying, in terms of the institutions within which they're studying, in terms of the first and proximate requirements to which they will be meaningfully subjected, in terms of the pragmatic requirements facing them before they can go the next step in their careers. I'm impatient with some of the strictures that are involved in that sequence, but it takes a kind of hubris and self-centeredness to assume that my impatience is broadly shared, ought to be broadly shared, and that vulnerable graduate students should share my sensibilities or be judged wanting for it. Only after all those hurdles are crossed am I comfortable being more personal and particular in my arguments about the merit of a proposal and about the ethos of intellectual practice I'd like most to reward.

Similarly, it seems to me that you rarely seem to ask with a sense of curiosity, "So why do people over there in education think about social justice, or have this disposition thing?" You read the catalog, read the boilerplate, and pass judgement. It's a judgement you're entitled to pass if you like, I think you make a point, and the churlishness with which you're met tends to confirm that you've struck a nerve. But were I you, I'd still try to travel a mile in someone else's shoes first, partially because I think that's what collegiality is as a system of values, and partially because I think that if you really want to change things, that's what you do first: sympathetically connect if at all possible.

If the Augean Stables seem too full of horsedung to you to go to that effort, ok. But then you leave yourself relatively little grounds on which to object when people fling dung at you from atop their piles. You've been making the point that as long as it's not about genuine institutional threats to people, faculty are free to sound off. You've got an argument about what's proper and not (complaints about dispositions proper, complaints about religious Americans not) that depends in part on whether the reader signs on with the external sense of values and common sense underlying the complaint. (In this case, I do, to some extent, so I agree that Shortell was intemperate in a way you were not: but it depends on that agreement, not on some institutional sense of what is right and not right for an academic to say about other academics.)

Collegiality isn't just for scoundrels, or just a weapon to be misused in tenure cases: it does strike me that it's about some shared professional ethos, and a sense that one owes a professional colleague, even a problematic one, the courtesy of some initial doubt, and some circumspect engagement in public until the initial dialogue is worked through with some genuine effort. And when there are Ocaam's Razor explanations besides, "Academics are uniquely up to no good", why not prefer them? (As in the case of the essay-contest memo you cited from a CUNY administrator, where I think you mistake a feature of organizational sociology in general for a specific "groupthink" problem in academia alone".)