The Strange Barrett Case

by Cliopatria

Inside Higher Ed has a review of the odd case of Kevin Barrett, who has been cleared to teach a course this fall at the University of Wisconsin. In the class, Islam: Religion and Culture, Barrett will cover, among other topics, his claim that the United States plotted 9/11.

My colleague Brian Ulrich has a perceptive post, with which I wholly agree, laying out the likely manner in which Barrett, an adjunct, was hired. I suppose the one obvious lesson from this affair is that departments should exercise more caution in hiring adjuncts: too often this task is perfunctory, without even giving a minimal inspection of the candidate's credentials.

Beyond that, this case poses (on a much smaller scale) the same type of dilemma as was offered in the Ward Churchill affair: what should be done when someone obviously unqualified attracts public attention because of his off-the-wall political views? FIRE has opposed dismissing Barrett, arguing that the cost to academic freedom would be too high. I tend to agree, one reason why I also opposed dismissing Churchill.

That said, this position, it seems to me, has to be coupled with an acknolwedgement that the decision to hire Barrett in the first place was a mistake. Yet from Wisconsin's provost, we see the opposite:"We cannot allow political pressure from critics of unpopular ideas to inhibit the free exchange of ideas . . . There is no question that Mr. Barrett holds personal opinions that many people find unconventional . . . Our students are not blank slates. They are capable of exercising good judgment, critical analysis and speaking their minds. Instructors do not hand over knowledge wrapped up in neat packages. Knowledge grows from challenging ideas in a setting that encourages dialogue and disagreement." Barrett's views go well beyond"unpopular" or"unonventional." Here's a rebuttal comment from IHE:

I am planning to include in my course on Music Theory a unit on my conviction that Elvis lives. I will, of course, allow arguments from the other side of this important issue. A quick Google search will show the substantial evidence adduced for my theory. No factual case has been presented proving Elvis is dead. Therefore, I trust that you will support my “academic freedom” to teach my course as I see fit. I assume Provost Farrell would as well.

I'm sure students at UW aren't"blank slates." But surely the purpose of a college education is not simply, as the provost suggests, that"knowledge grows from challenging ideas in a setting that encourages dialogue and disagreement." I can think of a whole host of"ideas" that most universities would find immediately unacceptable. UW should keep Barrett on, but also announce new procedures to ensure that new adjunct hires base their classroom presentations on more than unfounded, and unsubstantiated, speculation.

Hat Tip: Manan Ahmed.

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Jonathan Dresner - 7/14/2006

You can tell it's a really good conspiracy, because it doesn't leave that kind of evidence around....

Grant W Jones - 7/14/2006

Not to mention documentation on when, how and by whom they were contacted and informed to stay home that day.

D. Forbes Tuttle - 7/14/2006

And you have the name of each and every Freemason who stayed home?

I mean, you have a list of those names, right? A list of names you will produce.

Otherwise, dishonesty is kind a word for what you traffic in.

Grant W Jones - 7/14/2006

Why? Did they spend the day poisoning wells?

Oscar Chamberlain - 7/14/2006

Michael

Astute comments. The university really has cut a number of administrative positions. I will also grant that it took some pressure to do that. If the cuts had been restricted to that I would not be complaining. {At least, I'd like to think I wouldn't be.)

On the ther hand, the current system president in his first year initiated a change that eliminated one chancellor and some staff by combining the two year campuses with Extension. There is a long-term logic to this because both work in close cooperation with county governments and have as part of their missions the expansion of education in rural Wisconsin.

That may not have reduced the topc salaries, but it did reduce the number of people getting them. Yet to my knowledge, the Republican leadership has not acknowledged this as a step in the right direction.

Michael Burger - 7/14/2006

I know nothing about the UW, but I am curious. If UW is like other schools, administrative salaries are indeed overblown. (My favorite case is the argument that university presidents need to paid so much so as to keep them from the private [i.e., non-academic] sector. While I've seen some presidents hired into academe, presidents getting hired away from academe are rare to say the least.) Is it possible that the legislature made a good faith effort to cut spending on administration by lowering appropriations, and the UW administration responded by raising tuition and making cuts elsewhere? _If_ so (I don't know that the scenario is true, only plausible given the bare factual narrative here), who is at fault?

Adam Kotsko - 7/13/2006

Little-known fact: All the Freemasons who were employed at the WTC called in sick on 9/11. Are you going to tell me that's just a "coincidence"?

Jonathan Dresner - 7/13/2006

The truth may be out there, but until it's accumulated enough evidence to be convincing, I'll go on with my well-documented fallacy.

Grant W Jones - 7/13/2006

And FDR was behind Pearl Harbor.

Adam Kotsko - 7/13/2006

when in fifty years it comes out that the US really did plot 9/11.

The truth is out there, but you can't handle it.

Brian Ulrich - 7/13/2006

Actually UW adjuncts get the same health care benefits as TA's, which are quite generous - something about having a risk pool consisting mainly of 20-year-olds.

Ralph E. Luker - 7/13/2006

It helps to keep in mind that he is in an adjunct slot: part-time, few if any bennies, no tenure track, surely won't have his contract renewed.

Jason T. Kuznicki - 7/13/2006

...and I can't.

Excuse me, I'm going to go burn my diploma now.

Oscar Chamberlain - 7/13/2006

Ralph

I agree that there are decisions at Madison that don't help the politics of the situation. And the more I think about this particular case, the more this seems like hiring a math teacher and then finding out that he thinks that 2+2=5 (though I suppose in some odd mathmatical universe it might).

However, how many bad decisions at one (or even two or three) campuses are proof that the budget to the entire system of 26 campuses plus extension needs to be cut?

I don't mind demands that we improve so long as the standards behind those demands are clear and sane. Right now, I honestly don't know what evidence the system could give to some of its critics in the legislature. I wish I did.

Ralph E. Luker - 7/13/2006

The university's Madison campus doesn't contribute much to reversing the state's niggling budget for higher education by hiring someone like Barrett into an adjunct slot. It really does need to show responsible use of funds available in order to make the case for increased funding.

Brian Ulrich - 7/13/2006

I second this. On a campus like UW-Madison, you need administrators to work on things like program development and outreach, if nothing else. What's more, a key reason they had to hire an adjunct in LCA is the lack of funding for a tenure-track hire in Islamic Studies, which many people have been seeking.

Oscar Chamberlain - 7/13/2006

Forgive a personal, and perhaps selfish response, but the comment in the IHE article from the Republican legislator about cutting administration was neither hot air nor a measured response.

Last term, a majority of Republicans and some Democrats directed massive budget cuts at the entire system (26 campuses) under the guise of cutting administrators. In fact, the cuts went far beyond administrators and resulted in another sharp tuition increase and a diminished capacity to serve all qualified students.

So what the legislator was referring to was not a targeted cut at UW Madison, but another excuse for a general cut to the system as a whole.

A final thought. One canot blame the legislature solely for the origins of this hostility. The UW upper administration has made some boneheaded moves, and I have no doubt that there could be some better efficiencies. And there are too many times that the liberalism of faculty does come across as a lack of respect for conservatives.

But right now, the University system here is getting absolutely no credit whatsoever for what it does right in teaching--or even when it does manage to reorganize in a way that saves money. There are people out there simply looking for reasons to cut us some more.

Robert KC Johnson - 7/12/2006

I agree with Ralph. At Brooklyn, when we hire adjuncts to teach our introductory classes, they have some leeway, but the department has some control over what they teach. (The class is a western Civ survey; they couldn't spend the term teaching political theory.)

The discouraging thing is that while we all lament it, it's likely that the trend toward more part-time teachers isn't going to be reversed, and so we're probably going to be seeing more cases like this in the future.

Ralph E. Luker - 7/12/2006

I've been discussing both the Barrett and the Deborah Frisch cases with Margaret Soltan at University Diaries. There's some indication that Barrett may have been the only applicant for this adjunct slot. If so, this might be a program that is otherwise also weak. In many cases, adjuncts have very little, if any, latitude in creating their own syllabi. I suspect that since the University already had a contract with Barrett it had little reasonable alternative but to honor it. But, really, both the Frisch and the Barrett cases point to yet another problem with higher education's increasing reliance on adjuncts to teach its classes. There's obviously nothing like the quality control in the hiring of adjuncts that one expects (and normally finds, Churchill to the contrary notwithstanding) in the hiring of full-time faculty.

Manan Ahmed - 7/12/2006

I agree with your post KC and I wonder how the department would have found out about his beliefs prior to hiring him and what is the alternative?

Either a department hire an adjunct to teach an existing syllabi/module and require that the adjunct not deviate or a department must do a syllabus review along with c.v. etc. prior to hiring.

In both cases, dicey territory.