Wednesday, April 4, 2012

National Association of Scholars, on left bias in UC system

Working paper on critique of  report by a conservative group, National Association of Scholars, NSA.  The  87 page pdf page report is at this link, A Crisis of Confidence, The Corrupting Effect of Political Activism in the University of California, April 2012.   The format of this review will be my comments in italics, before and after excerpted text referenced to PDF pagination.

The introduction sections, covering the purpose and theory of higher education, is consistent with many of my own views expressed elsewhere on this website.  It  expands on the inherent incompatibility between the goals of the political and the academic arenas.  One arena, the political, is to obfuscate and to indoctrinate; while the academic is to inform, and explicate, allowing individuals to seek his or her own personal conclusions.  This analysis of the report will describe the main points, and explore whether their prescriptions for change, both explicit as recommendations,  and implied in their choice of examples and terminology will achieve this desired result.
 

A concise summary of the introductory phase is this. 
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But all the instincts of radical activists go in the opposite direction. Their natural tendency is to denigrate the past in order to make the case for the sweeping social change that they seek. Accordingly, they don’t look at the past and see accumulated knowledge and wisdom, but instead a story of bigotry, inequality, and racial and sexual prejudice that needs to be swept aside. Political radicals are interested in the utopian future and their never-ending attempts to achieve it, not in the cultural past that must be  overcome to get them there.

The use of the term "radical activist" is excessively adversarial.  It also too narrowly defines the source of their stated problem as emanating from the few who meet this description rather than those who quietly reflect these values and subtly communicate them to students. 

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Here the report enumerates and describes he many self described Marxists in the CA university system. 

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In their constant efforts to expand the frontiers of knowledge, academic thinkers must continually rethink and reevaluate everything as they come to terms with new evidence, new discoveries, and new theories. Sometimes new developments can make them see everything they thought they knew in a different way. All of this sounds a very long way from the temperament of people who cling to an obsolescent political theory and refuse to reevaluate it no matter how badly it turned out to work when subjected to an extensive test in the real world. This is why those extraordinary numbers are so important. To surround oneself with grossly disproportionate numbers of people who share a congenial political standpoint just as that standpoint is decisively failing the test of experience looks very much like a way of insulating oneself from the lessons of experience, and a means of avoiding rethinking, reevaluating, and responding to new developments. But that is tantamount to a refusal to be an academic. An academy that contains substantial numbers of people who do not think and behave as academics must do is in serious trouble.
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John Stuart Mill, an important nineteenth century thinker widely respected among liberals is cited extensively. 

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Mill made another interesting remark about the need of both left and right for each other: “it is in a great measure the opposition of the other that keeps each within the limits of reason and sanity.” This remark is the key to the rise of political radicalism to dominance on the campuses. Where there are no right-of-center voices to keep the left healthy, the result is a much more extreme political culture. Political monocultures will inevitably degenerate into incoherence. The noted liberal scholar Cass Sunstein, in a recent article entitled “The Law of Group Polarization,”(24) has gathered together an impressive array of findings in social  sychology to document Mill’s point that groups heavily dominated by one political perspective, whether left or right, will over time become increasingly extreme. This implies that one-party departments are ultimately as bad for those that they include as for those that they exclude. As elements of a college campus they will be an intellectual catastrophe.
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The following touches on a cogent point, one that I have been exploring myself, as I describe in the comments after this excerpt. 

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....... the frank admission by Cary Nelson, the AAUP’s (American Assoc. of University Professors) present leader, that political criteria in hiring “are clearly fair when deciding whether or not to hire a faculty member in the first place. You have a right not to hire someone whose views you consider reprehensible.” It seems safe to assume that for campus activists, “reprehensible” will be anything to the right of center. Once again, the present AAUP violates the clear sense of its own classic statements of principle. Vince Carroll displays a more realistic awareness of the problem posed by an academy where left-of-center faculty “don’t merely dominate the faculty, they essentially are the faculty.” Carroll concludes: “One has to wonder, however, about the self-correcting ability of an academic culture so in-bred that it reflects only half of the political spectrum. What arguments will be overlooked? What lines of inquiry ignored?”

The report hits the nail on the head here in the description of those rejected for an academic career by the current president of the professors organization.  He does not say that the applicant's views are wrong, or simplistic, but "reprehensible."  The use of this word, this moral loathing is the crux of the distinction between the left bias and that of the right.  Reprehensibility is akin to revulsion, a visceral reaction that controls the organism that needs no further rational justification.  A paraphrase would be "these people make me sick."  It simply demands rejection, and is justified by the perception alone.  And so an academic candidate who takes any position that could impede the goals of minorities is not to be evaluated, his position more carefully considered because it goes against the consensus, but to be condemned prima face.  This may be an effective long term political strategy, but it is antithetical to the essential values of a university.   
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Next is a long list of book assignments from various departments across the UC campuses, with the following conclusion

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We can generalize about all of these choices: they are all political; they are all written from the same radical perspective; they all concern the same small group of endlessly-repeated politically correct themes; no opposing points of view that could spark realistic debate are ever offered; and they have emotional appeal but not the intellectual complexity of an academic treatment. None require of the student what is often called “deep reading” – reading that requires continuous thought and processing of complex ideas, as opposed to the rapid absorption of a single message that continues unchanged throughout the book. This is a sad loss of an opportunity to introduce the students to ideas and writing that are complex enough to challenge them, ideas that they will not already find in ordinary, everyday politics. Once more, ideology crowds out education.
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Next, is the section that begins to undermine the conclusions of the observations and descriptions of the bias that the report documents. 

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An illustrative example is a teach-in that took place on April 24, 2006 at UC Santa Cruz. The title of the event was “The War on Terror,” but it was largely about the war in Iraq. As the publicity for the event announced, an extraordinary number of campus agencies sponsored the event: Major funding for the teach-in has been provided by the Offices of the Chancellor, Executive Vice Chancellor, and Student Affairs, with additional contributions from the Anthropology Department, Center for Cultural Studies, Center for Justice, Tolerance and Community (CJTC), College Nine, College...

That level of institutional funding could only be justified if this were an educational event, rather than an anti-war rally. Any academic teacher knows what an educational event on the war in Iraq would look like. It would start with an exposition of the case for the war, and follow that with an exposition of the case against the war. To ensure a first-rate educational event, the organizer would seek out speakers who could be relied on to make the best possible cases for and against. Following these initial presentations would be a series of
speakers commenting on the strengths and weaknesses of the two cases, after which audience questions to the speakers would be invited. Done well, this would make a splendid contribution to
a deeper understanding of the subject.

This section is deeply problematic.  There was no "exposition of the case for the war" for a cogent reason, if it exists it is not in the public domain.  The coalition lead by neo-con Republicans in the administration and endorsed by many Democrats can only be understood by a Realpolitik that is not acknowledged by any respected academic or public figure.  The invasion of Iraq was justified as the projection of American power as the hegemon of a post cold war world  (see Project for a new  American Century).  If this were presented, it would have been just another anti war argument, yet it is the only viable explanation. 


The NSA writers of this report have an obligation to actually describe what an explanation that supports this war would be.  As was known then, and confirmed now, the evidence for existence of WMD was spurious and such information was willfully ignored. The expectation of American control of a "liberated" Iraq was equally unfounded.  The harsh reality of our war in Iraq, reasonably anticipated before our entry and confirmed during our occupation and after, is that any explanation of the dynamics of our entry only further condemn the actions of those responsible for it.  A balanced argument can not be created unless such an argument actually exists.   

While this may not be a justification for university to treat an anti war rally as a teach in,  this example is one that shows that some of the described liberal excess is a reaction to the mythologies of the right.  It is the inclusion of this part of the analysis, the interplay of conservative and liberal forces that is necessary to complete this picture of the existing academic bias.  While this absence does not negate many points of this report, it shows that this is not a comprehensive study of the this vital subject- rather being somewhat of a polemic, exactly the main accusation against the liberals who control the current academic agenda. 
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The report makes an extensive argument that the current politicized environment, because it elevates indoctrination over academics, is most harmful to current minorities:

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Arum and Roksa give us further evidence of the damage that is being done here. We know that African-American students enter higher education with lower Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA) scores than their white counterparts. But Arum and Roksa found that “During their first two years of college, white students gained 41 CLA points, while African-American students gained only 7 points…. As a consequence, the gap between African-American and white students increased over time.”72 Initial inequalities ought to have moderated but instead have been exacerbated. This is a horrifying result, one that should cause everyone to think hard about how it has happened.

Another dimension to this problem emerges when Arum and Roksa report that while students on average study only 12 hours per week outside of their classes, African-Americans study even less – two hours less. They also take courses with more than minimal writing requirements at a rate one third less than white students. Why should a group that knows it has to catch up put in less, not more effort than others, and take less, not more demanding classes? There may be many factors at work, but one is clear: they are targets of the demoralizing message of politically radical professors.73
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This segment refuses to address other possible causes of the lack of increase in performance over time in college by African American students.  Yes, the other causes are more difficult to deal with, implicating deep intractable cultural or intellectual attributes, the discussion of which is eschewed by liberals--- and as reflected here, also by conservatives.  This is a fundamental conundrum for American universities, one that has been a contentious issue from the earliest post WWII period when the very concept of race, including its academic study was first conflated with "racism" and continues to this very day. This report by esteemed scholars of the right, seems to prefer to use this divisive subject as a political football to castigate their political opponents, rather than honestly discussing the issue, as their ideal true scholars are charged with doing. 
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There are other segments when this often realistic analysis is flawed, as shown here:

That faction has been able to remake the campus history curriculum in a way designed to instill in students its own low opinion of the country. Any reasonably thorough survey of American history and institutions would turn up events that do not represent our nation’s finest hour, but it would also find much that is admirable and even inspiring. A survey that ignored the negative factors in the nation’s history would be unrealistic, but it is just as unrealistic to ignore what is positive.

Historiography does not do "admirable" or "inspiring"  as historical data, but perhaps as the perception that is fostered by nationalist movements. This is the stuff of propaganda, no better when celebratory than cynical.  The writers of this article betray their own bias with snippets such as this.

There have been two prongs to the strategy to conceal anything that might be encouraging. First, required survey courses in U.S. history have been largely abolished; and second, the optional courses that remain have concentrated on those aspects of national history that promote the radical activists’ negative attitudes. In this way much of the basic knowledge of how U.S. history unfolded is withheld, for the simple reason that it would make the country look better than radical activists want it to look.

Here the writers of this report have veered into "The Simpsons" territory, when they did a parody of such an assistant professor of history who wowed over Marge for a while, until he was uncovered as the simpleton that he was, as understood by the program's vast audience.  In this eighty seven pages of decrying poor writing, the group responsible for this report missed that one element of effective polemic is restraint, that overstating an argument will destroy it.  I won't let that happen in this case, as there are legitimate points being made.   But to advocated cheerleading as in this section, weakens the argument for correcting the actual problems of lack of intellectual stimulation caused by a predominance of a single partisan view.

 In spite of the serious flaws, and maybe because of them, this is an important report.  Its solutions, more imposition of rules by the California State Regents over hiring and subject matter appears unrealistic, and given the subtext of the report, if successful, would only lead to a swing of the pendulum towards another bias. The challenge of this report was to illustrate an ideal of non partisan education, which seemed to be attempted for a while by focusing on objective research.. I heard later the voice of another contingent of this committee formed document trying to make points that, by being politically colored, damaged the central argument.

  Yet, to ignore the central premises of the first part of the report, the pernicious effect of a university with a social agenda advanced by a dominant culture, from administrators to department heads to professors, would be an over reaction to its defects.  Attention should be paid.  There need be more rigor, more dedication to values that, while not exemplified in this report, were well articulated.  It should be the beginning of a serious dialog.  

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The criticism and response of this report is emblematic of the culture clash that is reflected throughout our society, the political dialogue that determines elections that change our legal climate as well as what happens ion our universities.  I will be writing more on this issue, including my contacts with the group, NAS, that wrote it and the responses from the U.C.

The following is an essay that describes why I take a personal interest in this issue.

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