Last week the Chronicle of Higher Education ran a couple of pieces that caught my attention. The first was
This Professor Compared a Columnist to a Bedbug. Then the Columnist Contacted the Provost. The article included an interview with the professor, David Karpf. He had written a Tweet about the NY Times columnist Bret Stephens that eventually went viral, but only after Stephens responded to it in a way that raised attention. The other piece appeared the next day. It is by Steven Salaita and is entitled
My Life As a Cautionary Tale: Probing the limits of academic freedom. I will comment a bit on both of these articles below. Mainly for my own edification before writing this piece, I did a Google search on academic freedom versus freedom of speech. From that search I found
this page at Columbia Law School, which I found helpful. While I'm no legal scholar, I had two points to take away from this piece. First, many people confound the two. Second, academic freedom is about community rights, groups of scholars within a certain field have the right to set the norms for the field and establish those truths that the field embraces. Freedom of speech is an individual right. The two may be related but they are different. Then I want to bring in this piece from the Sunday Review,
Can We Guarantee That Colleges Are Intellectually Diverse? This will round out the picture for me.
I want to begin with some history, which will start when I was in grad school (1976-80). In this world that I was introduced to, scholarly communication happened first via working paper, where the authors produced a document that might have had earlier drafts and might have been previewed by some small circle of colleagues, but then was revised for broader distribution, yet the work had yet to go through the peer review process. Most of the audience for a paper would read it in working paper form. During this time period, line space in published journals was scarce, so even a paper that was accepted for publication might be trimmed substantially to fit with the space allotted to it. The working paper then would survive as the longer form, even after the paper had been published. This gives some sense of the community for which the working paper was intended.
Sometimes reprints of popular articles would be made and distributed in undergraduate classes, to expose those students to well known research. However, undergraduates generally didn't have access to the published research in bound periodicals. When I was an undergraduate at Cornell, I only could get into the stacks by having the faculty member I was doing some research for sign a note that my access was on his behalf. At Illinois, undergraduates don't have access to the stacks in the Main Library. I can't remember what the situation was at Northwestern this way. But my general sense is that published research was restricted in its release to faculty and graduate students. It was not meant for a general audience.
Regarding publication in general interest magazines or op-ed pieces in a newspaper, some luminaries in the field did that, certainly. So there was an "educating the public about the field" function achieved this way. But those who authored in this way counted for only a small fraction of the field. Most scholars didn't do this at the time.
In the late 1970s - the mid 1980s academic freedom was contained to this sort of communication. At the individual scholar level, the research agenda was determined by that scholar; co-authors, and academic friends who would make friendly suggestions about the work might have some influence, but the ultimate decision was with the individual scholar. Similarly, while course assignments were made by the academic department, given the course assignment the scholar would control the syllabus and the set of readings chosen. There were some obligations that were mandatory - the instructor had to specify office hours and a final exam had to be given, except in seminar courses. The instructor did have to operate within these constraints, but had flexibility on other matters as long as the constraints were satisfied.
What about publication of work entirely outside the field, scholarly or otherwise? Could that impact academic freedom? My first year of grad school at Northwestern, Arthur Butz, a tenured faculty member in Electrical Engineering, published
The Hoax of the Twentieth Century, which denied the Holocaust ever happened. It created quite a maelstrom yet Butz kept his tenure, to the chagrin of many on campus. If we contrast what happened with Butz to the Salaita case, I believe there are two factors that are important to note here. The first is that Northwestern is a private university while Illinois is a public university. Second, Butz had already been at Northwestern for a couple of years before the book came out. So his tenure had been granted ahead of that event. In contrast, in the fine print of the offer letter that Salaita received from Illinois it said
pending the approval of the Board of Trustees. Such approval was never granted. That much I know. What I don't know is when Salaita resigned from Virginia Tech. If it was when he initially received the offer letter from Illinois, then in retrospect that was a mistake, since he did have tenure at Virginia Tech. I can only guess about this. My conjecture is that any controversial publication of work outside of normally scholarly outlets will severely limit the scholar's market, regardless of the quality of the scholarly publications. If the scholar has tenure at one institution that is some job security, but it doesn't transfer to other institutions.
Now let's move forward to how the Internet has impacted scholarly communication. A different form emerged - communities of practice - where members of the community would post or respond to other posts in some discussion forum. This began with Usenet Newsgroups in the mid 1980s. I initially did something like this in the bulletin board applications FirstClass (for folks on my campus who were affiliated with
SCALE) and in Allaire Forums for those who were part of the Sloan-C community. Listserv made email an effective way for groups to form and communicate, since members then didn't need other software to participate. Communities of practice were not restricted to academic fields and could be used for any endeavor where members shared some common interest. For example, many classes embraced a community of practice approach where members of the class could discuss course topics. An important distinction to keep in mind is open groups versus closed groups. With an open group, a potential member can self-enroll into the group. With a closed group, only vetted individuals become members and the criteria for membership would be predetermined. Class groups, for example were typically restricted to the instructor and the students who were registered in the class.
My experience is that while mostly such groups had discussion where members respected each other and where disagreements might then be negotiated in a friendly fashion, once in a while there would be a jerk in a group, whose flip and off the cuff remarks would bother other members. This could then cascade into something toxic. I've experienced this both in professional groups and in class groups. Something similar might then happen with individual emails. We soon learned that while people understood norms of behavior when in face to face discussion, when writing on a computer screen with the message to be sent after the writing was completed, many people would "take the gloves off" and say harsh things, only to regret that they had sent the message after it had been delivered and they had calmed down from the earlier provocation. It is from this observation that
netiquette was born. Further, many people learned to move away from the computer when they were agitated. Alas, these lessons may not have stayed learned and/or the next generation of users never mastered them.
As the technology changed some of the issues also morphed. I started this blog back in spring 2005. Within about six months or so I was part of the edu blogging community. Other people would read my blog regularly and I would read other blogs in the community on a regular basis as well. Sometimes we would comment on their blogs. Other times we would respond in our subsequent posts. I later learned that I was a
slow blogger (possibly the slowest). Indeed Barbara Ganley, who is pictured writing outside at the beginning of the linked piece, was one of the people who became part of the circle I was in. I enjoyed that community very much. But it didn't last. The sort of writing that I'm doing in this post is meant to be read on a computer screen. As smartphones began to take over, the readership for these longer pieces declined, simply because of the screen size to render the text. Plus the multiprocessing, moving between many different messages in a short period of time, doesn't favor the lengthy piece that has been composed slowly. The quick hitter wins out here. And winning has a metric, or a set of metrics, that are undeniable - hits, likes, referrals, etc. I should also note here that life events also impacted my participation in the edu blogging community. After I retired (in summer 2010) I didn't feel the need. I still wrote posts once in a while. But I no longer felt it necessary to read other edu blogs, let alone comment on them.
The point here, bringing this back to the title of my post, is that a truly academic discussion of a subject, with nuance and counterpoints, is facilitated by a slow blogging approach. A scholar can make a strong argument this way where others can disagree but see the scholar has attended to the underlying issues and treated others respectfully. While that is still possible, the market largely made slow blogging dry up.
So, for example, in the Chronicle piece featuring the interview with David Karpf, he argues that Bret Stephens simply didn't get it that Karpf's initial tweet was a joke. Let us, for a moment, imagine that Stephens read the Chronicle piece before he ever saw the tweet. Would Stephens have reacted the same way if only then did he see the tweet or would he have shrugged it off as not worthy of a response? There is an issue for which I can see an argument made both ways as to whether an author bears any responsibility for errors resulting in misinterpretation that someone in the audience might make, especially if the author is someone like David Karpf who is savvy about how social media works. Karpf talked in the interview about how he felt secure because he has tenure. So he would not be harmed by Stephens' response (contacting the Provost of George Washington University in the process). But Karpf did not address whether his institution might be harmed even if he personally remains unscathed. I can't say in this case, but I'm quite clear that in the Salaita matter the U of I was hurt in this episode, along a variety of fronts. If the individual faculty member remains unharmed but the institution might be damaged as a result, what is the responsible thing for the faculty member to do? I will return to this question in a bit.
I have had a couple of incidents in teaching where my students misinterpreted my intentions, in such a way as to render what I planned, which made sense to me for good pedagogic reasons both ex ante and ex post, but which the students thought I was pursuing some far left agenda and indoctrinating them in the process (I wasn't). So the idea that especially conservative students will misinterpret instructor motives seems a very real issue to me. I don't know how most faculty deal with it, but as for me I opted not to teach behavioral economics, the class where the issue arose, and changed the approach in the next course I did teach, the economics of organizations, so the issue wouldn't arise there. I wrote about this in a post called
On the role or economic rationality in teaching undergraduate economics. The post makes reference to the book
Nudge, by Sunstein and Thaler.
Seeing that a behavioral approach can have real economic consequence
in areas where the assumption of rational decision making would predict
no consequence whatsoever, there is a temptation to want to teach about
behavioral economics. Indeed I offered a course on that in spring
2011. Unfortunately I stumbled into a couple of issues, one
anticipated, the other not. The anticipated one concerned senioritis.
Attendance dropped below 50% fairly early into the semester. Many of
the students didn't seem very earnest about what they were supposedly
learning. The unanticipated issue resulted from using the Nudge book as
the core reading in the second half of the course. The underlying
philosophy to guide the nudges is called Libertarian Paternalism.
It is libertarian in the sense that choice by the individual is
retained. It is paternalistic in that the nudges are defined to achieve
some social good defined by other than the individual. In preparation
for the students in encountering this philosophy, I had the students
read this piece by Amy Gutmann
on paternalism unmodified, with regard to the State's interest in the
education of children, and then I had them read the Supreme Court case Wisconsin versus Yoder.
Among those students who were earnestly participating in the class,
several reacted quite negatively to these pieces on the merits. They
wanted as little government interference in the ordinary activities of
individuals as possible. From there, they reacted negatively to much
that is in Nudge.
So I opted not to teach that course
again. I didn't want to have to do battle with the students on their
politics as we were learning the economics. Instead, last spring I
taught a course on the Economics of Organizations. This semester I'm
teaching on the same topic though in a different format. The
environment that organization members operate under is full of
uncertainty. Different members have different information and they may
very well also have different agendas for what the organization should
be trying to accomplish. So it is in this setting where I pose the
question - what should the role of economic rationality play in teaching
such a course?
That example is a sample of one course offering. In this case, the conservative students ended beating up on the liberal professor. And the liberal professor wanted out. In this case out means teaching economics in a way where liberal or conservative shouldn't matter much at all. I know it is dangerous to generalize from a sample of one. But that single experience has me believing that the hype and the reality are two different things on this issue. While conservatives lament liberal professors indoctrinating students, perhaps true in the humanities on occasion, how much does it happen in social science and business disciplines, where the conservative students mock liberal professors who then must conform to the prior expectations that students have? And if this reverse form of indoctrination is actually happening, who is reporting about it? If it happens more frequently than others care to admit, why isn't that commanding any attention?
I've set the stage for the real issue that I want to talk about, but which I'm afraid doesn't get any attention at all. But before I get to this, here is
my university's code of conduct. The code is fundamentally about preserving the trust between the university and the larger community. At this level of generality, it seems an imperative we must all respect. But when one drills down a little, it then creates many issues about what preserving the trust means. These issues are exacerbated by how the university raises funds, with state tax dollars playing less of a role, while tuition and gifts are of increasing importance.
Undergraduate education at the university should be a concern for all faculty, all undergraduate students, and those graduate students who participate as TAs, graders, or in other capacities in undergraduate instruction. Yet we are a campus where STEM rules and Social Science drools. (I won't even mention the arts and humanities.) We market the successes that sometimes occurs in STEM. (For example, see
this page about undergraduate research at the university.) We don't discuss the mediocrity and outright failures that are more obvious when looking in social science.
I wrote about this in a post called
More Thoughts on Campus Strategic Planning - Five Years Later. Imagine that we will do a SWOT analysis on undergraduate education. The underlying issue is whether weakness and threats can get a full airing or if they are glossed over because the fundraising arm of the university reports that an open discussion of the issues will damage contributions. Those who are writing the checks want to feel good about the university, even if that feeling is generated in a glossed over, uncritical way. Further, there is a long run/short run aspect to this consideration. If eventually all the warts will come out, does the current claim that everything is honky-dory amount to the powers that be saying that if the bad news will eventually come out, let it happen on the next person's watch?
The particular issue that I'd like to see get a broader hearing are student transfers within campus, particularly those from the College of Engineering to some major in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Economics in particular. The previous time I taught my course, fall 2017, I had quite a few such students who transferred in this way and many of them, perhaps all of them, were bitter about their experiences while in Engineering. One of them, based on what she wrote in her blog for my class, went through a rather severe depression as a result of that experience. Yet the strong academic reputation of the university is based largely on the reputation of the College of Engineering. My sense of things is that new students coming in don't understand the reality on the ground and/or the brutal competition that engineering engenders needs to be softened so the students don't get beaten up by it. But this is a tough issue to discuss openly. So one wants to know, will we ever get to such a discussion or not?
I don't know whether this would make sense to either David Karpf or Steven Salaita, but it is my view that episodes like the ones they were engaged in weaken the university in a way which makes it much harder to have the type of discussion I've described in the previous paragraph. Put a different way, since no news is good news, when the university makes the news that usually ends up tarnishing the university's reputation. Senior leadership of the university then proceeds by damage control. Stopping the bleeding becomes job one. Nothing else can be accomplished until the university's reputation has been restored.
It is my view that Twitter is a terrible forum for discussing university issues, while simultaneously being the best forum if the goal is to attract eyeballs. It invites a blunt and inflamed rhetoric by the author and thereby encourages venting rather than calm and persuasive discourse. We live in a world where now anyone can self-publish online. It seems to me that academic freedom, as distinct from freedom of speech, comes with a responsibility to educate, especially when the audience for the communication is largely outside the university. If we know ahead of time that some people will have a visceral and strongly negative reaction to a blunt message, then academics have a responsibility to mitigate against that outcome by changing the nature of how they communicate. The visceral and negative reaction might still happen. Yet any thoughtful reader would then have to acknowledge that the author tried to make an even handed argument. We should work toward that as our social norm.
