I tend to be one of those ‘glass-half-full’ kind of people. Maybe it is because of my fundamental sense of identity as a teacher. I see most things, even things that I do not agree with, also as possible ‘teachable moments’ that can be used to obtain a deeper understanding of issues. This is why, even though I think that so-called intelligent design (ID) theory is not science, discussing why this is so can lead to a deeper understanding of the nature of science.

The same is true with the attempts to legislate a so-called “academic bill of rights� for students to supposedly protect them from alleged abuse by college professors and which in Ohio is taking the form of Senate Bill 24, currently pending in committee. While I think this is a really bad idea, articulating why this is so can lead to fruitful discussions on what education should be like.

Last Thursday I was on a panel that met to discuss the implications for universities if such a bill were to be enacted (Thanks to Veronica of the Case ACLU for organizing it.) A mix of faculty and students met over the inevitable pizza to discuss the issue.

As I said in my opening comments to the group, it is my belief that it is in such types of informal gatherings of faculty and students to discuss issues of mutual interest that real learning occurs. We should have a lot more of such gatherings and fewer structured courses in college. But since formal courses and grades are a seemingly unchangeable component on the current educational structure, what we should try to do is to replicate as much as possible this kind of informal atmosphere in our formal courses.

This means that we should, as far as possible, move away from highly detailed syllabi and course requirements, and allow for more flexibility so that the direction each course takes can be driven by the shared interests of students and faculty, while still maintaining the integrity of the overall curriculum. Of course, it is only in small enrollment courses (say with fifteen students or less) that achieving this kind of consensus becomes feasible and in my own small enrollment SAGES course I have been moving in this direction and will keep doing so.

With large enrollment courses, however, many of the course and curricular decisions have to be made even before the course begins, in order to manage the logistical issues. But even there we should try to build in room for as much flexibility as possible.

I have addressed in a previous posting that things like Senate bill 24 will move things in the opposite direction, in effect writing curricula and mandating what should be in syllabi and exams, and the mind boggles as to where this can lead. For example, section A of the bill says that “curricula and reading lists in the humanities and social studies shall respect all human knowledge in these areas and provide students with dissenting sources and viewpoints.� This immediately raises problems of interpretation and enforcement.

For example, when discussing history can the instructor assume that the concentration camps of World War II are an established fact or is he/she obliged to also provide readings of holocaust deniers and use class time to discuss their ideas? If the instructor does not do so, does this mean that a student who does not believe that the holocaust occurred has grounds for complaint?

Also Marxist economics and social theory are not taught much in US universities although they have had a major influence worldwide. Should instructors be forced to have more of it and to analyze each topic in the light of what this theory says? If an economics course ignores Marxist theory, does a student have grounds for complaint? And even the terms “Marxist economics� or “capitalist economics� are open to many interpretations, with diverging schools of thought. Which schools of thought are worthy of inclusion?

If a student does complain in either of the above situations, who should be the judge of whether the instructor acted appropriately or not? Who gets to decide what is worthy and not worthy of inclusion? It is not hard to see that this kind of thing can lead to a bureaucratic nightmare.

What this bill does is infantilize faculty and students. It assumes that faculty cannot be trusted to exercise their trained judgment on what should and should not be allowed in curricula, and that students are not capable of judging when their professors are doing their job well. This bill also underestimates students’ ability to hold on to their beliefs in the face of opposing views, a topic I will discuss further in future postings.

Other panelists addressed the political and legal implications. I learned from Professor Durschlag some very interesting information about how the US Supreme Court has in the past interpreted the first amendment’s application to university education and the precedents that have been set. I will write about that at a future date when I get hold of the actual ruling. It involves a trek to the Law school library.

POST SCRIPT

There is an interesting post and discussion going on at Research in Progress about the Lawrence Summers controversy about the representation of women in academia and the professions, and the connection to Stephen Pinker’s work and talk at Case last week. You really should visit.

Update: There is also now a new post on the topic, also well worth reading.

As you enter my office, directly across from the door is a bulletin board and on it is a little sticker. It has the words ‘SAFE ZONE’ in large purple letters over an inverted pink triangle background.

It was given to me by the Spectrum group at Case which, according to its website seeks to “provide an environment where GLBTQQIA (gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, queer, questioning, intersexed, and allied) persons can socialize, learn, and grow.�

The sticker on my bulletin board is meant to be a signal that a student who fits into any of those categories can let me know without fearing any adverse or hostile reaction from me.

I have to say that I feel a little sad whenever my eye falls on that sticker. Have we come to this, that we have to publicly announce zones of safety for people for no other reason than their sexual orientation? Shouldn’t that be something that is taken for granted? The fact that it is not is a sign of how far we are from creating a tolerant society.

I have never quite been able to understand why some people get so upset by other people’s private lives. Yes, I can understand that because of your own religious beliefs or culture or upbringing or whatever there are certain things that you personally might not approve of. But you are always free not to do them. But why should the private lives of other consenting adults, even total strangers, matter to you?

And yet, it seems that many people are concerned about just such things. To me, one of the more disturbing features on last November’s election was the adoption of so many anti-gay measures across the nation. In Ohio Issue 1, that sought to prohibit gay couples from getting some of the benefits that married heterosexual couples take for granted, was adopted by 62% to 38%, an alarmingly large margin.

It seems pretty clear that there are at least two groups who currently run the risk of open discrimination – non-heterosexuals and Arabs/Muslims. It seems to be perfectly acceptable to say disparaging things against either of these two groups without being shamed or called to account.

When it comes to Arabs, for example, Third-Tier Pundit™ Hall of Famer Ann Coulter recently in her column referred to veteran journalist Helen Thomas as “that old Arab.� James Wolcott speculates as to the outrage that would ensure if that kind of language was applied to other groups. And Coulter’s fellow traveler on the Third-Tier Pundit™ circuit Michelle Malkin’s approval of the internment of ethnic Japanese during World War II and her advocacy of racial, religious and nationality profiling now is another example of this appalling tendency to select specific groups for discriminatory treatment.

Back to the issue of ‘safe zones’, I am not naïve. I know that people who are not ‘straight’ run the risk of being discriminated against, or much worse, in the broader society and that they are justified in being cautious about who knows about them. But it is a little disheartening that even in a university there is this fear of intolerance. A university should be different, even though it is populated by the same kinds of people as elsewhere, because in the university there exists something that does not exist outside in any organized way and which should act as a uniting force that overcomes the friction and divergence that can be caused by differences.

This unifying force is the love of learning and a respect for academic values that universities are built upon. If we immerse ourselves in that shared love of learning, then we will find that people who are sometimes very different from us can be the very sources of our own intellectual, spiritual, and moral growth.

In a university you will find people who are different in many ways, not just in terms of their sexual orientation. It is such individual differences that make life so interesting and enjoyable and these same qualities have been the fuel for some of the most creative people that ever lived. Our society, and our universities, should find room for all these people and not seek to shred them of their distinctiveness and make them conform to some idealized ‘norm.’

In other words, we need to make the whole university a safe zone for everyone.

In a previous posting I described the disturbing phenomenon that so many Americans seemed to be living is a reality-free world. I argued that this was because they were being systematically misled by people who should, and do, know better.

Further support for my somewhat cynical view comes from an article by former Wall Street Journal reporter Ron Suskind that appeared in the October 17, 2004 New York Times Magazine and that deserves to be better known because of the light it sheds on the extent to which the current administration is ideologically driven. His article has this chilling anecdote:

“In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn’t like about Bush’s former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House’s displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn’t fully comprehend – but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

“The aide said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’ I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’ he continued. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.'”

What you have on display here is a world-view that is so arrogant that it believes that it has the power to create its own realities.

It is not unusual in the hey-day of empires for its leaders to have the feeling that they alone can direct the course of events, that they can overcome the realities they face, and that nothing can stop them from achieving their goals, whatever they may be.

What is perhaps extreme in this case is that this arrogance seems to be causing the leaders to ignore the actual realities and to think that they can create their own version of it. In other words, they believe that what they want to believe actually exists. Now, in some ways, it is always possible to do this. Reality is a complex business, composed of many disparate elements, and it is always possible to pick out those elements that support one’s fantasy, ignore the rest, and act accordingly.

But what is happening here is deeper and more disturbing. What this administration is doing is trying to make reality irrelevant by creating an alternate “reality.” They do this by quickly and repeatedly and strongly saying the things that they wish the public to believe are true and depending on the media or the Democratic Party to not call them on the lack of support for the assertions. As a result, after a short time, the administration’s assertions enter the public consciousness, become the new “reality”, and thus become the basis for vacuous ‘policy debates’ that have nothing to do with the actual situation.

We saw this happen in the run-up to the war with Iraq and we are seeing it again with the recent killing in Lebanon of Rafik Hariri. Using a combination of innuendo and bombast, the administration has managed to make people think that Syria is the culprit even though, until today, no evidence in support of this claim has been presented and there even exists some counterevidence. On the other hand, Robert Fisk reports today that the UN investigation team is due to make a report that will allege that there may have been a cover-up of the investigation by Lebanese and Syrian authorities, so that the situation is still murky.

What most reality-based people realize is that while forcing your own version of reality on events can win you short-term political victories, it is a prescription for long-term disaster because eventually the contradiction between the ‘virtual reality’ and reality become too stark to make your actions viable. The “judicious study of discernible reality,” sneered at by the senior Bush advisor, is the way to arrive at reasoned judgments that have a chance of producing policies that make sense.

In many ways, universities have to be reality-based. The work of universities rests on empirical bases, on data, on evidence. This does not mean that they restrict themselves to describing just what is. Speculative ideas are the life-blood of academia because that is how new knowledge is created. Making bold speculations and pushing the limits of theories is part of the job of universities.

But such efforts must always rest on an empirical basis because otherwise they cease to be credible. You can build on reality, but you can’t totally depart from it. Academics know that their credibility rests on their ability to balance speculation and theorizing with empirical data. For example, a physicist who proposes theories that do not have a basis in data would be ridiculed.

But no such constraints seem to restrain the current political leaders. At one time, the media might have played the role of injecting reality into the public discussion, by comparing official statements with the facts on the ground and providing historical context. But now that the press has largely abdicated that role (see the previous postings on The questions not asked part I and part II) in favor of either acting as a mouthpiece for the fantasies of political leaders or debating tactical points while not questioning the core fantasies, it is up to the universities to fill that void.

This is why efforts like Ohio’s Senate Bill 24 that seek to restrict what university instructors can and cannot say are so dangerous. They seek to bring universities also under political control, to suffocate one of the few remaining viable reality-based institutions. While opponents decry universities as being too “liberal”, what really make universities “dangerous” is that they are fundamentally reality-based institutions that cannot be easily co-opted into accepting fantasies as reality.

It seems ironic that universities, long derided as ivory towers occupied by pointy-headed intellectuals out of touch with the “real world”, may in fact need to be the force that brings reality back into public life.

POST SCRIPT 1

On Thursday, May 17) in the Guilford Parlor from 11:30-1:00pm there will be a forum on Ohio’s Senate Bill #24 (the so-called academic bill of rights. I will be on the panel along with Professor Mel Durschlag (Law), Professor Jonathan Sadowsky (History), and Professor Joe White (Political Science).

POST SCRIPT 2

Update on a previous posting:

I received a call yesterday (March 14) from a person associated with Students for Academic Freedom informing me that my op-ed had triggered the release of more information on their website, where more details are given.

Although the student referred to had not in fact given this testimony at the Colorado Senate hearings as had been alleged earlier, the level of detail (which had not been released until now) provided on the SAF website is sufficient to remove this story from the category of urban legends since it does give some names and places and dates. But a judgment on whether this constitutes academic bullying will have to await more details on what actually transpired between professor and student. My contact at SAF says that the incident is still under investigation and confidentiality prevents the release of more information.

Update on the update (3/15/05): It gets curioser and curioser.

The blog Canadian Cynic reports that new information on this case has come out and that Horowitz is now backtracking on almost all of the key charges that were originally made. Canadian Cynic highlights Horowitz’s statements now that “Some Of Our Facts Were Wrong; Our Point Was Right” and “”I consider this an important matter and will get to the bottom of it even if it should mean withdrawing the claim.”

See the article on the website Inside Higher Education. It seems to be the most authoritative source of information on this case.