Academic Freedom and Viewpoint Diversity
Are the critics really after a balance of voices?
One of the topic prompts for this newsletter occurs when I see multiple stories addressing pretty much the same topic from different locations. Frequently, those stories require more nuance than they are given and certainly a more in-depth interrogation of what’s going on.
Yesterday, Inside Higher Ed reported on the latest shenanigans at the New College of Florida. The newly constituted DeSantis-friendly board of trustees abruptly denied tenure to faculty in spite of having cleared all other hurdles within the college. Five faculty members had their tenure applications denied or deferred due to “extraordinary circumstances”. As NCF is being remade in Hillsdale’s image, the interim president noted “current uncertainty of the needs of the divisions/units and college.”
Speakers at the public session (NCF is a state school) derided the board’s actions. One faculty member resigned on the spot.
While some trustees made the argument that the denials were because the candidates came up in their fifth year instead of their sixth, reporting suggests that this wasn’t unusual at NCF.
Tenure is under attack in a number of places and has been significantly weakened in those places where it remains. In my years as chief academic officer, I did occasionally see a tenure decision slowed down because of specific board concerns. But a wholesale disruption of process is troubling to anyone who cares about the quality of faculty.
Here’s another Inside Higher Ed story out of North Carolina. It opens like this:
Hundreds of University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill faculty members are speaking out against right-leaning proposals from their governing boards and, now, the state General Assembly.
It’s reminiscent of faculty objections to legislative and other proposals to diminish tenure and target diversity, equity and inclusion in Florida, Tennessee and Texas.
Since January, Chapel Hill faculty members have raised concerns over their flagship campus leaders’ proposed School of Civic Life and Leadership. David Boliek, chairman of the campus’s Board of Trustees, called the initiative “an effort to try to remedy” what he called a lack of “right-of-center views” on campus.
So NCF wants to be like Hillsdale and UNC is correcting a perceived left-leaning bias on campus. It’s just about balance, right?
The North Carolina house has passed legislation, the North Carolina Reclaiming College Education on America’s Constitutional Heritage Act, that
would require UNC system students who want bachelor’s degrees and community college students who want associate degrees to pass a course that requires them to read six documents, including the U.S. and North Carolina Constitutions, in their entirety, plus five Federalist Papers essays. The legislation says the final exam would be “on the principles in the documents” and be worth at least a fifth of the final grade.
The House of Representatives passed this bill last month, and it’s now in the State Senate.
I don’t know if legislators are writing the syllabus and final exam, but it seems pretty heavy-handed. Now, one could read those documents in a purely objective fashion and try to understand the tensions between Hamiltonian and Jeffersonian perspectives on central government. But the cynic in me says that this is just a “yay America” course.
Another story in Inside Higher Ed today focused on a faculty member at Bakersfield [Community] College in California. The faculty member
has been a polarizing figure on campus as co-founder of the Renegade Institute for Liberty, which describes itself as a faculty coalition “dedicated to the free speech, open inquiry, critical thinking to advance American ideals within the broader Western tradition of meritocracy, individual agency, civic virtue, liberty of conscience and free markets.” Members of the group say it’s intended to foster diversity of thought and good-faith debate. Critics say some members have contributed to a hostile campus environment by making inflammatory posts on the group’s social media page and stalling diversity initiatives by repeatedly questioning and criticizing them in committee meetings.
He’s appealing with support from free speech organizations. But I was struck by the language describing the Renegade Institute for Liberty. It is devoted to “free speech, open inquiry, and critical thinking”. If it had stopped there, I could be okay.
But that open inquiry and critical thinking is to occur in support of “meritocracy, individual agency, civic virtue, liberty of conscience and free markets”. Its intent is to foster good-faith dialogue.
How does one have open inquiry within the “broader Western tradition”? Are the Renegades really open to critical thinking about economic inequality or structural racism? Or is the answer supportive of meritocracy and free markets by default?
It’s true that in many fields the professoriate leans left politically. That is as likely due to the subject material covered as to political correctness. It’s tough to be a sociologist, for example, and maintain a blind allegiance to meritocracy and free markets.
I spent four decades as the political progressive on conservative Christian University campuses (although if a REAL progressive showed up, they would faint). I learned how to explain my positions with nuance without demonizing my colleagues in the business or Bible departments (at least not much).
Disciplinary diversity is an important component of higher education, especially for liberal arts institutions. But that’s not what’s happening in these stories in Inside Higher Ed. They instead reflect concentrated initiatives to eliminate “critical” perspectives from the curriculum altogether. While some of this can be explained by the career-oriented shift in higher education, what is going on here is much more about legislators and pundits distrusting the entire premise of higher education. They are creating bogey-men of indoctrination while mandating content that fits their preferential outcomes. So they aren’t really opposed to indoctrination — they just want it to be on their terms.