Alan Jones, Dean of Faculty, Pitzer College
09/04/05
This summer, a colleague
of mine, a president at one of the top liberal arts colleges in the
country announced to a national conference of her colleagues that we,
as a body need to recognize that “we are at war”. She was responding to
a call from some quarters at the meeting for more civil discourse and
compromise on campus. What drove her to take such a radical stand in a
body not known for taking radical stands ? She had come to realize that
there was no choice, that people of conscience in the Academy are under
attack and there is no more room for compromise.
When someone is threatening to burn down your house, you can’t politely
suggest to them that a workable compromise might be for them to burn
down only the left side of your house. You have to fight, and there is
no bargaining.
What is at stake is at the very heart of what we do in the
Academy–reasoned thought and critical, independent thinking. Our
process is not driven by loyalty to any individual or tied to a
particular religious or ideological agenda. This commitment is to
truth, and to the application of reason and empirical methodologies to
determine what is true, is unacceptable to the Bush administration. In
the words of a senior Bush advisor to New York Times reporter, Ron
Suskind, guys like you [Suskind] exist in “what we call the reality
based community”, which he went on to define as “people who believe
that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernable
reality”. When Suskind started to agree, the aide cut him off and said,
“that’s not the way the world works anymore. We’re an empire now. When
we act, we create our own reality, and while you’re studying the
reality, we’ll act again, creating new realities.” The empire that
George W. Bush inhabits is becoming, in some ways, like that of the
Imperial Pharaohs and Caesars, a dangerous brew of narrow egocentrism
and messianic delusion.
In the same article, Suskind informs readers that Bush, in speaking to
Amish farmers in Lancaster County, PA, said “I trust that God speaks
through me.” In the fragile world constructed out of such absolutes,
individuals or institutions that question the President’s
fundamental(ist) vision or the facts that support it, cannot be
tolerated. As the bumper sticker says: “God said it, I believe it,
that’s that”. Truth is, after all, directly imparted and the task of
the true believer is not to question or refine that truth but to
maintain and assert it in spite of the overwhelming evidence that
contradicts it.
The contradiction between faith based and inquiry based epistemologies
is fundamental. Questions of justice and truth emerging from within the
Academy through a thoughtful process of empirical investigation and
reasoned analysis are at best, irrelevant to the President’s reality
and, at worst, hostile to his vision for carrying out god’s work. The
objective fact that there never were weapons of mass destruction and
that Saddam never did pose a threat to the American people is
irrelevant. Their existence became a part of the reality that allowed
him to act on his vision of invading Iraq.
For followers of the President, the task is not to weigh the merits of
his decisions or to evaluate the facts that support his position. The
task is to have faith in him, despite the facts. So where does that
leave the academic community, firmly committed to the pursuit of truth
through the mechanisms of critical thinking, empirical research and the
formal application of reason? Inevitably, it plants us squarely in the
camp of what his aide referred to as the reality based community. Since
members of the academic community have not infrequently questioned the
merits and rationality of his “received wisdom” , our community has
increasingly been viewed as disloyal to the president’s vision
directly, and to god’s plan, indirectly.
So, what does the administration do? With enormous financial support
from the Olin Foundation, The Scaife Foundation, and the Bradley Fund,
and with the political backing from Carl Rove and Tom Delay, David
Horowitz and his Center for the Study of popular culture have unleashed
a vicious attack on higher education in this country. Graham Larkin of
the California AAUP and Stanford University, describes Horowitz’s
techniques as “ranging from cooked statistics, race baiting and guilt
by association to editorial foul play”. (Inside Higher Education
“Horowitz’s War on Rational Discourse”)
Evidence for this latter charge is reinforced by Michael Berube of Penn
State University. Berube describes an on-line debate that he had with
Horowitz on Horowitz’s FrontPage Blog site. In transcribing the debate,
Horowitz excised large portions of Berube’s comments (without informing
him) in a manner that rendered Berube’s arguments incoherent. In a
debate with Larkin, Horowitz asserted that his ABOR bill had the
backing of progressives like Stanley Fish, Todd Gitlin and Berube. When
Larkin contacted these individuals to confirm this, they were
incredulous. Horowitz had simply lied. The facts apparently did not did
not fit with Horowitz’s rapidly developing reality. Even when Larkin
confronted Horowitz with the lie and cited their numerous objections to
the ABOR, Horowitz, more vehemently continued to assert the “fact” of
their support.
Although Horowitz carefully couches the language of his bill in the
rhetoric of free speech and academic freedom, principals no
self-respecting academic could resist, imbedded within this unctuous
language however, is a Horowitzian statement of “truth” that the
academy is an unrepentant repository of leftist bias, and that
conservative students are the objects of unrelenting politically
inspired indoctrination – An accusation for which he can muster only
the most shameful form of anecdotal support. Horowitz goes on to assert
a second truth. Since Colleges and Universities are incapable of
addressing this issue themselves, legislative intervention is necessary
– hence the Acaadeamic Bill of Rights (ABOR)
These bills, although their form varies from state to state, guarantee
that whatever belief (truth) a student asserts (particularly if they
are conservative beliefs), they have a right to assert it. The
unexamined truth thereby becomes protected speech. Something is true
simply because the student believes that it is true. In this version of
reality all such assertions of truth have equal merit and are deserving
of a faculty member’s respect. A faculty member, who challenges such a
statement on the basis of failures in its logical underpinnings, now
runs the risk of having the student file a charge of bias. This
pernicious bill then, guts the ability of a faculty member to engage
and challenge students in the kind of rigorous logical debate that has
characterized the Academy for 400 years. It undermines the ability of
faculty to nurture and develop in students precisely the kind of
critical thinking skills that will be necessary to challenge the
“received wisdom” orthodoxy of the Bush administration.
Although Horowitz has continuously assured faculty in various venues
that he has no desire to impose outside oversight to what goes on in
their classrooms, bills have been introduced into legislatures in 18
states, and Horowitz nearly did back-flips when HR177 (an ABOR-like
resolution) passed the Pennsylvania House in July. One passage in this
bill is particularly noteworthy:
“Resolved that if an individual makes an allegation against a faculty
member claiming bias, the faculty member must be given at least 48
hours notices of the specifics of the allegation prior to the testimony
being given and be given an opportunity to testify at the same hearing
as the individual making the allegation.”
So, a select committee appointed by the Pennsylvania State Legislature
will now investigate all charges of political bias in the classroom – a
select subcommittee of the state legislature, a partisan appointed
committee, will be charged with insuring against political bias in the
classroom. The ABOR has nothing to do with insuring an open atmosphere
for the free exchange of ideas and the promotion of critical thinking
and thereby enriching the Academy. It is designed, in fact, to do
exactly the opposite. It is designed as Horowitz says “not to refute
your opponent’s arguments but to wipe him from the face of the earth”
(in The Art of Political War)
The Academy has been slow to recognize and to respond to the Bush
Administration’s attack on rational discourse and critical thinking,
but it is coming around. The highly publicized and vicious attacks on
University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill, for his political
views, were a wake-up call. I and hundreds of my colleagues have been
organizing to resist the attacks on him and on the Academy in general.
We have generated a petition of support for Churchill that has thus far
gathered over 600 faculty signatures. We have a website and list serve
to communicate with one another. We have formed discussion groups to
educate ourselves about the apparent war that is being waged against
us, and we are beginning to write about the fraudulent nature of this
attack. We are encouraged that, given the level of outraged vitriol in
the attacks on Churchill and calls for his dismissal, initially on
charges of sedition, by the Governors of two states and by David
Horowitz, his students, in the midst of this, voted him a distinguished
teaching award. Perhaps they have developed critical thinking skills
after all.