Tag: Intellectual

  • Indiana’s Attack on Intellectual Diversity

    Indiana’s Attack on Intellectual Diversity

    Indiana’s new Act 202, which advocates of free inquiry have feared would suppress academic freedom despite its claims to promote intellectual diversity, now has been implemented in real life: Citing Act 202, Indiana University (IU) officials suspended Social Work professor Jessica Adams from teaching a class called “Diversity, Human Rights and Social Justice” because U.S. Senator Jim Banks complained that she showed a chart in class that included “Make America Great Again” as a slogan that can be used as covert white supremacy.

    Senator Banks declared, “At least one student in the classroom was uncomfortable, and I’m sure there are more. This type of hateful rhetoric has no place in the classroom.” He is wrong. Hateful rhetoric has every place in the classroom, and bans on all ideas deemed “hateful” by someone would require massive repression. The goal of a challenging university must be to make students uncomfortable at times.

    Although Act 202 is a terrible law, it’s important to point out that this law does not allow Adams to be suspended. Act 202 only allows colleges to do two things in response to complaints: Provide the information to the trustees, and “refer” them “for consideration in employee reviews and other tenure and promotion decisions.”

    It does not authorize censoring classes or removing teachers on the grounds of intellectual diversity. In fact, Act 202 specifically prohibits this action because it says that institutions cannot “Limit or restrict the academic freedom of faculty members or prevent faculty members from teaching, researching, or writing publications about diversity, equity, and inclusion or other topics.”

    Obviously, banning a professor from teaching because they used a chart about white supremacy is a direct violation of this provision of Act 202. By suspending a professor from a class and invoking this law, the Indiana University administration is going far beyond the requirements and the authority of the law, and Indiana officials are violating the Bill of Rights, Act 202 and their own policies.

    The unjustifiable, illegal suspension of Adams without due process is yet another act of repression by Indiana University officials.

    But the attack from Act 202 in the name of intellectual diversity has a long history. The right has taken the language of the left, mockingly imitating the words and then turning them into tools of repression.

    In 2003, David Horowitz urged conservatives to “use the language that the left has deployed” and declare that there is “a lack of ‘intellectual diversity’ on college faculties.” Horowitz tried to invoke “academic freedom” to justify suppressing it, creating the Academic Bill of Rights and his “Students for Academic Freedom,” claiming that protecting the rights of students meant banning professors from expressing political views.

    Horowitz’s terrible idea is implemented in Act 202, where one fireable offense is the crime of being deemed by trustees “likely” while teaching “to subject students to political or ideological views and opinions that are unrelated to the faculty member’s academic discipline or assigned course of instruction.” One problem is that no evidence of any misconduct is needed, simply a feeling that a professor might be “likely” to say something forbidden. But the deeper flaw is the belief that professors should not be allowed to say anything unrelated to their classes.

    The AAUP’s standard is for “teachers to avoid persistently intruding material which has no relation to their subject.” It’s not the presence of any ideas unrelated to a class that violates academic norms, but only persistently intruding material. And this rule must be applied in a viewpoint neutral manner. Colleges cannot punish unrelated speech about politics more than they punish unrelated speech about football or the weather or any other topic. By targeting political viewpoints alone for penalties, SB 202 clearly violates the First Amendment.

    Heterodox Academy, an organization that advocates for viewpoint diversity, spoke out strongly against these repressive aspects of Act 202. Joe Cohn warned: “The trustees’ guess that the faculty member is likely to ever express a political or ideological view that isn’t germane to the class is sufficient to justify the denial of promotion or tenure.”

    These kinds of massive, totalistic bans on speech have an enormous chilling effect in practice, since no one knows what ideas could be deemed “unrelated” to a professor’s field by a trustee who knows nothing about that field.

    Indiana has legislated Horowitz’s old dream of banning politics from the classroom, which in practice is meant to be a targeted attack on the expression of left-wing viewpoints.

    When we resist bad laws like Act 202 by attacking intellectual diversity, we end up undermining the values we’re trying to protect and undercutting public support. Instead of denouncing the concept of intellectual diversity, we ought to say instead that we are defending intellectual diversity against those who cynically or misguidedly invoke it in order to destroy it.

    In the past century, no concept has done more to protect intellectual diversity than tenure. Act 202, by creating a post-tenure review by trustees with no competence to judge academic work, undermines tenure and endangers intellectual diversity rather than defending it.

    The Indiana law, by weakening tenure protections, is one of the greatest threats to intellectual diversity in the state. We need to attack the “intellectual diversity” law not because we oppose intellectual diversity, but because we support it. We want professors to be judged by their academic work, not by their political views, and we want academic work to be judged by academic experts rather than unqualified political appointees, because intellectual diversity is endangered when academic freedom and shared governance are attacked.

    This week, I spoke about Indiana’s intellectual diversity law as part of a panel on academic freedom at Purdue University Northwest (an event funded by the University of Chicago’s Forum for Free Inquiry and Expression as part of its Academic Freedom Institute). And while attacks on academic freedom can inspire some people to mobilize against the threat, the far more common response is fear and silence.

    In an atmosphere of budget cuts, no one is safe. We’re all contingent now, even the diminishingly few faculty with tenure in places where tenure still means something, because entire departments can be whacked to pieces as easily as a controversial adjunct professor is not rehired.

    Indiana’s Act 202 attacks intellectual diversity. And when administrators violate the law to suspend faculty for presenting controversial views, academic freedom is under even greater threat.

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  • Final “Intellectual Affairs” column by Scott McLemee (opinion)

    Final “Intellectual Affairs” column by Scott McLemee (opinion)

    The historian and political analyst Garry Wills once described writing for magazines and newspapers as a way to continue his education while getting paid to do it. The thought made a lasting impression on me and has been a driving force since well before I started writing “Intellectual Affairs” in 2005.

    Twenty years is a sizable portion of anyone’s life; a kind of record of it exists in the form of something short of a thousand columns. I am a slow writer (my wonderful and long-suffering editors at IHE can confirm this), and quantifying the amount of time invested in each piece would probably make me feel older, even, than I look.

    The launch of the column came after a decade of covering scholarly books and debates, first as a contributing editor at Lingua Franca and then as a senior writer at The Chronicle of Higher Education. The founders of Inside Higher Ed approached me with an offer of far less money but complete freedom in what and how I wrote. The decision was easy to make. The offer seemed as close to tenure as a perpetual student could hope to get.

    The shift from writing for dead-tree publications to an online-only venue was not an obvious choice to make, but IHE’s audience and reputation grew rapidly. Getting review copies of new books was not always straightforward or quick. Confusion with other publications having similar names was also a problem. But “Intellectual Affairs” began to draw a certain amount of attention—whether enthusiastic, contemptuous or trollish—in the academic blogosphere of the day.

    The work itself, while grueling at times, was for the most part gratifying. Scholars would write to express astonishment that I’d actually read their books, and even understood them. It seemed best to regard that as a compliment.

    I tend to forget about a column as soon as it’s finished and rarely look at it again. To explain this it is impossible to improve upon Samuel Johnson, who was a columnist of sorts even though the term had not yet been coined. In 1752 he wrote,

    “He that condemns himself to compose on a stated day will often bring to his task attention dissipated, a memory embarrassed, an imagination overwhelmed, a mind distracted with anxieties, a body languishing with disease: he will labour on a barren topic till it is too late to change it; or, in the ardour of invention, diffuse his thoughts into wild exuberance, which the pressing hour of publication cannot suffer judgment to examine or reduce.”

    It’s not always that bad, but the experience he describes is familiar and typically yields the resolution to start earlier next time. But there is no next time with this column.

    I’ve revisited the digital archive in recent days to assemble the selection below. If “Intellectual Affairs” has served as the notebook of an intellectual vagabond, here are a few pages from a long, strange trip.

    Among the earlier columns was one considering the practice of annotating texts while you are reading—specifically, ones printed on paper with ink. A few people found my account of an improvised method useful. These days I mark up PDFs along much the same lines.

    Much Sturm und Drang over e-publishing was underway during the column’s first decade—not least in scholarly circles. A column from 2014 surveys some of the trends predicted, emergent and/or collapsing at the time. Another piece described efforts to rethink literary history with an eye to the prevailing energy sources at the time a text was written.

    More offbeat (and a personal favorite) was this exposé of the unspeakable secret behind Miskatonic University’s financial stability. Another piece brought together the purported psychic powers of Edgar Cayce, a.k.a. “the sleeping prophet,” with news of a technological advance permitting someone to “read” a closed book, or its first few pages, at any rate.

    Early in the last decade, the New York Public Library prepared to offload a sizable portion of its holdings to locations outside the city—freeing up space for more computer terminals. Scholars and citizens spoke up in protest. A second column was necessary to correct the record after an official spun his way through a response to the first one.

    Compulsive and compulsory technological change was at issue in this column suggesting that the Pixar film WALL-E owed a lot to the dystopian satire presented in the cultural theorist Kenneth Burke’s “Helhaven” essays. It was a bit of a stretch, sure, but the point was to honor their “margin of overlap,” as KB would say.

    Many interviews ran in “Intellectual Affairs” over the years. Two in particular stand out. The earliest was with Barbara Ehrenreich on the occasion of her 2005 book about white-collar labor. I also reviewed two of her later books, here and here.

    The other interview was with George Scialabba—a public intellectual working at a certain distance from the tenure track—on the occasion of his first book. His collected essays appeared not too long ago.

    I stand by this assessment of Cornel West’s self-portrait. It caused a ruckus for a few days, but nothing changed in its wake, which is disappointing.

    While by no means prescient, a column on the scholarly study of ignorance from 2008 still feels topical. The subject remained far too relevant 15 years later. Someone will eventually start an Institute for Applied Agnotology; it won’t have trouble finding financial backing.

    Also distressingly perennial is a column considering social-scientific analysis of American demagogues of the 1930s and ’40s. A sequel of sorts, at least in hindsight, was this look into the stagnant depths of a spree killer’s worldview. And I was at work on a column about Ku Klux Klan historiography when Charlottesville broke into the news.

    Less connected to the news cycle but likewise bloody was an item filed after attending a seldom-performed Shakespeare play in 2009. A year earlier, I looked into the far-fetched legend that The Tempest was inspired by a small island near New Bedford, Mass. (Copies of this column were available for a while in pamphlet form at the local historical society.)

    Finally—and a matter of bragging rights— there’s this piece on the first volume of a biography of the long-forgotten Hubert Harrison, a Caribbean-born African American polymath and pan-African activist from the early 20th century. On more than one occasion the author told me that nothing generated more interest in the book than the column.

    George Orwell characterized the professional book reviewer as someone “pouring his immortal spirit down the drain, half a pint at a time.” I once considered this amusing; now it makes me wince. (It’s not even a whole pint, mind you.) The rewards of non-celebrity-oriented cultural journalism tend to be meager and infrequent, but writing this column for Inside Higher Ed has provided more than my share. Thanks in particular to Scott Jaschik, Sarah Bray and Elizabeth Redden for their patience and keen eyes.

    Scott McLemee is Inside Higher Ed’s “Intellectual Affairs” columnist. He was a contributing editor at Lingua Franca magazine and a senior writer at The Chronicle of Higher Education before joining Inside Higher Ed in 2005.

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