Another good reason to join AAUP.

Long Haired Hippie wrote:

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  Have they started reading faculty emails yet? http://www.bruinalumni.com/

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This happened many years ago (in the eighties) when i was at Duke. Only they weren'tcrss enough to offer bounties . . . .

If they send me $100, I'll glady email my lectures notes and powerpoint slides. I say cut out the middleman!

If these professors were expousing strongly conservative views there would be no need to gather incriminating evidence. They would have been fired already .

Also,I believe these professors are public employees paid by the taxpayers.

What can I say - - - with "friends" like this, who needs enemies? One of the more bone-headed tactics I've heard. The group would be better off to endow a guest lectureship or publish a newsletter, or some legitimate means of having its voice heard.

Carolina Moonie wrote:

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 I recall when faculty members in the University of North Carolina system were required to sign "loyalty oaths." That was clearly an offshoot of the McCarthy era.

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USM had its Theodore Bilbo era and, some years later, its W.D. McCain era. And now we have....

HJM wrote:

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Again, this is nothing like McCarthy, and they haven't demanded syllabi, vitae, or any other documents. They haven't demanded anyone to sign a loyalty oath or even a pinkie swear. I have a sneaking suspicion that if those professors targeted have couched their classroom activities in accepted pedagogy they'll have nothing to worry about. If, on the other hand, they are using their positions to further a personal political, social, or religious agenda, then they deserve to get raked over the coals. The backlash against that type of behavior is real, and it is coming.

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It is difficult to spend several hours a day in front of a group of people and not say something that will offend someone. Particularly if people are determined to find something to be offended about . . . and particularly if the agenda is not to find "irresponsible" faculty  members but to control discourse.

The best classrooms are places where ideas erupt. Ideas are not pretty things -- nor are they easily controllable. There simply are not waves of professors out there who are infecting the minds of youth or using the classroom as a pulpit. For those that are -- there are usually some pretty good appeal mechanisms for students to use within the system.

The kind of activity contemplated here does not teach students to stand up for themselves (a very good job skill to have) nor does it suggest that they should first do the right thing 1) confront the professor (or, if you are afraid of that, go to the department chair or if you don't trust the department chair go to the dean etc. ) In other words -- learn and follow the process FIRST (another good job skill), before you destroy someone's career.

Instead, it invites students to become spies and snitches. That is a great environment in which to think, exchnage ideas,research, and teach (not).

It is true that the classroom is a power center and that the nature of the heirarchy puts the professor in a relationship of control over the student. Those relationships are ever-present in most professional environments. This is not the solution to that power relationship.

I'll tell you something . . .  I never thought about a student recording my lectures before my time at Duke. But when that happened I started to become very suspicious of those taping me -- especially when they did not ask permission or when they clearly tried to hide what they were doing.

I'm in the arts -- and lots of the stuff we deal with isn't either going to make sense, or in some cases it will absolutely offend people who stand outside the discipline. It would be so easy to take any moment in in day and turn that into a cause for anyone who wants one

We've already had a couple of incidents in which readings in lit class were called into question. Don't think this idea is simply confined to ferreting out abusive professors -- it is geared to ferreting out anything the moral guardians deem offensive.

I learned when I was a student that many of my professors were being deliberately "offensive" to particular points of views. Some professors scattered their offensivenes around  . . . others concentrated their questions in a very narrow spectrum of ideas. Some professors did this well -- others didn't do it well but it was part of my learning to figure out who were genuine and who were poseurs.

That was frightening to me -- but it also taught me that I had damn sure better get my intellectual act together if I was going to play in the sand box. Armed with the weapons of language and reason, any student can begin to separate the procative professors who are knowlegably challenging them from those who are simply as biased and set in his/her ways as the next person.

This isn't really a liberal/conservative issue, but when I went to school back in the dark ages many professors were quite conservative. Intellectual and political tides shift back and forth -- if the perception is that right now there are too many liberals in the classroom it is because the tide of intellectualism has already turned and you can expect that the next generation of scholars will likely be more conservative (although I really hate this incredibly simplistic version of either the intellectual world or of academics).

So in the scheme of things, the sea of ideas washes in and out and exchanges the new tide of ideas for the old. This only works when we accept this as an ongoing process of intellectual life rather than panic over what particular wave of ideas or theories are nw dominant.

Remember Post Modernism?  If you were there it was a fascinating time . . . . lots of energy spent dismembering (some thought) the Modernism that had preceded it. And as an intellectual wave it did -- it cleared the decks for new thinking from all sides of the intellectual (and of course political) spectrum. Now we are in a new time were old ideas are remerging and finding some new pathways in combination with those trains of thought that survived the decline of Post Modernism.

That is how the world of ideas works.

 

 

This activity is not supposed to teach students to stand up for themselves. It is designed to teach faculty that their classroom activities are being monitored by an outside group. If I am a faculty member at UCLA, I had better have a good idea of what I'm doing in the classroom. I had better have a "plan" for how to conduct my classes in a manner that is defensible.

When you say

"I learned when I was a student that many of my professors were being deliberately 'offensive' to particular points of views. Some professors scattered their offensivenes around . . . others concentrated their questions in a very narrow spectrum of ideas. Some professors did this well -- others didn't do it well but it was part of my learning to figure out who were genuine and who were poseurs.

"That was frightening to me -- but it also taught me that I had damn sure better get my intellectual act together if I was going to play in the sand box. Armed with the weapons of language and reason, any student can begin to separate the procative professors who are knowlegably challenging them from those who are simply as biased and set in his/her ways as the next person."

I hope you also understand that most of our students do not come to USM armed with the upbringing to question the authority of a professor in class nor do they come armed with the skliis necessary to successfully argue a point with a professor.

To engage such a student in this type of baiting is both unfair and unnecessary. Does USM have a freshman-level course in "How to Argue and Win (with your professor)"? If not, then as an offshoot of Southern culture, a student who is faced with a professor who seems to espouse strong ideals that are at odds with the student's ideals will respond by shutting down, mimicing the professor's statements, and getting through the course. This type of activity doesn't teach our students to think for themselves. It teaches them to become parrots.

I'm not saying anybody at USM is doing this, just that I can already see an outcome. What you seem to be saying is that groups like the Bruin Alumni cannot be trusted to manage their stated purpose in a decent manner, and that they will abuse their self-made power at the first opportunity while at the same time you are saying to trust professors to wield their classroom power in a way that is fair and balanced, regardless of the method used. I hate to break it to you, but there's not a whole lot of trust running around these days, and I can say that I would not be comfortable allowing my child to attend a college with a reputation for endoctrination, one way or the other. I want my child to learn to balance a chemical equation, not balance the political views of the family (one way or the other), and I want my child to obtain an advanced degree, not a degree in advanced conservative or liberal studies.

As an aside, it's a little disconcerting that a professor in any field would take the position that it's his or her job to teach a student how to think and then not demonstrate such skills with a wide spectrum of viewpoints. While I'm not all for making everyone cozy in the classroom, I also think that there are many students who need reassurance that it's OK to be a [liberal, conservative, Christian, athiest, ...] thinker in this classroom.

I'm not going to continue to argue this point here, because it really gets us no further down the road to an agreement. However, I will say that those professors on the UCLA target list who have a stable teaching philosophy and truly follow a defensible plan of action in class (even if it is a long-run plan) probably have nothing to worry about. After all, at real schools, administrators are also faculty members.

We all know the real perceived danger by groups like those Bruin alumni is that faculty in most disciplines teach students to be critical thinkers - to question perceived "truths" - to seek their own answers in analytically rigorous ways - to demand evidence for interpretations.  We live in a crazy time where simply to demand facts and answers is portrayed as "hateful" questioning of another's right to have an opinion.  Face it, a huge portion of the things that students entering college think they know are incorrect, and therefore college (if it is a real college) challenges the beliefs of students at fundamental levels.  That is what higher education has always been about - see the ancient Greeks for an example.  If college does not challenge student preconceptions than it is not an institution of higher learning.  This naturally pisses off those people who seek to limit access to knowledge for fear that students may grow up to be adults who think for themselves and refuse to blindly follow one set of beliefs or another.  Higher education does not always achieve this ideal, but it must continue to try to do so or become a vocational school.

"Unfortunately, this too seldom happens, and (equally unfortunately) the classroom (or, for instance, the walls or bulletin boards outside faculty offices) become places to propagandize for very rigid, dogmatic views and/or genuinely insulting commentary." 

Correction: I should have said that "sometimes" or "often" this happens; obviously the problem is not universal.

qwerty wrote:

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 I'll glady email my lectures notes

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Those of you who read your lectures verbatim straight out of some textbook can simply provide a copy of that textbook

libs are so afraid of carl rove it's funny. rovism is a laughable coin of phrase.

this might as well be a blog. it's just another one-sided liberal column in which facts are selectively presented or not. for instance, the cheryl harris mentioned in the column. exactly what percent of her course reading are liberal and what percent are conservative in nature. i'd bet it's a lot closer to 90% lib 10% cons than 50-50.

having a few conservative articles sprinkled into the course for show doesn't make it balanced. also, if the liberal articles are constantly praised while conservative articles are criticized, does that make it a balanced course?

the fact that he advertises his political leanings on his website is an immediate bias to any and all students. even if he doesn't evangelize for the church of liberalism, his public statements could influence student behavior even before the first day of class.