Faculty, Administrators & Finding the Truth

my morning reading

Note: this essay does not represent the views of my employer Duke University, but are instead my views offered under academic freedom.

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Two interesting pieces collided over morning coffee and the 1940 American Association of University Professors (AAUP), and Association of American Universities (AAU) statement on Academic Freedom and Tenure. This agreement is best understood as a truce between faculty (to be free to do their research without control) and administrators (to be free to expand, professionalize and modernize the university) that paved the way for the GI Bill’s massive investment in higher education.

Scott Scheall, a Professor and Chair of the Faculty Governance Council at the University of Austin, writes today in the Martin Center’s newsletter a piece “Why the Worst Get to the Top in Academia” that the incentive structure in academia does not maintain the required focus on scholarship because those seeking academic leadership roles have done so because their scholarly career trajectory was not great. It is a bit of a sweeping claim that would be empirically fraught with endogeneity if one tried to tease out the relationship empirically, but will garner plenty of faculty chuckles in the lounge or especially the bar after a few drinks among professors. There is a cats v. dogs aspect to the faculty v. administrator relationship and it is hard to keep a foot in both camps.

The other piece that caught my eye is an interview in the Chronicle of Higher Education with four of the authors of the recent report on the Humanities and Humanistic Social Sciences that was commissioned and paid for by Wash U Saint Louis and Vanderbilt Chancellor/President. Inside the Report that has Divided the Academy features responses by philosophers K. Anthonty Appiah and Paul Boghossian, as well as historians Katherine Fleming and Sean Wilentz to questions from Evan Goldstein and Len Gutkin from the Chronicle (I wrote briefly about the report). I suspect that if you asked these four scholars if Scheall’s thesis was correct that failed academics become academic leaders they would say natch to signify the obvious nature of the answer. Then they would provide a qualified, but of course there are examples to the contrary. Katherine Fleming, one of the authors of the report and an interviewee was a Provost, after all. This simply demonstrates that there are never-ending hierarchies within hierarchies among faculty within and across department, disciplines, fields and institutions. These nooks and crannies are where the report needs to be debated and discussed.

A few points I want to highlight. Wash U and Vandy self-financed the work of the report, including the hiring of other researchers who supported the authors. The internal reports that are said to contain evidence for the report’s broader claims will be released publicly by decision of the report authors and I hope and assume these will all become public; Appiah commits that his will so be released in the interview. The authors make some important caveats, aimed at critics and cheerleaders in and out of the academy (the call outs are direct quotes).

Not circling the wagons during war:

Katherine Fleming: We’ve been acutely aware of the political environment in which we were operating. I’ve been dismayed by the fact that one thread of response seems to regard any work of this sort taking place during this political moment as illegitimate, traitorous, dangerous. It strikes me as paradoxical that that is emerging as another weirdly quiet, velvet-fisted form of silencing trickling out of this political moment.

Noting that the phrase relativism used in the report was quite narrow, while it is commonly used in many ways:

Paul Boghossian: We say how we are taking the term “relativism” to mean the very narrow view that epistemic values are always relative to nonepistemic values, to moral or pragmatic values. Very, very narrow. There are many kinds of relativism. Einstein’s theory of relativity is a relativistic view of time. We weren’t dismissing all possible relativisms about everything to everything else. It’s a very, very specific view.

K. Anthony Appiah: We say what we’re using the word “relativism” to do. Now, I know philosophers do that, and it sort of works with philosophers. It doesn’t work with everybody. When you say you’re using a term a certain way, they wander off and use it in any old way or in a way they’re used to. That’s one of the things we should have anticipated.

Of course there are things you might call relativism that are true and that are indeed the yield of anthropology, history, and so on. We said what we meant by the doctrine of relativism that we were rejecting, and it doesn’t follow from the fact that we rejected that doctrine, that we reject every single doctrine that has ever been called relativism, even all the doctrines that have reasonably been called relativism.

As for folks like Elise Stelfanik and other political or culture warrior types who have cheered on the report in spite of its statements against much of what they are seeking to do to higher education, my grandmother would say simply “bless your heart.”

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I hope that the detailed internal reports will be released, and plan to try and get some of the authors of the report to Duke so that we can have a variety of types of conversations about their points. We faculty should also have our own discussions around the report, a similar one issued by Yale and institution specific areas of focus. The discussion needs to become as concrete as possible. Examples of scholarship that refute the general claim of politicization of scholarship as well as those that some claim to demonstrate this would be useful for scholars to write, debate and discuss. The phrase ‘settled science’ figures in a few different ways in the report and the follow up convo, and the key aspect of this idea is that it is determined in groups—disciplines, fields, areas and the like. This will take time and work but it is worth it.

Finally, I want to reject explicitly the idea that we in the University should not talk about how we determine what to be true as scholars because the Trump Administration and many state legislatures and others are attacking higher education for their own purposes. I understand that they do not tend to come in good faith, but they are riding that train because they understand the broad loss of trust that we have suffered. Some deserved, some not, much hyperbole, but we have to answer in the way we do what we do—as scholars. The third point of the 1940 AAU/AAUP Statement on Academic Freedom and Tenure that I mentioned earlier is particularly important because it identifies being a faculty member not only as a job, but a calling that is committed to seeking the truth as disciplines determine same:

College and university teachers are citizens, members of a learned profession, and officers of an educational institution. When they speak or write as citizens, they should be free from institutional censorship or discipline, but their special position in the community imposes special obligations. As scholars and educational offi- cers, they should remember that the public may judge their profession and their institution by their utterances. Hence they should at all times be accurate, should exercise appropriate restraint, should show respect for the opinions of others, and should make every effort to indicate that they are not speaking for the institution.6

I note that this is written explicitly and verbatim into the faculty handbook at Duke University, and has been since 1976. We faculty have been granted important protections and rights and with them come important responsibilities.