Friday, October 27, 2017

Feeding a Dangerous Fiction, Redux

The news is that UCOP has legitimated the conventional wisdom that there's a crisis of free speech on campus by funding a center to study it.  But I'm still thinking about the situation at other campuses, from Drexel's suspension of a tweeting professor that I discussed at length in Inside Higher Ed last week ("Feeding a Dangerous Fiction"), to one of the many interesting exchanges I recently had in Reno. 

During questions after my lecture at the University of Nevada campus there, a man in his mid-40s told a story about his friend, a cement tycoon, who didn't get a thank you note from his East coast alma mater for building them a football stadium.  He then asked me when I thought universities were going to get back to "merit and accomplishment" and stop spending their time catering to their "special snowflakes." I smiled at him.  He was a UNR alumnus but not an academic, and I love talking with non-university people about universities.

I said that there is no tension between rewarding academic merit and "protecting snowflakes," which I translated as creating non-punitive and non-threatening conditions so that people's brains can operate correctly.  The latter is the means for achieving the former.  People learn only when they feel relatively safe and respected--not protected from their own wrongness, stupidity, and failure, but protected from stigmas, stereotyping, and mistreatment based on who they are and where they are coming from.  We can look at the vast learning literature for evidence of this truth.  

Or, I said, we can can refer to your story. Your donor friend felt hurt for not being thanked properly for his gift, and thus is having his "performance" in relation to his alma mater reduced. Similarly, the classroom performance of Black lesbian feminists is impaired by disrespect for them, implied or intended.  I'm a default egalitarian, I continued, which means supporting everyone's performance equally, while also knowing that means different things depending on whether one is a rich white donor feeling unappreciated or a young Black college student hearing nonsense talked about themselves.  I may have said "even if we own a cement business we're all basically snowflakes"-- I can't remember. In any case he smiled, waved, and departed.  I was left to ponder where he got the idea that even UNR, with its endless pouring of cement (pictured above), is mainly in the snowflakes business.

The most direct answer is that a bipartisan crew of campus free speech advocates continues to mis-frame the stakes of the debate.  Key members of the liberal center have joined the political right in committing this important error.  The error is to cast universities as safe harbors for enemies of free speech in particular and of freedom in general--with administrators as their squishy enablers.

Every week, the situation gets a little more propagandized. On the right, the motive for affirming this fake story is obvious. Republicans have to control all three branches of the federal government and most state legislatures and governorships with only 1/3rd of the national electorate.   They have a sole economic strategy, which is a combination of deregulation and tax cuts that over the decades has directly hurt their middle class base without actually helping the economy.  To maintain minority rule on the basis of failed economic policy, they need to trot out enemies, and the university has been a stock culture-wars enemy for well over 50 years.

In addition, now that "The Party of Lincoln Is the Party of Trump," Republicans need to sustain Trump's leadership moves--retaliation and abuse--while neutralizing their downside, which is retaliation and abuse, or, in other words, tyrant modalities in the service of what political scientist Jeffrey A. Winters describes as the country's "civil oligarchy."  They also need to keep people from noticing that their business agenda depends on secrecy and confusion,  which free speech standards would undermine were they applied to commerce.   For example, VP Mike Pence broke a tie on a Senate vote that forces victims of bank fraud back into private arbitration, where victims are not even allowed to talk about the problem for which they are seeking redress.  The Right protects commercial speech from disclosure while advocating it for public spaces, where the First Amendment does apply, and also for college campuses, whether or not it interferes with academic freedom.  In sponsoring speech that insults and upsets people, usually members of social minorities without power to retaliate, they can hope to trigger a backlash in which, Milo-style, they can play the victim.  When they do defend free speech for leftist professors, as the National Review did in the George Ciccariello-Maher case I also wrote about, they use it to describe college campuses as clubs for protected idiots.

The Right's demand for democratic speech is highly selective, not applying to Equifax or Renaissance Technologies but always applying to the student and professor part of the university sector.  These two groups stay in the political doghouse where they can be theatrically punished.  This venerable practice generally receives an unfortunate assist from the political center, which helps frame universities as anti-liberty.  As I noted in the IHE piece, some prominent liberals have aligned themselves with the Right's stereotypes of the freedom-hating campus Left.
Yale law professor and novelist Stephen L. Carter, writing in Bloomberg, said that Middlebury-style “down shouters will go on behaving deplorably and reminding the rest of us that the true harbinger of an authoritarian future lives not in the White House but in the groves of academe.” Fareed Zakaria asserted on his CNN program in May, “American universities these days seem committed to every kind of diversity, except intellectual diversity. Conservative voices and views, already a besieged minority, are being silenced entirely … There is also an anti-intellectualism on the left, an attitude of self-righteousness that says we are so pure, we’re so morally superior, we cannot bear to hear an idea with which we disagree.” Historian Jill Lepore used her space in The New Yorker to argue, via a cherry-picked series of scattered examples, that today’s controversies are driven by a “tragedy of betrayals” in which, from the 1970s on, “the left’s commitment to free speech began to unravel.”
My new friend in Reno would have every reason to think snowflakes were demanding that all campuses silence speech, since he could find that view in the New Yorker as on Bloomberg as readily as on Breitbart.

My pal could also get it from the leading First Amendment scholar and Berkeley Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky, who frames his arguments with the same stereotype that "current college students are often ambivalent, or even hostile, to the idea of free speech on campus."  When he appeared on KQED's Forum program last August, Chemerinsky did not engage caller questions about whether universities must host advocates of positions that science and scholarship has already refuted, which were questions about academic standards and academic freedom, but chose to hear them as doubting the First Amendment.

Actual Left positions on free speech are represented by Joan Scott (interview with Bill Moyers rejecting viewpoint-discrimination on campus), Hank Reichman (bridging free speech and academic freedom via a post-Marcusian critique of tolerance), Wendy Brown (rejecting free corporate speech as the model for campus speech), Leigh Raiford (tying free speech movements to civil rights), Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor (describing speech protests as widening civil rights tactics and goals), Tiya Miles (on speech needing to be embodied in "corporeal protest") and Robert Post (universities' obligations to educational goals are logically prior to their First Amendment duties).   (Post's longer paper is here.)  None of these positions advocate a priori viewpoint discrimination, though that is the typical charge.

Post's argument is that the First Amendment protects political speech but not all speech in any context. an obvious exception is private business: mall security can prevent anti-abortion rallies at the shopping center food court without losing a First Amendment lawsuit.  Post notes that free speech requirements also don't govern the exercise of professional competence. "We do not apply to doctors sued for malpractice the core First Amendment doctrine that 'there is no such thing as false idea.' We hold doctors accountable for their expertise."  He goes on to apply this professionalist framework to universities:
Another “bedrock principle” of the First Amendment is that “the government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea itself offensive or disagreeable.” Yet no competent teacher would permit a class to descend into name-calling and insults. Even if the object of classroom education is to expose students to ideas that they might find disturbing or threatening, it is nevertheless inconsistent with learning for students to experience this encounter in settings where they are personally abused or degraded.
Regarding outside speakers, Post writes,
universities are not Hyde Parks. Unless they are wasting their resources on frolics and detours, they can support student-invited speakers only because it serves university purposes to do so. And these purposes must involve the purpose of education.
There's much to be said about this view pro and con, but the core idea is correct: in principle, academic authority rests on tested, disputable, and accountable expertise, not on the exercise of superior political power as covered (and prohibited) by the First Amendment.

The Left has long done a superb job of describing all the ways that formal viewpoint neutrality is actually discriminatory.  It has mapped the many ways that this discrimination works generally against whomever has less power.  This has involved talking about inequalities of power and resources, which are topics that the Right does not enjoy, and that its partisans conceal in part with the trumped-up free speech controversy.

In addition to continuing to press on denied, veiled, and structural discriminations, I'd like to see the Left develop a model of free speech also grounded in both professional duty (the doctor example above) and educational purposes.  Both are based in things the Right has successfully weakened over decades--appreciation for expertise, and a working model of public goods.  Racial equity, gender justice, and similar forms of equality and reciprocity are good both because they help the public good of learning and because they are common goods, if not rights, ethically and philosophically valuable for their own sake.

In other words, free speech needs to be reconnected to the social justice issues that trigger the Right-- and too much of the center.


Monday, October 16, 2017

UC Loses More Autonomy

In the latest fallout from last spring's disastrous, and disastrously handled, audit, Governor Brown has just signed a new law that tightens up legislative oversight over UC Finances.  You will probably remember that the State Auditor challenged UCOP's handling of funds and accused UCOP of intervening in the audit process in order to gain more favorable responses from campus officials (although UCOP denied the allegations).  In response, the State transformed UC's budget.  And now the state is increasing its intervention into UC budgeting.

In what can only be seen as a response UCOP's role in changing campus responses to the Auditor's inquiries, the new law forbids communication between UCOP and a campus
whenever a request for information relating to the security of funds of the University of California is made by the California State Auditor’s Office pursuant to these provisions to one or more campuses of the University of California, would prohibit those campuses from coordinating their responses with, or seeking counsel, advice, or similar contact regarding their response from, the Office of the President of the University of California before submitting the requested information to the California State Auditor’s Office. The bill would require the California State Auditor’s Office, when requesting information under these provisions, to include a statement in the request that it is requesting the information pursuant to these provisions and that the request for information is not to be shared with the Office of the President of the University of California.
In addition, the legislature demands increased fine tuning of the University's cost of education calculation both in terms of the relative costs of undergraduate education, graduate education, and health science education and by funding source.  Given that UC has consistently insisted that this demand is unreasonable, we can expect further political tensions between Sacramento and the University.

Chris and I have long called for greater transparency about spending and funding sources.  And I can understand the State's desire to ensure that the information it receives during audits not be tampered with.  Still, this latest statute raises a series of important issues:

1) When the accusations about tampering first broke, UC announced that it was hiring an independent investigator to examine the charges.  Has that report been concluded?  If so, when will it be released?  What did it determine?  If it hasn't been concluded then why not?  And when can we find out what actually happened?

2) As I pointed out earlier, the State's response continues to be based on the notion that legislators and the Regents are the most appropriate people to co-govern the university with UCOP.  But as has been proven repeatedly, neither the Legislature, nor the Regents, nor the Governor nor UCOP, for that matter, has demonstrated much grasp of the educational and research practices of the University.  What is needed is greater internal democracy rather than simply legislative demands.  And that internal democracy should be applied to the question of how to achieve the highest academic accomplishment, not simply how to achieve the greatest savings or, as far too many local administrators seem to think, develop the latest private sector fads.

3).  When will there be genuine accountability at UCOP and the Board of Regents?  As the audit,  this year's budget, and this legislation demonstrate, UC has become extremely vulnerable to outside pressures and the political status of the University is remarkably low.  Does anyone really believe that the people who have brought the University to this point are the ones to correct it?  And given the destructive forces emanating from Washington, does anyone expect that the budget or the political climate is going to get better?

4) Shouldn't the Senate take a leading and public role in formulating proposals to recenter the University on its academic missions?



Monday, October 2, 2017

Berkeley Disconnect


The farce that was MiloFest has now frittered away into failure.  Of course, that will not be the last time that the right-wing attempts to undermine the authority and status of higher education under the guise of standing up for free thought.  The challenge will be ongoing.

At the same time, we should not allow the fireworks over free speech to divert us from other important attacks on the educational mission of universities.  These attacks are driven not by the ideologies of the alt-right but by the ideologies of austerity.

One classic case of the damage brought about by privatization-driven austerity was revealed amidst the hubbub over free speech week at Berkeley.  While most attention was focused on the spectacles of Shapiro and Yiannopoulos, the Daily Cal reported that the Christ administration is proposing to end the funding for the tremendously successful Berkeley Connect program as part of its budget cutting plans.

Berkeley Connect is an  innovative program that provides academic mentoring to undergraduates and fellowship support to graduate students.  Undergraduates who join the program are linked with a graduate student adviser who helps them navigate their academic experience.  Students take part in small discussion groups and workshops, and pursue a specially designed curriculum.  Students overwhelmingly praise the program and it has been shown to improve their academic performance.  Over 10,000 have participated.  Even though the program had its campus support cut last year from $2M to $1M dollars it still was able to support 1200 undergraduates while providing 29 graduate fellowships.

What makes this proposed elimination so striking is that the Christ Administration appears willing to sacrifice precisely the sort of program that Berkeley claims it wants to promote because it improves the quality of undergraduate education.  Berkeley Connect began in 2010 as a result of a donation from the father of an English Department alumnus.  In 2013, recognizing its success, the campus agreed to fund its extension to additional departments.  It now serves 13 departments from Math, Computational Biology and Physics on the one hand to History, Architecture and African-American Studies on the other.  So the Christ administration is proposing to eliminate a highly successful program, built upon a commitment of campus funds and the support of appreciative parent of an alumnus, and that has demonstrably improved both undergraduate and graduate education.  And just for the record, the amount going to Berkeley Connect this year is approximately the same as what the University has recently spent on the Shapiro and Yiannopoulos events and less than 1/5 of the continued subvention of the chronically mismanaged Intercollegiate Athletics department.

To be sure, the particular brutalism of Berkeley's imposition of austerity is not due to the campus leadership alone.  UCOP is demanding the pace of deficit reduction and therefore making it more difficult to balance the budget without affecting innovative educational programs.  But when the campus announces that they have decided to exclude fellowships from the chopping block  and then turns around and makes a decision that will cut nearly 30 graduate fellowships, one has to wonder about how believable the administration's claims really are.

Indeed, as Chris pointed out in his recent budget post, Berkeley has shown no sign of an open and deep rethinking of their budget strategies and priorities of the last 15 years.  Beginning with the Birgeneau and Breslauer administration, Berkeley has been announcing new and greater privatization schemes while allowing for a dramatic expansion in administration even as funding for core educational activities has become increasingly strained.  Although it is true that in this year's budget plan, administrative cuts are serious, they don't make up for the imbalance in spending over the last several administrations.

If the Christ Administration eliminates Berkeley Connect it will be both a terrible step and a canary in a coal mine.  The Chancellor has insisted that she is determined to protect instruction.  If she is, then she will insist that her administration find the funds to maintain Berkeley Connect.  If she does not, it will be another example of the slide of Berkeley from the days when its headlines were about educational innovation to these days, when we hear mostly about rankings declines and athletic department mismanagement.