A student organization at the University of Texas has had the good idea of posting a weblist of professors who politicize their classrooms. We faculty never monitor this kind of misbehavior by instructors, and sometimes we even glorify our laziness by calling it devotion to "academic freedom". But it is much more important to look into what a professor teaches and how he teaches it than to monitor student happiness or unhappiness via end-of-semester surveys as we do. Here are a couple of items from the list.
Instructor: David Edwards
Dr. Edwards allows his hatred of conservatism and capitalism to permeate his entire
curriculum. His videos
reflect the left-wing viewpoint nine times out of 10. He teaches one side of the story,
and uses examples of
Bush's policies for nearly every criticism of political actors. The articles he
highlights from the New York
Times are almost always criticisms of capitalism, free trade organizations or the Iraq
war.
Instructor: Steve Bronars
Dr. Bronars acknowledges that one of the reasons he teaches economics is to get more
people to agree with his
opinions on it. He champions the free market system and believes in minimal government
intervention. Although
he may try to offer a liberal perspective on economics early on, he will admit that his
class focuses instead
on efficiency. He is very good at teaching economics, but sometimes his opinions are
the main things that
shine through in his lectures. You probably wouldn't take a free market economics class
if you didn't already
believe in capitalism, but Dr. Bronars may try to do the thinking for his students
without challenging them to
question why they feel the way they do.
I don't know whether the list is accurate or not. The only instructors I've heard of
are Professor Bronars (and I forget the context) and one instructor on the "Honor Roll"
of conspicuously balanced professors, J. Budziszewski, a "natural law" scholar. But the
idea is a good one, and other people can put up their own lists contradicting this one.
Department: Government
Course Evaluated: International Relations
Spring 2004 courses: Politics and Reality, 310 American Government
Department: Economics
Course Evaluated: Introduction to Microeconomics
Spring 2004 courses:
One informed and intelligent though biased person who has commented is Brian Leiter, a law and philosophy professor at Texas.
And their "honor roll"--presumably of faculty who never, ever push an ideological viewpoint--includes at least one faculty member who so patently deserves to be on the Watchlist as to make a mockery of the whole thing. ... In the case of some of those on the Watchlist and on the Honor Roll, it's rather clear from every report I've heard from students (and I mean students unconnected to the YCT smear machine) that intellectual content in fact takes a backseat to pontification. ... A Government professor, for example, is criticized for requiring two books that reflect a "pro-Palestinian bias." But presumably the professor assigns them because he thinks they are better books than those the YCT hacks would deem to be pro-Israel. Yet surely one part of academic freedom is the right of a professor to choose the materials that he or she deems most reliable and sound. That the YCT or Hamas doesn't share that professor's scholarly judgment is neither here nor there: academic freedom has to protect the right of faculty to choose materials that, in their informed judgment, are meritorious. ... Relatedly, what exactly would be the remedy for the complaints lodged in the Watchlist. Should administrators, or student committees, edit the syllabi to insure "balance" as they understand "balance"? Surely even the YCT hacks must recognize what a catastrophe this would be.I think Professor Leiter's criticism of the idea of the list is wrong, but it does invite discussion. For what is the list useful? First, it is useful for students deciding which courses to take. This usefulness is of course limited by how accurate the list may be, but since everyone knows the YCT is a conservative organization and a student organization, they will take its statements with a grain of salt (just, as, actually, they would do with official university statements, as being from a liberal organization and a bureaucratic organization).Consider: most of what is written on natural law theory is an argumentative and analytical embarrassment, which poses a challenge when teaching a serious course in jurisprudence: if you're having students read H.L.A. Hart, Joseph Raz, and Ronald Dworkin, you can't, all of a sudden, ask them to read--for the sake of "balance"--Hadley Arkes or Harry Jaffa or any of the others in the legions of natural law preachers who couldn't argue their way out of a paper bag. In my informed scholarly judgment, there are exactly four major natural law theorists who can be assigned in a serious jurisprudence class: John Finnis, Mark Murphy, David Brink, and Michael Moore. (I usually assign at least two of them, by the way.) If academic freedom does not encompass my right to make that judgment, then I'm not sure what it does protect.
Second, the list is useful for improving teaching. It may shame the people on it, or even just alert them to biases (or just perceptions of bias) of which they were not aware. It may be used by the colleagues and superiors of those on the list for deciding on pay and promotion. Other Government Department professors will not, of course, just see that someone is on the YCT list and decide to turn the person down for tenure. They will, it is to be hoped, see that someone is on the YCT list, investigate exactly what the person is teaching, and if that teaching is poor enough, warn him that he had better clean up his act or be denied tenure or raises. In this respect, the YCT list is just like any other student complaint--- and is much more useful than the numerical student evaluations which are standardly used for pay and promotion. The YCT list is written by students who took their own time to think about teaching, whose biases are known, and who are specific in their criticisms. How much better this is than the numerical rating by a student who is told to take two minutes of class time to check off a number and who is not asked to explain whether poor teaching means, to him, politicized teaching, incoherent teaching, too much homework, an attendance requirement, or being cold-called by the instructor.
It is, as Professor Leiter points out, quite possible, or even necessary, that good teaching has a kind of bias and imbalance. The instructor should not teach points of view that are clearly wrong. A course on Nazi Germany should not have equal time for Holocaust deniers; a course on American politics should not have equal time for the theory that the Rosicrucians run everything; a course on economic forecasting should not have equal time for astrologers. But on the other hand, the instructor should not teach only points of view that are clearly wrong, and, moreover, an instructor who even gives equal time to them should be told to change. If an assistant in my department were to seriously teach astrology as one of several forecasting methods, I would have grave doubts about giving him tenure. He should not be allowed to cry "academic freedom!" and get away with bad teaching. (This applies to research, too, where deciding whether a research approach or topic is worthwhile is a common problem in trying to evaluate tenure dossiers.)
I don't know enough about jurisprudence to know what thinkers Professor Leiter ought to teach. If I taught the subject, my immediate instinct is that I wouldn't want to teach any of the thinkers he names above--including Dworkin and Hart-- and that I'd teach Bentham, Aquinas, Posner and suchlike instead. But that might well be just ignorance on my part, and if I really were assigned the course to teach, I'd go to someone like Leiter to find out what he thinks is important in such a course, and I'd teach thinkers I did not respect, so long as they are considered important by a substantial body of scholars. This does raise a problem if there is any area, such as, perhaps, natural law, where there is a respectable way of thought but no good authors. What I would do in such a case might be to assign (a) a mediocre but representative author, (b) an obsolete but historically important author, and (c) my own notes, presenting the idea as best I can since the mediocre and obsolete authors don't do it justice.
In any case, my colleagues ought to look at what I'm teaching, and if I am obviously teaching a skewed and improper view of the subject, they should reprimand me. The problem is no different, in principle, from the problem of a professor who is balanced in viewpoint but assigns all the wrong authors or chooses obscure topics that interest him but don't give the students the proper coverage of the subject. The only difference in practice is that when political bias is the problem, it can be a problem for those doing the reprimanding as much as for the instructor under examination.
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