"Diversity of Everything but Ideas" Davenport

[Jed Dilligan]

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2005/12/26/EDGQIF5HRI1.DTL

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So what is to be done to promote greater intellectual diversity on campuses? It won't be easy, given that tenure protects professors' jobs and academic freedom is used to defend almost whatever they choose to say. Still, there is plenty that can be done to broaden the range of ideas on campus.

Trustees and administrators should undertake a study of the diversity of thought on their own campuses. One way to balance what is presented in the classroom is to invite a greater diversity of outside speakers, or part-time adjunct faculty. Deans should look at the syllabus for courses to see if a range of ideas is presented in the readings and engage faculty on the issue. It doesn't violate academic freedom to have a conversation about a professor's reading list. As one of my bosses correctly said to me, "You have academic freedom to write what you want and I have freedom to say what I want about what you write." Intellectual diversity should be part of student course evaluations, and should be reviewed at the highest levels.

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I hope people understand what is being proposed here and its significance. There's a lot of this "intellectual diversity" crap going around lately, especially if you include the intelligent design scam. Any thoughts on what to do as a counterpunch--other than the obvious "PhD's are liberal because they are not stupid"?

[CarbonDate]

1. I agree. There should be more intellectual diversity....

...on America's campuses.



Stupid people are massively under-represented.

[Jed Dilligan]

2. Taught college lately?

You ought to see what passes for an "essay" these days...

[Demeter]

3. You Know, The Point of Education Is Knowledge, Not "Ideas"

You want "ideas" go to the marketing department. They will distort reality ten ways from Sunday to convince you that black is white and up is down.

You want creativity, go to the hard sciences and engineering departments. They are dying for a chance to show you what can be done with just a tenth of the resources wasted on "ideas" and marketing.

You want morals? Go to the soft sciences: psychology, sociology, anthropology.

You want beauty? Support the arts.

You want knowledge? Keep the lying, cheating GOP out.

[Jed Dilligan]

4. Right on

Every conservative "idea", from intelligent design to trickle-down economics, is intellectually indefensible. They are "underrepresented" because they lost the debates--not because of any conspiracy.

[Demeter]

5. Thanks for Reading and Reinforcing

sometimes I feel rather like John the Baptist, crying in the wilderness and served up on a plate for Salome.

[TallahasseeGrannie]

6. I have a different take on this

and that is the concept that in order to defend progressive ideas we need to be able to argue them coherently. So I say bring on the right wingers and let them speak. A lot. Dialogue is good. I firmly believe that the facts, not just the morality, is on our side.

I was in an education seminar recently where the prof would not allow any defense whatsoever of the No Child Left Behind Act because he hated it. Well, I hate it, too. But I wanted to hear what people SAID about it. No way was he going to give them a forum. To me, that is bad teaching. He should have been ready to defend his ideals.

[Demeter]

7. Arguing With Idiots Only Gives Them Credibiliity In Their Eyes

and those otherwise uninformed. Facts will speak for themselves, if only they can be heard. The trouble until recently was that the GOP echo chamber drowned them out. That has stopped with the voice of Katrina drowning not only BushCo but a large portion of the South.

[TallahasseeGrannie]

8. Maybe that is why "debate"

is effective with its fairness and rules. I think it is an underused technique.

[Demeter]

9. The GOP Doesn't Recognize Rules (or Facts)

so it's hard to play the debate game with cheaters.

[TallahasseeGrannie]

10. But we're not talking GOP here

we're talking in the classroom. If we are going to teach our ideals we have to teach how to defend them.

[Jed Dilligan]

11. The real battle, apparently

is to keep them from taking control of the university administrations.

[opihimoimoi]

12. Sometimes, it seems as if its a lost art...to dicuss and defend

ideas and concepts...and extrapolation as well.

[Demeter]

13. Yes, We Are Talking GOP

It's certainly not the Democrats nor the Independents that are creating the "controversy", which is as bogus as the "War against Christmas" meme that they tried to pull over the eyes of the sheep.

Back in the Victorian days, when being a big blowhard was fashionable, a lot of prejudice, speculation, and just bad science (contaminated by error) was propagated in several fields. Science was the rich man's hobby horse; women and working classes need not apply. It has only been in the past 30-50 years that some of that nonsense has been debunked, from animal studies to medicine. The War on Ideas would take us back to those times when, lacking an adequate peer review process, faulty and fanciful theories got written up as fact and passed down the generations.

Now that the peer review process keeps the quacks out of science and research and colleges, the right wing cries foul. Fundamentalists try to force their truly crackpot notions on an unsophisticated public by screaming loudly and redefining what constitutes science, or education, or public health, or even Constitutional law. Don't fall for it, don't tolerate it, and for all our sakes, don't encourage it. Truth will out, but we shouldn't have to endure generations of misinformed people.

[TallahasseeGrannie]

14. I can't speak to the sciences as that is not my field

but I can speak to education, which is. Those of us who came out of the Sixties and Seventies college experience in education were fed a completely bogus line of crap called the "open classroom." It sounded so wonderful on paper. It was compassionate, free, and joyful. Only problem was, it was NOT research based and it flat out didn't work. There is a whole generation of kids out there who can't read, write and spell, but they are cool with paper mache and basket weaving. In my ed classes at the time there was no one who would dare buck the trend. To be "structured" was equal to fascism and structured schools were routinely referred to as fascist schools. Some things don't change!

My husband is a professor at a southern university and it is his feeling that students don't learn to defend their ideas...the spout the party line and are cookie cutter molded as thoroughly as the kids at Bob Jones University, but on the other end of the political spectrum.

We need to teach our kids why our ideas are good ones and be ready to defend them. Anything less is not an education, but an indoctrination.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

15. Yes, if you can't defend your ideas against their opposite, then you are

just brainwashed, not educated.

That's why the fundies and right-wingers don't want their kids exposed to "liberal" ideas--their own ideas do not stand up to scrutiny.

That's why we should make sure that our young people learn both sides or all three or four sides of every issue along with the intellectual tools for distinguishing truth from bullshit.

This is not the same as saying "Here are the two sides. Pick one. It doesn't matter which."

Debate--real, structured traditional debate, not Crossfire-style shouting matches--is an excellent tool for this, because debating teams have to learn an issue so thoroughly that they can argue either side. A classroom teacher can teach traditional debate and set ground rules that prevent the conservatives from just shouting down the opposition.

[TallahasseeGrannie]

16. You nailed it

any idea worth having is worth researching and defending.

[Jed Dilligan]

19. No one is anti-debate. The real issue is the creation of a non-issue

to which bureaucracies can be manipulated into responding, thereby limiting the intellectual freedom of faculty members.

There is no left-wing bias in college classrooms. Most students never even know their professors' political affiliations. Sometimes colleagues don't even know how their colleagues vote. The watchword on campuses has been political apathy for at least thirty years now. I'd say maybe 5% of the students I've taught have been politically aware, and only a fraction of those are active.

[Demeter]

17. That Wasn't Liberal--It was Lazy

There was a great destructive trend in the teaching colleges based on some truly odd notions. And it started much earlier than you think. The difference was marked between the high school class of 1971 and that of 1973. Grammar was tossed, reading was trashed, then they started in on the math programs. Why is not clear. I think partly it was a reaction to the push for excellence that Sputnik triggered. Teaching became too much like work. My grandmother was a public school teacher and she bitterly complained about the administrative deterioration in Detroit, and I saw the quality of teaching (and the textbooks) plummet after 1967 riots.

[Jed Dilligan]

18. VERY well-said! nt