Doesn't mean that younger students can't get on board, understanding where those terms are coming from, and still think critically about what is put in front of them.
Again, the main problem is that money rules over academia. So publicly fund it, #taxtherich:
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At no point in my academic pursuits did I feel like I knew something better than the person who devoted their career to learning about it. And, every professor I had would approach things in an implicitly nonbiased way. Just because it traumatizes Jonathan when people use newer words in meetings 14/
Effective teaching resembles a workable democracy in that it is premised on free and open exchange. And if you think we have protected and nourished that value at our colleges and universities, you haven’t been paying attention. The current academic culture of fear, timidity, and conformity is inimical to both education and democracy. Trump has ramped up that fear, but he certainly did not create it. We created it. It is up to us, therefore, to undo it.
Finally, this is always a frustrating sticking point for me. Colleges and universities SHOULD be a place premised on free and open exchange. But, professors, the experts, should still be the ones choosing the content, and then challenging their students to engage with it. 13/
It will not go to "College Presidents for Teaching Preparedness" because, as I've said many times before, that is not how are allowed to receive money for higher education, because it's not where the philanthropy lords want it to go. 12/
Some of our techno-futurists have, gamely, imagined that AI will free professors up to do the real work of liberal education — debate, critique, analysis — while the robot takes care of the rote dimensions. But that, too, presumes a university that puts teaching front and center. There is no organization called College Presidents for Teaching Preparedness, because we do not prepare people to teach in our colleges. That needs to change if we want to make good on our democratic charge. Every department that produces new faculty members should have a set of required courses devoted to the instruction of that discipline. And every professor’s teaching — like their research — should be judged by their peers. Student evaluations are important, but they are not enough. I have taught at Penn for nine years, and nobody has observed me in the classroom. I could be doing anything — or nothing.
And again, he is soooo close to getting it, but instead just swings back to demonizing his peers. Donors are going to throw money where they think the most profitable investment is. Until the AI bubble inevitably pops, that is where funding will go. 11/
In Alcoholics Anonymous, the first step to recovery is admitting that you have a problem. Most of my colleagues aren’t there yet. The trauma of Trump is too fresh, too raw, too painful. When a group is under attack, its initial impulse will be to defend itself. Thus, everything our team says is right and everything the other team says is wrong. Mocking the idea that universities are biased against conservatives, the American Association of University Professors — our most august academic organization — recently posted that “fascism generally doesn’t do great under peer review.” In other words: The reason we have so few Republican professors is because they are brownshirts in disguise. We do not have to engage or debate them; indeed, we must not engage or debate them.
Also, as someone who has been to AA, it's rich for someone to force the first step in such a ham-fisted way into an article demanding better academic integrity. If only Jonathan could reach the 10th step:
"Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it." 10/
You don't need to have any sympathy for college presidents who are deeply complicit in ruining our institutions, but their motives are nothing like the professors who use the peer-reviewed evidence they are experts on to teach that might just so happen to take a "left-wing side." 9/
The job of a university president is no different than Roger Goodell in the NFL: Eat shit in public for the Board of Trustees or the 32 team owners and we'll give you a big salary.
Quoting their mealy-mouthed half answers is evidence of money controlling institutions to an unfathomable degree 8/
Professors generally refuse to admit any of this, which compounds the problem. We are like little children who close their eyes in the hopes that nobody can see them. That was apparent during the fateful testimony by three college presidents in December 2023 before a congressional committee investigating antisemitism on campuses following the Hamas attack on Israel and the subsequent war in Gaza. Asked whether calls for genocide would be protected speech, the presidents answered — correctly — that it depends on the context. But here is what they did not say: Universities have not defended this principle consistently. At Harvard, for example, the eminent evolutionary biologist Carole Hooven was effectively pushed out for saying that there are a multiplicity of genders but only two sexes: male and female. “In what world is a call for violence against Jews protected speech, but a belief that sex is biological and binary isn’t?” Harvard president Claudine Gay was asked. She replied that Harvard supports “constructive dialogue, even on the most complex and divisive issues.” The Hooven episode proved the opposite, of course.
and then not ask students to read the hacky book by Buruma and Margolit. It's like saying "After they assigned Hemingway we didn't read Nicholas Sparks." On top of that, it's wild to follow this up with testimony from college presidents as evidence of people afraid to take a "non-left" stance. 7/
Professors cannot fulfill their obligations to their students — and to our democracy — if they are not deeply committed to educating them. That means exposing them to a wide range of ideas, which was once the heart of the liberal ideal. But no longer. In a recent study, the political scientist Jon A. Shields and two colleagues surveyed course syllabi to see if professors who assigned Edward Said’s Orientalism also asked students to read Ian Buruma’s and Avishai Margalit’s Occidentalism or other critiques of Said. They also looked to see whether teachers teaching The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander’s now-canonical account of racism in criminal justice, also assigned scholars who took issue with Alexander, such as the Yale Law School professor James Forman Jr. or the Princeton sociologist Patrick Sharkey. Shields’ conclusion was sad and altogether predictable: These kinds of pairings, these efforts at fairness and complication, are extremely rare.
This is also an insane and disingenuous comparison that might fool anyone who didn't study history, but most of us know this is a huge reach. Edward Said is studied everywhere because he broke ground and new historical scholarship builds off of his contributions. It's not biased to read Said, 6/
Lack of training is actually a problem. But, it's almost certainly, again, a funding problem. Rich people like to slap their name on a dorm. That's why UPenn has a dorm named after the evil AF Estee Lauder family and not a program called the "Lauder TA Preparedness Program." 5/
When did the contract start to unravel? One common story links it to the student demonstrations and social upheavals of the 1960s, which soured taxpayers — especially those on the right — against higher education. Ronald Reagan won the governorship of California in 1966 by pledging to “clean up the mess at Berkeley,” which had exploded in protest two years earlier. (He also railed against campus “hippies,” whom Reagan famously described as “someone who looks like Tarzan, walks like Jane, and smells like Cheetah.”) Yet tuition remained free for in-state students until 1970, when California instituted a nominal $150 fee. The big nationwide tuition increases did not kick in until the 1980s, as state legislatures started to slash their higher-education budgets. After Reagan ascended to the White House, the federal government reduced student aid by 25 percent over five years.
I'm willing to bet that most voters in the 60s - 80s didn't really give a damn about what was going on campuses this way, until conservatives realized they could bash them in the head with clichés and stereotypes about it. Something that Jonathan, curiously, keeps doing even today. 4/
“Out to lunch” is where much of higher education is — oblivious about how we got here and how we might change course. Yes, Trump represents a dagger at our heart; and yes, we must join hands to resist him. But long before he came to power, growing numbers of Americans — and not just Republicans — were starting to see higher education as something of a scam. We charge ever-higher sticker prices for degrees of increasingly dubious worth, even as we proclaim our commitment to the public good. To make good on that ideal, we cannot simply circle the wagons. We need to look in the mirror.
>70% of undergraduates are enrolled at public universities. You can blame the "cost of tuition rose exponentially while the value of a degree dropped" all you want, but I'm not going to take you seriously until you admit that the main problem is a unified attack on the public funding of education 3/
Of course, as a Columbia/John Hopkins grad, who taught at NYU and UPenn, Jonathan might very well live in a bubble that makes him think the entire world operates like the private colleges he has been so fortunate to grace with his presence for >40 years. But most people don't have that luxury... 2/
🗃️ Funny how it's ALWAYS an older, white, male professor, who stems an op-ed that "actually everyone that came into this discipline after me is doing it wrong and they are the problem. Not me!"
There are so many leaps in this piece that it's hard to wrap my head around, but I'll try a few:
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Curiously, virtually no one at the public college shares this stupid self defeating POV.
I work at the public college with >15,000 enrolled students less than 20 blocks up the street from Columbia and I’m lucky if we get mentioned in the news more than once a year.
Thank you for continuing to speak publicly about this. Just, as a college staff member watching the slow weaponization of antisemitism to divide students, and make campuses less hospitable to everyone, I’m really appreciative of those who speak out from a position of genuine knowledge.
Well written piece by @joelhs.bsky.social, who knows the ins and outs of this issue more than almost anyone.
It is chilling how much we are falling into the trap of limiting free speech and expression, especially towards issues where the need to have a real conversation is desperately needed.
Whoops, *was owned. In 2023 the Ford Foundation separately funded the Chronicle for Philanthropy and it spun off to be independent.
Nevertheless, that isn’t actually “better.”
Because the Chronicle for Higher Ed is owned by the same people as the Chronicle for Philanthropy, and I work in higher ed fundraising and am forced to read both a lot, I am not surprised by this being published at all
I really wish we had louder voices! And not from sycophantic donor publications!
If someone thinks they might be trans, I think our duty is to welcome them with open arms and help them in their journeys no matter where it leads.
Judging people who think they might be trans and subjecting their motives to intense scrutiny HARMS TRANS PEOPLE. It’s really that simple.
Espaillat fought for years, even getting back up again after losing to fight the “Rangel machine” that had stagnated politics in this district so much.
Only to quickly become the very thing he fought so hard to replace. I believe he’s had his chance, and that Darializa would do so much better!
^ This. I still voted for her. I voted for Biden and Hillary too. Now, I didn’t vote for any of them in the primaries, and I’m allowed to critique them where I believe they fell short. Because they did. If they didn’t, Trump wouldn’t be president. We need to do better, not point fingers.
For anyone curious about what this means, trust me, it doesn't *mean* anything. But this stupid company will gladly take your money if you're naïve enough to buy the electronic bowl that almost certainly tracks your every move.
I had to look this up. He was on the Jazz.. twice?! That dude got around.
How I would act when meeting any of those young'uns:
Move to Utah, where even baby's are beginning to embrace this inevitable trend:
If your policy proposal sounds like a job description, and not a slogan, almost no one is going to remember to give you credit for it.
You can look down on people's attention spans all you want, but this is Politics 101 and I still can't believe how reluctant the Dems are to do it.
