THE FACULTY ADVOCATE
NEWSLETTER OF THE UMKC CHAPTER OF THE
AMERICAN ASSOCIATION OF UNIVERSITY PROFESSORS
October 2007
Editor: Patricia
Brodsky
Vol. 8, No. 1
Institute for Labor
Studies Under the Gun: AAUP Sponsors Panel Discussion Oct. 26
The Attack on Labor
Studies, by Judy Ancel
Landmark Court
Decision OK's Unionization for Missouri Public Employees
SB 389,
Missouri Omnibus Higher Education Bill: A Trojan Horse Within our Gates,
by Patricia Brodsky
The War on Higher
Education in Missouri, by David Brodsky
Curators, Upper
Admin Impose Grievance Policy Undermining Academic Freedom, by Patricia
Brodsky
Letter to the Missouri
Assembly, by Charles Reitz and Roena Haynie
Testimony to
Missouri Senate Education Committee, 25 April 2007, by David Robinson
AAUP Condemns
Missouri Bill, by Cary Nelson and Ernest Benjamin
Brooker
Intellectual Diversity Bill Dead--For Now (excerpts), by Keith Hardeman
News of the Chapter
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Back Issues
Institute for
Labor Studies Under the Gun: AAUP Sponsors Panel Discussion Oct. 26
Last summer UMKC announced it was
closing the Institute for Labor Studies, the only labor education
program between Columbia MO and Albuquerque NM. Many members of
the UMKC and labor communities rallied to ask the Chancellor to rescind
the decision, because they knew and valued the work of the ILS, from
its credit and non-credit courses to its weekly radio show on KKFI, the
Heartland Labor Forum. The Institute and ILS Director Judy Ancel
got a one-semester reprieve, but their future is still in doubt.
A decision will be made soon as to the fate of the program.
Faculty should acknowledge that,
in addition to being professionals, we are also workers. Over
half the AAUP membership belongs to Collective Bargaining
chapters. We need to defend both of our identities, particularly
at a time when the national agenda is the corporatization of education
and the deprofessionalization of academic work. A recent AAUP
study reported that 76.7% of faculty at UMKC are contingent workers,
i.e. non-tenure line, both full- and part-time. Our colleagues
are particularly vulnerable to substandard labor practices. Labor
studies turns out to be relevant for all of us. It can provide a
historical context for the deteriorating status of the profession and
can inform us of our rights and how to defend them.
In order to educate the campus
community about labor studies, the AAUP chapter is sponsoring a panel
discussion with the title "Labor Studies: What is it and why do we need
it?" The panel consists of Judy Ancel, Director, Institute of
Labor Studies; Judy Morgan, President, Kansas City Federation of
Teachers; and Jesse Heckman, Labor Certificate graduate. The
discussion will take place Friday, October 26 from 3 to 5 PM in Room
307 Education. Please make every effort to attend.
The Attack on
Labor Studies
by Judy Ancel
By now, most people know that
UMKC is trying to get rid of labor studies. Just to refresh you,
in late May, departing Provost Bruce Bubacz, with no advance warning,
fired a parting shot at The Institute for Labor Studies by unilaterally
ending the twenty-two year partnership between UMKC and Longview
Community College to co-sponsor the program. My department chair
and I were copied on the letter to Longview. There had been no
evaluation of the program and no opportunity to defend it in advance of
this decision.
I appealed to Dean Karen Vorst
and Chancellor Guy Bailey, hoping they would quickly understand what a
mistake this was and rectify it. Both defended the decision
although Bailey apologized for Bubacz's incivility. After a
petition signed by several hundred students, faculty, community
supporters, unions, and faculty in labor studies and industrial
relations from around the country, calls and letters from State
Senators and local union leaders, Bailey backed up a step and agreed to
maintain the nine-year old state-wide Certificate program whose funds
support video courses generated and received on three campuses.
He decided not to fire me immediately. However, the loss of
Longview and cuts in UMKC's support of the program have cost our budget
$30,000. I was told to reorganize the program, meaning find
outside money. Bailey characterized the cuts as administrative.
One could hardly blame him for
that error, since no one had bothered to look at what ILS does to
fulfill UMKC's mission. Not only is ILS a very lean program
delivering credit and non-credit programming with a staff of one, but
also I do much of the teaching, speaking to civic organizations,
churches, the media, and schools and I coordinate our weekly
educational radio show, The Heartland Labor Forum, on KKFI. The
Institute for Labor Studies has, over the years, brought UMKC into
parts of the community it never reaches and served people who basically
view higher ed as irrelevant elitism.
When I last counted, the Bloch
School had 47 full and part-time faculty serving the needs of the
business community. Labor Studies has one and that's
endangered. Should the UMKC community care? Does it matter
that there's someone on campus who studies, teaches and speaks out
about trends in working conditions, the role of unions in a democratic
society, or how offshoring of jobs is affecting society? Is it
important to have courses for students and a center that encourages
them to go into careers in the labor movement as organizers,
researchers, policy advocates? Clearly these things are part of
UMKC's mission, but when your state is 47th out of 50 in funding for
higher education, then the mission can easily be sacrificed.
Bailey doesn't talk about mission
anymore, he talks about core mission. He says core mission is
degree programs. We don't have a degree in labor studies, only a
certificate. Since the curator's mandated cuts require us to
finance raises by cannibalizing programs, we can expect to see more
shots fired at the body of our mission and more programs lopped off
which serve both community and students. Before that's done, I
hope the UMKC community seriously looks at what we're sacrificing and
how selective the impact is. Like The Institute for Labor
Studies, other centers are at risk. Find your own money, we're
told. Before we know it we'll be lopping off more than the
working class. What's at risk? Precisely those parts of our
community with the least resources and those parts of our endeavor that
are most innovative and experimental. Core mission takes on a
decidedly Social Darwinist cast.
Landmark
Court Decision OK's Unionization for Missouri Public Employees
At the end of May the Missouri
Supreme Court, in a 5-2 decision, reversed a 1947 ruling and reaffirmed
the right of public employees in Missouri to organize and bargain
collectively. The language of the Missouri Constitution Bill of
Rights, Article I Section 29, is plain: "... employees shall have the
right to organize and to bargain collectively through representatives
of their own choosing." Yet previous courts had maintained that
these rights did not apply to public employees.
The case was brought by the
National Education Association against the Independence School
District. Governor Blunt called the ruling, written by Missouri
Chief Justice Michael A. Wolff, "terrible" and "reckless."
But for the 390,000 public-sector employees in Missouri whose rights
have been reconfirmed, it could mean a whole new ballgame.
Thanks to Judy Ancel for details in
this report.
SB 389,
Missouri Omnibus Higher Education Bill: A Trojan Horse Within our Gates
by Patricia Brodsky
Much could be, and has been, said
about SB 389, the Omnibus Higher Education Bill, the so-called Mohela
Bill, passed by the Missouri Senate in April 2007 and by the House in
May. Two elements of this bill in particular deserve a closer
look as threats to the academic profession.
The first is the clause that
reads "A public college or university shall not reject an applicant for
a faculty position solely on the lack of a graduate degree if the
applicant has an undergraduate degree and has served at least eight
years in the General Assembly" (summary of Section 173.475).
A candidate for a faculty
position is normally expected to have at least a graduate if not a
terminal degree in an academic discipline. For a tenure track
position in most fields the candidate is expected to have completed a
lengthy course of specialized study and a dissertation, and will
usually have experience teaching in his/her speciality as well as in
the broader discipline. He/she is also expected to have a
commitment to expand human knowledge through original research.
The equation of eight years experience in the General Assembly with the
rigors of academic preparation demeans our professional status and
would shortchange our students.
There is something to be said for
practical experience and "street learning," and in a very few cases
faculty have been hired and even tenured at UMKC and elsewhere without
graduate or terminal degrees. But these are exceptional
individuals, who brought such valuable experience and expertise to
their positions that it was considered to make up for the lack of
formal training. While serving as an elected official undoubtedly
can provide an individual with insight into the political system, just
being elected doesn't guarantee systematic knowledge, understanding, or
wisdom, or the ability to teach effectively what one has experienced in
the legislature. In the case of many politicians today, serving
in elected office increasingly recommends itself as a likely disqualification for an
academic job.
The basic issue here is one of
professionalism. This law clearly undermines academic standards
and faculty responsibility for hiring. Institutions and faculty
would be deprived of their rights to determine criteria for admission
into the academic profession, and requirements for tenure would
logically be undermined. It is not a great leap to see this
legislation as another move in the campaign to do away with tenure
altogether.
Though one may assume a
legislator would be applying for a position in government or political
science, the law doesn't actually limit the jobs for which he/she must
be considered. This omission could lead to bizarre
scenarios. Envision, for example, a legislator who, after eight
years of pushing factory farm subsidies or arranging TIF's for
developers, conceives a yearning to teach brain surgery, or
musicology. According to the law, the mere lack of a graduate
degree can't stand in the way. True, there are other criteria,
and a hiring committee would probably be able to show that
Representative X is not qualified for the position. Nevertheless,
the prestige and power associated with elected office could
not-so-subtly intimidate hiring committees to look the other way.
The second disturbing element
mandated by SB 389 is the new website on which each campus is to
provide personal information about each instructor for each
course. Aside from unobjectionable data, such as where and when
the faculty member received his/her graduate degrees, the site is also
intended to include a set of student evaluations for each professor and
course. If these are student-generated comments, then it is
totally inappropriate for the university itself to post such
material. Students at many universities publish their own
comments on the faculty, and there is nothing to prevent our students
from setting up a blog, a chat room, or a printed publication making
these comments available. Likewise they are free to take their
opinions to professor.com.
UMKC Senate Chair Gary Ebersole
reports that the evaluations will be responses to questions drafted by
the individual campuses. But the result would still represent a
kind of rating and ranking of professors and courses, which again is
not appro-priate for the university. Never mind the time and
money this unfunded mandate will require to create and maintain a new
site and to gather and collate the information, every semester.
Thus SB 389 presents a slippery
slope both toward devaluing and deprofessionalizing the faculty, and
toward a further commercialization of education (students as
"consumers" rating faculty as "product"), in which the university would
be complicit. Faculty should protest these "mandates," work to
defuse their harmful effects in practice, and call for their reversal
in a new legislature.
The War on
Higher Education in Missouri
by David Brodsky
1.
The larger context of HB 213
HB 213 was only one component of
the war on higher education in Missouri, which included a number of
other assaults by the state government. SB 389 (see above), which
became law, contained three attacks on higher education. First,
it raided funds belonging to Mohela, the state student loan program, to
pay for UM campus bulding projects, thus weakening the viability of the
funds. Second, it undermined professionalism by circumventing
advanced degrees as hiring qualifications. And third, it attacked
faculty by sponsoring student evaluations on official university
websites.
A different, extremely harsh and
punitive bill targeting undocumented immigrant workers, which did not
become law, would, among other things, have barred them from attending
college in the state. Such legislation is meant to help clear the
path for the planned NAFTA transportation corridor. One of
Governor Blunt's new appointees to the Board of Curators, who also
represents UMKC, is Warren K. Erdman. Erdman is Vice President
for Corporate Affairs at Kansas City Southern Industries (KCSI, a
holding company comprised of four railroads in the US, Mexico and
Panama) and a mover and shaker in the NAFTA transportation corridor
project. Kansas City is slated to play a major role as a
transporatation hub for a hugely expanded guest worker program of
indentured servants from Mexico and Central America, a program which
one observer calls "transient servitude". On the Board of
Curators Erdman replaces Angela Bennett, an African-American graduate
of UMKC and dedicated proponent of that institution and of public
higher education. As Curator for the next six years, Erdman will
have ample opportunity to promote the corporatization of UMKC and the
UM system, perhaps as a servicing agent for the NAFTA transportation
corridor.
2.
The Emily Brooker Case revisited
Pat Brodsky's op ed (see Faculty Advocate, No. 21) gave
a brief summary of the case: "Emily Brooker was a student at Missouri
State University in Springfield who sued the institution. She
claimed to have been victimized by the faculty's alleged political bias
against her (she opposed gay adoption based on her religious
beliefs). The university settled within a week, disciplined the
instructor, investigated the Social Work Program, and awarded the
plaintiff a handsome sum."
The signal aspect of the Emily
Brooker lawsuit against Frank G. Kauffman and other members of the
Social Work faculty at Missouri State is that the public knows, at
best, only one side of the story, that of the plaintiff. Frank
Schmidt, president of the Faculty Council at UM Columbia, acknowledged
this fact in his testimony to the House Higher Education Committee on
February 27. He stated: "None of us know exactly what happened
because the case was settled and the records sealed. The were no
public findings of fact. We have allegations and press releases
but little else, nor are we likely to get more." The later report
of an MSU investigating commission that claims to have confirmed
previous allegations may likewise be one-sided.
As a consequence, the public has
not been allowed to hear a single word in their own defense from
Kauffman or from other faculty in the MSU Social Work program that was
harshly disciplined by the MSU administration. The
administration's actions violated the faculty's academic freedom,
usurped faculty governance rights--only the faculty have the right and
responsibility of investigating charges against a faculty member and,
if substantiated, of recommending disciplinary procedures--and
sabotaged due process, since by settling out of court and silencing the
accused, they have suppressed the facts of the case. Meanwhile,
the press across the political spectrum, as well as most academic
commentary, has agreed that Kauffman and the program committed terrible
deeds deserving the punishment they received. This rush to
judgment is based solely on allegations in the lawsuit with no rebuttal
by the defense.
As the lawsuit establishes,
Brooker attacked Kauffman not only for his alleged coercive pedagogy
(in fact, as the lawsuit admits, she was permitted to do a different
project). She also denounced her instructor because he "engaged
in leftist diatribes denigrating President Bush." Thus the most
likely reason Kauffman was targeted by Brooker and the right-wing legal
foundation that represented her was not his academic behavior--which,
like HB 213 itself, was a pretext--but the fact that he was an
outspoken progressive in conservative Springfield. He publicly
supported gay rights and universal healthcare and criticized President
Bush and his war policies. The Springfield
News-Leader wrote on January 31 that Kauffman is "a frequent
letter writer to the News-Leader
... [and] an unabashed liberal. Some will find that a convictable
offense."
The attack on Kauffman and the
Social Work Program occured in the context of a nationwide right-wing
campaign against gays and lesbians. The online journal Inside Higher Ed reported on Nov.
1, 2006 that "in a separate case, the Foundation for Individual Rights
in Education asked the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to
drop ties with the Council on Social Work Education unless the council
changes its evaluation standards that FIRE calls 'politically
loaded'." The Chronicle of
Higher Education reported on Nov. 9, 2006 that "several
conservative groups have attacked the Council on Social Work Education,
an accrediting body, for imposing standards on the field that
discriminate against students based on their political beliefs and that
violate their free-speech rights. The groups contend that the
requirements can amount to a loyalty test to left-wing principles
(sic)."
The professional discipline of Social Work is a self-evident target of
the right because it defends the victims of right-wing
aggression. Ultra-conservative ideology and the legislation and
polcies this ideology promotes deny that (among other groups) poor
people, people of color, immigrants, and people with other sexual
orientations have any rights whatsoever.
3.
Update on HB 213, the Emily Brooker Intellectual Diversity Act
Once the media and the MSU
administration "established the guilt" of the Social Work Program, the
right-wing campaign took advantage of this unsubstantiated judgment to
extend its assault to all of academe. If one member of the
faculty could be tarred and feathered as a model of "one of the the
most extraordinarily egregious cases I've ever seen," in the words of
Brian Foster, University of Missouri-Columbia provost, then all
academics could be regarded with suspicion as potential
criminals. Such logic repeats ad nauseam the police state
measures of the USA Patriot Act, executive orders, the infamous logon
message at UMKC in the Gilliland era, FBI "national security letters"
sent to libraries and bookstores, etc. Thus HB 213 based its
justification ultimately on a police state rationale, one which the
public, the legislature, administrators, and all too many academics
bought into unreservedly.
The last issue of Faculty Advocate went to press at
the start of April, before HB 213 was passed by the full House and the
Senate Education Committee. The bill was an overwhelmingly
partisan affair, sponsored and passed out of committees according to
party lines. The party distribution of the Missouri House is 92
Republicans and 71 Democrats. But the lopsided floor vote, 97-50
in favor, was the result of 12 Democrats voting for the bill and
another 10 who were absent and did not vote (one Republican voted
against HB 213 and 6 others were absent).
A remarkable amendment added to
the House version, which was passed by the entire body, called for
protecting the viewpoint that "the Bible is inerrant." The
Biblical inerrancy clause generated the most publicity, although it was
the least of the bill's problems. Nevertheless, had it passed, it
would have enshrined religious fundamentalism as the authority
controlling all public institutions of higher education. Quoted
in Inside Higher Ed, Cary
Nelson, President of the national AAUP, called the bill "one of the
worst pieces of higher education legislation in a century" and noted
that, if it were to become law, "Missouri would no longer have any
system of secular public higher education."
The bill prepared by the Senate
Education Committee was a sanitized version presenting an innocuous and
friendly face for smooth marketing. Besides eliminating Biblical
inerrancy, it carefully suppressed all mention of the legislation's
true intent, to impose, in the House version's language, "political,
ideological, and religious" criteria on all areas of campus life.
Nevertheless, it retained the crucial bias favoring student "opinion"
over faculty professional judgment and academic standards: "No students
shall be penalized for the expression of an opinion when such opinion
relates to the subject matter being taught or issues being
discussed." It substituted the word "opinion" for the term
"belief" in HB 213, and "student academic freedom" for "intellectual
diversity," "pluralism," or "viewpoint discrimination."
The "student academic freedom"
strategy brought it closer to David Horowitz's "Academic Bill of
Rights" (ABOR) and his organization, "Students for Academic
Freedom." The Senate version still required faculty to inform
students of grievance procedures when they objected to challenges to
their received opinions, or to being evaluated according to
professional norms. Finally, it specified institutional reporting
requirements that tabulate the number of student "academic freedom"
grievances filed at each campus. Quantity of grievances appeared
to be the main criterion for the Missouri legislature to reward or
punish university budgets.
Despite cosmetic changes, the
Senate version continued to authorize government intrusion in academic
affairs, violation of delegated institutional autonomy, and contempt
for academic standards and the professional foundation of higher
education.
The AAUP Committee on Academic
Freedom has written about the "Academic Bill of Rights" and its
variants: "proper pedagogical authority is to be determined by
reference to scholarly and professional standards, as interpreted and
applied by the faculty itself." The professional judgment of
faculty "separate[s] serious work from mere opinion.... The
student has no 'right' to be rewarded for an opinion ... that is
independent of these scholarly standards. If students possessed
such rights, all knowledge would be reduced to opinion, and education
would be rendered superfluous" [emphasis DB].
In the AAUP's "Joint Statement on
Rights and Freedoms of Students," the section "Protection Against
Improper Academic Evaluation" reads: "Students should have
protection through orderly procedures against prejudiced or capricious
academic evaluation [emphasis DB]. At the same time, they
are responsible for maintaining standards of academic performance
established for each course in which they are enrolled."
In other words, students have
every right to make reasoned arguments against what they find
objectionable. They are free to say what they want, but their
opinions are not exempt from challenges raised by faculty or other
students. If students dislike the content of an academic
discipline, the teacher's opinions, or the course materials, they are
still responsible for doing the work, and their performance in the
course will determine their grade. But they cannot refuse to make
a serious effort to engage the subject matter, or flout the ethical
standards of a profession, or require that their opinion meets with
general approval, and then politically denounce the instructor by
making false claims of "viewpoint discrimination."
The Senate version was never
scheduled for a floor vote, due in part to increasing opposition.
One likely factor in its defeat was an intensified campaign mounted by
the AAUP chapter and distributed by the Education for Democracy
Network. Following an initial appeal mailed in March requesting
messages to the legislature, the campaign sent out four additional
appeals in the next five weeks. Messages came from Missouri and
nationwide, and from as far afield as the European Union.
Other likely factors were letters
to the editor, op eds, and testimony at legislative hearings, including
a number of AAUP interventions. Besides Pat Brodsky's
publications in March and early April (St.
Charles County Business Record, Kansas City Star, UMKC University News), AAUP State
Conference Vice President David Robinson of Truman State University
gave testimony to the Senate Education Committee, AAUP State Conference
President Keith Hardeman published op eds in the Springfield News-Leader and St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and
national AAUP President Cary Nelson and Executive Director Ernest
Benjamin posted a public statement on the AAUP website, which
simultaneously was sent as a letter to the Missouri Senate Education
Committee. A report on the bill in Inside Higher Ed (April 16) helped
bring the crisis to national attention.
This issue of Faculty Advocate reprints
Robinson's testimony, Nelson and Benjamin's statement, and Hardeman's
summary of the campaign in the Fall issue of Missouri Academe. It also
reprints a letter to the legislature by two Kansas City retired social
science professors, which places the issues in sharp focus.
For thorough background on ABOR,
consult Faculty Advocate No. 19 online,
which contains a cluster of three articles on the subject.
Curators,
Upper Admin Impose Grievance Policy Undermining Academic Freedom
by Patricia Brodsky
1.
"Intellectual Diversity" and the Curators' Plan
When, after passing in the
Missouri House, HB 213, the "Emily Brooker Intellectual Diversity Act,"
failed to make it to the Senate floor during the 2007 session,
opponents in the legislature and the higher education community thought
they had received a reprieve. They naturally assumed that the
mean-spirited bill, a direct outgrowth of David Horowitz's national
campaign against academic freedom, would reappear in some form in the
next session, and began working out new strategies to oppose it.
But by October it became evident that forces promoting the bill had
decided to take the non-law into their own hands.
This turn of events did not come
as a complete surprise. A newspaper report in the Columbia Tribune (April 6) explains
the untoward silence of the University of Missouri, which issued no
public statements and did not testify at the House Higher Education
Committee hearing on HB 213 in February. The article reports that
some high-placed administrators--Stephen Lehmkuhle, then Senior Vice
President for Academic Affairs in the UM system, and Brian Foster,
University of Missouri Columbia provost--essentially came out in favor
of the bill in early April. Curator David Wasinger, who a year
ago led the attack on the UM system retirement plan and retiree health
benefits, was a predictable proponent of HB 213, and he repeated the
false allegations of David Horowitz that right-wing students and
faculty are fearful of expressing their opinions.
As reported in the Tribune, UM Columbia provost Foster
said, "'I think the Brooker case is one of the most extraordinarily
egregious cases I've ever seen of this sort." Lehmkuhle stated
that "this issue is less about the views of faculty members; it's more
about how to accommodate and respect the views and perspectives of
students that may conflict with the tenets of a discipline and its
normal methodologies'." In other words, student "opinion" trumps
professional standards. Perhaps deprofessionalized faculty needed
to be instructed in the techniques of deference to right-wing opinion,
and lessons might start with bowing and scraping exercises.
Lehmkuhle has since left the University of Missouri to take a job in
Minnesota.
A draft document suddenly
surfaced on UM campuses, apparently issuing from a meeting between the
Curators, Provosts, and administrators from Student Affairs. It
contained four virtually identical sections, one for each campus,
driven by a supposed need for a new grievance mechanism for students to
register ideological complaints agains faculty. Soon after,
another draft document, unsigned and undated, headed "Intellectual
Pluralism. Progress Report. University of Missouri-Kansas City" arrived
on the scene. It contained a series of mandates, such as "[e]ach
campus will establish a readily accessible website for students to
register concerns or complaints about an instructor," and "[e]ach
campus will designate an individual to receive student complaints about
an instructor." The designated ombudsman is to keep records of
all complaints, and write a report at the end of each year.
(Significantly, the document omitted to say who was to receive this
report and whether it would be kept confidential.)
Following each of the mandates
was a description of UMKC's efforts to conform to them. UMKC was
said to be in the process of creating an online form for this purpose,
and to have "appointed Robin Hamilton, Executive Staff Assistant within
the Office of the VC for Student Affairs" as acting ombudsman, "until
they hire a new person as campus ombudsman." To facilitate this
system, various "teaching support programs" were mandated. UMKC
promised to emphasize "diversity" via workshops for GTA's, discussions
in FaCET, and New Faculty Orientation materials.
2.
Faculty Objections
Opponents of HB 213 made it clear
from the beginning that college faculty strongly support academic
freedom, freedom of speech, and respect for varying points of view,
both for students and professors. However, the spectre of
students suffering at the hands of biased instructors, which drove
propaganda for HB 213, was pure invention. The real threat
was the legislation itself, the purposeful distortion of the terms
"diversity" and "pluralism" by the right wing, and its agenda to create
a climate of intimidation of faculty and to encourage self-censorship
of mainstream, non-reactionary points of view.
The Curators' policy and its
implementation by upper administrations on all four campuses
accomplishes essentially the same things, and criticisms of the
legislation apply equally to the new policy. It undermines the
professional basis of higher education, on which academic freedom
rests, by replacing professional with ideological criteria. It
violates delegated institutional autonomy and due process. It
supersedes peer review--faculty responsibility for investigating and
disciplining faculty improprieties. And it harms academic
standards, and thus the reputation and income (loss of tuition revenue
and large grants in the sciences) of higher education institutions in
Missouri.
The overt intent of Horowitz's
"Academic Bill of Rights" and its spinoffs like HB 213 is to advance
right-wing ideology while suppressing non-right-wing viewpoints.
But clear, long-standing university policies already deal effectively
with student grievances. Thus the self-evident purpose of the the
Curators' mandating a new and separate track for student "viewpoint
discrimination" ("diversity," "pluralism") complaints is to promote and
encourage political and ideological denunciations of mainstream faculty
by right-wing students (Wasinger's ideological rationale is
explicit). That such a regime will chill the teaching and
practice of critical thinking and silence challenges to the received
opinions of such students is likewise self-evident. Other
self-evident consequences are institutionally based ideological
surveillance, political policing, and harassment of targeted
faculty. The worst aspect of the curators' policy is that it
establishes a precedent in the UM system for these illegitimate and
reprehensible principles.
Not surprisingly, this
ideological denunciation system was invented and implemented in order
to bypass and discredit faculty procedures and to nullify faculty
responsibility for the curriculum, for student evaluation, and for
disciplining faculty who violate academic standards. First of
all, the denunciation regime was planned entirely without faculty
participation, business as usual in the UM system. Instead of defending
the faculty and reaffirming the University's commitment to academic
freedom, the administrations jumped on the Curators' bandwagon.
Second, besides long-standing student grievance policies handled by the
administration, with very specific instructions for registering a
formal complaint, academic units have procedures for addressing student
complaints before they get to the formal grievance stage. The new
imposed system intentionally circumvents faculty procdures, and student
complaints, rather than being adjudicated at the level of the
department, go directly to an administrator and become part of the
permanent record (see the "year-end report," above). The
political denunciation system escalates problems that can usually be
solved by a face to face discussion, aided by the chair or a faculty
committee. Instead, students are encouraged to complain about their
instructors, thereby setting faculty and students against one another
in an adversarial relationship, and splitting the campus along
ideological lines, the usual divide and rule tactic. These are
calculated outcomes of Horowitz's strategy.
3.
The UMKC Website: HB 213 as a Guide for Students
What does the UMKC complaint
website look like? One can access the relevant page either by
typing in http://www.umkc.edu/helpline/
or by going to the UMKC home page, clicking on "Student Life," then (at
the upper right) clicking on "get help" and finally on
"helpline." What comes up is the "Helpline" page. Here we
find a statement of UMKC's unobjectionable position on intellectual
diversity and discrimination. The student is told to go to
helpline@umkc.edu if he feels he has been treated unfairly on the bases
of his personal beliefs or affiliations. (NB this is merely an
email address; there are no instructions for filing a complaint.)
Under "Additional Resources," the site provides a link to the Board of
Curators' response to "intellectual pluralism." This document
quotes the Collected Rules and
Regulations, which in turn are based on the 1940 AAUP statement
on academic freedom. But the last paragraph, which cites the
vacuous notion of "intellectual pluralism," thereby intentionally
misreads the AAUP statement (as does Horowitz's "Academic Bill of
Rights"). The website also has links to procedures for the
already existing student grievance process, and a brief overview about
making a formal complaint.
However, the shocking fourth link
on the UMKC website is to the "Full text of House Bill 213, 'Emily
Brooker Intellectual Diversity Act'." It should be noted that on
the student grievance websites of the other three UM campuses, links to
HB 213 do not (as yet) show up. By placing HB 213 on this
particular website, its authors are not merely providing background
information for students. They are investing HB 213 with
authority and legitimacy. In this way, the UMKC administration is
promoting and thereby lobbying for the passage of a failed law.
Such solidarity with the far right recalls the Gilliland era.
There is
absolutely no justification for an official University web page to
refer to a failed piece of legislation as a legal or intellectual
authority. Faculty need to ask who was responsible for
this website. Who at UMKC proposed and who approved the inclusion
of this document, notoriously hostile to the faculty and to academic
freedom, as a guide for student complaints? The
top-down imposition of an administrative "solution" to a non-problem
and the circumvention of existing procedures undermine faculty
governance. By investing HB 213 with political and intellectual
authority, the drafters of this webpage demonstrate their hostility to
the faculty and abet students' adversarial relationship with their
instructors.
4.
Reactions on Other UM Campuses
Other UM campus administrations
have acquiesced to pressure from the Curators. At UMSL a website
is up, but the links are not finished, and as yet no one has taken on
the role of ombudsman. UMC's Office of Student Rights and
Responsibilities includes a quote from the American Council on
Education's Statement on Academic Rights and Responsibilities as a
basis for UMC's policy. "Submit Concerns/Complaints" leads to the
message that this site is under construction. UM Rolla's
statement on Student Discrimination Grievance or Informal Concern/
Complaint was difficult to find; it doesn't seem to be foregrounded,
and one has to google "grievance" to get there. Of note is the
fact that the site assures the student that "information will be kept
confidential and will be shared with only those involved with the
incident and the Student Discrimination & Grievance
procedure." Nowhere does the site specifically refer to
complaints about instructors.
In addition to new websites,
official responses have included a forum on "intellectual diversity"
held at UMSL on October 11. Sponsored by the UMSL Chancellor's
Diversity Initiative and the Center for Teaching and Learning, the
meeting was structured as a panel discussion, but was dominated by
conservative voices. The message of the meeting seemed to be "if
we don't want the legislature to police us, we must police
ourselves"--a variant of "it's a done deal, so let's make the best of
it." One student complained that his poli sci courses had not
provided him with enough contacts to Republican party
organizations. Most disturbingly, Representative Jane Cunningham,
sponsor of HB 213, was invited to the forum without the faculty's
knowledge, and was given ten uninterrupted minutes to present her
distinctly biased view of the Emily Brooker case (see "The War on
Higher Education"). Inviting a politician to make a partisan
presentation at the UMSL faculty meeting demonstrates the same kind of
administrative political bias as the UMKC website legitimation of HB
213.
Like all people, faculty hold
opinions, some of them strong. But because faculty opinion is
based on long study that results in knowledge of a discipline, they
have not only the right but the duty to express their opinions
forthrightly and without apology. A new AAUP report, "Freedom in
the Classroom," which references HB 213 at the start, makes that point
explicit. If a student is permitted and encouraged to denounce
the instructor with whom he disagrees, then education and the
professionalism on which it rests is a dead letter.
Faculty at both UMC and UMSL have
expressed opposition to the Curators' policy and to their
administrations' response. A dormant AAUP chapter in Columbia is
stirring back to life, as faculty seek channels to resist.
5.
Where do we go From Here?
An editorial in the Kansas City Star on Sunday October
21 defended the faculty and higher education, making some of the same
points as AAUP critiques had done earlier. Besides blasting the
legislature for "stingy budget appropriations," and certain curators
for berating academic freedom, which the editorial calls "the most
basic tenet of higher education," it warned of potential damage to the
reputation of Missouri's public universities. The last session of
the legislature, it stated, "was particularly embarrassing," due to the
"hostility toward higher education" shown by the Missouri General
Assembly and three ultra-conservative Curators, David Wasinger, Doug
Russell, and John Carnahan. Its conclusion echoes the appeals
made by the AAUP chapter: "Too many Republican lawmakers--and even the
curators mentioned above--have allowed misguided political and
religious agendas to harm Missouri's universities. People who
care about the future of the state and its colleges--including
thousands of alumni across Missouri--need to speak up and demand a
change in course."
The Star's advice to "speak up and
demand a change in course" applies above all to faculty, particularly
those in the UM system, who are about to be subjected to the same
regime that HB 213 recommended. The accommodation of faculty
organizations to this assault has been rather pronounced. The
response on three campuses has been resignation ("done deal") and
complacency ("it isn't so bad, we can work around it"). Both
responses are fallacies. Faculty input into planning the
denunciation regime has been nil, and so far there has been little
evidence of faculty intervention after the regime was imposed. As
for "done deals," it is useful to remember that it took less than a
week to remove the infamous logon message criminalizing all computer
users, which the Gilliland administration tried to impose several years
ago.
Faculty activism burnout is
understandable but not justifiable. Neither is the lesser of two
evils rationale offered by everyone, from the above-named curators
(who, because they supported the legislation, pressured UM campuses to
adopt this regime while posing as protectors of the university), to the
Interim President of the system, to the central administration, to
campus administrations, and to UM faculty themselves. This
rationale alleges that university "self-policing" will reduce the
pressure for legislation.
We should remember that highly
placed UM administrators called for this political denunciation system
at the April Curators meeting even before the House voted on the bill,
thus, in effect lobbying for its passage. Now that the
denunciation regime has been imposed from above, the same forces that
wrote and promoted the legislation are preparing to take advantage of
the fait accompli in the UM system to extend HB 213 type legislation to
all public institutions in the state. Once the large public
institutions are subjected to the regime, many smaller private ones are
sure to follow.
Never mind that "self-policing"
is the ideal scenario envi-sioned by Horowitz himself.
"Voluntary" compliance preserves the shell of academic freedom while
eviscerating its substance. Self-policing is, of course,
self-censorship, which signals the end of de facto academic freedom and
the demoralization of both faculty and students. Self-policing,
and perhaps also grade inflation, would be foregone conclusions for
vulnerable contingent faculty, who constitute three-fourths of the
total faculty at University of Missouri campuses, and well over half at
most other public institutions in the state.
But self-policing, it turns out,
may not accomplish what it alleges. Besides acting as a
convenient method of anesthetizing faculty opposition, the notion that
voluntary self-censorship will somehow prevent censorship imposed "from
outside" is a delusion. According to an attendee at the UMSL
campus-wide forum on "intellectual diversity", the sponsor of HB 213,
Representative Jane Cunningham--when asked by a knowledgeable faculty
member whether "self-policing" by the UM campuses would reduce the
pressure for legislation--said she was definitely planning to
introduce the bill again in the upcoming session in 2008.
So, instead of preempting
repressive legislation, self-censorship actually aids and abets
it. Rather than the lesser of two evils, faculty will be hit by
the same evil, but doubled in its impact. Faculty accommodation
today will smooth the way for both evils tomorrow. Rather than
protect the university from malign legislation, the curators and upper
administrators in central and on the UM campuses are doing all they can
to insure the passage of a failed bill by persuading the faculty to do
nothing.
Because Republicans have a
comfortable majority in both houses (92-71 in the House, 20-14 in the
Senate) and votes have closely followed party lines, defeating it in
committee or filibustering are viable options in the Assembly, although
filibusters can and have been overridden. Thus the best and
probably only method of defeating the bill in 2008 is a massive
outpouring of public opposition. Pressure from faculty to
immediately remove the political denunciation regime (website plus
ombudsman) from all four UM campuses would effectively end the argument
of a precedent (done deal) justifying the legislation.
We should not forget that faculty
and academic disciplines are being held hostage to an aggressive and
vocal minority intent on marginalizing mainstream opinion, which on
this issue includes the editorial page of the conservative Star. The mainstream
outnumbers the vocal minority, and, if it wishes, can make its voice
authoritative. Another compelling reason to overturn the
denuniciation regime is the fact that the tenured and tenure-line
faculty, who comprise only one-quarter of the teachers in the UM
system, are the custodians of academic freedom for the 75% of
instructors who are contingent and lack all protections.
Faculty should write their
academic senators, demanding a public forum on the "viewpoint
discrimination" agenda and the Curators' and administration role in its
imposition. An appropriate venue for such a forum would be the
special open meeting which the Senate is required to offer once a
semester.
There should be a single
grievance process (excluding ideological denunciations), and it should
be structured, developed and maintained by faculty. It should
contain only a brief statement reiterating faculty support of academic
freedom and respect for all members of the university community, and
clear instructions for accessing existing procedures, starting at the
department level. There is no need for an ombudsman to receive
complaints. That position simply represents an extra layer of
bureaucracy and undermines faculty governance.
If the Curators and
administrations are incapable of accepting this reasoned response (no
ombudsman, faculty responsibility for grievances), another response is
possible. Curators are appointed to serve the good of the
University, which includes the protection of the faculty's academic
freedom. Academic freedom is specifically included in the UM Collected Rules and Regulations.
If the Curators cannot or will not support academic freedom and faculty
governance responsibilities, then the faculty might consider a vote of
no confidence. As for the Assembly, there is an election next
year.
For those who insist that
resistance is futile and accommodation is astute, I can only say:
remember Martha. And remember what the united faculty
accomplished.
Letter to the
Missouri Assembly
by Charles Reitz and Roena Haynie
We are two retired social science
professors writing to ask you to oppose the "The Emily Brooker
Intellectual Diversity Act," HB 213, and hope you will consider what we
believe are compelling reasons to stop it.
This so-called diversity proposal
really has no cosmopolitan or multicultural vision. It is not
committed to defending the rights of minorities, to the protection of
dissent, or to reclaiming our common humanity. It is a calculated and
vicious misrepresentation to call it a diversity proposal.
Instead it attempts to oppose those who advocate multicultural
education reform and intercultural peace and understanding. The
proposal actually constricts debate and critical thinking through a
reassertion of a variety of conservative ideologies. We see this
"diversity" proposal as akin to the "diversity" that the religious
right would like to see introduced into the nation's biology texts, to
include creationism and intelligent design ideologies and displace
scientific rigor in the natural sciences. Now they want to stress
nationalism, militarism, and a narrow-minded jingoism, to censure and
intimidate the critics of war, racism, and sexism in the social
sciences today. This is an utterly bogus plan to "expand"
academic freedom. On the contrary, it creates pressure for
self-censorship.
If the legislature wishes to
bring genuine diversity to education, especially higher education, it
should first acknowledge that until rather recently the
Humanities--studies thought of as having universally human aims and
goals--were actually disfigured by the politics of privilege: white
privilege, male privilege, and wealth privilege. For decades
prior to the 1960s education built silences into the curriculum
suppressing the histories of women, blacks, Hispanics, Native
Americans, Asian Americans, and the labor movement. This
mono-cultural WASP or Anglo-conformist curriculum has been successfully
challenged by the multicultural education reform movement over the past
few decades. The civil rights movement, the women's movement, and
the student anti-war movement each contributed to a reconsideration of
conventional thinking about historical conditions in the US. But
now this key intellectual progress and the expanded democratic freedoms
represented by genuine multicultural efforts in schools and society are
being pushed back by a backlash including the calculatedly deceptive
"diversity" proposal now before the House. Let the legislature
support curriculum reform efforts that reclaim our common humanity by
celebrating the global dream of peace, equality, and empowerment for
all. There is a library of scholarly resources available on the
work still needed in intercultural education: James Banks, Christine
Sleeter, and Carl Grant offer the academic research that should stand
at the foundation of any of the legislature's future efforts.
Thank you and best wishes,
Charles Reitz, Ph.D., Kansas City MO
Professor of Social Science and Director of Multicultural Education
(Retired), Kansas City Kansas Community College
Roena L. Haynie, Ph.D, Kansas City, MO
Chair of Social Science (Retired), Avila University, Kansas City, MO
Testimony
to Missouri Senate Education Committee, 25 April 2007
by David Robinson
Testimony of David K. Robinson,
Professor of History, Truman State University, Vice-President of
Missouri Conference of the American Association of University
Professors (AAUP)
Mr. Chairman and honored senators:
Faculty at institutions of higher
education in our state are overwhelmingly opposed to HB213.
Similar bills have been introduced and defeated in twenty-eight other
states over the past four years. We urge you to do the same, for
the following reasons:
1. HB 213 would have the opposite
effect of its stated intentions: it would curtail academic freedom and
free expression by imposing restrictions on what can or cannot be
taught. Academic freedom means that faculty members, who are
trained to evaluate information through critical inquiry, interact with
students who need to learn to do the same. Legislating someone's
idea of "balance" in the classroom will require that opinions or
beliefs be given equal weight with facts and scientific theory,
implying that all imaginable theories and laws have equal legitimacy,
regardless of expert consensus within a discipline. The best way to
assure the kind of intellectual diversity that we really need in
colleges and universities is to promote academic freedom, to keep a
free market of ideas alive and flourishing. This legislation would
restrict that market by stifling debate and inquiry.
2. Grievance mechanisms are
already in place in all Missouri colleges and universities. These
procedures work well, and this legislation would harm rather than
improve the grievance systems. Even the unfortunate Brooker case
was satisfactorily resolved, once her administration was
informed. Such cases are extremely rare, and we must not destroy
the whole system in a vain attempt to save it from that rare problem.
3. HB 213 would open the learning
process to partisan battles that really have no place in most
classrooms. Rather than protecting students from unnecessary
politicization, such oversight could well insert politics into every
classroom.
4. Under HB 213, colleges and
universities would incur significant costs, both in money and
time. If this becomes an unfunded mandate, faculty will have less
time for their important duties of class preparation, grading,
tutoring, research, recruiting, etc.
5. Nationally the main proponents
of such proposals as HB 213 are the American Council of Trustees and
Alumni (ACTA) and David Horowitz, who claim to be defending students
from "indoctrination," but present precious little evidence that
students are not free to follow their interests. Other states
that have examined such proposals have all rejected them. In my
opinion, they did so because they feared the unnecessary politicization
that the so-called "Intellectual Diversity Laws" would bring to their
universities. I am quite sure that Horowitz and his followers
will never be satisfied until they eliminate the views that they
disagree with. They are in the business of destroying academic
freedom, not protecting it. Please do not help them with their
destruction. Please reject HB213.
Text reproduced from Truman State
University AAUP chapter website
AAUP
Condemns Missouri Bill
by Cary Nelson and Ernest Benjamin
AAUP President Cary Nelson and
Executive Director Ernest Benjamin have
released the following statement regarding Missouri BIll H213.
The Missouri House of
Representatives has passed a bill (HB 213) which
ostensibly "ensure[s] intellectual diversity and the free exchange of
ideas." The bill, sponsored by legislators and others who are
concerned about what they see as the politicalization of the classroom,
directs public colleges and universities to report annually to the
state legislature steps they have taken to achieve these goals.
Possible steps enumerated in the legislation include grievance policies
that allow for complaints to be filed "directly with the governing
board"; a "balanced variety" of campus speakers; methods to achieve
educational objectives that do not require a student "to act against
his or her conscience"; and periodic meetings with students to
determine if they believe "they are receiving a sound and respectful
education." Moreover, the bill states that intellectual diversity
in
teaching must protect "the viewpoint that the Bible is inerrant."
If this bill becomes law, it will
do incalculable damage to the
independence of Missouri's state colleges and universities and to
academic freedom. A fundamental principle of academic freedom is
that
decisions concerning the content of academic programs and academic
policies are to be made by academic professionals. Some
departments,
for example, may endorse many schools of thought; others may wish to
emphasize a particular disciplinary approach. One institution may
conclude that a diverse array of outside speakers makes good academic
sense; another may favor a limited range of speakers. And while
some
individuals may believe that the Bible is inerrant, it is for
professors to decide on the basis of their expertise and training and
in accordance with standards of the academic profession whether and how
that belief may find its way into classroom teaching; it is not for the
Missouri legislature to dictate the content of what can be
taught. The
former is an exercise of academic freedom, the latter an abridgment of
it.
The bill threatens to impose
legislative oversight on the professional
judgment of faculty and to deprive academic institutions of their
authority from making decisions that are central to their academic
purpose. It would substitute a political body for academic ones,
replace academic decisions with political judgments, and therefore open
colleges and universities to greater politicalization, not less.
The
bill's proponents have not put forward any compelling reasons for
adopting a measure that is so at odds with the principles of academic
freedom. Indeed, the bill itself would limit and constrain
intellectual diversity and the free exchange of ideas. The bill's
infirmities run too deep to be cured with textual refinements. It
should be discarded entirely.
Text reproduced from national AAUP website
Brooker
Intellectual Diversity Bill Dead--For Now (excerpts)
by Keith Hardeman
The Emily Brooker Intellectual
Diversity Bill ..., sponsored by Rep. Jane Cunningham (R-Chesterfield),
died last May on the Senate Informal Calendar. Had this
legislation passed, political standards would have been imposed in the
classrooms of Missouri's public colleges and universities.
A clone of David Horowitz's
equally misnamed Academic Bill of Rights, the Brooker bill would have
put unsubstantiated (or, in some cases, factually discredited) opinions
and perspectives on a level playing field with mainstream disciplinary
information, evidence, and logic.
Science departments could have
been mandated to give equal time to creationism (and its factually
inaccurate assertion that the earth is only 6000 years old) as a
plausible scientific alternative to evolution, cosmology, and
thermonuclear dynamics. The content of environment courses would
need to include the notion that global warming has no relation to human
activity, which, again, goes against the vast consensus of the world's
credible science community.
History professors might have had
to entertain the idea that the Holocaust never took place. In
many cases, we would have been in the position of having to evaluate
students based as much on their own religious and political points of
view as on substantive course material. Therefore, the bill that
Rep. Cunningham claims would remove politics from the classroom would,
in reality, guarantee the opposite effect. The above scenarios
could still happen.
The fight to maintain academic
standards in Missouri is likely not over. Since the Brooker Bill
passed the Missouri House by a 97-50 margin, do not be surprised if
Representative Cunningham or others follow up with more nefarious
attempts to polticize a college education and reduce academic freedom.
..........
... unaware faculty members ...
at first glance may see nothing wrong with a government-regulated
decrease of academic freedom ...
Perhaps they erronesouly believe
their own course material could not be influenced. We must be
vigilant not only in the public and political arenas, but also in our
own back yards. I hope we are able to reach this minority of
professors and enlighten them: When the government limits academic
freedom by imposing points of
view on experts in institutions beholden to the search for truth, everyone is adversely affected,
regardless of one's own personal politics.
..........
The Brooker bill was never about
improving education. It was about partisan politics at their
worst. Obtaining the third highest academic degree in the world
should mean something beyond receiving a glorified endorsement of one's
own political or religious ideologies. In other words, the point
of a college education is for students to step outside the box and
learn different perspectives,
ideas, and ways of thinking. Dumbing down and politicizing
curriculum simply because some do not like the facts within a
discipline will only serve to dumb down society as a whole. And
no one wins when that happens.
Let us continue to work in the
best interests of our students so that Missouri does not have the
dubious distinction of becoming the first and only state to adopt such
perilous legislation.
[Missouri Academe] Editor's
Note: Representative Jane Cunningham was contacted and invited to
provide text in favor of her bill for publication in this issue.
She did not respond.
Faculty Advocate note: This article
originally appeared in Missouri Academe (Sept. 2007), the newsletter of the
Missouri Conference of AAUP. Keith Hardeman, Professor and Chair
of Communication and Fine Arts at Westminster College, is President of
the Conference.
The lively and well-attended
first meeting of the semester was held on September 14th at Kelly
Pinkham's. Attendees enjoyed the refreshments and pleasant
surroundings and caught up on each other's summer activities. The
meeting proper began with Roger Pick's treasurer's report and dealt
with a number of campus issues. These included possible targets
for cuts under the mandated "1% rule;" the upcoming election for IFC
representative; and faculty governance problems in one campus
unit.
One attendee gave the group a
heads-up about post-tenure review. The system, which was mandated
some five years ago, is now going into effect. Central
Administration is apparently circumventing the review procedures the
schools had decided on. For example, the first persons to come up
for review should have been those who had not undergone recent special
reviews. Yet some faculty members who have just completed special
review processes, such as for promotion or tenure, have already
received notices from the Central Administration that they are due for
post tenure review.
The national AAUP as well as the
UMKC Chapter have spoken out vigorously against the system of post
tenure review, as it is clearly a plan to undermine the tenure
system. Tenure is by definition a definitive review: a faculty
member is judged by his peers to deserve permanent appointment, which
can be removed only in very specific, narrowly defined circumstances.
Post tenure review could be
transformed from a punitive system to one that supports faculty, for
example, via reduced teaching loads or release time for research or
retraining. But for this to happen, the faculty would have to
seize the process and make it their own.
Other discussion focused on the
chapter's plans for 2007-2008. One major project is a recruitment
campaign. Numbers are important for a member-driven organization
like the AAUP, and our operating budget is based entirely on dues and
the occasional, very welcome, gift. In addition, it's always been
our goal to attract people with energy, ideas and commitment.
Members of the Executive Committee plan to visit faculty who aren't yet
members, solicit their issues and ideas, and invite them to join
AAUP. Membership Chair Scott Baker made a brief report on how the
recruitment campaign is shaping up. As always, all chapter
members are urged to approach their colleagues about joining. It
needn't take much time, and talking about something you believe in is a
pleasure.
In early 2008 we will once again
sponsor a Tenure Workshop for non-tenured faculty. Our previous
workshops have consisted of a panel of faculty and
administrators--typically a department chair, a dean, a member of the
Campus P & T Committee, a recently tenured faculty member, and
someone currently undergoing tenure review. Brief presentations
and a question and answer session have proved very useful by providing
honest, practical advice to faculty on the tenure track.
Proposals were discussed for two
AAUP-sponsored forums, one of which has already been scheduled for
October 26. Judy Ancel, Director of the Institute for Labor
Studies, which is still under threat of arbitrary closure, will speak
on the history and goals of labor education. She will be joined
by Judy Morgan, President of the Kansas City Federation of Teachers,
and Jesse Heckman, UMKC Labor Certificate graduate (see above).
The second proposed meeting was a
legislative forum focussing on "intellectual diversity." HB 213,
the "Emily Brooker Intellectual Diversity Act," was passed by the
Missouri House in the spring, but never made it to the floor of the
Senate (see Faculty Advocate, No. 21 for a critique of the bill and the
national agenda behind it; also see related articles in this
issue). At the time of our September meeting it seemed likely
that a related bill would reappear in the next legislative session (and
that likelihood became a certainty when confirmed a month later by the
bill's sponsor). Chapter members agreed that it was important to
educate people on the issues, and on the deceptive use of language
which strives to make a destructive idea sound harmless or even
desirable.
Now, however, such a forum would
have to expand to deal with the new "intellectual diversity" mandate
called for by the Curators and imposed by the upper administrations of
each UM campus. It consists of a dedicated website to
specifically address student ideological grievances and campus
ombudsmen to process them (see above "Curators, Upper Admin Impose
Grievance Policy Undermining Academic Freedom").
One of our most important
activities, which, of necessity, receives little publicity, is aiding
AAUP members at UMKC and in other institutions with grievances.
Besides helping our own colleagues prepare their cases and resolve
conflicts, over the past year chapter members have offered counseling
on governance and academic freedom issues to faculty at other
universities in the Metro area and around the state. They have
also served as outside observers on grievance panels. In
addition, the chapter has supported faculty at several institutions in
their chapter organizing efforts. We shouldn't forget that our
chapter can be of great service to our colleagues by sharing our
experience and expertise.
In other news, Pat Brodsky,
Alfred Esser, Ed Hood and Ana Iriarte were among the new emeriti
professors honored at Celebrate UMKC,
the fall convocation in September.
JOIN AAUP!
DEFEND ACADEMIC FREEDOM!
They're at it again. Forces hostile to academic freedom and
quality education are trying to shape the university in their own
distorted image. Join AAUP and serve the best interests of your
students, your institution, and your community.
The entire contents of each issue of The Faculty Advocate (except for
public domain material) is copyrighted. The Faculty Advocate, October 2007,
Copyright 2007 by the UMKC Chapter of the American Association of
University Professors. All rights returned to authors upon
publication. AAUP chapters, state conferences, and the national
organization have permission to reproduce and distribute.
Permission for other non-profit publishers is a formality, but UMKC
AAUP asks them for the courtesy of requesting it. Contact the
Editor, Patricia Brodsky: 913-649-2536, e-mail: brodskyp@umkc.edu
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The Faculty
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Advocate, Vol. 4, Nos. 3-4 (April 2004)
The Faculty
Advocate, Vol. 5, No.1 (August 2004)
The Faculty Advocate,
Vol. 5, No. 2 (October 2004)
The Faculty Advocate,
Vol. 5, No. 3 (February 2005)
The Faculty Advocate,
Vol. 5, No. 4 (May 2005)
The Faculty Advocate,
Vol. 6, Nos. 1-2 (November 2005)
The Faculty Advocate,
Vol. 7, No. 1 (October 2006)
The Faculty Advocate,
Vol. 7, Nos. 2-3 (April 2007)
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