A Look at Anne D. Neal and ACTA

I was on the News Gazette site this evening when I saw an article on a new fund that wants to come to the University:

With a slate of conservative advisers backing it, the Academy on Capitalism and Limited Government Fund is ostensibly an endowment to support the research and teaching of free market capitalism, limited government, entrepreneurship, enterprise and individual rights and responsibilities...

... Fellow founder and board member Tom O'Laughlin is not shy about stating what the initiative is all about. In essays through the years, he often has written about "what we perceive to be an imbalance in the critical scheme of things.

"There's a decided left-wing bias in schools," he said. "This is our attempt to offer a forum for another point of view."

Although I can't imagine why, some members of the faculty are all in an uproar.

"Faculty members have the right to establish any interest group they want on campus," said Cary Nelson, emeritus English professor with the UI and current president of the American Association of University Professors, an organization that works to protect academic freedom and shared governance. Nelson said he welcomed the Senate's intervention.

"If an entity is involved in supporting instruction, in making decisions about instruction, they should go through the process of shared government," he said.

If, for example, a donor wants to build a fountain or renovate the stadium, faculty and campus academic units might have little say, Burbules said.

But if a donor wants to endow a professorship or support research in a particular department, the departments or colleges would be involved, and a formal process would be set up to determine who would qualify and how the professor would be chosen. The Foundation and donors wouldn't make the decisions themselves, he said.

Fair, as long as this is the established procedure. If George Soros wanted to sponsor scholarship at the University, I'd except his foundation to go through the same procedure. I doubt, however, it would get the same uproar.

Much of it, however, seems to stem from Anne Neal:

Neal's American Council on Trustees and Alumni "is an extremely conservative organization that fundamentally does not understand academic freedom. They constantly attack professors exercising what (the American Association of University Professors) regards as their academic rights," Nelson said.

"The idea of she and Stephen (Balch) being enshrined in a building on campus suggests those kind of activities will spread to our campus. That will not be a positive contribution to collegiality."

I was curious what sort of attacks Nelson was referring to. The ACTA Wikipedia entry doesn't mention anything objectionable, and neither does their blog. Right now there's an interesting article on the lack of a core curriculum, a common theme for ACTA.

Attempting to learn more about Anne Neal, and why Nelson dislikes her so, I ran across an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education titled A Not-So-Professorial Watchdog. Unfortunately, it's subscription only. I tracked it down on LexisNexis (not sure that link will even work), but you need a UI account to login.

It's a bit of a biography of Anne Neal and her involvement with ACTA. Right at the second paragraph I can see why Nelson might not like her:

Welcoming people to the [Harvard] library room was Anne D. Neal, president of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni. She is no friend of Harvard professors. Just last winter Ms. Neal ripped into them when they helped force the ouster of Lawrence H. Summers, criticizing them as "politically correct" and saying it was Harvard professors, not the president, who deserved a "vote of no confidence."

But Anne Neal's support of Summers is hardly unique, even among Harvard faculty. Further on in the article there's a second incident:

Deciding what belongs in the classroom and what doesn't, Mr. Bowen argues, is not as easy as Ms. Neal believes. "Anne has never taught a class, and she doesn't know the dynamics," he says. For example, the council has criticized the AAUP this year for failing to come down hard on professors in Wisconsin and New Hampshire who have endorsed September 11 conspiracy theories in the classroom.

But Mr. Bowen says sometimes such a discussion is relevant. "What if you're teaching a psychology course? I think you could make the case that conspiracy theories are an interesting aspect of mass psychology. Thus far the evidence for these theories is lacking, but does that make discussion of that out of bounds? I don't think so."

I don't know about New Hampshire, but Wisconsin is in reference to Kevin Barrett teaching 9/11 conspiracy theories as part of his Introduction to Islam course. Despite the fact that science and academic rigor have completely debunked his theories, Barett believes the US government orchestrated the 9/11 attacks in order to instigate a Christian holy war against Muslims. That's quite a bit different than using it to teach aspects of mass psychology, where the material is probably relevant (and academically sound).

Perhaps that is why some in higher education were flabbergasted when ACTA issued another report, in May, called "How Many Ward Churchills?" It contends that Mr. Churchill, the University of Colorado professor who referred to some victims of the World Trade Center attacks as "little Eichmanns," is far from alone in his beliefs. "The kinds of politically extreme opinions for which he has become justly infamous," says the report, are "enthusiastically embraced" by academe.

The report lists course after course to prove, it says, that professors are "displaying an ideological slant" in the classroom. "Indoctrination," the report concludes, "is replacing education."...

... To Mr. Nelson, likening Mr. Churchill's remarks to what goes on in classrooms across the country is ridiculous. The report, he says, reveals the council's desire "to return to a 19th-century state of knowledge." The kinds of teaching that the report lambastes -- including an anthropology course on Mr. Nelson's campus [UIUC] that examines "racism, sexism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, and other stereotypical ideologies of 'the Other'" -- aren't wacky or way-out, he says: "These are fundamental conclusions of central academic disciplines, positions that have evolved over time." The Churchill report, he adds, "is sort of a rejection of modern life."

The ACTA blog has a summary of the report. It concludes "throughout American higher education, professors are using their classrooms to push political agendas in the name of teaching students to think critically." The referenced course at UIUC is Anthropology 268.

Are racism, sexism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, and other stereotypical ideologies of "the Other" inevitable and universal, or do they have local histories and alternatives? In comparing a broad array of images of "Others," the course will challenge you to interrogate the cultural and historical foundations of the widespread ideologies that define "other" populations. We deliberately examine many kinds of "other" groups as defined by ethnicity, "race," gender, health, religion, and sexual orientation. After briefly exploring some conceptual models that will help us think about and understand notions of "the Other"--including a mixture of symbolic, historical, political and economic perspectives--we will survey some mainstream Western images of "other" groups from classic Greek times to the contemporary period. At the end of the semester, we will reverse our gaze to look at Western social traditions as "Other" when seen from the perspective of non-Western groups, as well as some non-Western people's images of each other. In taking a broad sweep both historically and cross-culturally, the course aims to demonstrate the contingent nature of ideologies of "other" groups, but also their deep embeddedness in social institutions ranging from family structure and religion to economy and polity. At the same time, we aim to see the factors that might allow us as a species to value--rather than mock, condemn, or seek to annihilate--difference.

I happen to like the idea of teaching empathy, if such a thing is possible. I'm guessing, however, that ACTA places this course under "indoctrination". Could a student who's taking the course reach the conclusion that not all "others" are valuable? Would such a student still pass if their arguments were well researched? Can a course teach critical thinking if only one conclusion is allowed?

I don't know. It's unfair to judge the course (as ACTA has done) without actually taking it, which is why I think Nelson is right to criticize the report. However, I do think that Nelson and his group are overreacting to the goals of ACTA:

But make no mistake, says Roger W. Bowen, general secretary of the American Association of University Professors: Ms. Neal is dangerous. "Anne is on a mission from God to remake the academy in the image of conservative values," he says. "She is part of a larger, national campaign to take over higher education and influence its agenda. If you're conservative, you say, 'We've got the White House. We've got the courts. We've got Congress. What we don't have is higher education, and if we want to control the country, that's where we have to implant ourselves.'"

What is it, exactly, that so damn dangerous about a core curriculum? I get the feeling that many in academia have come to believe that the only liberal education is a Liberal education.

I hope Anne Neal and her group make some serious waves here at the University of Illinois.

Comments

Core curriculum? With all due respect, these days you don't need a core curriculum. I certainly didn't have one. The school advertised hundreds of traditional degree paths. But a core curriculum would be superfluous. With outcome based education you don't need a core curriculum. At Alverano College, where the average student does 250 loads of laundry per school year, they don't have a core curriculum. Everybody who's anybody in academia models OBE after Alverano. Alverano is the gold standard. In short, institutes of higher learning have become springboards, political action committees, and “learning laboratories” for every half-baked idea that comes down the pike.

Core curriculum? Surely you jest. Take William Ayers. Besides drugs, he knows political activism. That’s not education; that’s political activism. A way to stay stoned, firmly ensconced in the 70s. Yet Professor Ayers decides education policy. Ward Churchill, that’s education? That’s where our tuition and tax dollars go before finding their way into the pockets of community organizers, and even more un-American activities. We don’t need no stinking core curriculum. Here's but a sample. In 1995 Barack Obama and Bill Ayers get together to focus on education, Bill Clinton proclaims himself the education president, yet Clinton never boasts his role in that capacity. Not a single time: never: http://theseedsof9-11.com