… Interpretation of the Constitution to the Christian Right
I thought that the way in which my academic freedom was curtailed was in the need to cater to the tendentious religions and politics of the students. I have long been aware, to give one very clear example, that I as a professor cannot criticize Creation Science – even as an example of anti-intellectualism or poor logic – without taking very great care because I do not have eighteen graduate hours in either biology or theology, so I lack the credentials to refute it. I find this ridiculous, but it is a fact.
Everyone feels that they have “the right to their opinion” and “freedom of speech” so if they have decided trees are made of jelly beans I do not have the right to mark them wrong. The FAQs on my class policy pages include explanations of why and when I do have the right to mark students wrong on facts (I have even had them argue, in upper level courses, about grammar and usage in Spanish – “I feel it should be this way, so you may not tell me it is not this way, because that hurts, since I put a lot of thought into this essay”). Where I studied such complaints would not be taken seriously, but where I work faculty are not trusted and administrators may be poorly educated, provincial, and insecure. One has to be very careful.
…Academic Authority to Financially Strapped University Presses
In any case, it has always been clear to me that the situation constitutes a curtailment of academic freedom and that it impoverishes education. It took me longer to realize that when I accepted a book contract on terms I disagreed with, but which had been set so that the book would seem as fashionable as possible to as broad an audience as possible, I was complicit in another form of violation of academic freedom. The outsourcing of tenure decisions to presses which must make their decisions for commercial reasons has since been discussed extensively. But it took me a long time to understand that my pain over the project was over the fact that for bureaucratic purposes I was writing things I did not believe; that it was in fact legitimate in the case of a book manuscript to want to write something one feels one can stand by; and that the need to sacrifice academics for market concerns without admitting this, but making other, apparently academic excuses for it was in fact a problem.
…Teaching to Commercial Textbook Companies
Finally, it has taken me up until now to understand fully that the most amazing violation of academic freedom I experience daily is the lack of latitude to meet students’ needs in basic courses. In our case, a non-professor in the thrall of a commercial, not a regular college textbook publisher, has chosen a book, commercial website, and testing program for us. We all have to follow this quite poor program to the letter, and it takes up so much time and energy and is so mechanical that I have barely had time to ask students what their own interests are in life – this last being, of course, the best material on which to base a language class.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
Two notes here:
1. Within the first week of becoming a professor I realized that to be a professor in most places one must renounce one’s intellect. It is a prerequisite.
2. Completely different: looking back on all of these things and on my reactions to them I realize: I should not doubt I am an abuse victim. The reactions I have to all of these things are as strong as they are because they fall on old wounds.
2.1. YOU MUST NOT BE YOURSELF AND IT IS YOUR INTELLECT WHICH WE DO NOT LIKE.
2.2. My university says: “We need your Ph.D. for our statistics but we do not want your expertise. Hide it and we will tolerate you.” My parents said: “We want the prestige of having a child but we do not like the one we got, namely you. We like the prestige of having a child who does well in school but we are angry that you are so intellectual.” And on, and on.
You’ve got to be kidding!
Incidentally, I don’t know if I told you by Belacqua is at a new site. Click on my name to get there.
Case
O good, I’ll change my link.
Kidding: ludicrous, isn’t it? Anyway I am glad I have finally figured this out about academic freedom.
I had already renounced it without realizing this was what I was renouncing when Reeducation came and said I must renounce personal freedom as well. That is how I got so depressed – no space of liberty, anywhere, and no space for self!
I just hope that this “I gotta have my opinion” authoritarian BS doesn’t seep all the way to Africa before I have a chance to teach there.
May I be saved from the general populace as authoritarians.
Your situation sounds especially bad. I have been in similar binds but only when I worked for private language schools. In the public colleges where I worked, I had considerable freedom.
I can’t imagine a serious institution of higher education treating its professors that way. Ergo, the place you teach is not a serious institution of higher learning!
Authoritarian BS, that’s exactly right, and yet it masquerades as democracy.
Private language schools, yes, that is in a way how this institution views the basic language sequence.
This institution does not treat its professors that way for all courses, but for the ones which are also taught by instructors and adjuncts, it does – and from what I can gather, partly on the recommendation of the instructors and adjuncts themselves.
Whether this place is serious – that is what we often debate. It is a hybrid. The old timers have it figured out. They say it is a middle school, a high school, a technical school, a community college, a four year college, and a PhD granting institution all rolled into one. There is a great difference among semesters, depending upon which pocket of the place your particular schedule throws you into at any particular time.
2.2. My university says: “We need your Ph.D. for our statistics but we do not want your expertise. Hide it and we will tolerate you.” My parents said: “We want the prestige of having a child but we do not like the one we got, namely you. We like the prestige of having a child who does well in school but we are angry that you are so intellectual.” And on, and on.
Oooh! That is a nasty runover/overlap there. Aargh — painful. I can particularly relate to the sense of not being liked for being an intellectual. Albeit I didn’t do very, very well in school. I did pretty well in Zimbabwe, but in Australia I was unmotivated. Still it was the intellectual side of me that wasn’t liked.
Yes – it is because of that overlap that I only handle things as well as I do, am oversensitive and so on.
It is why I liked the fancy state university I went to so much. You had to be bright to be there, but they had so many bright people that they didn’t need you in particular, although you were welcome to play. If you turned out to be bright and also an intellectual, they were pleased, but they were still too busy to project into anyone.
I think we all have overlaps. But my feeling and my theory are that for members of society to have these “sensitivities” is actually adaptive for the societies in which we live. After all, if some of us didn’t develop sensitivities then all forms of society would become nothing other than a brutalisation process, whereby different individuals got together to wear each other down, without self-reflection or consideration.
Whereas it may not be adaptive for individuals to be traumatised by this or that past experience, society itself benefits by becoming humanised (rather than merely mechanically oppressive) when it can take to heart that which we insist is going wrong.
Our sensitivities – which produce a negative reaction and faculty of criticism — serves to assure that others do not need to go through quite what we have been through. This is adaptive.
This is true. Although being produced by and in capitalism, I think I should be satisfied waiting in that spiritual bread line, to get pieces of my identity back! 😉
This blog was actually created so that I could give myself pieces of it back, rather than wait in a spiritual bread line for it. I had not figured this out about the spiritual bread line.
Oh, the minute I kind of clued into the fact that I was being attacked, and it dawned on me just how I was being attacked and what the nature of the game was, I set about reversing the process. I’ve been doing that for a while. For instance, I never buy into the emotional and economic blackmail that goes, “If you just behave we may well reward you in due course!” I KNOW that I will not be rewarded, either now or later.
And the autobiography — a way of maintaining self control over myself through historical self awareness.
Everything…everything I do — a war.
“I never buy into the emotional and economic blackmail that goes, ‘If you just behave we may well reward you in due course!'”
I have bought into this more than would have been wise.