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Posted

I think there is a difference between working through an ongoing attack like UVA and UCLA (the details matter and I would like to think they could fight but might be harder than we might expect), and literally bending the knee and saying "yes dear leader we will do as you command for research money." 

Posted
40 minutes ago, tx 3 putt said:

stephen miller wants to control admissions 

 

100%   And this part is really, really important: the demon is "DEI" and "CRT" and anything related to people who aren't white (mostly males).  So, how do you GUARANTEE that no spot was offered to anyone for DEI/CRT/Affirmative Action/whatever boogeyman you think exists reasons?  Easy.  Only admit and cater to white males.  There is a 100% guarantee that a white male was NOT admitted for one of those "reasons," so really, admitting only white males is the only safe thing to do.

That's the end-game.  They've fucking told you as much.  Believe them.

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Posted
13 minutes ago, Brisketexan said:

100%   And this part is really, really important: the demon is "DEI" and "CRT" and anything related to people who aren't white (mostly males).  So, how do you GUARANTEE that no spot was offered to anyone for DEI/CRT/Affirmative Action/whatever boogeyman you think exists reasons?  Easy.  Only admit and cater to white males.  There is a 100% guarantee that a white male was NOT admitted for one of those "reasons," so really, admitting only white males is the only safe thing to do.

That's the end-game.  They've fucking told you as much.  Believe them.

 

curious how all this holds up under a new administration 

Posted
3 hours ago, Foosters said:

Just to clarify, this is separate from the "compact" that was offered to the select schools, including UT. I think this goes back to the original attack by Trump on Harvard, UCLA, and others. Not that it excuses UCLA's cowardice here. 

Agreed. But, man. It's a deal with the devil because as it states this doesn't mean he won't still swoop in with punitive measures if they don't like the way campus protests are handled, for instance. And yet me say, with Jewish friends who have current undergrads ensuring a safe space for people of all backgrounds is important. But one can't do that at the cost of peaceful expressions of free speech.

Posted (edited)

Interesting interview with our new provost - you have to register and you get one free article before you pay. I've copied pasted the article below. He's guarded, but I'm cautiously optimistic that whatever path we embark on - and some sort of change is indeed inevitable - that it's not as dire as was directed (or implemented at UCLA). 

I don't think it's wrong to think that in many ways there is a loosening of trust in higher education in the public - certainly in some polarized circles, which I am less interested in fixing (because it can't be). And perhaps one does need to think about how to address this. But some things make my spider-sense tingle like : 'Academic freedom is a very robust right, but it’s not an unlimited right.'. Fair, but the bigger question is who defines and enforces the limits?

I want to follow his advice, but it's hard to: 'My plea to everyone on campus is: Wait until we actually have something announced, and then we can have that discussion.'

Link: https://www.chronicle.com/article/we-as-universities-have-lost-our-way

Spoiler

The most recent issue of National Affairsfeatured an essay by William Inboden titled “Restoring the Academic Social Contract,” which examines the university’s vulnerability on multiple fronts, including loss of public trust, rampant politicization, and of course, “the new punitive measures that the Trump administration and Congress are wielding.” A historian by training and former Republican congressional staffer who worked in the George W. Bush White House, Inboden was most recently the head of the University of Florida’s Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education, one of a handful of semi-autonomous entities backed by red and purple state legislatures to, in part, bring more ideological diversity to campuses.

In August, Inboden became provost at the University of Texas at Austin, one of the original nine institutions asked to sign Trump’s “compact.” At this point, UT Austin hasn’t made an announcement about whether it plans to sign. But if anyone can negotiate this difficult moment, it might be Inboden, a stalwart in red-state higher education who was appointed provost in a state governed by Greg Abbott, a Trump loyalist — and this despite the fact that “Inboden’s opposition to Trump is … well documented,” as the Austin American-Statesman put it. When it comes to pressure from the White House, Inboden speaks carefully. But he also named the UT Austin law professor David M. Rabban’s book Academic Freedom: From Professional Norm to First Amendment Right as a crucial source of his own thinking. Rabban recently was a co-author of an essay in our pages arguing that aspects of the compact are flatly incompatible with academic freedom. A signal? We’ll see what happens. 

Evan Goldstein: Can you give us a sense of where things stand right now with UT Austin and the Trump compact?

William Inboden: Our university leadership is having constructive behind-the-scenes discussions with the White House. We’re a state university, so governed by the State of Texas and by a Board of Regents appointed by the governor. Our board chairman, when the compact was first announced, had a statement: We appreciate the White House’s recognition of the good efforts of UT Austin — I’m paraphrasing.

I think we align with the principles of conduct that they want. A lot of that is already a combination of Texas state law and university policy. But of course there’s the question of the procedures — how those would be enforced in the compact. That’s where we’re grateful that the White House is open-minded.

We’re also governed by the First Amendment and by protections of particular civil liberties. And we’re certainly committed to the cardinal tenets of academic freedom. As written, some of the procedural enforcements of the compact would clash with state law and some of our other institutional prerogatives. But in the main, we’re happy to be having those discussions with them.

Goldstein: So you’re substantively simpatico but procedurally concerned about enforcement mechanisms and some other aspects?

Inboden: That’s a pretty accurate summary. I don’t want to say too much more because we find these discussions are best had behind the scenes.

Goldstein: I’m hearing from UT Austin faculty members, and I would describe the level of anxiety as quite high. Some of them are certain, for instance, that women’s and gender and sexuality studies won’t survive the year. As one person put it to me, “COLA” — the College of Liberal Arts — “is fucked.” How worried should they be?

Inboden: I’m going to keep my part of this interview PG-13.

Goldstein: Sorry for bringing it to R. That will be my only infraction.

Inboden: There certainly are high levels of anxiety among a number of sectors of faculty on campus. I understand that. We’re in a very turbulent time in higher education, and at the leadership level there are some things in a particular moment where we just can’t say much publicly. That can be frustrating, because when there is a vacuum I understand why people worry about dire scenarios.

President [James E.] Davis and I both arrived in our new positions this year. He and I are working with some other deans and faculty leaders to take a look across campus: Are we optimally structured with our academic mission? Do we have the right allocation of faculty resources and faculty lines to where there is significant student demand for particular majors or fields of study, or are there some areas where we could use more faculty lines because there’s so much student demand that we can’t meet and other areas where we have more faculty lines but not as much student demand? That’s not the only factor in making decisions on academic structuring, but it’s a significant one.

So I’m certainly aware of a number of the questions in the College of Liberal Arts. That is one of several units we’re looking at. We’re looking at things in the College of Natural Sciences and others. We will in time be announcing reforms and restructurings there.

Academic freedom is a very robust right, but it’s not an unlimited right.

But we’re also asking questions about different units and their academic missions, and making sure that the academic mission is structured in a way that it is open and welcoming to different viewpoints and different methodologies, that it is not solely characterized by one particular worldview. Or if it’s characterized much more in an activist rather than scholarly way. There’s gradations of those things, but that’s something else that we’re going to be looking at. It’s part of a broader effort to preserve the excellence we have at UT.

My plea to everyone on campus is: Wait until we actually have something announced, and then we can have that discussion.

Len Gutkin: There’s also a lot of worry that Texas House Bill 229, which is about the definition of biological sex, is written in such a way that certain topics could become very hard to teach. I’ve seen faculty members worried that they wouldn’t be able to teach about transvestism on the Shakespearean stage, or transgender plots in the 19th-century French decadent novel. Are concerned faculty members misunderstanding something, or are there new limitations on what they can teach now?

Inboden: Currently, Texas law doesn’t prohibit teaching about those subjects. That’s the first clarification. But stepping back, in the current environment of heightened legislative scrutiny of campuses, both in Texas and elsewhere, I can understand how faculty would have those concerns, especially when you see what’s happened at some other universities in the state. President Davis and I are very committed to protecting the university’s mission: the academic freedom of our faculty for research and teaching in their areas of expertise.

We’re working on what we’re calling the Texas Statement on Academic Integrity, about academic freedom and teaching responsibilities. A committee of our faculty is putting this together. To be able to teach controversial subjects, that’s what our academic freedom protects, but the integrity with which we exercise that freedom means that when we are teaching about controversial subjects, we do it in a balanced way. That doesn’t mean a faculty member can’t have his or her own views on something. Of course they can. But teaching with balance means that if it’s a contested matter of public concern, we acknowledge that there are other viewpoints, maybe even present what some of the other viewpoints would be in a good-faith way.

The second principle is doing it in a way that students in the class who may hold a dissenting view from the professor or from other students feel free to voice those views. That they don’t feel intimidated into silence.

The responsibility of our academic freedom includes exposing students to multiple views. A lot of the public backlash or concern we’re seeing, or even some of the legislative measures, come from a sense that some faculty at some universities have presented these controversial topics in a dogmatic or doctrinaire way.

Goldstein: I’m reminded of the 1915 AAUP “Declaration of Principles on Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure,” which you cite in your article, which says essentially that if faculty don’t police themselves, outside forces will come in and police you. Is the Texas statement an attempt by the university to both set a tone on campus and erect a shield against political intrusion.

Inboden: I’m glad you mentioned the 1915 AAUP statement. When our academic-integrity statement comes out, you’ll see a lot of it is going to cite a number of precedents: the 1915 AAUP statement, the 1940 AAUP statement, some Supreme Court precedents. And I’ve recently read this fantastic book by David Rabban, one of our UT law professors, on academic freedom that came out last year — the single most magisterial treatment on academic freedom.

Academic freedom is a very robust right, but it’s not an unlimited right, and it includes responsibilities: How do we teach students? It doesn’t include the freedom to indoctrinate students. I know that’s a loaded term, but we can appreciate distinctions between teaching and indoctrination. There’s a great century-long tradition of both norms and laws for academic freedom in this country. But it’s all embedded in that deeper social contract between the American people and our universities. That includes universities policing ourselves better and exercising our rights responsibly. If we don’t, political leaders will get more involved, with a more heavy hand.

Gutkin: Beginning in 2022, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick began dismantling faculty senates in Texas. That legislative process was accompanied by some pretty strong language. He’s complained about “loony Marxist professors” and so on. What do you think about the dissolution of faculty senates? And how do you triangulate your own reform efforts vis-á-vis the faculty on the one hand and political figures like Dan Patrick on the other?

Inboden: Here on campus we’re implementing SB 37, the new law that was passed. I think it’s a category error to equate faculty councils or faculty senates with shared governance. Traditionally, for many universities, those bodies have been the most visible instantiation of the faculty role in governance. But as we’re about to show here at the University of Texas, the fact that we no longer have a faculty council, per se, doesn’t mean that we don’t have robust faculty involvement in the running of the university.

This week, we are going to be announcing the new structure that we’re putting in place here: A president’s faculty advisory board comprised of 14 of our most distinguished faculty members. We are also creating a faculty advisory cohort of another 60 distinguished faculty members who will be broken up into different standing committees.

As a faculty member here myself for 13 years, I can say that a lot of faculty at UT didn’t feel like the Faculty Council represented us. Part of our efforts with this new structure is to have faculty members who are more representative of the broader faculty.

When I was at the University of Florida, we had some needlessly contentious sessions with the Faculty Senate. There were efforts to block the approval of new majors that the Hamilton School was offering, and there were no good substantive academic grounds to block these. If you view the transcripts of those meetings, it was political posturing. Those scenarios don’t give faculty governance a good name when it is not being done in the best academic interest of the university.

Goldstein: To what extent do faculty concerns at UT and UF reflect anxiety about a real shift in power dynamic from faculty, traditionally the heart of a university, to politicians and political appointees? The faculty’s view of the Hamilton School was that it emerged out of the Legislature and was imposed on UF.

Inboden: Just about every public university in the country is ultimately governed by the political leadership of the state. The University of Texas charter is in the constitution of the state. It even gives a mandate on the subjects we’re supposed to be teaching.

And the regents, the ultimate governing body here, are appointed by the governor. So the Legislature writes the authorizing legislation for us. They appropriate the funding. It’s roughly similar at Florida and most other state universities. The ultimate authority and power for state universities has always been held by the elected leadership of the state.

How much that’s been implemented in practice has ebbed and flowed over the decades. Some of what we’re seeing has to do with the eroding of the social contract between the American people and universities. In state universities, you’re seeing a more vigorous exercising of the authority that state leaders have always had.

When universities are perceived as losing their way, we shouldn’t be surprised. It’s going to be appropriate for the state leadership to step in and say, we need to chart a new direction.

Is it appropriate for a state to dictate — to use a loaded term — the academic content or mission of university? They do it all the time. When a state passes a law saying that the University of Texas should have a new medical school, we’re going to build a new medical school, right?

Gutkin: You mentioned the perception that colleges have lost their way, and that’s certainly real.

On the other hand, recent polling suggests that the public feels that the Trump administration in particular is overreaching in its interference with university operations and its various punitive measures. Do you worry that the current demands coming from Washington are overshooting the mark and compelling you to do things that might ultimately be unpopular with the public?

Inboden: I’m not going to get too much into the details of particular measures of the Trump administration. We’ve got some behind-the-scenes dialogue going on there. But some of the themes I’m most concerned with are: What can we as universities be doing right? What’s in our control? I’m always asking: How did we get here, right? And I do think it’s partly that we as universities have lost our way. What can we as universities be doing to restore and recapture public trust? Let’s focus on what’s in our control to fix, and hopefully the questions of public opinion or government policy will eventually take care of themselves.

Goldstein: Let me ask about an area you control, faculty hiring. What are the concrete hiring practices that you support to add viewpoint diversity? Can it be done without adopting a political litmus test?

Inboden: There’s a very considerable, almost extreme, political imbalance on most university faculties, especially in the humanities and social sciences and adjacent fields. The concern is that often creates a political monoculture and squelches dissenting voices, and ultimately is an impoverishing experience for students.

But the answer to the left-wing politicization of campuses isn’t a counter-right-wing politicization. My ultimate goal, one that I think a lot of university leaders and faculty share, is to depoliticize higher ed.

But when you have a political monoculture, when everyone agrees politically, it’s very easy to lapse into taking much more explicit political stances and squelching out dissenting voices. The best way to address this in faculty hiring isn’t something as crude as: Let’s find registered Republicans with Ph.D.s and start creating special slots for them, but rather connecting this to what has also been a narrowing of a number of important fields that just happened to be ones that political conservatives are more often attracted to: diplomatic and military history, intellectual history, political history, political science, political theory, political philosophy, international relations. In literature, some of the more traditional fields of Shakespearean or Elizabethan literature. In philosophy, ethics.

Let’s focus on what’s in our control to fix, and hopefully the questions of public opinion or government policy will eventually take care of themselves.

There’s a lot of student interest in those fields. If you want to see classes that are more fully subscribed, it’s usually in those fields. If universities bolster hiring in those fields, it will accomplish multiple goals. It’ll be more attractive to faculty with differing political views, often from the more conservative end of the spectrum. But it also can help revive student interest and enrollment.

So it first starts with an expansion or reinvigoration of these fields, and sometimes that means creating new academic units because with the strong faculty role in faculty hiring, if a particular department has become a political monoculture, it’s often going to be hard for them to think outside of their own narrowed epistemic walls.

They may find that it creates a more fertile and vibrant intellectual community on campus, too. A lot of faculty who might personally describe themselves more on the political left get tired of living in an echo chamber.

Gutkin: I wanted to circle back to something I asked about earlier, regarding whether I can teach about transvestism on the Shakespearean stage. Obviously one of the reasons people are so nervous about this is not just because of the text of the law itself, but because at Texas A&M, a professor was fired, apparently, for teaching about transgender topics in a course where she was sort of ambushed by a student who objected politically.

I write a lot about things that have happened in the last 10 years where left-wing students or students with one or another kind of identitarian grievance have tried to get professors removed from the classroom for ideological misdeeds. And that’s happening here, except that the student is on the right, and it’s with the full cooperation of the State Legislature. How can people feel comfortable teaching about subjects like the ones I mentioned?

Inboden: I don’t know the internal details of exactly what transpired there. There are questions about the course syllabus and the course description. But I will say I’m reasonably sure that the Texas Legislature as a legislature wasn’t involved, right? There were some individual members of the Legislature who, on social media, highlighted it and expressed their views on what should happen. But I can understand how that phenomenon would cause anxiety among faculty, including ours. But there was not a specific law from the Legislature that was implemented there.

Gutkin: You’re right that she was fired for some alleged misdeeds related to the syllabus, which looks to a lot of people like a pretextual reason. But nevertheless, the general thrust of the event looks like she was being persecuted for her politics.

Inboden: What we’re trying to do here at UT is reassert that it is important to be able to teach about controversial subjects, especially if they’re directly germane to the material. So in our School of Social Work or Nursing, where the faculty are regularly encountering people who identify as transgender, they need to be able to know about those subjects. Given that Shakespeare’s theater had men who would dress up as women characters — to understand Shakespeare, you need to be able to teach about that. We’re certainly very committed to protecting that academic freedom.

But I also go back to — and I don’t know if this applied in the Texas A&M case or not — what has hurt our credibility as universities with large swaths of the public is that, in some settings, in some places, when controversial subjects are taught, they’re only taught in a one-sided, dogmatic way. A contested issue is presented as a settled issue. A student who dissents might be vilified or ostracized.

There’s a recent study by Jon Shields and a couple of his colleagues at Claremont [McKenna College] about course syllabi. Using a very large net analysis of syllabi at hundreds of universities across the country and overseas, they show that on a number of contested subjects, whether it’s race and crime or abortion or Israel, the syllabi material is overwhelmingly distorted. That will necessarily, I think, impoverish or constrict classroom discussion.

Gutkin: But to the extent that people are getting fired — that can’t, it seems to me, be the way to achieve those reforms.

Inboden: No. I agree.

Goldstein: Let me ask one specific follow-up on that. The senior vice provost for academic affairs, Art Markman, said he was recently dismissed over ideological differences. Is there anything you can add to what went on there?

Inboden: There’s very little I can say on personnel matters. But I can say that he was in an administrative position, and he still has his faculty position. Administrators serve at the will of university leadership, and his assertions are false.

Goldstein: You mentioned earlier this reassertion of state and federal governments in the management of universities. You were part of such a wave at UF. You’re now part of a wave of change at UT. I’ve heard your allies celebrate a “red-state renewal of higher ed.” Do you see yourself as part of a red-state renewal?

Inboden: I’m wary of putting things too much in a partisan context — red state, blue state. But I’m very aware of what you’re talking about. It is a fact that, as a shorthand, red states have been at the vanguard in their public flagship universities of creating some of these new academic units. It’s an exciting time of experimentation, of recovering this broader civic mission of universities, of reminding us that our job is not only to train students for meaningful careers. It’s not only to train politicized activists, but also to train citizens. That’s fundamental to restoring that broader social contract. It’s an honor to be a part of it.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

 

Edited by Txzen
Posted
Quote

'My plea to everyone on campus is: Wait until we actually have something announced, and then we can have that discussion.'

Trust is earned. If this were evolving naturally, through an academic slide, or student feedback (enrollment), one might extend patience and trust. I don't need big government in my colleges.

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Posted

Thanks for posting that.

I find his assertion that universities "policing" themselves will keep outside political forces from interfering to be almost absurdly naive in this day and age. I suspect he actually knows better and is making that argument in bad faith.

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Posted
3 minutes ago, tokamak said:

Thanks for posting that.

I find his assertion that universities "policing" themselves will keep outside political forces from interfering to be almost absurdly naive in this day and age. I suspect he actually knows better and is making that argument in bad faith.

There's only two possibilities: (1) he's a fucking idiot who truly doesn't realize the first thing you said, or (2) he's making the argument in bad faith so they have the cover to completely fuck us over while we stand on the sidelines.

Or, I guess option 3 is "both."

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Posted
33 minutes ago, tokamak said:

Thanks for posting that.

I find his assertion that universities "policing" themselves will keep outside political forces from interfering to be almost absurdly naive in this day and age. I suspect he actually knows better and is making that argument in bad faith.

Yeah, "outside political forces" are just waiting for some snowflake student to post a video about some professor so they can swoop in and get some attention and drama.

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