In Response to Valerie Strauss’ Criticism of Stephen Hawking

Last week, Valerie Strauss wrote, “Why Stephen Hawking made a mistake backing Israel boycott,” in her Answer Sheet blog in the Washington Post.

Here is my extended response:

Academic boycotts may be ineffective forms of protest and it is certainly difficult to maintain philosophical consistency—both legitimate reasons for not using this tactic. However, Strauss’ claim that “Academics is [sic] supposed to be about the pursuit of knowledge and truth” begs the question, To What Purpose? Knowledge and Truth may give a person intellectual satisfaction, but they do not put food on the table, nor do they keep repressive regimes from bulldozing homes or imprisoning dissidents.

The notion that academics exist on another plane, divorced from the socioeconomic and political realities of the rest of the world, is absurd. With many discoveries, the potential for making profits becomes far more important than the potential to save lives, leading to patents that prevent poor people from accessing them (e.g., AIDS medicines in Africa). The emphasis on profits even influences what research will be done in the first place. More and more scientists are now relying on funding from private companies, thus biasing their research, while federal funding for public health and preventative healthcare research has always been small compared with the share going to research on weapons and patentable drugs.

The naïve or uncritical “pursuit of knowledge and truth,” abstracted from their sociopolitical context, often results in corrupted research, incorrect analyses and conclusions, and sometimes tragic social consequences (e.g., eugenics research supporting the racist beliefs that Jews or Africans were subhuman). In other examples, the “pursuit of knowledge and truth” has been used to justify research that is inhumane, ecologically devastating or otherwise unethical (e.g., U.S. radiation experiments on prisoners and soldiers; Mengele’s experiments on concentration camp prisoners; the Tuskegee syphilis experiments). And sometimes the sponsors of research have no interest in truth and are trying to obscure reality (e.g., Big Tobacco’s research “proving” secondhand smoke is not dangerous; Big Oil and Coal’s research “disproving” human influenced climate change).

Wayne State to End Tenure, Other Universities to Follow?

Wayne State University in Detroit has proposed a new contract that would make it the first research university in the U.S. to abolish tenure, according to a recent article in Labor Notes. Other public universities are likely to follow suit (or attempt to) in order to cut labor costs as they grapple with years of declining revenue.

The proposed contract would effectively remove peer review and give administrators more power to get rid of faculty, including for financial reasons. (Veteran professors cost universities more, since they have more years of service credit). The administration also wants the right to fire faculty for participating in or supporting political actions that “interrupt the normal daily teaching.”  

Terrible for Students and the Public

The purpose of tenure is to provide protection for academic freedom. Professors and teachers who lack tenure can be dismissed at will, for any number of reasons that have little or nothing to do with the quality of their teaching. Without tenure, professors could be compelled to focus their research on topics generated by the administration or by private interests that stand to gain from the research, thus infusing the research with a bias that could undermine its validity.

This could have grave repercussions for the public in the case of medical and scientific research, especially considering that some corporate funded research contracts give the corporation the right to determine which data will (or won’t) be published. For example, a contract could forbid the publication of data revealing that a new medicine is no more effective than existing or cheaper alternatives. Without tenure rights, a professor would have fewer protections if she or he refused to accept such funding, particularly if it was being pushed by administrators.

Loss of tenure would also be bad for students. Teachers often advocate for the wellbeing of their students or the integrity of their academic programs. Tenure protects this kind of free speech. Without tenure, professors could more easily be fired for advocating positions opposed by administrators. Furthermore, without tenure, professors would have a more difficult time resisting administrators who pressure them to change their grading policies or curriculum in order to improve the university’s profile and fundraising abilities, even if such changes eviscerate the integrity of the course or undercut the objectives of the department.

The university has roughly 3,000 faculty members, approximately one-third of whom are tenured or tenure-track. They are represented by AAUP Teachers Local 6075, an AFT affiliate.

Art Teacher Threatened for Refusing to Force Students to Buy eBooks

After tuition and housing, textbooks are one of the biggest expenses for college students. Even back when I was in college, when tuition at the University of California was a “reasonable” $600 per semester, textbooks still took a serious chunk out of my budget. They were (and still are) large and expensive, especially for the sciences. For many classes, you are expected to buy several books. In some cases, the books are supplemental—not even necessary to succeed in the course.

The current trend toward electronic or digital books (ebooks) has reduced the burden on students’ backs and bookshelves, but not their pocketbooks. Reducing this burden ought to be simple: make the supplementary books optional. However, when Mike Tracy, a teacher at the Art Institute of California-Orange County, refused to make students buy an e-book they didn’t need, he may have jeopardized his job.

The Art Institute is part of a national chain of more than 50 for-profit schools, according to Good Education. Goldman Sachs has a 41% share in the company. Since ebooks are a significant part of the chain’s profit stream, compelling students to purchase as many as possible is in the company’s financial interest. School policy requires students to pay a $50-70 fee to download temporary copies of the books, regardless of whether they purchase a hard copy of the book. According to Tracy, some of these books are completely unnecessary and are required only to increase the school’s profits.

There is a  Change.org petition demanding that the Art Institute of California-Orange County keep Tracy on staff.

UCLA Professor Wins Academic Freedom Fight

This spring, UCLA professor David Delgado Shorter was asked to remove a link from his website that called for the boycott of Isreal. He was accused of advancing a political agenda that was inappropriate in the classroom, though he argued the link was one of many suggested links available in a “clearinghouse” of views for students to peruse in his Tribal Worldviews course. In his class, he discussed not only the boycott, but presented the views of those who oppose the boycott.

Last week, the UCLA faculty senate’s committee on academic freedom ruled that Shorter’s use of the boycott link was not a violation of UCLA policy, according to the Los Angeles Times. The policy allows faculty to present controversial material as long as it is relevant to the course no student feels pressure to adopt a point of view.

Censorship and Suppression of Academic Freedom at UCLA

UCLA Professor David Delgado Shorter has been asked to remove a link on his website that calls for the boycott of Israel, according to the Los Angeles Times. The university has asked him to remove the link and claimed he has agreed to not use the link in the future. Shorter claimed he never made such an agreement. In fact, he thought they had agreed to continue discussions over the issue and to provide an explanation of the campus policy on the matter.

Shorter said the link was one of a number of suggested links for his course “Tribal Worldviews.” The links were not required reading and were provided only as part of a “clearinghouse” of ideas.

The UCLA leadership was acting on a complaint by the Zionist AMCHA Initiative organization, a group of Jewish faculty that has accused other UC campuses of ignoring anti-Semitism and allowing harassment of Jews and that has acted as an apologist for the state of Israel.

While it is commonly believed that a professor’s job is to teach students how to think, not to think for them, exposing students to political movements, protests and other partisan activities cannot be banned or limited without also diluting or undermining the very nature of many courses. Furthermore, it’s a stretch to argue that exposing students to a cause is in any way condoning it or recruiting for it.

A political science teacher might ask students to visit the MoveOn.org website in order to study how digital fundraising can influence an election, while an ethnic studies professor might ask students to visit a hate group’s website to study how they recruit new members or to analyze the content of their speech.

Prohibiting political links on a professor’s website could prevent a philosophy of science teacher from posting links to organizations opposing stem cell research or those denying evolution or climate change, even those there are pedagogically sound reasons for asking students to study such organizations.

Such academic policies suppress academic freedom, critical thinking and learning and do little, or nothing to prevent the proselytization of students. Merely posting a partisan link as one of many in a clearinghouse of resources available for students is not at all the same as espousing or condoning a particular viewpoint. If our goal as educators is to teach students how to think, and not what to think, we must be allowed to expose them to a variety of resources and viewpoints, including controversial ones and ones we may ourselves oppose, while at the same time encouraging them to assess the content critically.