A colleague once said to me that "we teach criticisms of the canon, but not the canon", leaving our students without a clear grasp of either the "canon" or why the critiques are important and meaningful (or not). That stuck with me and helped me change my teaching approach.
Thank you for this excellent article, which makes some great points! "Roughly a quarter of professors who teach The New Jim Crow, for example, are trained in the fields of English, social work, education, theology, and philosophy—and thus they presumably have no real expertise in law or political science." Indeed, the fact that most controversial topics are taught in American universities in English departments has created enormous damage to generations of students. In my own field, French studies, English professors taught for years so-called "French theory" (an American concept based on a misappropriation of French philosophers)--people who not only cannot read the original, but have no knowledge of the general cultural context and misinterpret what they read. This is how many American students have come to believe that by saying that "one becomes a woman, one is not born a woman", De Beauvoir meant that biology doesn't matter (a gross misinterpretation based on decontextualization).
"now is not the time to be raising these concerns. In the face of Trump’s blunderbuss war on the universities, we shouldn’t air our profession’s dirty laundry."
The laundry is already there for everyone to see. Do they not understand what got universities into the crosshairs in the first place?
"The right seems to be on a mission to expose universities as centers of leftist indoctrination."
I'm a liberal and also despise university mono-culture and leftist indoctrination. It is not just "the right." The situation is not best described liberal bias but flat out illiberalism. It seems Persuasion agrees.
I have taught Orientalism many times, but I always paired it with Ian Buruma's Occidentalism and related works to show the limitations and flaws of Said's argument. I would also encourage my students to consider how non-Arab cultures, such as Eastern Europe or China, are stereotyped and misunderstood in the West. The problem is not that professors teach controversial texts. The problem is that they are not teaching controversy.
I can't comment on the study's methodological soundness since I've only read this summary, rather than the research itself, but it seems like exactly the kind of self-examination that's required in higher education.
We could probably clock the time it will take for someone to come in and compare this effort to teach real controversies within a field to the "teach the controversy" push by religious conservatives to teach the "controversy" about evolution vs. intelligent design, and to tar this study with the miserable failure that is "teach the controversy" in biology, where there is virtually no controversy in the field.
I'm betting with you. The religionists and Stephen Millers will certainly try to co-opt studies like this. If the study can be replicated, it is certainly valuable as a tool for repairing a flawed university system.
I was suggesting someone from the progressive side of things would use the "teach the controversy" bullshit that has been peddled by the religious conservatives as a reason why we should be wary of "teach the controversy" in this context.
I don't understand why so many academics, especially in the liberal arts, believe that teaching and doing research in their chosen disciplines are not important enough. In trying to change the world, they do, however, make the world safer for hypocrisy.
Could it be a reaction to being told their disciplines are not important enough?
Even in STEM, there was an obvious difference between studying systematics for my PhD and teaching physiology to nursing students in my job. When I was in systematics, the question of 'what is this good for?' came up a lot, and there was a definite prickly defensiveness in the field. Once I was teaching nurses, I never had to face that question again and could bask in their reflected glory, so I had no incentive to try and make my work seem more important.
I don’t know if professors should be forced to teach both sides of an issue in all cases. Should biologists teach creationism?
The bigger problem to me seems to be something you mentioned in the end: that many of these courses are taught by professors without domain expertise. I don’t see what business an English professor has assigning reading related to social sciences. They should stick to actual literature. I know that boat left the harbor a long time ago, but stuff like this is evidence that it’s not sea worthy.
Textual interpretation is not a good method of understanding the social world. You can argue whatever you want simply by cherry picking your examples. Is it any surprise that the writing in the critical studies fields are often unempirical or that they easily descend into word salad or that domain experts don’t think very highly of them.
Let’s take Discipline and Punish as an example. It’s been out for over 50 years now. My impression is that historians don’t think very highly of the actual historical evidence in there. I have never seen any quantitative empirical evidence backing up any of its sweeping claims. Why exactly do we continue to teach it as if it were the gospel. Perhaps it’s time to reclassify it as fiction writing and move on.
I'm not sure they should be "forced" to teach a controversy; I think that, if there is a controversy in the field, they should include representatives of those viewpoints, should be coached to do so and pressured to do so.
There is no controversy in the field of biology regarding creationism.
I think the important thing about Creationism in this context is that it isn’t biology at all. If one wants to teach this controversy, a professor of theology is required to represent the other side.
A colleague once said to me that "we teach criticisms of the canon, but not the canon", leaving our students without a clear grasp of either the "canon" or why the critiques are important and meaningful (or not). That stuck with me and helped me change my teaching approach.
Thank you for this excellent article, which makes some great points! "Roughly a quarter of professors who teach The New Jim Crow, for example, are trained in the fields of English, social work, education, theology, and philosophy—and thus they presumably have no real expertise in law or political science." Indeed, the fact that most controversial topics are taught in American universities in English departments has created enormous damage to generations of students. In my own field, French studies, English professors taught for years so-called "French theory" (an American concept based on a misappropriation of French philosophers)--people who not only cannot read the original, but have no knowledge of the general cultural context and misinterpret what they read. This is how many American students have come to believe that by saying that "one becomes a woman, one is not born a woman", De Beauvoir meant that biology doesn't matter (a gross misinterpretation based on decontextualization).
"now is not the time to be raising these concerns. In the face of Trump’s blunderbuss war on the universities, we shouldn’t air our profession’s dirty laundry."
The laundry is already there for everyone to see. Do they not understand what got universities into the crosshairs in the first place?
it’s refreshing to find scholars willing to turn their analytical skills on their own profession and institutions in the service of liberalism.
"The right seems to be on a mission to expose universities as centers of leftist indoctrination."
I'm a liberal and also despise university mono-culture and leftist indoctrination. It is not just "the right." The situation is not best described liberal bias but flat out illiberalism. It seems Persuasion agrees.
I agree 100% "illiberalism" is the best description of what's going wrong.
This is really important work. Thanks for doing it.
I have taught Orientalism many times, but I always paired it with Ian Buruma's Occidentalism and related works to show the limitations and flaws of Said's argument. I would also encourage my students to consider how non-Arab cultures, such as Eastern Europe or China, are stereotyped and misunderstood in the West. The problem is not that professors teach controversial texts. The problem is that they are not teaching controversy.
From what I have seen in our study, you are an exceptional teacher. And I could not have put your last sentence better.
Thank you, Yuval.
I can't comment on the study's methodological soundness since I've only read this summary, rather than the research itself, but it seems like exactly the kind of self-examination that's required in higher education.
We could probably clock the time it will take for someone to come in and compare this effort to teach real controversies within a field to the "teach the controversy" push by religious conservatives to teach the "controversy" about evolution vs. intelligent design, and to tar this study with the miserable failure that is "teach the controversy" in biology, where there is virtually no controversy in the field.
I'm betting with you. The religionists and Stephen Millers will certainly try to co-opt studies like this. If the study can be replicated, it is certainly valuable as a tool for repairing a flawed university system.
I was suggesting someone from the progressive side of things would use the "teach the controversy" bullshit that has been peddled by the religious conservatives as a reason why we should be wary of "teach the controversy" in this context.
I understood that.
Apologies, I'd misunderstood your comment!
Intriguing empirical work, and great discussion of it here.
Thank you for this excellent study and title list!
I don't understand why so many academics, especially in the liberal arts, believe that teaching and doing research in their chosen disciplines are not important enough. In trying to change the world, they do, however, make the world safer for hypocrisy.
Could it be a reaction to being told their disciplines are not important enough?
Even in STEM, there was an obvious difference between studying systematics for my PhD and teaching physiology to nursing students in my job. When I was in systematics, the question of 'what is this good for?' came up a lot, and there was a definite prickly defensiveness in the field. Once I was teaching nurses, I never had to face that question again and could bask in their reflected glory, so I had no incentive to try and make my work seem more important.
I don’t know if professors should be forced to teach both sides of an issue in all cases. Should biologists teach creationism?
The bigger problem to me seems to be something you mentioned in the end: that many of these courses are taught by professors without domain expertise. I don’t see what business an English professor has assigning reading related to social sciences. They should stick to actual literature. I know that boat left the harbor a long time ago, but stuff like this is evidence that it’s not sea worthy.
Textual interpretation is not a good method of understanding the social world. You can argue whatever you want simply by cherry picking your examples. Is it any surprise that the writing in the critical studies fields are often unempirical or that they easily descend into word salad or that domain experts don’t think very highly of them.
Let’s take Discipline and Punish as an example. It’s been out for over 50 years now. My impression is that historians don’t think very highly of the actual historical evidence in there. I have never seen any quantitative empirical evidence backing up any of its sweeping claims. Why exactly do we continue to teach it as if it were the gospel. Perhaps it’s time to reclassify it as fiction writing and move on.
I'm not sure they should be "forced" to teach a controversy; I think that, if there is a controversy in the field, they should include representatives of those viewpoints, should be coached to do so and pressured to do so.
There is no controversy in the field of biology regarding creationism.
I think the important thing about Creationism in this context is that it isn’t biology at all. If one wants to teach this controversy, a professor of theology is required to represent the other side.