Leading up to its annual conference, which opened here on Wednesday, the American Association of University Professors adopted new guidelines for personnel decisions involving politically controversial scholars. In doing so, it rejected complaints that its recommendations deny important outside constituencies a voice in such matters and appear focused on protecting liberal advocacy.
The association’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure overwhelmingly adopted a report containing such recommendations last weekend, just over three months after a subcommittee first released a draft version for public comment. Cary Nelson, the AAUP’s president, said that committee’s approval is all that is necessary for an abridged version of the report to become part of the organization’s “redbook” of major policy statements.
Among its recommendations, the report calls for colleges to generally disregard complaints about faculty members’ statements coming from outsiders—or even from on-campus student groups objecting to statements heard secondhand rather than in the classroom—in making judgments related to the faculty member’s performance.
In essays published in The Chronicle and in a panel discussion of the report on Wednesday, Peter Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars, had argued that complaints about scholars should be judged on their merits, no matter who makes them, and that the AAUP document puts the onus for objecting to the behavior of faculty members on students in their classrooms, who have the most reason to fear retaliation. Among other objections he raised to the document, he argued that it gives college faculty members far too much leeway to engage in political advocacy in the classroom.
Ernst Benjamin, a former general secretary of the AAUP and the chairman of the subcommittee that drafted the document, had disputed such assertions. In an essay for The Chronicle replying to Mr. Wood, he had argued that the report is simply urging “that external critiques not intrude directly into the careful evaluation of faculty professional conduct” by faculty members’ academic peers, following established procedures.
On Wednesday, Mr. Benjamin said that advocacy is an unavoidable part of college instruction, as much of what professors teach is disputed somewhere, but that the document draws “a distinction between advocacy and real indoctrination.”
Mr. Wood warned during Wednesday’s discussion that the AAUP runs the risk “of being seen as a biased player” in political debates if it keeps adopting such statements.
Another participant in Wednesday’s panel discussion, John K. Wilson, who writes extensively about academic freedom and runs the Web site College Freedom, praised the document but said such statements are not needed so much as more aggressive efforts by the AAUP to intervene on behalf of college faculty members who face negative consequences for speaking out.
In response, Mr. Benjamin argued that the AAUP runs the risk of damaging its credibility if it weighs in on such disputes too quickly.
Ideological Imbalance
In another session on Wednesday, some members of a panel that examined the work lives of politically conservative professors expressed concerns that the ideological imbalance among many faculties has led higher education to lose part of its purpose.
“We’re supposed to debate ideas, but if we all agree, how vigorous are our debates going to be?” asked Robert A. Maranto, who holds an endowed chair in leadership at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville’s department of education reform. He urged campuses to do more to embrace a culture that fosters intellectual diversity and said he worries that academics have lost the ability to effectively debate people with whom they disagree.
Mr. Maranto, a co-editor of the book The Politically Correct University: Problems, Scope, and Reforms (2009), also urged more conservative thinkers to pursue academic careers and advised those who do so not to allow themselves to be “ghettoized” on their campuses by mingling largely with like-minded peers. Instead, they should seek out faculty mentors who are liberal and can help them navigate across ideological divides. He also emphasized the need for scholars of all ideologies to be polite with one another and to show flexibility to admit when they are wrong.
At the same session, Matthew C. Woessner, associate professor of political science and public policy at Pennsylvania State University’s Harrisburg campus, said that conservative professors, despite being vastly outnumbered, appear to have successfully adapted in the academic workplace. Drawing on his own research, including studies he and his co-authors presented in the book The Still Divided Academy: How Competing Visions of Power, Politics, and Diversity Complicate the Mission of Higher Education (2011), he noted that Republican and conservative faculty seem, for the most part, to be successful, happy, and prosperous.
Mr. Woessner, a self-described conservative Republican, said that the imbalance of political perspectives in the classroom also does not seem to cause significant shifts in the partisan orientation of undergraduates over time.
Nevertheless, Richard E. Redding, associate dean for academic affairs and a professor of law and psychology at Chapman University School of Law, said during the session that he remained concerned about the effects of the political imbalance of faculties on conservative graduate students. If a graduate student wanted to research affirmative action, for instance, from a conservative viewpoint, Mr. Redding said, it might be hard for the student to find a faculty mentor to agree to guide him or her.
Stress and Bullying: the Vicious Cycle
A session about incivility and bullying in academe—an increasingly pervasive problem—was a lively one as several attendees gave firsthand accounts of students or fellow professors who had crossed the line in the workplace.
Janet T. McMahon, a clinical associate professor of nursing at Towson University, and her husband, Lt. Matthew P. McMahon, a Nurse Corps officer in the U.S. Navy, highlighted the factors that contribute to bullying, described the many forms that incivility and bullying can take in the academic workplace, and gave suggestions on how to eradicate it.
Stressful environments, the couple said, are known for producing bullies. Faculty members, in addition to bullying each other, also intimidate students. “Think about how your students see you,” Ms. McMahon said. And stressed-out students—those who can’t quite cut it academically, for instance—are just as prone to resorting to behavior that includes yelling, swearing, and ignoring the professors who try to engage them in class.
Meanwhile, professors have suffered through colleagues who have spread rumors about them, sent nasty e-mails to them, or spread vicious rumors.
As a result, Ms. McMahon said, professors’ scholarship drops off, they tend to “retire on the job,” and some of them end up leaving their institutions to escape the toxic climate.
In the end, curbing incivility in the workplace boils down to faculty and administrators acknowledging the existence of aggressive behavior and then refusing to tolerate it on campus, the speakers said. Department chairs, for example, should establish formal policies against bullying and incivility and immediately address it when it surfaces. Faculty members need to have candid conversations about the damage that incivility and bullying leaves in its wake and make a conscious effort to confront it.
