[The Montana Professor 1.3, Fall 1991 <http://mtprof.msun.edu>]

The First Amendment and Academia

Marie E. Wirsing
Educational Foundations
University of Colorado at Denver

Thank you for the invitation to participate in this celebration of free speech.

I already feel a certain sense of professional camaraderie with this group. Last spring, the Montana Federation of Teachers published in The Montana Professor a speech in which I detailed my academic freedom lawsuit against the Board of Regents of the University of Colorado. This is a welcomed opportunity for me to give you an update on my case, to speak about some implications for the professoriate as a whole, and to engage in dialogue.

Standardization, academic freedom, and litigation

You might recall the basic issue of my lawsuit. In 1986, the Regents of the University of Colorado mandated that student evaluation of faculty would be carried out each semester through the use of a standardized instrument. The instrument asked students to assess faculty against a listing of institutionally-determined criteria of good teaching characteristics. The Regents' mandate followed action by the Colorado General Assembly to place all state colleges and universities under an accountability mode of operation./1/ The Regents subsequently mandated a student outcomes policy for all undergraduate programs within the University of Colorado system.

After three years of unsuccessfully appealing the faculty assessment policy within the University, and attempting to educate the Regents and Administration about my objections, I filed before the Federal District Court in Denver./2/ My position was that the policy violated my First Amendment rights and placed me in direct conflict with the academic and professional Standards which govern my particular discipline, Foundations of Education. Under these national Standards, all assessment decisions are determined properly by the informed judgment of faculty credentialed in the field of Foundations of Education./3/ The imposed policy also contradicted the Regents' own published statement of academic freedom which directs faculty to act on and off campus with integrity and in accordance with the "highest standards of their profession," and ensures faculty against administrative intrusion into academic matters./4/ In our Brief, my attorneys pointed out that the Regent policy undermined the very content and purposes of my instruction, and implicitly sanctioned one ideology as binding on the entire academic community.

The Federal District Court, in June 1990, issued a decision upholding the Board of Regents./5/ Arguing that the Regents represented The Academy against the interests of one professor, and that the Federal Court, itself, represented the state, Judge Lewis Babcock refused to intervene. Since I was insubordinate in my refusal to use the standardized form, the Federal Court sustained the authority of the Regents to continue to penalize me by freezing my salary level.

On September 19, 1991--just last month--oral arguments in my case were presented before the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals in Salt Lake City. My attorneys pressed the fact that the Federal Court had completely ignored both the national Standards of my discipline and the Regents' own law pertaining to academic freedom. They also pointed out that the issue in my case was not between me--an individual faculty member--and The Academy. Instead, I represented The Academy, whereas the Regents, in fact, represent the state in a purely regulatory--not academic--capacity.

Judge Logan, who chaired the Tenth Circuit proceedings, commented to the University attorney at one point: "Your policy might be okay if Dr. Wirsing taught physics. But she teaches educational theory and methods. And what you are asking her to do she finds anathema." His comment from the bench led me to believe there was judicial awareness of the free speech issue. However, on October 4, 1991, the three-member appellate court released a very brief ruling which affirmed the decision of the Federal District Court./6/ The Tenth Circuit Court provided no accompanying rationale nor citation of case law to justify its decision. At the present time, we are drafting a writ of certiorari--a legal petition--to be filed before the United States Supreme Court.

One of the many things I have learned over the past few years of litigation is that the court is an adversarial not an educational forum. Thus, largeness of mental horizons usually is sacrificed to the narrow specifics of legal precedent. Success is chiefly dependent on the skill of attorneys in interpreting law with respect to the precise issue at hand. Nonetheless, I remain convinced that important academic issues must continue to be pursued in the courts as a necessary and appropriate final resort. I am also convinced that this is a forum in which more members of The Academy need to develop new kinds of communication skills so that difficult and arcane bodies of knowledge can be treated with brevity and in ways that non-academicians can grasp.

Furthermore, there is always the possibility of education--even within the constraints of the litigation process. One has to admire the efforts of the philosopher-educator, Alexander Meiklejohn, in linking academic freedom with constitutional protections. In a long life, Meiklejohn educated many lawyers--even Supreme Court justices--in bringing academic freedom under the First Amendment. Although a philosopher with no legal training, Meiklejohn's articles were published in many law journals. In 1931, Meiklejohn wrote what still stands, in my mind, as the most eloquent rationale for preserving academic freedom. It is a rationale that extends to all members of The Academy and to American educators in general.

It is obvious that the teacher must be free to do what he is trying to get his students to do. No one can teach an art which he is forbidden to practice. Slaves cannot teach freedom. If the members of our faculties are forbidden to make up their own minds and to express their own thoughts, they cannot lead their pupils into the making up of their minds and the expressing of their thoughts. They can only teach what they do. To require our teachers to say to their pupils, "I want you to learn from me how to do what I am forbidden to do," is to make of education the most utter nonsense./7/

What prompts my appearance here today is not so much a desire to discuss the pursuit of academic freedom through the courts. Nor do I wish to focus on the historical development of academic freedom within American education and its linkage with the First Amendment. I have written about this elsewhere within the past year./8/ Instead, I want to address you as fellow academics, and to suggest what you can do as educators to advance the cause of free speech. My chief recommendation is that you break the deafening silence of The Academy.

The silence of The Academy

In his book The Great Fear--a study of the Anti-Communist purge under the Truman and Eisenhower administrations--David Caute writes that

during the crucial years of the great fear the most influential, opinion-forming faction of the American intelligentsia largely (but not wholly) abandoned the critical function that all intellectuals in all countries ought to sustain toward government agencies and government actions.... All available evidence confirms that this malaise, this insensitivity, this willingness to defend democracy by means of antidemocratic methods, spread rapidly and widely through the middle-class professions./9/

I believe that there has been a similar abandonment of the critical functions among the American intelligentsia of our own day. Comparable to the retreat of professionals from the political pressures of a generation ago, today's intelligentsia mostly conforms to external directives.

Let me relate several personal encounters to make my point. I think they typify The Academy's response in general.

At the time my case was being investigated by the University Privilege and Tenure Committee, the chair of the committee of peers said to me privately: "I sympathize with you, but why don't you just quietly go ahead and use the standardized form? Everyone knows it really doesn't mean anything anyway!"/10/

In 1988, I was invited to give a speech before the first CU-Denver Campus "Teaching Excellence Symposium." I used that occasion to explain the absurdity of advancing any one set of prescriptive teaching behaviors, and that the historical record was filled with great educators who had nothing in common about their educational philosophies or their instructional strategies. Following my speech, I was approached by a number of colleagues from departments across our academic community. To a person, they thanked me for my comments, expressed anger over CU's assessment policy, and concurred that faculty, indeed, needed to take a firm stand. Several weeks later, I joined with a few faculty members from the School of Education who were interested in mounting collective opposition among the professoriate to the newly announced undergraduate mandate on outcome-based instruction. I took that opportunity to contact individuals in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and other professional schools who had warmly endorsed my comments at the teaching conference. The response, with one exception, was passive. Several wrote letters to me expressing interest, but begged off under the pressure of personal publication deadlines and/or their lack of tenure status.

When we were trying to organize opposition to the policy of outcome-based instruction, some of my colleagues prepared an official-looking memo and circulated it within the School of Education. The memo was intended as a joke, but one that might jar faculty into a realization of what was happening to the academic community. The memo asked faculty to submit detailed course syllabi and lesson plans. Only one professor expressed justifiable outrage. Several persons threw the memo away, but many began asking how they should comply and where they should send their curriculum material.

Last year, one of my colleagues--a social scientist--explained to me that the members of his department had dreamed up some innocuous standardized pre- and post-test for their students in order to meet the imposed outcomes-based learning requirement. "It doesn't mean anything," he told me with a hint of embarrassment, "but it keeps the University Administration and the Colorado Commission on Higher Education off our backs." This past summer, Committee C of the American Association of University Professors published its report, "Mandated Assessment of Educational Outcomes."/11/ The report is an important one since it represents the first major effort on the part of The Academy to attack initiatives for legislatively mandating assessment within the nation's colleges and universities. The report concluded as follows: "Externally mandated assessment procedures are not appropriate for the evaluation of individual students or faculty members and should not be used for that purpose."/12/ This document conceivably could galvanize academics into reclaiming their fundamental rights. Unfortunately, according to the chair-person of Committee C, the level of interest in the report among academics appears to depend on "the extent to which assessment is a visible issue in a particular state."/13/

What I urge you to consider is that continuing silence, acquiescence, and/or indifference by members of The Academy toward such issues is a very dangerous course of action. It is equally dangerous to passively await decisions by the courts in matters which encroach upon intellectual freedoms within academia.

American courts, it is well to keep in mind, usually reflect the Zeitgeist of the much larger society. For the past twenty years, Americans have been experiencing another climate of fear: fear that we no longer command superpower status abroad either politically or economically, fear that we no longer are able to control the many internal dimensions of our lives--whether with respect to budgetary problems, drug usage, AIDS, social violence, the collapse of the traditional family unit, or the growing alienation of our youth.

A generation ago, the things mostly cited as problems by school personnel were students talking out of turn in class, chewing gum, and disorderly conduct. These contrast sharply with the kind of problems confronting today's teachers: alcohol, drugs, rape, teen pregnancy, and gang warfare. Because of the continuing inability to resolve these serious social problems, many citizens have become fearful for the nation's future. The response, increasingly, has been the adoption of institutional policies centralizing power and control. This response, in my judgment, has been ill-conceived, irrational, and self-defeating. It also has added a destructive political component to the operation of our education system. However, it is not the first time in history that frightened people have turned to authoritarian solutions.

American public schools--always a sensitive barometer--began to reflect state-level policies which centralized curriculum authority and monitored instructional behavior with the passage of the first accountability laws in the early 1970s. Over the next two decades, state and local accountability policies escalated dramatically in terms of the scope of control exerted over the classroom teacher. By the late 1980s, prescribed competency-based curricula, predetermined instructional formulas tied to merit pay, and a vast proliferation of standardized testing instruments had become commonplace for the nation's elementary and secondary schools.

Last month, the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in one if its recent academic freedom cases, Miles v. Denver Public Schools,/14/ that a high school teacher has no more claim to academic freedom than have student contributors to a high school newspaper. Miles was disciplined by school officials for statements he had made in a ninth grade government class. He brought suit, claiming that his punishment of forced administrative leave and letter of reprimand had chilled his free speech. The Tenth Circuit Court upheld the actions of the Denver Public Schools Administration, relying heavily on the 1988 Hazelwood decision in which the Supreme Court had ruled that "school officials may impose reasonable restrictions on the speech of students, teachers, and other members of the school community." If the Miles decision is sustained by the Supreme Court, America's public school teaching force will have been recognized, legally, as little more than trained technicians bound by the intellectually-restrictive doctrine of "school-sponsored speech." For all practical purposes, university-based preparation for our elementary and secondary teachers will have been rendered irrelevant.

Few of us in higher education have paid much attention to what has been happening in the lower schools. However, when reformers turned their guns on the colleges and universities, following the appearance of the Holmes and Carnegie reports five years ago,/15/ accountability policies began to make their way into the world once considered the inviolate domain of The Academy. The Society of Professors of Education, in a 1988 publication, Accountability and Assessment in Higher Education, reported that assessment procedures were "being discussed on three-fourths of the nation's campuses," that "approximately half" were in the process of developing assessment procedures, and that eighty percent "expected to introduce some form of assessment in the next few years."/16/ By August 1991, the AAUP's Committee C noted that:

twenty-seven states reported either legislative- or board-mandated assessment initiatives in place. Still other states indicated that formal assessment policies were under study...and only eight [states] reported "nothing in place and nothing immediately planned."/17/

Before the decade of the 1980s was over, two similar policies promoting instructional and curriculum standardization had been widely adopted in American colleges and universities: (1) uniform, objectified, and measurable criteria under which students were to evaluate the teaching effectiveness of faculty in determining merit pay, tenure, and promotion--that is, the policy I am challenging in the courts; and (2) mandated assessment of educational outcomes--that is, uniform, objectified, and measurable criteria under which faculty were to evaluate the learning success of students. It is important to recognize that the two policies reflect identical a priori assumptions about the nature of reality, knowledge, and values--assumptions that are held by disciples of positivist-realist philosophy and behaviorist psychology. It is my belief that such ideas have become politicized and institutionalized not because of their intellectual merit, but because they conveniently fit external demands for educational cost-accounting procedures, and because they provide a vehicle for authoritarian control. Before such policies, The Academy has yielded.

Authoritarian control versus Constitutional freedoms

During the first hearing of my case before the Federal District Court in June 1990, Judge Babcock commented that a balance had to be effected between the efficient administration of the University and the rights of a faculty member. Then he added, "We cannot permit anarchy." It struck me forcefully that Judge Babcock had interpreted my attorneys' argument for intellectual and instructional diversity--the traditional demands of academic freedom--as anarchistic and intolerable. Accordingly, he ruled against us, holding that the University administrative policy was "reasonable," "content-neutral," and therefore did not rise to the level of a First Amendment issue. The Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals, for unstated reasons of its own, upheld Judge Babcock's thinking.

As an educational historian, I am trying to make sense out of what appears to be happening in our day, broadly speaking--and to grapple with my own situation in that context. I have come to believe that we are moving steadily in the direction of a national and oppressive system of education. The National Commission Report, A Nation at Risk,/18/ issued in 1983, was an important milestone, because it provided federal sanction for policies of educational control that were well underway in most of the states.

The National Governors Conference report of 1990, the Jeffersonian Compact,/19/ with its six stipulated educational goals to be achieved by the year 2000, was a logical if troubling extension of A Nation at Risk. Currently, the Jeffersonian Compact is being translated into plans for massively overhauling (or "restructuring") the schools in given directions, and for bringing American educators into alignment with the stated national priorities. You will recall that the Jeffersonian Compact determined that American students would be first in the world in science and mathematics achievement by the year 2000. One of the proposals placed before the Colorado General Assembly this fall was that of authorizing local boards of education to pay elementary and secondary teachers differently based on the subjects they teach./20/

The United States does not have at this time a National Ministry of Education. However, a parallel function is being performed by the fifty state legislative bodies, governors, and thousands of local school boards--most of whom are adopting similar policies and ideology./21/

No doubt that the rhetoric of schooling "decline," the pronouncement of "a rising tide of mediocrity," and long-time teacher bashing have greatly popularized legislative, gubernatorial, and presidential initiatives to forcibly reshape American education. Since the much-heralded "crisis" in education is colored by public perceptions of the existence of legions of "poor teachers," political steps--even strong-armed efforts--are widely acclaimed. Last spring, for example, Governor Roy Romer of Colorado--using his authority in an unprecedented way--broke a threatened teachers' strike in Denver and personally drafted tight new terms under which Denver classroom teachers henceforth were expected to reach forced consensus on all schooling matters, including curriculum substance and peer assessment for merit pay.

More recently, Governor Romer--in his capacity as chairperson of the National Educational Goals Panel--issued the first annual report card which compared and rated the public schools with respect to the politically-adopted six national goals. The report card placed American students at the bottom of "world-class standards" in mathematics. Numerous scholars, over the past thirty years, have criticized the intellectual reductionism, naïveté, and serious fallacies involved in interpreting standardized test data./22/ Nonetheless, the National Educational Goals Panel has used spurious standardized test data to invest itself and the National Governors Conference with new educational powers. On October 1, 1991, Governor Romer announced:

We now have a baseline, and we have a decade-long commitment by the president and 50 governors to move toward the goals.... We're making judgments about what is competent and not competent./23/

The point I am making--and it is a significant one for this symposium to consider--is the ease with which constitutional guarantees and freedoms are swept away when a society is enveloped by a climate of fear, whether the fear is real or manufactured.

Probably there are individuals among us who can recall how the constitutional rights of academics were flagrantly denied during the anti-Communist crusade. Pennsylvania, California, and New York were three of the states that passed laws in the 1950s providing for the immediate dismissal of teachers who appealed to the Fifth Amendment when called before loyalty investigation boards./24/

One of the powerful arguments that removed state tenure protection from Colorado public school teachers a little over a year ago--replacing tenure with the policy of externally-determined performance objectives--was that due process proceedings, in an era of shrinking budgets, simply had become "too expensive." Removal of teachers under charges of "unsatisfactory performance" vis-à-vis uniform performance objectives will not require the customary litigation involved in proving teacher incompetency. These are unfortunate facts about our recent history that ought not be lost sight of in present academic freedom struggles.

What I do find bizarre, however, in the fall of 1991, is the eagerness with which the American public seems to be embracing an authoritarian schooling model--when we have just witnessed the collapse of such an experiment within the Soviet Union. In over seventy years, the political and ideological control of the Soviet government and its Ministry of Education over all phases of schooling--from curriculum design and content, instructional methods, to state-determined learning priorities, outcomes, and assessments--has proved to be a massive failure. There is no one, surely, who would argue that the Soviet experiment ushered in either excellence or national productivity, or that it secured the Soviet position as one of the world's great superpowers. Yet, it is within a growing and ominous atmosphere of authoritarian control in our own society that American scholars today must confront the issue of free speech.

Academia and the case for diversity

The most authoritative statement of academic freedom was written in 1930 by the distinguished philosopher, Arthur Lovejoy. Lovejoy had been a leader within the American Association of University Professors. Academic freedom, he wrote, is

the freedom of the teacher or research worker in higher institutions of learning to investigate and discuss the problems of his science and to express his conclusions, whether through publication or in the instruction of students, without interference from political or ecclesiastical authority, or from the administrative officials of the institution in which he is employed, unless his methods are found by qualified bodies of his own profession to be clearly incompetent or contrary to professional ethics./25/

Lovejoy went on to emphasize that although the teacher is in his economic status "a salaried employee," the principle of academic freedom "implies a denial of the right of those who provide or administer the funds from which he is paid, to control the content of his teaching."/26/

Lovejoy's definition needs to be aggressively articulated and defended by The Academy in public forums. The principle of academic freedom needs to be openly defended because it is most compatible with a democratic society. It is also our best hope as a nation in addressing virtually all the great problems which confront us at home and abroad. There is an impressive body of scholarly knowledge that supports the wisdom of academic freedom--that supports diversity, not uniformity, as a societal basis for genuine human excellence, productivity, and even survival.

I call upon members of The Academy who have expertise in the field of Business. Can you not assume rigorous leadership in critiquing the outmoded administrative mentality that has come to dominate American schools and universities? In 1911, Frederick Winslow Taylor, an engineer and pioneer in time-efficiency theory, published his influential book, The Principles of Scientific Management. The gist of Taylor's turn-of-the-century thinking was that productivity would be increased by establishing top-down control within industrial organizations, replacing the inferior judgment of the worker--over all aspects of his job--with the more intelligent judgment of the factory manager. Taylor held that workers were inherently "stupid" and he was absolutely convinced that his administrative formula of control ought to be applied to all other institutions in American society, including the operation of our universities./27/

Taylorism was the scourge of American industrial workers well into the 1940s. By mid-century, industrial research revealed that management of Taylorism was counter-productive. More recent industrial research, by Rensis Likert and others, has promoted humane management approaches which are characterized by sensitivity training, worker participation in work design and decision-making, and other person-oriented techniques./28/ Thomas Peters and Robert Waterman, in their 1982 study, In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America's Best-Run Companies, pointed out that productivity was intimately tied to the self-esteem of workers, and that individuals worked best with a minimum of bureaucratic interference, and where their own ideas were acknowledged by the organization to be valuable./29/

It is peculiar, to say the least, that Taylorism--with its management-by-objectives formula, and its corresponding degrading view of workers--has become the unmistakable administrative model behind the present educational reform movement. The popular premise that schools and universities ought to function like a business or industrial organization is, itself, highly questionable and should be challenged. Unlike factory workers, American scholars and educators are not in agreement about their end goals; they are not all headed toward the same "intellectual Rome"! But if there is public insistence on a business management model for our schooling organizations, at least let it be on more enlightened terms. It seems to me that our colleagues in Business ought to be on the frontline of public debate over the foolishness of adopting a long-discredited Taylorism./30/

I call upon members of The Academy with expertise in Mathematics. In 1947, John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern showed that it is mathematically impossible to maximize more than one variable in an interlinked system at the same time. That is, if one variable is adjusted to its maximum condition, the freedom to do the same with other factors is lost. In others words, everything cannot be made "best" simultaneously./31/ Surely this important theorem has extremely important implications when it comes to anything so complex as a university or public school. The educational reformers of our day simplistically and perpetually conceptualize change in terms of the whole of interlinked systems! The current bandwagon for "restructuring" American schools is a prime example. It seems to me that the much wider implications of the maximization theorem ought to be publicly discussed.

I call upon our colleagues in Biology, Zoology, and Botany to publicly generate debate over the broader implications of recent findings in their own fields. The ecologist David Ehrenfeld is one scientist who has applied von Neumann and Morgenstern's maximization theorem to the world beyond abstract numbers.

As fisheries science has become more sophisticated, there has come the realization that the maximum sustained yield is an impossible dream.... The dream is impossible for theoretical, scientific reasons, not just because of socio-political or technical problems. It is a victim of von Neumann and Morgenstern's theorem. In the first place, a "species" of fish is not a uniform entity, but a composite of different populations that behave differently and have different environmental requirements. Treating these populations as if they were all the same for the purpose of management is already a less-than-maximum compromise, because none will be kept at its optimal size. More importantly, different species of fish swimming in the same waters are part of the same ecological system, related in numerous ways by predation, competition, and cooperation. When the catch of one species is regulated, it affects all the others--regulating them independently so that each reaches a "maximum" is impossible./32/

Faculties in our schooling institutions are not uniform entities either, but a composite of very different populations that behave differently and have different requirements. Such human diversity "swimming in the same waters" is disregarded by prevailing educational accountability directives which presume an inherent sameness in the human species. The requirement that educational objectives be formulated in behavioral terms, that pedagogy be competence- or performance-based, and the insistence on educational evaluation which limits itself to that which can be observed, measured, compared, and controlled by others all flow from a misplaced management view of trying to make everything "best" simultaneously. As Ehrenfeld concluded in his studies of fish populations, the result of such efforts toward the simultaneous maximization of variables is "devastating to the myth of power and control."/33/

Recently, Eugene Linden published troubling facts in connection with global crop production, pointing up a serious decline in the diversity of crops at the same time the world's population is exploding:

Unfortunately the strains of crops that seem to have almost magical qualities are becoming even harder to find. As farmers go for the highest possible yields these days, they all want to use the same kind of seeds. Individual crops share more genetic material, and local varieties are vanishing. Moreover, as the explosive growth of the world's population causes more farmers to turn more forest land into fields, wild species of plants are getting wiped out. Potentially valuable food sources are lost--forever--before they are even discovered. The world is losing a marvelous diversity of genetic material that has enabled the plant kingdom to overcome pests, blights and droughts throughout the ages./34/

I am one teacher educator who is alarmed over the parallel loss of a marvelous diversity of educational philosophies and instructional strategies, a diversity that has characterized our history until recent times. Like the misguided farmers seeking the highest possible yields through the use of the same kind of seeds, the educational policy makers of this generation are obsessed with imposing the same kind of suffocating thought and behavior.

I call upon members of The Academy with expertise in History, the Social Sciences, the Humanities, and the Arts. I urge you to consider and then forthrightly discuss in the public realm what your own respective disciplines can illuminate about efforts to circumscribe knowledge and to destroy diversity.

In 1984, the Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Denver challenged his freshmen students to engage in "the tradition of liberal thought, the thought that keeps the mind active and free to consider options and possibilities." Dean Thomas Bambrey cautioned students against the quest for certainty, advising that in their four years of exposure to liberal studies, they would learn, if all went well, "to see that in all broad areas of life there are no single correct answers, that knowledge has a way of generating more questions, that inquiry is good for you, and that the world is often more ambiguous than it appears."/35/

Another scholar of liberal learning, Wayne Booth, underscored the ambiguity of knowledge and the related function of a college education. Although Booth's gender usage is now a generation out of date, his fundamental argument still speaks to us.

In science, in philosophy...in theology, in psychology and anthropology, and in literature...we are presented with accounts of our universe and of our place in it that as men we can respond to in only one manly way: by thinking about them, by speculating and testing our speculations.

We know before we start that our thought is doomed to incompleteness and error and downright chanciness. Even the most rigorously scientific view will be changed, we know, within a decade, or perhaps even by tomorrow....

A college education, surely, should throw every student into a regular torrent of speculation, and it should school him to recognize the different standards of validation proper to different kinds of claims to truth....

It is not the business of a college to determine or limit what a man will know; if it tries to, he will properly resent its impositions, perhaps immediately, perhaps ten years later when the imposed information is outmoded. But I think it is the business of a college to help teach a man how to use his mind for himself./36/

In his 1967 treatise, Is There Any Knowledge that a Man Must Have?, Booth emphasized that a person who does not take an active stance in grappling with this world and all of its complexities, and who does not reserve judgment unto himself, risks being "enslaved by the political and social intentions of other men, benign or malign."/37/

Sir Isaiah Berlin in his last and most memorable book, The Crooked Timber of Humanity, wrote that

uniformity kills; that men can live full lives only in societies with an open texture, in which variety is not merely tolerated but is approved and encouraged; that the richest development of human potentialities can occur only in societies in which there is a wide spectrum of opinions--the freedom for what J.S. Mill called "experiments in living" in which there is liberty of thought and expression, views and opinions clash with each other, societies in which friction and even conflict are permitted, albeit with rules to control them and prevent destruction and violence, that subjection to a single ideology, no matter how reasonable and imaginative, robs men of freedom and vitality.... To crush all diversity and even conflict in the interest of uniformity is...to crush life itself./38/

In a magnificent moment of observation, Berlin drew upon Immanuel Kant, noting that

"Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made." And for that reason no perfect solution is, not merely in practice, but in principle, possible in human affairs, and any determined attempt to produce it is likely to lead to suffering, disillusionment and failure./39/

The challenge before The Academy

This past summer I spent two weeks on a ranch in South Dakota. It was a marvelous vacation. With members of my family I rode horseback several hours each morning over different trails through the rolling hills. But there was a certain sadness that I also experienced on the ranch. I learned about brome grass.

During the Dust Bowl era, the U.S. Department of Agriculture experimented in ways to prevent soil erosion in the midwestern states. Brome grass promised early success and it flourished. Wherever the brome grass has rooted itself, the original prairie grass and its beautiful wild flowers have been destroyed. And all the diverse life forms dependent upon the prairie grass ecology--from bees to birds--similarly have disappeared. Thus, today, the tall and coarse fields of brome grass extend for miles, quiet and dull.

There is an intellectual brome grass sweeping across American education in the form of policies shaped by positivist-realist philosophy, behaviorist psychology, and the management of Taylorism. This ideological cluster is demolishing the richness, diversity, and vitality that once characterized our academic and professional lives. If not successfully challenged and reversed by The Academy, I think we can anticipate no challenge from other quarters. What is at stake, colleagues, is the ultimate quality of our society and our right as academics to help shape the future.

Notes

1. Colorado House Bill No. 1187, Concerning the Reorganization of Higher Education, 7 May 1985.[Back]

2. Brief submitted by Plaintiff to the U.S. District Court of Colorado in the case of Marie E. Wirsing v. The Board of Regents of the University of Colorado, et al., No. 90-B-38, 17 May 1990.[Back]

3. Council of Learned Societies in Education, Standards for Academic and Professional Instruction in Foundations of Education, Educational Studies and Educational Policy Studies (Ann Arbor, MI: Prakken Publications, 1986), 5-6. The Standards originally were published in 1977.[Back]

4. Article X, Laws of the Regents, as published in the University of Colorado Faculty Handbook, 1983 Edition, 79.[Back]

5. Judge Lewis Babcock, Memorandum Opinion and Order, U.S. District Court of Colorado, Marie E. Wirsing v. The Board of Regents of the University of Colorado, et al., No. 90-B-38, 28 June 1991.[Back]

6. Marie E. Wirsing v. The Board of Regents of the University of Colorado, et al., U.S. 10th Circuit Court of Appeals, No. 90-1215, 4 October 1991.[Back]

7. Alexander Meiklejohn, "Teachers and Controversial Questions," in Cynthia Stokes Brown (ed.), Alexander Meiklejohn, Teacher of Freedom (Berkeley, CA: Meiklejohn Civil Liberties Institute, 1981), 214.[Back]

8. Marie E. Wirsing, "Academic Freedom and Teaching Foundations of Education: A Personal Memoir," Educational Foundations (Winter 1991): 7032; Wirsing, "Faculty Evaluations and Academic Freedom," Montana Professor 1.2 (Spring 1991): 1, 8-11; Wirsing, "A Reply to Zirkel," Phi Delta Kappan (September 1991): 94, 96.[Back]

9. David Caute, The Great Fear (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978), 53.[Back]

10. The CU Privilege and Tenure Committee ruled in my behalf in 1989; the Board of Regents ignored their recommendations.[Back]

11. Committee C on College and University Teaching, Research, and Publication, the American Association of University Professors, "Mandated Assessment of Educational Outcomes," Academe (July-August 1991): 49-56. [Rpt. in this issue of TMP.][Back]

12. Ibid., 56.[Back]

13. Letter from Lawrence Poston, Department of English, The University of Illinois at Chicago, 10 October 1991.[Back]

14. John G. Miles v. Denver Public Schools, U.S. 10th circuit Court of Appeals, No. 90-1122, 11 September 1991.[Back]

15. Holmes Group, Tomorrow's Teachers: A Report of the Holmes Group, excerpted in The Chronicle of Higher Education (9 April 1986): 27-37; and Carnegie Task Force on Teaching as a Profession, A Nation Prepared: Teachers for the 21st Century, excerpted in the The Chronicle of Higher Education (21 May 1986): 43-54.[Back]

16. Erwin V. Johanningmeier, "Assessing Assessment: An Introduction," Accountability and Assessment in Higher Education (Tampa, FL: The Society of Professors of Education, 1988), 2; and Trudy W. Banta and Homer S. Fisher, "Tennessee's Performance Funding Policy: L'Enfant Terrible of Assessment at Age Eight," in Erwin V. Johanningmeier (ed.), op. cit., 28.[Back]

17. Committee C on College and University Teaching, Research, and Publication, AAUP, op. cit., 49.[Back]

18. National Commission of Excellence in Education, A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform (Washington, D.C.: U.S. GPO, April 1983).[Back]

19. The National Governors Conference Report, "The Jeffersonian Compact." See Dan Goodgame, "Calling for an Overhaul," Time (9 October 1989): 60, 69; also Edward B. Fiske, "Governors and White House Plan Vast Schooling Reform," The New York Times (26 February 1990): A12.[Back]

20. Eric Anderson, "Teaching Reforms Proposed," The Denver Post (6 September 1991): 3B.[Back]

21. See an early analysis of this trend toward a national system of education based on similar policies and ideology: Arthur E. Wise, Legislated Learning: The Bureaucratization of the American Classroom (Berkeley, CA: U of CA Press, 1979).[Back]

22. E.g., see Joint Committee on Testing: American Association of School Administrators, Council of Chief State School Officers, National Association of Secondary School Principles, Testing, Testing, Testing (Washington, D.C.: National Educational Association, 1962); Banesh Hoffman, The Tyranny of Testing (New York: The Crowell-Collier Publishing Company, 1962); Eugene R. Howard, "Positive Side of Test-Score Debate Cited," School & University Review (University of Colorado-Boulder, Fall 1979): 1-2, 7; David Owen, None of the Above: Behind the Myth of Scholastic Aptitude (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1985); and Gerald W. Bracey, "Why Can't They Be Like We Were?" Phi Delta Kappan (October 1991): 104-117.[Back]

23. Citing Governor Roy Romer, "U.S. Kids at Bottom of the Class," The Denver Post (1 October 1991): 1.[Back]

24. David Caute, op. cit., 415, 417, 425.[Back]

25. Arthur O. Lovejoy, "Academic Freedom," in Edwin R. A. Seligman and Alvin Johnson, eds., Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, Volume I (New York: Macmillan, 1930), 384.[Back]

26. Ibid.[Back]

27. Frederick W. Taylor, Principles of Scientific Management (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1911; reprinted by Easton Hive Publishing Company, 1985).[Back]

28. Rensis Likert, The Human Organization: Its Management and Value (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1967).[Back]

29. Thomas J. Peters and Robert H. Waterman Jr., In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America's Best-Run Companies (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, Inc., 1982).[Back]

30. Janice Farmer Weaver was among the first scholars to criticize the adoption of an obsolete Taylorism in the management of teacher education institutions. See Janice Farmer Weaver, "Scientific Management and Teacher Education," The Educational Forum (May 1974): 485-92.[Back]

31. David Ehrenfeld, The Arrogance of Humanism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 112, 126.[Back]

32. Ibid., 112-13.[Back]

33. Ibid., 113.[Back]

34. Eugene Linden, "Will We Run Low on Food?" Time (19 August 1991): 48.[Back]

35. Thomas Bambrey, "On Understanding the Liberal Arts," unpublished address, University of Denver, May 1984.[Back]

36. Wayne C. Booth, "Is There Any Knowledge That a Man Must Have?" in Wayne C. Booth, ed., The Knowledge Most Worth Having (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), 22, 25, 27.[Back]

37. Ibid., 26.[Back]

38. Isaiah Berlin, The Crooked Timber of Humanity (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991), 46.[Back]

39. Ibid., 48.[Back]

[The Montana Professor 1.3, Fall 1991 <http://mtprof.msun.edu>]