 |
 |
|
 |
| |
| |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
Holinger Responds to SB 5 |
|
April 15, 2005 Members of the Senate Education Committee: I write to urge you to oppose SB-5, the measure popularly known as the “student bill of rights.” I write from my perspective as chair of the Berkeley campus’s Department of History (ranked No. 2 in the nation by US News and World Report in their recent evaluation) and as the author of several studies in the history of higher education. I was the chief organizer of the conference at Berkeley revisiting the “loyalty oath” controversy of more than 50 years ago, in which I enlisted four former UC Presidents (Clark Kerr, David Saxon, David Gardner, and Jack Pelteson) for a symposium I chaired. I speak also as a Berkeley Ph.D. (1970) and a product of the public schools of California. I am also a member (and chair-elect) of the academic freedom committee of the American Association of University Professors. I would be testifying in person at your hearing on Wednesday but I have a class to teach on my own campus, and I do not think it right to cancel the class even for the purpose of appearing before you. Hence this mailing. All institutions are imperfect, but the bill before you does not help us to diminish the imperfections of our universities and colleges, and if enacted could easily create new imperfections. Why doesn’t it help us? Briefly, because we already have in place procedures for protecting students against intimidation and for making sure that classroom instruction and indeed the entire research programs of academic departments reflect the entire domain of warranted truths in any discipline. I want to elaborate on this point below. But first a brief answer to a second question: How do bills of this type risk the creating of new imperfections? By inviting non-professional criteria for evaluation, by encouraging the false idea that the content of teaching and research can be helpfully classified in popular political categories, and by inviting costly litigation. Now let me elaborate on the procedures we already have to deal with complaints that academics are not meeting their obligations. Not only do we have grievance procedures and institutionalized responsibility for examining on an ad hoc basis complaints of unprofessional conduct. Beyond that, and more importantly, department chairs, deans, provosts, and faculty review committees are continually involved in maintaining the professionalism of all academic programs. Appointments, promotions, merit reviews of individual faculty, and regular reviews of departments and schools enable academia to regulate itself in response to the progress of learning in given fields. "Professionalism” is the key. All professions are imperfect, as I say, but it is professionalism that has made Berkeley one of the finest universities in the world and my own department rivaled only by Yale and Princeton in my discipline. People who really know the subject matter being taught are the best qualified to decide what presentation is “balanced,” or “biased,” or in any other way unprofessional. When the charge is made that some instructor is acting unprofessionally, or that a given program does not reflect the full panorama of knowledge in the relevant fields, we have a set of interlocking circles of review to address the problem. Let me explain how this works. Any particular disciplinary community exists within what we might see as a series of concentric circles of accountability in an informal but vitally important structure of cognitive authority. This structure of cognitive authority is imperfectly understood by many of academia’s critics, yet it is the foundation for “peer-review” throughout the learned world. In order to maintain its standing in the learned world as a whole, a given community must keep the communities nearest to it persuaded that it is behaving responsibly, and it must also, partly through the support of these neighboring communities, diminish whatever skepticism about its operations might arise in more distant parts of the learned world, and beyond, in the society which scientists and scholars do, after all, serve. So the structure of cognitive authority moves out from particle physics to physics to natural science to science to the learned world as a whole, and then to the most informed members of the public. The farther you get from the technical particulars of the field, the less authority you have to decide what should be going on, but in a democratic society there is some authority distributed all the way out. It is the job of deans and provosts and faculty review committees to keep abreast of these trans-disciplinary conversations, and to pressure particular departments and schools to change their way of doing things—to achieve, indeed, balance— when and if the parts of the learned world most qualified to judge are truly dubious about their research programs and their attendant teaching and public service activities. Do academics always get it right? Of course not. But the kinds of anecdotal evidence brought up repeatedly by advocates of SB-5 and other bills like it in other states miss the point. Even when particular cases of bad conduct by faculty prove to be true (as often they do not!) we need to remember that all professions have problems with the enforcement of their own norms, AND that the academic professions are among the most self-correcting and flexible of professions because of the frequency of institutionalized, cross-disciplinary reviews. Academia serves society, but it does so the most effectively if its autonomy is respected rather than undercut by state authority. The University
of California, of all of the institutions in our state, is one
of the most effective. The Berkeley campus was just rated second
only to Harvard in all of the world’s universities in
an evaluation carried out by the Times of London (and even ahead
of Harvard in the reputation of its faculty). What more can
we do to prove to you that we are doing our job well? I am proud
to be part of this institution, and I hope that you share enough
of my pride in it to protect it from being damaged by this bill.
If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Yours,
Back to Larkin-Horowitz Exchange
|