Posted by Todd Zywicki:
Interesting Article on Campus Intellectual Diversity:
Thoughtful column by Professor KC Johnson in Inside Higher Ed on the
question of intellectual diversity in higher education,
[1]Transparency or a 'Selig Strategy'?
As Commissioner Bud Selig and several prominent players attempted
to evade subpoenas for recent House of Representatives hearings on
baseball's steroid problem, Rep. Henry Waxman observed, "What
strikes me is that baseball doesn't want to investigate it and they
don't want us to investigate it." The California congressman summed
up baseball's policy as "don't know, don't tell."
This "Selig Strategy" could also describe the academy's response to
indications that the nation's humanities and social sciences
departments suffer from a lack of intellectual and programmatic
diversity. Calls for outside inquiries have been denounced as
violations of academic freedom, while few if any signs exist that
the very internal academic procedures that created the problem can
successfully resolve it.
Instead of imitating baseball's strategy of trying to cover up
relevant information, the academy should bring transparency to the
now-cloaked world of faculty hires and in-class instruction,
compiling and publicizing the necessary data, probably through
college and department Web sites. Such a response would allow the
educational establishment to employ the habits of the academic
world, namely reasoned analysis through use of hard evidence, to
address (and, when false, disprove) specific allegations of
ideological bias. At the same time, the exposure associated with
greater transparency might deter those professors inclined to abuse
their classroom authority for indoctrination.
Johnson also lays out his view of how this greater transparency could
work.
References
1. http://insidehighered.com/views/2005/04/01/johnson
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