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Thursday, September 27, 2007
Burke on the Obligations of Academic Freedom
Tim Burke has a piece in The Minnesota Review. What do you think of this bit, for example?
In particular, the system of tenure, allegedly the cornerstone of academic freedom, often acts perversely in the opposite direction. The tenure system sometimes suppresses rather than enhances autonomy and freedom among graduate students and junior faculty during their most crucial period of professionalization. Moving outside of established consensus views of topics and methodologies as a junior scholar creates a very serious risk to an academic career. Junior scholars are encouraged to be original but often only within very narrow paradigmatic definitions of originality. While both academics and non-academics have heard tenure “horror stories” in which clearly qualified candidates have been punished for perceived non-conformity or unorthodoxy, the real problem is subtler. Senior scholars who break cover and exhibit open brutality towards junior faculty are at least slightly unusual. More important by far are the small, pervasive, and sometimes unconscious ways that tenured scholars are able to direct or channel the intellectual labor of untenured scholars.
Mark Bauerlein has call this a problem of “groupthink,” but he mischaracterizes it as a narrow consensus about political convictions. It is true that groupthink can include political elements, but more often than not, it represents an implicit and relatively narrow agreement on a range of methodological, intellectual, canonical, and scholarly postures and procedures that define and bound a discipline or subject field, practices which are infrequently defended in affirmative, deliberate, well-reasoned terms but which are simply assumed or implied as necessary orthodoxies. Groupthink does not usually involve direct sanction. It is registered through a thousand tiny cuts: in anonymous peer review, in tribalized declarations of canonical orthodoxy in conferences and workshops, in the petty cut-and-thrust of graduate school one-upmanship that is often cued or choreographed by faculty, in sly asides, in sentiments attributed to “the discipline” to which the speaker professes personal but helpless disagreement, in private evaluations of job candidacies, in footnotes and marginalia. Ultimately, for many academics, groupthink becomes an entirely internalized sense of vague paranoia, a sense that scholarly work is always being surveilled or scrutinized. (Yet another irony: this is where the efforts of some conservative critics to monitor teaching and scholarship hardly help to move academia towards a culture of openness, but instead neatly reinforce panoptic pressures.)
We’ve sort of heard that before, of course. But it’s well-said, I think.
Comments
I think it’s a tricky question as a certain amount of “groupthink” is inherent in the academic trades—or any other cultural business. When Kuhn’s notion of the paradigm is translated into social terms it becomes groupthink. So, does tenure artificially increase the groupthink that’s inherent in the intellectual business or is it merely consistent with and supportive of it?
The real challenge is to come up with an institutional means that is designed to work against groupthink. How about a scheme where accomplishment in an intellectual specialty gets you a Ph. D. and a job, but no more. To get an associate professorship you have to demonstrate generalized competence in your discipline, which might be demonstrated by teaching a broad introductory course for lower-division undergraduates, or writing about your discipline for the general educated public. For a full professorship you must demonstrate competence in a second specialty in an allied discipline. Just what qualifies as an “allied disciipline” is obviously a matter of some delicacy. Too close to one’s original speciality and the requirement no longer serves its broadening purpose. Too far, and meeting the requirment becomes too burdensome for many to meet it.
If you wish to retain tenue under this scheme, grant it at the full professor level. Prior to tenure one works on multi-year contracts.
To me the specific institutional forms are interesting. It isn’t really individual or mass psychology so much.
I’d really like to see an analysis of the way school rankings control hiring and thereby control departmental point of view in the best departments. It’s a lot of feedback loops: the consensus departments get the best rankings, place the most graduates, and attract the best graduate students, reinforcing the consensus. And this dynamic also marginalizes dissident or exceptional points of view (e.g. Notre Dame in economics) and even less-respected philosophical topics. (Though I’ve been told that Phil. now has a double track: a few prestigious elite jobs in philosophy of mind, science, logic, and language, and then some less prestigious fields like ethics—ethics is a twofer because there are jobs in med schools etc., but also it’s a girl job so you can get your gender equality numbers up.
Brian Leiter reads like a cartelmaster. As I understand, someone at Crooked Timber wrote about this.
Tenure makes it worse, especially because apparently retirement can’t be forced any more. I don’t know whether something has changed or whether I’m just learning the way of the world, but grad students seem more servile and ingratiating than I remember. Everywhere connections and networks seem more imprtant, and talent less important than before.
But I would say that.
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This has been a test.
I’m a big fan of Tim’s, but I think his opposition of “groupthink” to “innovation” is too simplistic. Academic units generally, and academic departments especially, are institutions that exist to adapt and refine existing bodies of knowledge to suit new circumstances.
Specializations of this sort are one of the byproducts of groupthink, but they only displace groupthink to another level. From my point of view, the issue is not groupthink per se, but whether the group is truly responding to problems important enough to interest those outside the group. In this vein, Sam Weber has some interesting essays about institutions that seem less in thrall to the individual author as innovator.
For my part, I think the most important and influential innovations are likely to come out of a group of writers and thinkers responding to and refining one another, which is of course another, more positive version of groupthink. And some “innovations,” like, say Pound’s theories of economics, cannot be properly assessed until they are weighed against the collected disciplinary knowledge of professional economists. So even the most individual or idiosyncratic innovation needs to be picked up and discussed by other scholars to be recognized as contributing something new to the current discussion. So how is this phenomenon NOT groupthink?
I’m also curious about what relation Tim might find between groupthink and the “wisdom of crowds,” because such arguments have become the most conventional justification for the value of blogs, etc. I don’t mind Tim challenging the conventional wisdom in this way, but I would like to see how regards these other, more benign versions of groupthink.
DM
I wouldn’t call voluntary collaboration a form of groupthink. Groupthink is when everyone in a group implicitly knows that certain principles must be unquestioned. Usually these principle are asserted at some level of training and seldom spoken of again. Those who fail or refuse to honor key principles tend to find themselves leaving the system, sometimes rudely expelled and sometimes quietly drifting away.
My surmise is that the first year of grad school is when the paradigms are imposed, though probably the best undergrad schools put the hammer down earlier. A friend of mine tells me that he uses a recommendation code for bright students, hard-working students who don’t play the game: “creative and original” (which he translated as “nut case”.)
In my contacts with trained humanities professionals, I frequently have experience the “methodological doubletake”. I say something prohibited, it is immediately recognized, there’s a slight panic and a fraction of a second of hesitation while a polite response ia being formulated. “John is a very nice person [or, an annoying person I’ll probably see again], but he’s not a professional and he just doesn’t understand....“.
Often the response is of the “not my department” sort: “In recent years, political economy has not been regarded as part of economics per se.....”
And yeah, if a physicist or a mathematician or a biologist responded to me that way it would be perfectly OK, because I don’t know anything about those field. I just don’t think that the people I’m thinking of really have enough of mental advantage over me to justify the condescension, and often enough they’re junior players who don’t really know why they think what they think, and are terrified that someone might catch them thnking about a forbidden proposition.
And as I said, the algorithmic objectification of hiring, promotion, departmental ratings, and acceptance by grad schools (a fairly recent innovation) produces feedback loops which have the effect of progressively narrowing each discipline. By now, it seems that the main way for a department to upgrade is to use shitloads of money to lure away already-established faculty. The only other way it can happen would be for new people on a low-ranking department to publish influential papers within the existing paradigm, but if that happens often the up-and-coing guy will be hired away. As far as I know, the possibility is nil that a department will be upgraded when it develops a genuinely new approach, or because the professional consensus changes about what philosophy should be.
I agree that the narrowing is one of the unfortunate consequences of groupthink, but I also think that discussion or debate over certain key contested assumptions is another form of “voluntary collaboration,” and one that is very important.
This is how the amorphous group of texts we might call “theory” was incorporated into much of the literary curriculum: it’s not that everyone woke up all of a sudden agreeing with Foucault or Adorno, but because they followed discussions of these writers and decided that there was something of value in them that was provoking debate. Tim himself has made this point. But I still think that his initial distinction between group and individual thinking is a misleading picture of how debates proceed, within and between disciplines.
Having said that, it may well be that Philosophy has its own ways of dealing with disagreement and methodological debate, and maybe it doesn’t accept “contested concepts” in the same way, or perhaps rules certain kinds of questions out of bounds. If that’s the case, that’s too bad.