Q: Should I say something to my department?
I don’t want to start a battle and I don’t want to infringe on academic freedom, but I also am very, very uncomfortable with another professor in my department teaching such obvious junk. This isn’t a simple matter of differing historical perspectives, but of teaching blatant quackery as fact. Should I say something? This particular professor has been teaching at our school for about 3-4 years but we rarely see him and I don’t think he has any political allies in the department. He has a Ph.D. in history from a good school, but this area isn’t lacking in adjuncts and he could be easily replaced. FWIW, I have a good relationship with my department chair.
I thought about asking him face to face, but frankly he gives me some very creepy vibes.
Never mind that this adjunct has a Ph.D. from a good school: Arthur Butz was at Northwestern. Academic freedom does not allow a geography or geology professor to teach that the world is flat. If this nonsense really is as bad as you say it is (it sounds like the work of Velikovsky?), any chair of any reputable department would want to put a stop to it.
ReplyDeleteBut, how much can you trust your department chair? If you were in the physics department in which I recently took over as Chair, you could bring me one of these handouts, and I would have a word with this adjunct by myself, and I wouldn't mention you. Why should I? If he left a handout lying around where you could find it, I may just as well have found it by myself. I would then handle this situation between me and him, and I wouldn't involve you, unless you specifically told me you wanted to be involved, and I would try to talk you out of that, since as an adjunct, you're too vulnerable. But of course, not all departments are run as well as I like to think mine is. So be careful.
There's no reason for this to become a battle between personalities if it's simply a matter of academic scholarship. Copy the handout and send it anonymously to the chair. Say that this is what is being taught in the class and that you, as a concerned colleague/parent/student/alumnus/... would like the chair to investigate to determine if the topics are really unreasonable.
ReplyDeleteAdjuncts are usually ridden pretty close for content in classes, so somebody - maybe the dept chair - surely has some knowledge of this person's syllabus. I like and do not like Ben's suggestion. The anonymity of it troubles me a bit, but I don't see any reason to come out swinging either. (I know that's a wishy-washy response.)
ReplyDeleteIf this scholar that's being studied is so nutty, perhaps it is important to get that info out there. I guess I'd have a very light conversation with the instructor first, creepy vibe or not.
This varies a lot. As far as I can tell (from my own experience and reading this page), adjuncts are often either micromanaged or left entirely on their own, with a fig-leaf's worth of supervision. The situation can also change from one pole to the other depending on who's supposed to be doing the supervising. At a research-oriented university, the chances for the fig-leaf approach increase considerably, since TT faculty members aren't really getting much credit for either teaching or service, and many have little interest in either. The whole point of using adjuncts to teach intro classes, after all, is to free them to do more interesting things, and that purpose is lost if they instead spend all their time managing the horde of adjuncts that results. So they fob the job off on a few people who are either way, way too interested (read control freaks) or completely checked out (read deadwood). My institution actually has a pretty decent balance between clear guidelines and training and freedom to plan one's own classes, but I think that's rare, and the result of very hard work by relatively few dedicated people. And they (and the department as a whole) are feeling pretty overwhelmed by the burden of supervising, evaluating, hiring, etc. a contingent faculty that vastly outnumbers the TT faculty.
DeleteThis is the total brainfuck that academia has become. The shit's really going to hit the fan in ten months when Romney gets elected and historians start teaching that Joseph Smith was in Missouri when he found holy gold tablets of truth that told him to wear magic underwear. I've already got fucktard colleagues who think Jesus walked on water. If we elect Gingrich, maybe he'll use his big swinging history proffie cred to completely rewrite history so that everybody believes Chauncey Gardiner was the 36th president and that he walked on water.
ReplyDeleteSonny sits by his window and thinks to himself how it's strange that some rooms are like cages.
Frod and Ben are right. Academic freedom comes with an obligation to call bullshit on the crackpot theories. A couple of additional thoughts:
ReplyDeletePlay the ball and not the man. This can be a hard distinction to draw, and sometimes people deliberately blur it. But your problem is with the idea being taught, not the teacher.
For a teaching issue, does your department have a clear curriculum on this issue? That also helps depersonalize the matter.
And there's a distinction between teaching that a crackpot theory is true versus examining why it is false. (Of course I haven't seen the handout, so I don't know what your colleague way saying about the theory you mention.) I don't teach young earth creationism in my History of Hamster Husbandry course, but I do discuss the fact that this theory exists and why it fails to fit the evidence.
Re-reading the thirsty, I realize my last comment was off base. If he's writing a blog promoting the theory, it seems unlikely that he'll be debunking it in class. I should have paid better attention.
DeleteTo borrow a phrase from Rick Perry: Oops.
I'm assuming that the handout has the adjunct's name on it. How about just anonymously slipping it into the department chair's mailbox?
ReplyDeleteI may be a coward (or a hypocrite), but I'd go for some variation on Beaker Ben's and/or Bison's suggestion: help the handout drift its way back to the chair. I don't see any need to write anything to accompany it, but if you feel the need (and your chair has any sense of humor/degree of cultural literacy), a simple post-it with "WTF?" and perhaps the url of the professor's website -- to make it clear that this probably wasn't just a provocative class exercise to get students thinking (which I'd otherwise suspect) -- would probably do the trick.
ReplyDeleteIf I were a tenure-track proffie beyond my first year or so, and was reasonably competent that the department was basically functional, I'd probably make an appointment to talk to the chair, and let him/her take the lead. If I had tenure, I'd make an appointment with the chair and perhaps be a bit more forceful if (s)he seemed inclined to blow it off (while being aware that personnel matters are still confidential). It's a tricky situation, since academic freedom *is* involved, but so is a course in the department's core curriculum, which should have some agreed-upon standards. I'd prefer a department structure in which all the professors teaching the class were in on the ongoing conversation about those standards, but, whether or not that's the case, there should be guidelines, goals, etc.
I'm just going to reinforce what everyone else said, but it's worthwhile: the department needs to know - and do something about - an instructor who is undermining the department with bullshit.
ReplyDelete(Unfortunately, Reg, adjunct supervision often isn't very substantial, at least not in the departments I'm familiar with. Adjuncts are often used - abused - to teach evening classes and satellite site classes that the T/T faculty don't want to bother with, so there's little contact. Frankly, we could use better supervision of our *tenured* faculty and their content....)