BY J. MICHAEL RIFENBURG
Guest blogger J. Michael Rifenburg teaches at the University of North Georgia. This is a letter he sent to the Dahlonega Nugget, the local newspaper in his community. It appeared there recently:
I’ve only been a college professor for a decade, but as 2017 begins, I feel my colleagues and I are under attack from outside stakeholders more so than we have been in a long time.
There seems to be a strong current of skepticism and even outright hostility directed toward professors and higher education. What’s more, these negative feelings seem largely grounded in ignorance, designed to incite more fear that professors and universities are maliciously dismantling traditional cultures and values.
Take for example, the website Professor Watchlist. This website lists a bio and picture of professors who advance a “radical agenda” in the classroom. My colleague Dr. Matthew Boedy on the Gainesville campus made this list for publically suggesting guns on campus aren’t a good idea.
Also, consider a recently released report “Making Citizens: How American Universities Teach Civics” published by the National Association of Scholars. In this report, the NAS decries what they term, the “New Civics.” I’ve never heard this term before, but the NAS uses it is describe college programs designed to help students engage in community service and civic engagement projects.
The NAS believes these service projects hide a sinister liberal and political activist agenda on the part of the universities.
The NAS specifically points an accusatory finger at the University of Colorado’s Writing Initiative for Service Engagement program run by my wonderful colleague Dr. Veronica House and argues federal dollars should not be allocated to such programs. According to the NAS, “At CU-Bolder, even learning to write a proper sentence has been suborned to progressive activism.”
Forget the fact that marrying community engagement and writing goes back to Aristotle and is exactly how the Declaration of Independence was penned. And forget the fact that service learning facilitates learning in remarkably ways and that UNG is dedicated to service learning a as a vital component of their mission.
What keeps me up at night is this growing fear of higher education and professors.
I’ll take the blame for some of this. Most professors, myself included, don’t do a good job communicating our work and research to people outside of our profession. If we are public researchers, teachers, and thinkers, then our work needs to be public and not just published in expensive journals and written in jargon-laden language.
But I’ll also chose to fight this darkness with light. Send me an email or Google my name. I’ve started posting all my course materials online and will send you research I have published for free.
Let me know if you want to sit in my class, and I’ll tell you when and where we met.
I’m a public educator whose paycheck is tied to federal and state dollars and whose career is tied to how the public views my job. Instead of being caught in yet another wave of fear, reach out to me to find out what my colleagues and I are doing with the 17,000 wonderful students at UNG.
Thank you for posting this very important voice about professors, teachers, and the standards we live by. Being a resident not far from Dalonega, do I ever hear you. My sister is a special education teacher, my daughter is a speech language pathologist, and I taught clinical research and nutrition.
The people, in my opinion, who are really afraid are those that fear what they don’t understand and that is why they fear us. If the NSA studied the wonderful work, research, and critical thinking arts, perhaps they would feel differently. What they fear most, I believe, is critical thinking that presents many different views, historical data, and new ways of viewing world events, culture studies, life patterns, and so on. Their fear equals their gun quest, however, ascertaining what they really fear is something else: insignificance, being irrelevant, and a power vacuum they are trying desperately to quench, destroy, and return to the old ways of thinking – their safety net. To accomplish their task, they are using a playbook of denigration, intimidation, and out-right-threats.
We cannot be afraid, if we fear, it gives them power and of course this is exactly what they need to power their agenda. Our power is the people we teach, our communities, our families, and our faiths, whatever they may be. This is the way we create our own pulpit, our bandbox, our voices, together loud and clear. Giving talks in schools, to the news media, in our churches, in organizations, in our local HOA boards, Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, and their are many that would welcome us. We just need ask. This is just the beginning, We are many – they are few! We must win them over to common sense and the new globe world we live in. Again, thank you for all you do.
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Dear Professor Rifenburg,
The National Association of Scholars, and I, stand by our conclusion in Making Citizens: How American Universities Teach Civics, that the New Civics suffers from gross politicization, and should be removed from the universities. We also believe that the public, via its elected representatives, has a right to oversee how their tax dollars are spent, and to fund only professors who meet the minimum professional standards that separate professional vocation from political advocacy.
I want to highlight one thing that you did not mention in your description of Making Citizens. A great deal of the New Civics is actually a “co-curricular” exercise. That means that it is run by administrators, who are using it as a way to leach authority from the faculty. We believe that removing the New Civics will restore substantial power to the faculty within the university.
We agree with you in one important particular, however: we too wish to cast light upon the darkness of academia. The public should know precisely what academics are doing with their money, and how they purport to educate their children. We are glad that you share this goal.
Respectfully yours,
David Randall
Director of Communications
National Association of Scholars
It’s difficult to convey just how frightening this McCarthyist attack is: the NAS is declaring that any professor who expresses political opinions is “unprofessional” and must be fired, and if universities won’t do it, legislators must step in to compel the purging of leftist faculty from universities by the power of the purse. This is one of the starkest attacks on academic freedom that conservatives have ever publicly announced.
Dear Mr. Wilson,
The power of the purse is an essential right of a free people. I do not believe you truly mean to argue that professors have a right to public employment in all circumstances whatsoever, as that would amount to a tyrannical imposition on the citizenry–taxation without representation, to borrow a phrase. Your argument surely has to do with the practical measures that should be taken to maximize both the rights of the citizenry to control public expenditure and the processes of academic freedom on campus.
So far as practical measures go, I gather that the AAUP position (and yours) has been to delegate all power to determine the exercise of academic freedom to the professoriate, with no role for trustees, college presidents, or the public. This is a claim with a hallowed precedent among medieval barons, who likewise equated liberty with their own enjoyment of irresponsible, unaccountable power. But the baronial claim that all liberty resided in their ancient rights to carnage and wreckage failed to endear itself to those who didn’t share their privileges. Likewise, your claim that all academic liberty resides in the professoriate’s self-assessment is no more convincing.
The NAS would, of course, be pleased if the AAUP instituted effective self-regulatory procedures to sanction professors who fail to live up to minimum professional standards. Substituting political advocacy in the classroom for education is one such dereliction.
This, of course, has nothing to do with the New Civics as such, which is indefensible in and of itself. But the broader principle is also worth stating.
Respectfully yours,
David Randall