Thoughtful column by Professor KC Johnson in Inside Higher Ed on the question of intellectual diversity in higher education, 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.
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