The Chronicle of Higher Education, a rather sober venue not given to polemics (I think they edit essays pretty thoroughly), nevertheless published a strong-minded article on how graduates of American schools of education are taking over the student-life administration of many schools, converting them into propaganda mills. Click on the screenshot to read the piece. The author, Lyell Asher, is an associate professor of English at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon, which means he’s in for trouble (Portland is Antifa and Authoritarian Left Central; Asher is also an Old White Man). If you can’t see the article, judicious inquiry might yield you a copy:
Asher’s thesis is threefold. First, American schools of education are dire: he sees them as more ideologically-infused factories designed to produce “social justice warriors” than schools devoted to objective investigation of the truth, wherever that investigation goes. I can’t speak about that, but in the article’s comments you’ll see ed-school people who both agree and vehemently disagree.
Second, Asher argues that graduates who took jobs at colleges as administrators and bureaucrats (instead of professors) found that they could justify their existence by acting as professors—by propagandizing students with the views they’d acquired in ed school. He gives several examples; here is one:
How did college administrators become so involved in “training” undergraduates in subjects that are properly the domain of academic departments? It’s a complex story, and a long one. There are chapters in this story, however, and one of the most significant opened around 2004, when two administrators at the University of Delaware — both of whom have doctorates in “educational leadership” — determined that resident advisers should be thought of as residence-hall “educators.” And as educators, they needed a curriculum. Kathleen Kerr and James Tweedy said they felt “invited” to develop such a curriculum by the views of their professional organizations, the American College Personnel Association and the National Association of Student Personnel Administrators, which have more than 20,000 members between them. Delaware faculty members were not consulted.
The program Kerr and Tweedy developed, the “curricular model” (CM) for learning beyond the classroom, has had enormous influence on college administrators across the nation. Kerr and Tweedy celebrated that influence in an essay published last spring in About Campus, a professional journal for college administrators.
. . . For what’s striking about Kerr and Tweedy’s 10-year retrospective essay, besides the moving sidewalk of bureaucratic jargon, is how little content there actually is, ideological or otherwise, until one gets to the issue of status — the status of administrators themselves as “educators.” That’s when things get concrete, and personal. Above all, the authors argue, their curricular model changed “how we view ourselves as educators,” “how we think about … our own roles as educators,” and “the spaces and places on campus” administrators now “occupy.” The model is “energizing and reinvigorating to professional staff,” they report, quoting new administrators in the thralls of relevance: “I finally get to use my master’s degree.” In the penultimate paragraph they declare: “The first change for everyone involved in this transformation is deciding unequivocally that we are educators.”
Such undisguised anxiety about their status as educators might provoke sympathy were it not for the authors’ lack of anxiety about the things that actually matter — the substance of education itself and the intellectual welfare of students; their right, for example, not to be coerced into facile, unreflective orthodoxy. Judging from the essay, those aren’t even peripheral considerations.
Finally, Asher argues that this proselytizing and curriculum-changing by those trained in ed schools is turning American colleges into places where you must parrot received ideological views rather than examine them. Here I agree, at least from my experience reading about universities and seeing things like members of my own faculty, and students at my own school, urging the deplatforming and banning of “impure” speakers like Steve Bannon. Asher:
There might be nothing wrong with training students in equity and social justice were it not for the inconvenient fact that a college campus is where these ideals and others like them are to be rigorously examined rather than piously assumed. It’s the difference between a curriculum and a catechism. Do ed schools recognize that difference? Perhaps some do. But it’s significant that their largest national accrediting agency, the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education, for many years included “social justice” in its glossary of so-called “dispositions” that ed schools could consider when evaluating a candidate’s fitness for the K-12 classroom. It dropped the criteria only in 2006, after complaints from both the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education and the National Association of Scholars.
One example of the influence ed-school people have had on college curricula involves microaggressions, a concept first outlined in 2007 by Derald Wing Sue and his colleagues in the paper below (American Psychologist 62:271-286), which has been cited thousands of times and launched the bandwagon of microaggression policy in many colleges (click on screenshot to access the paper for free). I haven’t yet read it, but will today:
The authors of this paper are associated with Teachers College of Columbia University, and the article has been widely criticized for its lack of rigor by several of my recent readings, including The Rise of Victimhood Culture, the book I discussed the other day. Readers who have time should read it and weigh in below (the article is 16 pages long). Here’s Asher’s take:
The weak foundations on which this vision often rests are evident in ed-school scholarship. Take the essay generally regarded as the founding text of the recent microaggression movement, “Racial Microaggressions in Everyday Life,” whose lead author, Derald Wing Sue, is a professor of psychology and education at Teachers College. His six co-authors were also associated with Teachers College when the article was published, in American Psychologist in 2007. Among administrators especially, their essay has achieved canonical status.
Reading the article for the first time last year, I was dumbfounded — not just that it had gained such currency, but that it had ever been published in a journal with pretensions to intellectual rigor. I don’t doubt that microaggressions exist or that they can do harm, but the confidence with which Sue and his co-authors reduce complex interactions to Manichaean encounters between villains and victims is astonishing.
It goes on, but you can read Asher’s criticism of Sue et al.’s Manichaean tactics in the original article.
The paper of Sue et al., as I said, has been enormously influential in shaping American college policy towards students, how those students are treated, how they are given orientation, and how “transgressions” are punished. That’s why those of us interested in this area should read it. You’ll recognize its thesis and many of the “microaggressions” that it lists. The article has been criticized for lack of definitional specificity, absence of research to see if these microaggressions are actually seen as such by their “targets”, whether they are “aggressive” in intending to demean people, and whether they have the negative psychological effects claimed. My own view is that it’s simple civility to think out your words in advance to try to avoid statements that might be interpreted as bigoted, whether meant that way or not, also that it’s not the business of colleges to beat that lesson into students or, more important, to outline what kinds of statements are unacceptable (one, of course is that “America is a melting pot,” but see the list in Sue et al.)
h/t: Jody
