A recent graduate of a top law school writes in to take issue with my benign appraisal of the change in regental rules in Texas bearing on classroom teaching:
I was a tenure-track assistant professor [in a humanities discipline] at a small liberal arts college.... The administration and the students loved me; my colleagues regarded me and my methods as avant-garde, radical even, and not in a good way. Everything I did provoked comment. This was a big shock, because before arriving on this campus I had adjuncted for a dozen years and (while I had won teaching awards) was certainly not considered to be one of the edgy/hip folks. None of my new colleagues was active in the academy at large; they proudly regarded themselves as members of a ‘teaching faculty’ as opposed to a ‘research faculty’ (an obviously silly divide – you can’t be a good teacher if you haven’t kept up with your field in a decade or more). I left that job for many reasons, although I felt fairly secure that I would get tenure. Even though my colleagues didn’t ‘get’ me, I was professionally active (which they liked) and the students really liked me, so my classes were always wildly oversubscribed; I generally taught three times as many students as any of my departmental colleagues in a give semester, and with a 3/4 teaching load that disparity is not insignificant. They would have looked ridiculous denying tenure to someone with publications and service and high student approval, particularly since both the president and the provost had invited me to sit on various special committees.
At any rate, I ended up in law school in part because I spent three years doing amateur legal research in many areas, including academic freedom, and getting a law degree seemed like a good way out; so I have a bit of experience with the “but are expected not to introduce into their teaching controversial matter that has no relation to his or her subject” clause. I am writing to tell you that the Texas language – which does, indeed, track the AAUP language (c. 1970-something) – will do absolutely nothing to protect a faculty member whose colleagues want to persecute her. It’s bad language, and I think faculty should protest it. It is an invitation to witch hunt faculty whose teaching methods are innovative. Frankly, the *first* clause is all that’s needed: “Faculty members are entitled to freedom in the classroom in discussing his or her subject” – full stop. That’s what academic freedom is all about. The second clause has nothing to do with academic freedom at all; it has to do with pedagogy, and every school has committees and such to evaluate such matters under controlled conditions. The first clause already has a restrictive element – you can discuss *your subject* your way; it doesn’t give you license to talk about your recent fly fishing vacation in your Chaucer class. That second clause opens a real Pandora’s Box; it puts a faculty member at the mercy of random colleagues on at least two levels – whether the material she teaches is controversial, and whether it relates to her subject. But it also lets the lousy teacher – the one who uses class time to shmooze about random things that are non-controversial but unrelated to the subject – entirely off the hook. This is the kind of clause that chills academic freedom, particularly on a campus, like mine, where many of the faculty are frozen in time.
This academic freedom language doesn’t protect academic freedom, and it gives no recourse to the faculty members who *need* help when attacked.
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