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POLITICAL EDUCATION.
David Horowitz in an article appearing in the "The Weekly Standard" comments on the politicisation of higher education in America.
David Horowitz is the author of Indoctrination U: The Left's War AgainstAcademic Freedom.
While he refers to the American situation, is there any doubt that the same or similar attitudes infect our educational establishments in Australia and Britain?
(Reviewed by David Hughes-Jones)
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David Howowitz refers to the latest response to complaints about the politicisation of higher education in the US.and criticises the American
Association of University Professors who he claims have embraced a novel view. The AAUP says;-
"It is not indoctrination for professors to expect students to comprehend ideas and apply knowledge that is accepted as true within a relevant discipline."
Under this precept; put forth in the association's recent report, Freedom in the Classroom, teachers are no
longer held to standards of scholarly or scientific or intellectually responsible discourse, but to whatever is
"accepted as true within a relevant discipline".
With this formulation,Howowitz says that
"the AAUP jettisons the traditional understanding of what constitutes a liberal education" and "ratifies -a transformation of the university that is already well advanced."
Supporting his claim he points to the many newly minted academic "disciplines" have appeared since 1960 that are the result not of scholarship or scientific developments but of political pressures brought to bear by ideological sects.For example he draws attention to the discipline of "Womens Studies" being the most important of these new fields. This discipline acknowledges its origins and mission in political terms. The preamble to the constitution of the National Women's Studies Association proclaims:
"Women's studies : is `equipping women not only to enter society as whole, as
productive human beings, but to transform the -world to one' that will be free of all oppression."
This leaves no one in any doubt that this is the statement of a political cause not a program of scholarly inquiry.
Howowitz believes that the AAUP has issued its defence of indoctrination fully cognisant of the fact that these new academic disciplines
are essentialy introduced and supported to instil an ideology in their stud ents:
Besides Womans Studies there are for instance;-
, African-American studies,
peace studies,
cultural studies,
Chicano studies,
gay-lesbian studies,
postcolonial studies,
whiteness studies,
communications studies
, community studies
and
recently politicised disciplines such as "cultural anthropology" and "sociology".
While the University of California Santa Cruz,(women's studies department) has renamed itself the "Department of Feminist Studies" presumably to emphasis and signify that it is a political training facility. Howowitz says that it has done so without any complaint or caution from university administrators.( or the A.A.U.P.) is significant.
The association's new, doctrine,shields these sectarian creeds from scrutiny by the scientific method.
and points to political control of a discipline as an adequate basis for closing off critical debate.
It is quite a novel idea that political power can establish truth ; it is a conception so contrary to the intellectual foundations of the modern research university that the even AAUP committee had to shroud it with a disingenuous compromise statement such as
;
"truth within a relevant discipline".
When a new edition of the AAUP's official journal, Academe, appeared, it featured two articles
defending the feminist indoctrination of university students. The first was "Impassioned teaching" by AAUP
chapter president Pamela Caughie, head of the women's studies department at Loyola University. Caughie
wrote:;
"I feel I am doing my job well when students become practitioners of feminist analysis and committed to
feminist politics."
Howowitz observes that
" This is the attitude of a missionary seeking to ground her students in feminist dogma, not a
professor seeking to educate them about women."
In the second article, Julie Kilmer of Olivet College describes
"the need to publicly expose and intimidate students who resist such indoctrination ( and includes suggestions how this may be acomplished)" .
The author says that these two articles reveal the true intentions and mindset of the AAUP .
Some defenders of the AAUP's position say ;-
"indoctrination is not really indoctrination if the student can object to a
professor's classroom advocacy without fear of reprisal.".
Howowitz questions the honesty of the AAUP because the following questions are not even raised let alone answered;-
" how would students know that there was no penalty for refusing to embrace a professor's political assumptions?" and " How would they deal with Kilmer's threats for instance, to expose them and break down their resistance, or resist the pressure implicit in Caughie's "impassioned teaching"?"
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