The Corruption of Post-Secondary Education – One in a (Long) Series
I have been writing this post in my head since I started this blog, as it’s prompted by an event that occurred just after I retired from my faculty position. I’m getting around to it now because a friend sent me a recent analysis of university course outlines that dovetails nicely into that story. So – a post in two parts.
I. Hiding Information at UWO
Shortly after I retired in a huff, I was in my office (my Chair did not kick me out of it upon retirement) and for a reason I don’t remember, went to the Departmental website with the intention of looking at a particular course outline for one of our courses. It had been standard practice in our Department to post on our site all of the course outlines for all the undergraduate courses that were being taught in each semester.
To my surprise, those course outlines were no longer posted. I asked a colleague about it, and was told that a directive had come down that Depts were to no longer post course outlines on their websites. Students could have access to them on the actual online sites for the courses in which they were registered, but those would require them to input their student credentials. In other words, the general public was to no longer have access to the syllabi of the courses taught at Western.
My colleague suggested they thought it was because not long ago some nutcase had gone into a classroom at U of Waterloo in which a gender studies course was being held, and stabbed two students and the professor. A terrible incident, to be sure, so the reasoning is that course outlines available to the public will allow crazy people to find out where and when courses of which they disapprove are being taught and then go and attack those in the classroom. Of course, this has not ever happened before or since, but you can’t be too careful, eh?
Thus, bowing to pressure from the Usual Faculty Suspects, the UWO Admin had ordered that course outlines with this information could not be made public. I was distressed – no, pissed off – by this, and went to see the Dept Chair to get confirmation that was what was going on. He confirmed it, and also mentioned in passing that some had suggested that we post course outlines that have the classrooms and meeting times deleted, but that was decided to be too much work.
I said ‘If I were still teaching I could prepare a version of my course outline with that information removed in six seconds’. He just looked at me.
Having recently looked again at the Dept website, I note that a sort of workaround has been found. One can view and download the syllabi from offerings of the course in previous years. Of course, if the instructor of the course changes, the previous year’s syllabi may not be very accurate, and a course that was not offered previously will have no info posted about it. I went to the websites of some other Depts in the Faculty and found they do the same: post previous year’s syllabi. I found some of those posted syllabi quite interesting, but will save any thoughts on them for another post.
[It is an irony lost on The Usual Faculty Suspects that said faculty, holding the safest and cushiest jobs on planet earth, are utterly consumed by worries about ‘safety’. Note, however, that students screaming into the faces of other students who are in a graduation ceremony – that is not a safety issue.]
I very much doubt any of you have much interest in reading university course outlines in any case. The thing is, if you wonder where the shit we all deal with daily comes from, you could learn a lot from reading the course outlines in gender studies and social work and sociology and anthropogy and even history and business these days.
I would suggest maybe you should, even if they are a year out of date. Which leads directly to part II below.
II. What is on university course outlines?
A friend sent me a copy of a paper titled ‘Closed Classrooms? An Analysis of College Syllabi on Contentious Issues’ .
In this analysis, the three authors make use of an interesting data base called OSP. This is, to quote them –
“…a unique database of college syllabi collected by the “Open Syllabus Project” (OSP). The OSP has amassed more than 27 million syllabi from around the world primarily by scraping them from university websites. They date as far back as 2008, though a majority are from the last ten years. Most of the data comes from universities in the United States, U.K., Canada, and Australia.”
[Note that ‘syllabus’ = ‘course outline’. The terms are interchangeable.]
Using this data base, the analysis they undertake can best be explained by an example.
Take a contentious topic – for example, Racism and the American Criminal Justice System.
A highly influential book on this topic is Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Color Blindness, published in 2010.
It lays the responsibility for the undeniable increase in incarceration rates in the US at the feet of white racism. The three authors of the paper summarize the thesis of Alexander’s book thusly:
“Alexander’s book claimed that American history should be understood as a cyclical struggle between white supremacists and advocates for racial justice. While advocates for racial justice eventually succeed in overthrowing systems of racial oppression (as they did in the case of slavery and Jim Crow), white supremacists are resilient. Thus, after the successful passage of the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act, Alexander says, they waged a new drug war that stirred up racialized fears of urban crime and social breakdown. In this way, Jim Crow—a system of racial oppression and social control—was reborn, just in a more sinister form.”
They then point out that the book elicited immediate and ongoing pushback from a number of other writers and scholars. This generated an entire literature of agreement and disagreement on the causes of mass incarceration. The authors then ask this question:
In what proportion of course syllabi in which the Alexander book appears do any of the books arguing against Alexander also appear? In other words, when faculty tell their students to read Alexander, with what frequency do they also tell the students to read her critics?
Here are the results from the OSP data base:
Table 1: Frequency with which Prominent Critics are Assigned with Alexander’s The New Jim Crow
__________________________________________________________________
Forman (2011) 149 of 4,309 (since 2012) 3.46%
Pfaff (2014) 3 of 3,758 (since 2015) 0.08%
Fortner (2015) 53 of 3,405 (since 2016) 1.56%
Pfaff (2017) 49 of 2,438 (since 2018) 2.01%
Forman (2017) 84 of 2,438 (since 2018) 3.45%
Sharkey (2018) 9 of 1,951 (since 2019) 0.46%
The names are the authors who have written books contesting Alexander’s analysis. The (since 201x) indicate that the study only looked at syllabi that were dated one year after the book indicated was published. They understand that a professor cannot be faulted for not putting a book on a reading list before it is actually published.
So, what we have here is that faculty who assign Alexander to be read almost never assign any of her critics.
But wait, there’s more.
One can also ask the opposite question. Among those reading lists that assign Alexander’s critics to be read, what percentage also assign Alexander?
Here’s the result of that:
Table 2: Frequency with which Alexander is Taught in Courses that Assign her Critics
____________________________________________________________
Forman (2011) #1* 82%
Pfaff (2014) #1 75%
Fortner (2015) #1 72%
Pfaff (2017) #1 72%
Forman (2017) #1 56%
Sharkey (2018) #1 26%
The two tables are kinda asymmetric, ain’t they?
The authors don’t stop there. They ask also: what other readings are assigned to students by faculty who have those students read Alexander? Answer: other leftist critics. The authors write:
“The top three titles assigned with Alexander are Angela Davis’s Are Prisons Obsolete?, Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me, and Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (see Table 3). Others in the top ten include Paulo Freire’ Pedagogy of the Oppressed and Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s Golden Gulag. Broadly speaking, then, it seems that most of the authors assigned with Alexander are those that reinforce rather than complicate her critical perspective.”
Teaching critical thinking, yewbetcha.
The paper goes on like this, and if you would like a copy of all 67 pages of it, drop me a line, as I would be happy to send along the pdf. They look at other contentious topics like abortion policy and the Israel/Palestine conflict. The story with those is essentially the same. To echo something I wrote in part I above, if you asked the profs who assign Alexander but not her critics why that is so, most would answer that they are not willing to make their students feel unsafe by exposing them to these other clearly racist and evil writings.
One other element is of interest here, I think, and it is captured in this table:
Table 4: Assignments of Alexander’s The New Jim Crow by Discipline __________________________________________________________________
Discipline Count, Percent
__________________________________________________________________
History 1,052, 22.4%
Sociology 1,032, 21.9%
English Literature 636, 13.5%
Criminal Justice 606 12.9%
Political Science 523, 11.1%
Social Work 296, 6.3%
Law 205, 4.4%
Philosophy 134, 2.8%
Education, 126, 2.7%
Theology 96, 2.0%
Here, the number after the discipline is the number of syllabi in that discipline that include Alexander on the reading list, and the percentage indicates the percentage of course outlines which include Alexander’s book that are from courses in that discipline. That a book on the US criminal justice system would be assigned in some History and Sociology courses is no surprise. Same with Criminal Justice. But that it is assigned in more Eng Lit courses than Criminal Justice courses? Huh? And way more often in Eng Lit than in Law?
21st century English profs have little interest in teaching literature or, god help us, writing. They are busy being front-line warriors for social justice.
As I noted in Part I, I looked through some (past) course outlines posted by other Depts in the UWO Faculty of Social Science, partly because I was curious about how they looked relative to what is in the OSP data. It was, as I said, quite interesting, and I will be writing more on that soon.