Friday Fragments: October 16th
Political engagement of faculty, group decision-making through a Rock'n'Roll lens, and a less-than-rosy outlook on enrollment.
What I’m reading…
I really appreciated this interesting opinion piece on intellectual life, academia, and political leanings, by Naomi Oreskes and Charlie Tyson. They touch on a range of topics, but one point I thought particularly germane to our work as educators addressed the perceived liberal bias of higher education:
This raises a difficult but important question: Why are educated people more liberal? One obvious answer is that liberals are more drawn to academic life; another is that education makes people more liberal. Evidence suggests that both are true. A large research literature finds that higher education tends to make people more concerned with the socially disadvantaged and more tolerant of political dissent.
I think it’s a worthwhile exercise to interrogate our positions and how these positions influence our work with students and with each other - but there doesn’t seem to be much evidence of a powerful leftward lean influencing curricular choices, admissions, or faculty hiring/promotion practices.
In complement to the previous article, this accounting of her institution’s reaction to “[t]he aspiring muckraker’s shocking exposé revealing that college professors had mean and snarky things to say on Twitter about the vice president” by L.D. Burnett is not a little intimidating.
First, the warning: What happened to me can happen to any of us. It doesn’t matter if you’re on Twitter or not. Any email, any recorded lecture, any live lecture that is surreptitiously recorded by a student, any donation to a political cause or a political party, any public comment or remark you make in any place, at any time, on any medium — any of those things can be distorted by the industrial engines of mass-produced, culture-wars outrage and turn you into the villainous professor du jour. This is the model: isolate, attack, destroy, and then move on to the next professor.
I thought this (2018) Economist article, A rocker’s guide to management, was an interesting analysis of the decision-making of various bands over time - although it’s noteworthy, and frankly disappointing, that no all-female bands or even bands with female members were profiled. If you’re going to do an analysis of leadership and decision-making and only address all-male groups, that seems like a glaring misstep.
My apologies for ending on a worrisome note, but the article, We Haven’t Begun to Feel the Real Economic Damage, outlines current enrollment declines and projects out to what spring and perhaps next fall might look like - and it’s not a rosy picture.
Happy reading!