Reading the Rules for Rule Makers, Part 1

The federal government has issued a raft of proposed changes to the rules for the people who set the rules for colleges and universities. They’re worth taking seriously.

I’ve been reading the Federal Register’s summary of proposed changes to the rules for accrediting agencies, in hopes of eventually helping to craft an institutional comment. I’ll be working my way through this for the next couple of posts. What follows here are my own personal musings, informed by decades of professional experience but not representing my college. I’m hoping that my wise and worldly readers will help me hone these observations into a form more appropriate for an official venue.

In section 602.17, proposed new language would require institutions to “maintain academic freedom protections that are clearly articulated and applied consistently to faculty regardless of appointment classification, race or other immutable characteristics, viewpoint, or ideology.” Yet the very next paragraph requires accrediting agencies to establish policies that would require institutions to “measure student and faculty perceptions on the range of viewpoints and perspectives offered by the institution or program.” Subsequent paragraphs repeatedly conflate academic freedom with perceived viewpoint diversity.

That’s such a fundamental category error as to imply bad faith.

I’ve written before on the fallacy of assuming that there are only two schools of political thought, and on the dangers of hiring people to fit predetermined slots. I stand by all that.

But this proposal is even worse. Start with the measure: student and faculty perceptions on the range of viewpoints offered by the institution or program.

Student perceptions of faculty viewpoints are often catastrophically wrong. I know this from decades of fielding student complaints about professors at several different colleges. Over the course of my own career, I’ve had students say they thought I was conservative, libertarian, liberal and leftist. (Being all of those at the same time would be exhausting, I would think.) I’ve seen them stereotype their instructors based on race, age, gender, clothing, last names, accents, haircuts and all manner of superficial indicators. A professor who goes to the trouble of representing multiple perspectives could easily be misunderstood as endorsing the one a student found most memorable. But according to the proposed language, what matters is not what the professor’s actual perspective is; what matters is what students think it is. If the students are wrong, well, too bad; by this standard, truth is not a defense.

Not that they should need a defense, according to the proffered definition that rules out both viewpoint and ideology as grounds to fire someone. So we’re supposed to ensure some sort of perceived ideological “balance” as defined by local opinion polls, but we’re not supposed to take action to achieve that balance. We’re supposed to achieve the end without using any means.

Even if the goal made sense, which it does not, the simultaneous mandate and prohibition doesn’t make sense on its own terms. In other words, in practice, it means whatever the evaluators want it to mean.

Worse, the standard isn’t only applied to a college or university as a whole; it’s applied to individual programs. So if, say, the HVAC department has two members, and students suspect—correctly or not—both of them of being (gasp) conservative, we would have a lack of viewpoint balance in the program, thereby imperiling the accreditation of the college. I’d have to put out an ad looking for an HVAC person with apparently social democratic leanings, paying them with money we don’t have. Or not, depending on which of the contradictory clauses gets emphasized at any given time. Hence, bad faith.

To give this any credibility at all, I’d need to be convinced that the perceived political leanings of a math professor affect how she teaches calculus. Alternately, I’d expect to see the University of Chicago economics department forced to hire some committed leftists to provide balance.

I’m not holding my breath.

Honestly, though, the ideology part is likely the shiny object meant to distract from the displacement of peer review altogether. For example, the proposed language goes out of its way to emphasize that self-studies shall no longer be required, and that accrediting agencies will no longer have to include or listen to educators. (“Institutions may prefer an independent audit or a review from business leaders in the community …”) In the name of efficiency, accrediting agencies made up of people who have never worked in higher education would be empowered to “conduct a cost/benefit analysis to review and ensure that institutions have sufficient flexibility in instructional staffing policies and policies regarding integrity of scholarly activity.”

That’s worth reading slowly. People from outside higher education will be given the authority to conduct “cost/benefit analyses” to determine whether colleges have sufficient flexibility in firing people. Insufficient flexibility to fire people would be cause to deny accreditation.

In a context of ideological policing, that could get scary.

Stay tuned …