1. Eastern Michigan University, a state school, is not “like Catholic health services.”

2. Freedom of religion ends where civil law–applied equally to everybody–begins. If one’s religion says, oh, park wherever you want, even under No Parking signs, you can’t park there and avoid a ticket because you’re practicing your religion. And, obviously, no ritual human sacrifices, no fatwahs, no stoning of women taking in adultery, etc. If you’re a counselor in a state institution, and the law says no discrimination on account of sexual orientation, you can’t practice that discrimination under the guise of “freedom of religion.” I’d suspect that if you work in the student health center, you can’t refuse to give/sell a student a condom because that runs counter to your religious beliefs.

3. I’m always curious how jffoster, the great linguistic and cultural athropological relativist on these threads, can be so utterly hidebound about homosexuality. He doesn’t quote Scripture, he doesn’t ever reason through his anti-gay sentiments, he just declares. One sometimes suspects–when an educated person keeps saying nothing but “Eewwww!”–a little bit of self-loathing caused by repression.

All professions have ethical rules for practice. If one disagrees with these rules, one needs not to enter that profession. There is no inherent right to enter whatever profession one wishes.

A professor is no longer the “Disseminator”, where she stands up in front of a class and spitballs information to the crowd in front of her. The professor should be more like the “Facilitator”, one who guides, filters and allows discovery for her students, while at the same time teaching students how to critically analyze the barrage of information they find on the Internet. Professors are no longer isolated in ivory towers. We all sit on a level playing field.

Mr. Hutcheson’s article is a good read and provides a useful history of many aspects of higher education. However, I could not help but note the irony as he wrote approvingly of those who would extend the academy beyond the study of (and academic/cleric’s interpretive control of) the Bible. His arguments bring to mind those use to defend that the ability to read and study the Bible should be limited to clerics, as ordinary people reading in their own language and thinking for themselves could come up with different interpretations than the clerics. Similar arguments were put forth against the printing of books for the general populace.

Mr. Hutcheson’s article makes the correct observation that the Internet gives the “common folk” an advantage over the lengthy process of peer-review, both in speed of dissemination and quantity of materials that can be written. He misses the point that one of the biggest flaw of limiting the creation and dissemination of knowledge to experts has often meant that, in many disciplines, both the writer and peer reviewers were of a similar ideology and that voices of dissent (the heart and sould of academic freedom) were often stifled by an academy (or a few illustrious folks therein) that did not welcome a challenge to their ideology.

Certainly, the Internet permits a great deal of “unpurified” information to be widely disseminated– information and misinformation residing in the same space. However, I would rather have the option of both MSNBC and FOX than to have an academic with an ideological bent telling me what I cannot watch (or read).

In my opinion the opposite holds true. I believe that “freedom” implies the ability of everyone to challenge and question knowledge. Academic freedom is not for the privileged professor, but rather the pursuit of everyone who desires higher knowledge. The professor who is truly an expert in any field should serve as a guide to those who are ignorant int their particular area of expertise.. Please don’t feel threatened by the fact that knowledge is so readily available, but rather feel challenged by the fact that you can participate and add to the knowledge base in this great discourse occurring on the Internet. Just my humble opinion.

The Internet’s not the threat; it’s the Yahoos who use it as an authority without critically assessing the source.

The internet and the increasingly networked world it epitomises is a powerful facilitator for scholarly conversation (to keep matters relevant to academia for the moment). At the same time, it allows for what, to my mind, is excessive democratisation of information. On the one hand, everyone with minimal technical proficiency (and I believe this is a generational function–successive generations feel more and more ‘natural’ about turning to Google for reference, etc.) to gain a decent idea upon any given topic. Pushing this further, it is quite possible for me to know the leading issues upon a topic I knew nothing about half an hour earlier, simply by going to Wikipedia for a general picture. After that I may follow the article’s footnotes or references for a more thorough picture. Finally, I may do Google searches to find out even more information on it.

The problem with this model is precisely that it allows for a rank amateur to fall into the error of feeling as though they ‘know’ something new. Academia is not general knowledge. As Richard Feynman so brilliantly (and amusingly) showed during an interview, it is a tall order to accurately answer the simple question of how magnets work. The internet is telling us how magnets work. In doing so, it is committing all the errors Feynman avoids. It is not just a question of dispensing information that concerns me, but rather the new model that the internet imprints upon us, and our future generations. Information, historically something to be researched and worked out, has now become a commodity to be accessed by a vast, world-spanning vending machine. The very meaning of scholarship is changing, and not for the better. Today, we already have problems with children curiously asking why they should learn spelling (since spell-check is ubiquitous), why they should learn to write legibly (since they type far more than write in daily life), and why they should acquire a dictionary (since most computer operating systems come with dictionaries, and online dictionaries are everywhere). These are not “damn kids these days” instances, but rather examples of how completely the default mindset has changed across generations. I think this is gravely problematic in its implications for the future of specialised research, critical thought (why bother training in a particular school of thought if all you have to do is go to some aggregator of reviews and sample diverse thoughts?), and academic conversation.

”
Academic freedom is not for the privileged professor, but rather the pursuit of everyone who desires higher knowledge.”

The problem is that much of what passes for “higher knowledge” on the internet is bogus, for example political or social opinions masquerading as fact, or discredited assertions that no longer hold water among experts but still have believers among the public –which may not have the skills or tools to differentiate the bogus from the legitimate.

”
The purpose of higher ed is no longer to disseminate “expert” information. The best approach to learning at this level would be to help students put the knowledge they are receiving from a variety of sources into a coherent framework.”

Many of these comments seem to focus on subjective “information” (politics, literary interpretation etc) that one can get off the internet. In engineering and the sciences, the purpose of higher ed is indeed to disseminate expert information, and the internet cannot replace that. One cannot learn to reliably design and construct a bridge, for example, or an electrical network without hands-on guidance from an expert.

“But the notion that professors’ jobs depend, essentially, on society
viewing them as smarter than everyone else is novel, and likely to be
more than a little controversial.”

No, it’s not about being “smarter,” but being better informed about a particular question or area of knowledge. An expert is someone with a high degree of knowledge or skill in a certain area of knowledge (according to both online sources and my hard copy dictionary).

The idea that professors are “smarter than everyone else” is a different matter. Unfortunately, it is not novel. It is evident when professors sound off (both within and outside the university) about things that they know little about. There sometimes seems to be alarmingly little critical thinking in emails that circulate on my campus and posts here in the Chronicle.

The analogy is useful because Priests are specialists in the field of God and the Bible and were the gatekeepers. Academics who don’t believe in the spread of information are trying to be gatekeepers. Certainly the degree of complexity of the topic will dictate how much help we need from mentors (like Profs). It’s also amazing how much we can learn online now from YouTube videos, Free courses like MIT OCW, Khan Academy etc. I’m guessing their fears are the competition and the potential layoffs.

 i am skeptical of the angle this post takes. the internet is a great tool to open up the doors of academia! i can publish my work online instantly and allow people, whoever they may be, to read my work. instead of crafting myself as an expert or one that holds special knowledge, i seek to share it! and the internet has much more to offer than “crowdsourcing.” we can work to change the publishing industry that stalls timely projects, charges students way too much for books, and keeps our writing in very particular spaces—unreachable by larger populations. if one is worried their position of professorship is threatened by the internet, well then, you got a lot more to worry about…long live open source publishing!  spaces—unreachable by larger populations. if one is worried their position of professorship is threatened by the internet, well then, you got a lot more to worry about…long live open source publishing! 

 I’m all for the democracy of the autodidact, and saying that one has a better chance of delving into Heidegger because one is at Berkeley studying with Herbert Dreyfus doesn’t mean that Jane Doe at some mid-tier school–or learning as an independent scholar who works part-time selling widgets and teaching at a community college–can’t buy the right books and listen to Dreyfus’s podcasts on Being and Time and find ways to make contributions to the scholarship on Heidegger or continental philosophy.  Maybe Jane is really smart and dedicated and will find a way to make sense on her own of texts that have taken Dreyfus himself decades of state subsidized time to master and to be recognized as one of the foremost interpreters of Heidegger.  But you know it is more likely that the Internet will contribute to obfuscation and misconceptions as Jane pursues her quest for deeper understanding of Heidegger.  Many Janes will crash and fail where a few succeed.  And isn’t college all about focusing the intellectual and educational efforts of members of our society so as not to waste time, talent, and lives pursing haphazard courses of study?  

Is there a suggestion that the university shouldn’t exist as a place that cultivates long projects like Dreyfus’s (and a host of other scholars’ and academics’ ideas that can fuel critical perspectives toward the broader culture)?  The flattening of culture may be inevitable, and it may seem terribly conservative and T.S. Eliotesque to suggest that higher forms of culture be preserved, but we should not be herded into deserting all vestiges of academic privilege in our culture under the misapprehension that the Internet has created a utopian space of pure democratic learning and expertise where now academic freedom is no longer needed and universities can be dismantled.  The elites will likely not be convinced to drop plans to send their progeny to Philips Exeter and Harvard just because the Internet has free online courses at MIT or Stanford.  And why won’t they be convinced?  

To me the promise of the Internet is great with crowd-sourcing and open source materials, but attacks on tenure and academic freedom seem less aligned with such things than with corporatizing and privatizing forces in society.  Those are decidedly not democratizing forces. The paradox many posters here labor under is that the public funded incubation of free ideas is under attack and the Internet is the proverbial camel’s nose under the tent being used to shut such freedom down in the name of…freedom and democracy.  

I have to agree with mbelvadi. While I strive to make my students comfortable enough to express themselves in discussions, a level playing field implies that we are equals in the classroom. If that were the case, what would be the point? I’m not facilitating a book club, but rather teaching a course in literature. Students should respect their professors as authorities, not simply another point of view.

Professors simply need to teach and demonstrate what is a “good” source of information and what is junk. It’s more obvious in the hard sciences, but even “soft” areas like Woman’s Studies or Sociology have ways of separating a developed, useful theory from a mere opinionated rant. think the abundance of informational available makes the sort of higher order reasoning one learns in higher education all the more valuable. 

Sometimes, I find that I don’t have a good answer to these “damn kids” questions.  When my daughter asks me why she should own a dictionary, I realize I have no especially good answer: if you’re good at using it (as she is), an online dictionary IS as useful as a paper one.  Just because I LIKE paper dictionaries is not a particularly good reason for advocating for them.  I know people who know Newt Gingrich personally; they like him very well, even if they would never vote for him.

Note that this discussion seems to be swirling around many more or less related topics: academic freedom, curation, editing, knowledge, community, hierarchy, authority, honesty, power, control, ego, and (occasionally) truth.   Not sure what it means, but it’s worth noticing, I think.

Who do you think writes the opinionated rants?  I imagine they also teach, no?  Do you expect them to teach their students to discount their own writings?