In the old days, for a professor to be called “uncollegial” meant that he was nasty to other people. Being so was not grounds for termination, but just disapproval. Like so many other things in higher education, that has changed. In today’s Martin Center article, David Randall of the National Association of Scholars looks at the new meaning of “collegiality.”
He writes:
Radical academics and administrators in higher education are now using “lack of collegiality” as a pretext to abrogate academic freedom or fire professors, regardless of tenure. The latest examples include Matthew Garrett at Bakersfield College, Scott Gerber at Ohio Northern University, Stephen Porter at North Carolina State University, and Amy Wax at the University of Pennsylvania.
Oh yes — academic freedom. It used to be prized throughout the academic world. Disagreement was a crucial part of the educational enterprise. But now, it doesn’t apply to scholars who disagree with aspects of the “progressive” agenda. Rather than admitting that, however, college officials resort to claiming that dissenters can be punished for their lack of collegiality.
Randall observes that the trouble goes deeper than just the eagerness to punish professors who disagree with the reigning ideology:
So too is the emergence of ‘interdisciplinary’ programs such as gender studies or African-American studies. These are, in any case, academic pseudodisciplines, devoted to activism rather than the search for truth and demanding assent to intellectually narrow “theories” that are actually catechisms. But it is their vaunted ‘interdisciplinarity’ that violates proper disciplinary collegiality. Such interdisciplinarity is a form of disciplinary colonialism, which restricts each intellectual discipline to the approaches and subject matters authorized by the program’s animating catechism.
Well said! Since the 1970s, the academic world has been overrun with programs that are about opinions rather than bodies of knowledge.
Read the whole thing.