By the time any valid ethical or political gesture gets heavily institutionalized in higher education, it loses most of the moral force it had in the first place. As a basic statement of truth, land acknowledgements strike me as an important starting place, for example. A well-composed land acknowledgement first off brings into focus the concrete, knowable history of indigenous life on the land that is today used and owned by others and it reminds contemporary listeners of the equally concrete and knowable history of how that land was seized by European settlers. Most contemporary non-Native Americans hear Native American place names as a kind of background noise in the region they live in, and they have a hazy, vague sense of the relevant history. They probably also have an aunt who claimed to be 1/32 Cherokee or some other nonsense of that kind. So continuously driving home a far more specific sense of the particular past of particular places is a good change in how Americans imagine themselves in relationship to the histories of where they live.
I think you could even extend that approach in a lot of colleges and universities, who are accustomed to telling their histories as a series of vaguely benevolent actions tied to paintings that are kept on the wall of some wood-panelled hall in an old building. Carry the story of the land the university sits on forward to when the university first appears on it. Who owned it after it was stolen from indigenous inhabitants and how did they get it? How many times was it sold? Who worked the land? What was it used for? Who had the money to found the university or college, and who came to it first, with what intentions or hopes? And so on. That is history that deserves to be recited as something other than a marketing tool or a self-authored benediction.
But when land acknowledgments become one more administrative orthodoxy, a managerial device, they stop serving that live, open-ended need and become largely a symbol of compliance and conformity. Thinking about the history in an attentive way should raise the next question: and now what? Routinizing the acknowledgment runs in the opposite direction: ok, got that taken care of, make sure everybody puts the standard, approved language that was endorsed by the lawyers on every scrap of official communication. Make sure to add that to a compliance officer’s checklist.
I really do understand why some faculty, staff and students sigh in exasperation when things come to that point. Just as I understand why it’s frustrating to sit through many forms of well-meaning training which alternate between stating the obvious and bracketing out the genuinely important questions and debates as beyond the scope of the training. That’s the alchemy of managerialism, in fact—to turn a conversation within a community dedicated to thinking and research into an empty dogma that is standardized across the institution and controlled not by the people who started the conversation but by people who don’t even really understand what it is that the compliance they’re demanding is actually about.
Being frustrated is one thing. Being a jerk is another. That would pretty well describe University of Washington computer science professor Stuart Reges, who responded to his institution’s land acknowledgement and the request that it be put on syllabi by putting on his own statement, which is that he supports “the labor theory of property” and thus doesn’t acknowledge any indigenous rights to land.
I hate that this has become yet another dumb showdown about free speech rights, led by FIRE, primarily because managerial responses from the University of Washington so clumsily drove the case in that direction. Before the compliance hammer comes down, there’s plenty of professional reasons within faculty governance to bracket what Reges did as inappropriate and frankly stupid.
Syllabi are not pamphlets or placards. They’re not a place to vent your opinions as a faculty member about the issues of the day if they have nothing to do with what you’re teaching or with the trained expertise you claim to have. They’re not the place to engage in a debate with administrators about rules or procedures. If you want to step around, elide or modestly vary a standardized statement that you don’t quite agree with, that should be within your discretion. I have a standard stump speech I give students about plagiarism and why it’s bad that isn’t the same as the standard institutional statement, but they’re complementary. I have a vision of what I’m aiming for in terms of teaching objectives that is fairly personal—a glimpse of that is one thing that led Chad Orzel to respond to last week’s column—but I also represent my department and institution’s views on those objectives fairly. If I had a serious dissent and I felt I was right about that, I’d address that where it belongs—in the public sphere, in faculty governance, in committees—but not on a syllabus.
Reges says a few students commented on evaluations but none spoke to him directly to complain about his statement. Of course they didn’t, if they had a complaint. I’m sure most of his students in computer science just tuned it out since it’s not what they’re in the class for and perhaps not a subject they care much about either way. But if any of them didn’t care for it, they’re not going to say a damn thing, precisely because it’s put as a formal personal declaration on something as official as a syllabus. It’s not a debate that Reges tossed out as a discussion prompt in a course devoted to land acknowledgments or Native American history or university policy, where the professor having a strong point-of-view is always legitimate and often an asset, as long as they retain some sense of a need to cultivate an actual conversation. You’d have to be either very brave or very stupid to complain directly to an aggrieved professor who is using their syllabus to communicate a political orthodoxy that has absolutely nothing to do with the course in question.
You might say, “Well, wouldn’t that be true if the acknowledgment on Reges’ syllabus was the approved institutional one?” No, it wouldn’t, because that’s the institution, and it has no bearing on how Reges evaluates the students in his class, whether he agrees with the standard language or not. If a student in his class isn’t happy with that being on the syllabus, he has the same options as Reges: take it up in the public sphere, write a letter to the administration, go to student government. It’s outside the relationship between a teacher and a student.
The other thing that really annoys me here that I think can be resolved within the sphere of faculty life is that this is precisely what a respect for expertise—supposedly a core value of higher education—should put off-limits. I say this as a generalist intellectual who sticks my nose into a lot of disciplines and areas of study outside my own deepest expertise. I may have some happy and beneficient thoughts about the Webb telescope, as I laid out yesterday, but it would never occur to me to put up an unorthodox or dissenting opinion about the management of astronomical instruments at the beginning of my next course syllabus dealing with African history. I may have some views about what constitutes bad pedagogy—or coaching—that would be relevant in a number of deliberative situations I have been and could yet be involved with, but I’m not going to put up a statement about the proper coaching of rugby at the beginning of a syllabus on the history of surveillance and privacy.
I feel really confident that Reges’ knowledge of the “labor theory of property”, basically a theory legitimating colonial subjugation and settler societies that goes back to John Locke, is no deeper than Wikipedia and maybe a couple of paragraphs from a far-right thinker like Murray Rothbard. If you’re going to drop something like that on a syllabus, you’d better be ready to talk about it as a professor, in an expert or intellectual way, with your colleagues and students. That’s the value proposition of higher education. You have to be better than reading a bad subreddit or your weird grand-uncle’s Facebook memes. If Reges were a professor of political philosophy who wanted to touch the third rail and knowledgeably teach a class that tried to open up debates about property rights that included reading Locke and some of those thinkers who have used Locke to justify settler seizures of land from indigenous people, I’d still find him pretty gross but I’d have to admit, in the most FIRE-approved fashion, that’s his prerogative in terms of having actual expertise and making a judgment call about course design from it.
In this case? No. Just don’t. If you have a problem, just don’t put the standard managerial acknowledgment on your syllabus. It’s not the place for that kind of grandstanding. Show some class. Show some restraint. Be a professional.
Image credit: “Coast Salish” by Sonny Assu, https://www.flickr.com/photos/56355577@N06/5927683921
Two thoughts:
1. Reges is not a newcomer to debates about inclusion. Eg https://quillette.com/2018/06/19/why-women-dont-code/ from 4 years ago, which also got him in trouble and demonstrates the same willingness to opine about things he doesn't have expertise in.
2. It seems like the land acknowledgement was mandated, and so this was one of the very common in my experience attempts to turn a requirement back on its head. The desire to do this seems over-represented among professors, rather than doing something simple like omitting it, which no one would have complained about, probably.
Another idle thought: what if you, as a professor, thought that plagiarism genuinely wasn't bad?