Update: Inside Higher Ed now reports that UC-Boulder has backed down from its suggestion that controversial teaching be prospectively approved by the university's IRB. On Monday, Provost Russell L. Moore sent the following email to faculty (emphasis mine):
Many of you are raising concerns about comments by our campus spokesperson Mark Miller published today in Inside Higher Ed.... I want to make it clear to you that this was a question raised by CU Arts & Sciences Dean Steve Leigh – whether or not the use of student TAs as actors in a skit presented in a class should be accorded a review by the IRB. I want to make clear that this was not a declaration of a policy, or an expansion of IRB’s role. Inherent in Dean Leigh’s question from the beginning was whether or not some consent form, comparable to what might be required by IRB, would be appropriate. Our campus policies reveal that this is not an area in which IRB would become involved, as it only deals with human subjects used in the research process, not material used for teaching.
In a second email IHE describes as having been sent by the provost to "campus," he explained (again, emphasis mine):
A number of you have raised concerns about academic freedom and how it may connect to this situation. Academic freedom protects faculty who teach controversial and uncomfortable/ unpopular subjects. However, academic freedom does not allow faculty members to violate the university’s sexual harassment policy by creating a hostile environment for their teaching assistants, or for their students attending the class. . . . In this case, university administrators heard from a number of concerned students about Professor Adler’s 'prostitution' skit, the way it was presented, and the environment it created for both students in the class and for teaching assistants. Student assistants made it clear to administrators that they felt there would be negative consequences for anyone who refused to participate in the skit. None of them wished to be publicly identified.
Yes, of course academic freedom does not protect "sexual harassment" — any more than it protects pedagogy that lacks any "legitimate educational basis" (which was the earlier version of the administration's concerns about the lecture) or the behavior for which Sandusky was convicted. (I offer no comment here on whether Adler's class exercise, details of which are somewhat sketchy, rises to the level of a hostile work/learning environment.) The issue is how to regulate the risk of a hostile learning environment: ex post, through investigations and, as appropriate, subsequent proceedings that bear at least the hallmarks of an adversarial process and due process — or ex ante, by a group that tends to speculate about (rather than rely on data to assess) possible future harms and benefits, that has stronger incentives to avoid Type II than Type I errors, that operate with virtually no transparency and no representation for the teacher during the decision-making process or for the students at all, and from whose unfavorable decision neither teacher nor students has any possibility of appeal? I'm glad that UC-Boulder appears to have rejected prospective group review of "risky" teaching.
On the other hand, if UC-Boulder is truly worried about sexual harrassment, then the administration's explanation for what it really finds appealing about the IRB process as applied to the teaching context is bizarre. UC-Boulder wants to regulate the risk of hostile learning environments by requiring (edgy? all?) teachers to obtain the voluntary, informed consent of students? The same students it suggests would experience "negative consequences" if they "refused to participate in the skit"? The signing of a consent form would certainly complicate a student-plaintiff's burden of showing "unwelcomeness" in a subsequent hostile environment lawsuit, but it's hardly guaranteed to defeat the suit. Successful plaintiffs may first give, then rescind, consent, and in any case, the consent must be voluntary, not the product of "coerced submission."
We've heard from the provost, the dean of arts and sciences, and the university spokesperson. Maybe it's time to hear from university counsel.
Original post below the fold.
Many of you have probably read claims by University of Colorado at Boulder sociology professor Patricia Adler that she is being pressured to accept early retirement from her tenured position after administrators objected to a class on prostitution that she gave as part of her large, apparently very popular course on social deviance. Here is how
Inside Higher Ed describes that particular class:
She uses prostitution, she said, to illustrate that status stratification occurs in various groups considered deviant by society. She seeks volunteers from among assistant teaching assistants (who are undergraduates) to dress up as various kinds of prostitutes — she named as categories "slave whores, crack whores, bar whores, streetwalkers, brothel workers and escort services." They work with Adler on scripts in which they describe their lives as these types of prostitutes.
During the lecture, Adler talks with them (with the...teaching assistants in character) about such issues as their backgrounds, "how they got into the business," how much they charge, the services they perform, and the risks they face of violence, arrest and AIDS. The class is a mix of lecture and discussion . . . .
According to Adler, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences Steven Leigh told her that a former TA "had raised a concern that some participants might be uncomfortable, but that none had in fact complained." She says Leigh told her that the lecture posed "too much risk" in a "post-Penn State environment," alluding to the Jerry Sandusky scandal. (That shift in "environment" presumably explains why Adler has taught both the course and this particular class twice per year for over 20 years without incident, until now.)
One of Adler's chief complaints is that, she says, the university gave her no opportunity to react to its concerns about the lecture before initiating buyout proceedings. But university spokesman Mark J. Miller shed some light on that, suggesting that Adler should have sought prospective approval for her pedagogical exercise from the university IRB:
CU-Boulder does not discourage teaching controversial topics but there has to be a legitimate educational basis for what is being taught in the classroom. In all cases involving people in research or teaching, whether controversial or not, we want to insist on best practices to ensure full regulatory compliance. In some cases, this could involve review from our Institutional Review Board, which is responsible for regulatory compliance involving human subjects.
It's not immediately clear what "regulatory compliance" Miller is worried that Adler's skit would fail to meet. Confronted with the obvious objection that IRBs regulate research, not teaching, Miller shifted from talk of "regulatory compliance" to talk of "best practices," but otherwise doubled down: "Students did participate in the lecture. All we are saying is that it is a best practice to go to the IRB."
So, in this "post-Penn State" world, the best response to one university failing to react to evidence of serial rape and sexual molestation is to license teaching exercises in order to avoid the hypothetical risk that a teacher's classroom exercise about sex might make a student "uncomfortable," despite no evidence that that exercise had had this effect during the past 20 years?
I'll let Adler have the last word about this brave new world of IRB review of teaching:
Adler said that the incident showed that if a lecture makes anyone uncomfortable, the university will ignore common sense and worry more about "the risk" someone might be offended than whether this is information professors have a right to teach, and students have a right to learn.
"It's a culture of fear. It's the bureaucratization of the university," she said.
Comments