… as found in this title to a short note in this morning’s Inside Higher Ed: “Female Instructor Barred From Teaching at Muslim University Without Burqa.”

In other news, Inside Higher Ed reports that Kenneth Howell, the University of Illinois religion professor who was fired after sending an email to his class explaining Catholicism’s view of homosexuality, will be returning to the classroom this fall. He’s not off the hook — the investigation of whether the firing was legit continues — but now at least he’s innocent until proven guilty. Meanwhile, the university has discontinued its problematic relationship with the campus Newman Center, an independent Catholic organization that was “nominating” and paying its professors of Catholic thought. This means Howell will be paid by the university itself this fall, which most likely is reeling at the news that it has to match the Center’s pay scale of $10,000 per class. That’s several times what most adjunct professors make.

In academia, anonymity and secrecy are held up as the necessary conditions of responsible peer review at every level — from hiring and promotion to publishing. Reviewers, the thinking goes, will be more honest if there is strict confidentiality. They shouldn’t have to put their names on their assessments of whether your article or book should be published. Nor should you know what they say or write about you when you are up for promotion and tenure. If this looks like an invitation to behave irresponsibly (to be lazy or vindictive) at key moments in other people’s careers, that’s because it is. But the time-honored rationale is that peer reviewers need the freedom from reprisal that lack of transparency gives them to do their work.

But it doesn’t have to work that way. Imagine peer reviewed publishing without anonymous readers’ reports and the distortions that come with them–the shoddiness and brevity of response (why write a detailed, thoughtful report when dashing off a short paragraph will do?), the off-baseness and pot-shotting (see climategate), the gamesmanship and ego-mongering (I’ll scratch your manuscript if you’ll scratch mine; your article is unacceptable because it fails to be all about my work; etc). Shakespeare Quarterly is rethinking peer review — and getting great results.

For this year’s fall issue, a special publication devoted to Shakespeare and new media, the journal offered contributors the chance to take part in a partially open peer-review process. Authors could opt to post drafts of their articles online, open them up for anyone to comment on, and then revise accordingly. The editors would make the final call about what to publish (hence the “partially open” label). As far as the editors know, it’s the first time a traditional humanities journal has tried out a version of crowd-sourcing in lieu of double-blind review.

The verdict from several scholars who took part: mostly a thumbs up, with a few cautionary notes and a dollop of “It’s about time” mixed in.

[...]

[The journal] invited about 90 scholars … to comment. Anybody willing to publish thoughts under his or her own name could join in, but the guest editor wanted recognized authorities as part of the field.

[...]

Some of the authors acknowledged doubts going into the experiment. Would open review be rigorous enough? Was it risky to post work in progress? But “the results were terrific,” said Mr. Witmore, who wrote his paper on Shakespearean linguistic analysis with Jonathan Hope, a reader in the English department of the University of Strathclyde, in Glasgow. “It’s very different from getting a two-paragraph reader’s report from a journal,” Mr. Witmore said. “In this case, what you get is individual readers from a wide range of subspecialties zooming in on a particular paragraph, saying ‘Tell me more about this’ or ‘Why did you do this?’ It seemed more like a dialogue.”

Another scholar, Alan Galey, submitted an article about Shakespeare and the history of information. An assistant professor on the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto, he worried that an article vetted this way might carry less professional weight—a matter of particular concern to a junior professor going for tenure. “It was very much going on faith in a way,” he said.

Mr. Galey’s dean told him to make sure the process would be rigorous and fair. The stature of the journal also helped reassure him on that point. So did Ms. Rowe’s willingness to answer questions and her decision to invite established scholars to join in. Many crowd-sourcing experiments depend on scale, Mr. Galey pointed out, but this relied “on relationships among scholars where you know you can trust somebody. It wasn’t a Wild West by any means. It was as controlled a process as traditional peer review. It was just controlled in a different way.”

Mr. Galey wound up feeling that the experiment paid off. “I got better feedback from this process than I’ve had from any other peer-review process,” he said.

Participants acknowledged that the process was more time-consuming than traditional peer review. But Shakespeare Quarterly felt that the positives far outweighed the drawbacks, and is planning to try the open review process again.

I think there is a lot to be said for people having to put their names to what they do. Academia’s elevation of anonymity as a procedural virtue has always struck me as a way of rationalizing cowardice and ensuring abuse by removing any semblance of accountability. Conversely, as Shakespeare Quarterly is showing, with names attached, people become at once more responsible and more effective peer reviewers. And so the process recovers its original aim–which was, after all, dialogue and debate among peers aimed at refining and advancing the ideas about which they share expertise and interest.

Once upon a time, back in the middle years of this decade, the higher ed news scene lit up with a series of cases in which graduate students were punished and threatened with expulsion for refusing to sign on to the official political belief system of their schools. There was Emily Brooker, a Missouri State social work student who sued after she refused to sign a letter to the state legislature advocating gay adoption. There was Robert Felkner, a social work student at Rhode Island College who was expelled after he refused to write essays and lobby the legislature on behalf of views he did not hold. There was Ed Swan, a Washington State education student who was punished for not having the proper “disposition” of a teacher (Swan believed in gun rights and did not subscribe to his school’s theory of white privilege). That’s not an exhaustive list, but you get the idea.

There was quite an uproar about these cases along about 2005 and 2006. The students got strong backup from FIRE and ACTA. Lawsuits were filed. Hearings were held. Missouri passed a law to protect students from the kinds of First Amendment violations Emily Brooker endured–and, after an external audit, gutted its social work program. The National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) revised its standards to clarify that students could not be subjected to ideological litmus tests in the name of “social justice.”

But not everybody got the memo. From the Chronicle of Higher Ed:

A graduate student in school counseling is accusing Augusta State University in federal court of violating her constitutional rights by demanding that she work to change her views opposing homosexuality.

In a lawsuit filed on Wednesday in the U.S. District Court in Augusta, Ga., the student, Jennifer Keeton, argues that faculty members and administrators at the university have violated her First Amendment rights to free speech and the free exercise of religion by threatening her with expulsion if she does not fulfill requirements contained in a remediation plan intended to get her to change her beliefs.

[...]

Ms. Keeton is being represented by lawyers affiliated with the Alliance Defense Fund, a coalition of Christian lawyers. The group has brought a similar lawsuit on behalf of an Eastern Michigan University graduate student who alleges she was dismissed from a counseling program for her beliefs about homosexuality. In 2006 the group extracted major concessions from Missouri State University in settling a lawsuit filed by a former social-work student who refused to respect a class project’s requirement that she sign a letter to the state legislature in support of homosexual adoption.

In a news release announcing the lawsuit against Augusta State, David French, senior counsel for the Alliance Defense Fund, said: “A public-university student shouldn’t be threatened with expulsion for being Christian and refusing to publicly renounce her faith, but that’s exactly what’s happening here. Simply put, the university is imposing thought reform.”

The lawsuit says Ms. Keeton has stated in classroom discussions and written assignments that she believes sexual behavior “is the result of accountable personal choice,” that people are born male or female, and that homosexuality is a lifestyle and not a “state of being.” It says faculty members at Augusta State confronted her about her beliefs based on such statements and on a student’s claim that Ms. Keeton has advocated “conversion therapy” for homosexuals in conversations with her peers—an allegation that Ms. Keeton denies.

The lawsuit says Augusta State faculty members developed a remediation plan specifically for Ms. Keeton and told her she would be expelled from the College of Education’s counselor-education program if she did not fulfill its requirements. The plan calls on Ms. Keeton to attend workshops on serving diverse populations, read articles on counseling gay, lesbian, and bisexual and transgendered people, and write reports to an adviser summarizing what she has learned. It also instructs her to work to increase her exposure to, and interaction with, gay populations, and suggests that she attend the local gay-pride parade. Ms. Keeton has refused to comply.

My favorite part: how the College prescribed conversion therapy to relieve a student of her heinous alleged belief in conversion therapy.

I am reminded of a scene in the classic film Roxanne. Daryl Hannah is walking naked behind a hedge, escorted by Steve Martin, who is averting his eyes.

Roxanne Kowalski: Nobody had a coat?

C.D. Bales: I thought you said you didn’t want a coat…

Roxanne Kowalski: Why would I not want a coat?

C.D. Bales: You said you didn’t want a coat!

Roxanne Kowalski: I was being ironic.

C.D. Bales: Oh, ho, ho, irony! Oh, no, no, we don’t get that here. See, uh, people ski topless here while smoking dope, so irony’s not really a, a high priority. We haven’t had any irony here since about, uh, ‘83, when I was the only practitioner of it. And I stopped because I was tired of being stared at.

Maybe one of these days schools like Augusta State will get tired of being stared at, too.

Pressured into vetting the suspicious story of confirmed academic fraud Michael Bellesiles, the Chronicle of Higher Education has found that the story is indeed false. The Chronicle also blames the student whose “story” Bellesiles told, cutting Bellesiles–and, by extension, themselves–way too much slack. Here’s the editor’s note appended to the bottom of the article:

The Chronicle has looked into questions raised by commenters and bloggers about this article.

We talked to the teaching assistant for the course, who confirmed Mr. Bellesiles’s account of the student’s story. According to the teaching assistant, a Marine veteran, the student told him that his brother had been shot in the head and later died from his injuries.

The Chronicle also spoke with the student called “Ernesto” in the article. The student said the soldier who died was his half-brother, was a member of the U.S. Army, and had died in Afghanistan in November. The student declined to provide further details because of unspecified “issues.”

At The Chronicle’s request, an Army spokesman searched a database of all U.S. military deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan using the name the student provided. There were no matches. The Chronicle’s own search of Department of Defense news releases turned up no casualties under any name that matched the student’s description.

Subsequently the student told us that he had fabricated several details in the story he had told Mr. Bellesiles and The Chronicle. The student said he knew a soldier who he believed had died in Afghanistan, but he said the person was not his half-brother. The student had no explanation for why the name was not on the military’s casualty lists.

Asked for a response, Mr. Bellesiles said he was saddened that his student had altered the details of a personal tragedy and that he regretted that he had unknowingly passed on a story that was not accurate. “But I hope that no one mistakes the point of my article in calling for greater sympathy and support in our colleges for veterans and the families of those who have suffered loss in our current wars.”

This poor man. First a flood destroys the data he used in Arming America, causing him to be found guilty of academic fraud, and costing him his job. And now this.

For what it’s worth, here’s what a military history professor had to say about Michael Bellesiles’ problematic recent Chronicle of Higher Ed piece about teaching military history:

I actually do teach military history, in the present, at a large R-1 university. And I didn’t believe a word of Bellesisles’ story, even before I made the connection to his earlier troubles. Here’s why:

The characters are just too perfectly drawn, and the events unfold in a predictably tragic yet meaningful way. “Ernesto” and “Javier”–they are plucky immigrants that liberal academics are bound to root for, as opposed to white meatheads named Dave and Bob. Javier joined the military to thank the nation for “giving his family refuge”–they came here for political purposes, not to take our jobs! Ernesto, a Latino, writes a paper critical of DADT, in order to cement our liberal affection for him . . . . What’s more, his research paper is “amazing,” so that all us academics, who by June are ready to stab our own eyes out after spending 9 months trying to teach disinterested students who IM right through class, will like him all the more! Because it would be totally unrealistic to imagine that a non-native speaker of English in a college history class might struggle with his work! Ernesto’s brother is serving in combat–how enobling! And how rare, especially in Iraq these days! And then he gets shot in the head by a sniper, an uncomplicated death that makes clear who was right and who was wrong, because the shooter is obviously skilled, and poor Javier couldn’t fight back because he couldn’t even see the person sniping at him! It works much better than, say, “he got killed by friendly fire while kicking down the door to a family’s house,” or, “he got electrocuted because a greedy private contractor installed faulty wiring in a FOB shower.”

It’s all so perfectly tragic! And, Javier’s condition is such that he can’t even get evacuated to Germany, which serves the narrative very conveniently, because the author needs the family to not be able to go to Javier’s bedside, something the real-life military would facilitate, so that Ernesto can remain in the story. And then Ernesto, in the course of just a few weeks, becomes a skinhead military junkie–but one who still comes to class! Yes, that is far more realistic than someone with profound depression, say, withdrawing from the university or just dropping out altogether.

It’s all just so perfect–so achingly, tragically, profoundly perfect. Just like real life!

Yes, teaching military history in a time of war IS hard, because, more often, you have students in ROTC uniforms, which is kind of the equivalent of the football team wearing their uniforms to class, using said symbol of national sacrifice to bully and silence other students in the class who are afraid of appearing that they “don’t support the troops” if they offer a critical appraisal of American foreign policy. And then there are the real veterans–the combat veterans tend to be quiet, and they smile these knowing little smiles and tell you creepy things in confidence after class, while the retired pillow-case stuffers and chairborne rangers (the vast majority of military veterans) use their “status” to bluff, bluster, and intimidate.

I don’t believe a word [o]f Bellesisles’ “story.” As Tim O’Brien tells us in “The Things They Carried,” any meaning or moral that can be teased out of a “true war story” ought to make you wary of its veracity. . . . [Bellesiles’s] piece is based solely on his own observations, so it rests on his credibility alone–-and he has none. The Chronicle should be embarrassed to have printed this drivel.

Set aside the borderline snark. And assume this guy is what he says he is (I do wish more academics would conduct their online lives under their own names; in a case like this one, which is all about truthfulness and the capacity to verify, the problems with anonymous posting are particularly evident). If you can do those two things, the comment is worth some mulling. Nice to see someone who’s not a lit professor doing some genre forensics here. As Jim Lindgren notes, the gist of this comment is to suggest that Bellesiles’ essay reads like a short story with himself as the caring, compassionate professor-hero. All of this is awfully interesting.

Lindgren–who helped expose Bellesiles’ data manipulation/fabrication in Arming America eight years ago, and is now raising concerns about the authenticity of Bellesiles’ account–prompted the Chronicle of Higher Ed to announce its intentions to fact-check Bellesiles’ story. That was several days ago. He now notes that the clock is ticking, and wonders what’s taking them so long.

Everything you always wanted to know about me but were afraid to ask is here, courtesy of Norm Geras. Post title courtesy of Emily Dickinson.

Here’s ACTA president Anne Neal in the Washington Examiner:

Who could be opposed to community service? Don’t we need to volunteer, get outside ourselves, and do something nice for others? Our country, after all, has a great tradition of volunteerism — what Tocqueville called our “spirit of association.”

That’s the thinking behind the Treasury and Education departments’ current study of the feasibility of making community service mandatory for anyone who wants to receive a tax credit for college tuition.

Their study responds to a congressional mandate in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, commonly known as the stimulus bill. Given our history, the federal government’s interest in college students doing community service might seem like great news. But is it?

By definition, volunteerism is just that: voluntary. You volunteer — no one makes you do it.
This would seem reason enough to object to such a mandate. But there is a bigger issue at stake. A college education is about education. It’s about cultivating a love of learning in students and giving them the skills and knowledge they need to become informed citizens and effective workers. It is most emphatically not about having the government dictate how students spend their time and live their lives.

Fortunately, there has been less than a groundswell of support. The American Council on Education, the biggest college lobbying group, wrote Congress an eight-page letter decrying the proposal, joined by an alphabet soup of other organizations. As ACE sees it, a community service requirement would be unworkable because colleges couldn’t possibly keep track of which students perform the service.

However, the real problem here is not administrative, but educational. There is already overwhelming evidence that colleges and universities are failing to focus on their core mission of undergraduate education. They certainly don’t need to be further distracted by community service requirements.

At many colleges and universities, presidents and administrators have lost sight of students’ education, busy as they are expanding facilities, running high-profile athletic programs, asking alumni and legislators for more money, and growing their own ranks. According to the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, the number of noninstructional “support staff” on campuses has doubled in the last two decades, far outpacing enrollment and directly contributing to skyrocketing tuition increases and mounting student debt.

General education requirements, once the backbone of a college education, have gradually fallen to the wayside. As we discovered in surveying graduation requirements for our college-guide Web site WhatWillTheyLearn.com, students can graduate from the vast majority of our colleges without taking broad courses in American history or government, economics, and literature.

Is it any wonder then that so many college graduates today can no longer name the freedoms protected by the First Amendment or read and understand a complicated book? According to the American Institutes for Research, one in five can’t do the math to figure out if a car has enough gas to take it to the next station. It’s pretty hard to do community service, when you can’t get to the community.

Rather than mandating community service, the best way to help college students get outside themselves is to have them delve into great figures of history, wrap their minds around the best works of literature, and grapple with big ideas that have changed the world.

We certainly would balk if Congress decided to give families a tax credit for students to participate in sports or act in local theaters — wholesome activities, yes, but ones which have little to do with an institution’s main educational purpose. For the same reason, we should oppose any efforts by Congress to mandate community service — something that students, by any definition, should voluntarily choose — particularly when the available evidence suggests that students desperately need to be focused on learning, not something else.

A broader issue, too: Be wary of governmental uses of the vocabulary of service (and sacrifice). Harvard president Drew Faust has done a marvelous analysis of how, during the Civil War, that language was installed by the government and became the engine for expanding its scope and powers. That’s been true ever since — and perhaps never more so than now. My review of Faust’s This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War is here.

The University of Illinois has been getting hammered for firing a professor who was accused of hate speech after explaining–on topic, and as part of a course–the Catholic Church’s position on homosexuality. Now they’re rethinking things.

Here’s the email that caused all the uproar. See what you think. My own sense is that the professor–who, until he was fired, was a religion professor and director of the St. John’s Institute for Catholic Thought–is perhaps a bit too complacent in his expectation that readers will differentiate between his explanation of principle, which is a relaying of ideas held elsewhere, and an exhortation on behalf of his own belief, which is something else entirely. Matters are complicated when we consider that the students in receipt of this email knew their professor to be a committed Catholic. Still, it takes real boneheadedness to decide that the email is an example of hate speech as the brave anonymous student complainant did — and it likewise takes stupidity that far exceeds the professor’s naive trust in his students’ intelligence for administrators to run with the complaint as they did. I think Professor Howell is likely to give his students far less credit in the future, if he has a professional future–and to cover his backside better as a result. Will the student and the enabling admins learn anything from this? Doubt it. Righteousness is not a receptive frame of mind.

I know my own readers are far too suave and worldly ever to be caught up in the sort of confusion that lies behind the Illinois debacle. But just for the record, let me say that I think the position articulated in Howell’s email is hogwash, that homosexual love and sex are every bit as legit as straight love and sex, and that, if I were less secure in my own beliefs, I might be personally offended by his email. But as it is, I think it’s interesting to see the elaboration of a moral system that is established and powerful and has enormous institutional weight behind it — precisely because it bears so little relation to my own baseline moral set points. It’s always empowering, enlightening, and stimulating to understand how people different from oneself think. There’s nothing intimidating or hateful about it.

In Texas, professors at public colleges and universities are now required by law to post faculty syllabi, curriculum vitae, lists of publications, and even salary. I’m thinking that’s a grand idea–I used to put all that stuff (except for my salary) online at Penn, updating every term as new courses and new syllabi rolled around. I loved it. It was a clean, paperless, transparent way of saying to students–and anyone else who cared to look–this is who I am, this is what I teach, this is what I do, and it’s all aboveboard and you can take it or leave it. It was also, secondarily, a great recruiting tool for students, who self-selected when signing up for classes, plus it totally resolved that perennial problem of students who lose the syllabus or your course policies. Everyone got one paper copy on day one of class — but they knew it was all posted online as well. So I wasn’t having to continually print new hard copies of things, and they weren’t able (as a very few students will inevitably do) to declare that they couldn’t be held responsible for X or Y because they had lost my handouts.

So I like the idea of posting it all online, and think there is something to be said for posting the salaries, too. I wouldn’t have minded the world seeing the punitive 1 percent “raises”–anything less would have required formal permission from the university–that I received annually after my department decided I was a conservative nutjob. And I would have loved to see how others were doing–where the favors were going, and what the imbalances were. Those things would probably have stopped, of course, if all the information were publicly available. Sunlight does have a way of disinfecting.

But the good professors of Texas don’t like this new rule. The Dallas Morning News summarizes their objections thus:

The Texas Conference of the American Association of University Professors requested a repeal of the law in its June newsletter. The group said the law is an unfunded mandate that would have a chilling effect on classroom discussion of controversial subjects.

If professors are required to post detailed descriptions of class material online, those opposed to the discussion topics would be able to target specific classes and professors, the association said.

“As far as any of us can tell, this is an attempt by cultural conservatives to identify course content they might view as undesirable, and is thus clearly an attack upon academic freedom,” a previous newsletter said.

Murray Leaf, speaker of the Faculty Senate at the University of Texas at Dallas, said that despite the bill’s portrayal as a measure promoting transparency, it displays “an insulting mistrust of higher education faculty.”

“Faculty in the United States decide the curriculum,” Leaf said. “We are largely autonomous. The people behind this bill are opposed to that and are trying to undermine it.”

A law requiring professors to post their résumés online suggests that they’re not qualified to teach their classes. And the higher education system depends on peer review by other educators, which is a better method for judging professors’ qualifications than review by the general public, Leaf said.

“The law really isn’t primarily about giving students better information, but about giving people who want to attack higher education better information,” he said. “We’re not against transparency. We’re against being attacked by our enemies.”

I’d say that’s paranoid and laughably self-serving–except that it’s so par for the academic course that it’s normal. What does that tell you about academic culture? Could such targeting ever happen? Sure it could. But here’s the thing: Many things can happen. That doesn’t mean they will, nor does it mean that you do nothing for fear of remote contingency. The perfect is the enemy of the good. It’s also, in this case, a rationalization for maintaining a status quo that is very far from good in a great many ways.

And besides, there is the little matter of accountability to the folks who pay the bills:

Sponsors of the new law, however, say transparency is the legislation’s only aim.

“Some fear that this is a ‘gotcha’ system, and it’s really not at all,” said state Rep. Lois Kolkhorst, R-Brenham. “I think that this will be a great tool to help the consumer.”

Today’s students choose colleges based on how good its football team is, its reputation and how far it is from home, Kolkhorst said. But after the law goes into effect, detailed course information could also factor into the decision.

“The motivation behind the bill was to really empower the students and the parents to choose classes that really fit their goals,” she said. “As college tuition has gone up sharply … dollars are very tight and students are leaving universities with thousands of dollars in debt, I think it’s very important that we have transparency.”

Justin Keener, vice president of policy and communications at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, said it is essential for public colleges and universities to post professors’ salaries online.

“This is a public institution, it’s public dollars being used, and the public deserves to know how it’s being used,” Keener said. “The taxpayer deserves to see what they’re paying you.”

If professors don’t want their salary information to be open to the public, they should work at private institutions, Kenner said.

“This isn’t an issue of trust … this is not personal,” he said. “The public is paying for it. They deserve to see every single penny.”

I know many academics have nothing but the finest, most cultivated contempt for a great American unwashed–not to mention all conservatives, washed or not. If it doesn’t come naturally, it’s learned on the job. But that doesn’t change the reality–that academia exists to serve the public good, and that academic freedom does not mean freedom from accountability. The tantrums in moments like this do not serve professors well, and only lend credence to the notion that they should not be left to their own professional devices.

Prof Mondo–who is a practicing medievalist under another name–has more.