About #4: It seems that my anecdotal experience may have more to do with the type of institution I teach at:

According to:”Is the Academy a Liberal Hegemony? The Political Orientations and Educational Values of Professors”
John F. Zipp and Rudy Fenwick (Public Opinion Q)

They find that:

“Through the 1990s, the percentage of both liberals and conservatives declined in most academic disciplines. This was especially true for conservatives, who witnessed growth only among biologists and, interestingly enough, social scientists.”

That may not be generalizable to social scientists in Communication, though, so I kept reading:

“‘Liberals’ were dominant at the elite liberal arts colleges, while ‘conservatives’ were more common at two-year colleges and Comprehensive II universities….”

(Note: they say more common, but not majority. If national trends hover at around 2.6 liberals to each conservative faculty member, at these schools, it may be closer to 1.2 liberals to each conservative. And this includes faculty across disciplines, and claims that faculty in the sciences tend to be more conservative than faculty in the humanities (perhaps skewing the results for terms of this discussion) are uninterrogated.

Perhaps what I am associating with an “empiricist” bent is more likely described as a “middling to lower tier school” bent?

That said: By Jasper Neel’s count, based on a simplification of the Carnegie data, this “low to middling” category of institution may constitute anywhere from 60-93% of schools (depending on where you locate schools like St. Ben’s and other private non-elite liberal arts colleges). So the bulk of membership at NCA, the ones teaching three or four or five sections of Comm each semester, with one or two of those sections always being public speaking, small group, or a hybrid service course, may be teaching at one of those institutions with the 1.2:1 ratio.

I’ve moved the goalpost in my argument, I know; but I’m still not convinced that the liberal orientation you sense among your colleagues is discipline-wide.

Not that I don’t want it to be true; it’s just not, anecdotally, my experience.

1. & 2. Amen.

3. Ooh, that one is very complicated, knowing more of the back story on it. Definitely not something to discuss in this forum except to say that NCA’s SILENCE on the issue was the result of cowardice, no matter how you felt about the reward recipient.

4. Well, I have not been around much in our field, only in three departments. I think social scientists—and some of my best friends are social scientists—tend to be lefty politically, although I think a case can be made in terms of social or cultural issues for conservative leanings. I just don’t have a life sample big enough for me to generalize on this issue. All the social scientists I know tend to lean toward the democratic party and, before 2004, even support Nader. So, I dunno, I think those assertions are hard to make.

1. I don’t want to go to California. I second the idea that this is a reason not to.

2. Fish on “Professional Correctness” seems important here; academics are called by the media only when the media feels certain that they know what the academics will say.

3. Isn’t this the same NCA that gave an award to someone who tried to push his wife’s head through a wall? (That statement is too easy, too reductive, and too flip. I apologize for that. But there is a history of bad choices.)

4. Most importantly: There is a subtle presumption, I think, in some of this conversation that NCA members are politically distinct from or in opposition to Horowitz’ position. I see no evidence for that presumption. I think that the social scientists in the NCA membership (a number as large as the “liberal arts” types used, I think, inaccurately as a trope for the whole field above) share the conservative predilections of bean-counting empiricists everywhere. It seems to me, completely anecdotally, that there are more speech departments without rhetoricians than there are speech departments without social scientists. Those social scientists may share a predilection toward conservative thought, even if that thought runs counter to their best interests.

Remember Frank’s book, about Kansans voting against their own best interests by voting for Bush? That describes perfectly my Republican colleagues who repeatedly vote for governors who systematically underfund higher education. Whether tenure is a shield that protects one from seeing the stupidity of that move is something I can only guess.

Are we sure, in other words, that for every five NCA members who protest, there won’t be six, eight, ten who are actually there because they align with Horowitz’ values? You’ll be able to identify them — they’ll be conducting surveys on the audience on the way out and swabbing mouths to measure cortisol to assess aggression or whatever it is that the cortisol measures.

The NCA-F Advisory Board

Herbert W. Simons, Director of NCA-F; Professor, Temple University

Betsy W. Bach, Second Vice-President, NCA, Professor, University of Montana

Art Bochner, First Vice-President, NCA; Professor, University of South Florida

John Gastil, Professor, University of Washington

Robert Hariman, Professor, Northwestern University

Roderick P. Hart, Professor, University of Texas at Austin

Stephen J. Hartnett, Associate Professor, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

J. Michael Hogan, Professor, Pennsylvania State University

Lisa Keränen, Assistant Professor, University of Colorado at Boulder

Cindy Spurlock, Doctoral Student, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Tracey Weiss, Assistant to the Director, Temple University
__

Hardly a list synonymous with NCA as a whole, of course, but certainly making decisions “in the name of.” It seems a rhetoric-friendly list, so, at least in their discussions audience analysis will factor in (hence, my optimism).

I wish I could share the optimism Josh expresses in his initial post–that NCA will utlimately not move forward with this. But I suspect there’s a very real chance they will, which seems consistent with the organization’s corporate ethos. The amateur quality of Comm Currents that Josh notes, for example, is a product of out-sourcing the web design. The recent discussion on CRT-NET was a laugh, as the defense of the design was, “We can’t control it…” The hell they, can’t, they can find a new designer, or find someone competent in house. Of course, the website in general is about 10 years behind, isn’t it?

More to the point, when NCA asked Judee Burgoon to deliver the Arnold lecture in 2005, it seemed perfectly comfortable with a speaker who is well-funded by the Dept. of Defense. In other words, seeking publicity or a high-profile speaker seems perfectly fine, whether or not it supports defensible values (don’t get me started on the irony of our recent “Faith, Intellect, Ethics” theme).

All of which is to say that I find it perfectly possible that NCA will go ahead and invite Horowitz to San Diego. Like others here, I would respond by refusing to attend. Add this to the increasing corporatism, excessive scheduling of papers and panels, and the general absence of legitimate intellectual exchange, and my dissatisfaction with NCA only grows…

I also agree with your personal, affective assessment: it’s unfair for you to be left out of the discussion when Horowitz has caused you must personal distress (I didn’t realize that you were; are you not on the NCA-R board? I mean, you were in their forum last year . . . I see that you are not, but Rod Hart is and he is privy to the harassment). At the same time, there’s a little jouissance here on your and “their” part: the persistant refusal to acknowledge affective life in rhetorical studies is consistent with excluding you. You have a right to be insulted, but, given the disciplinary discursive regime, are we surprised you were excluded?

My impulse in controversial discussions such as this is to go structural instead of personal. That’s why I went for the publicity angle, and that’s why I think this argument will be more successful in persuading others than one focusing on affect and anxiety and insult—or individuals. It seems to me the desire to publicize the field and for us to become more intellectual in popular spaces, to be experts and what not, is the general desire most folks thinking about this issue would share. My argument is a means-ends thing in this instance: (a) priority one, stop it from happening; (b) if it does happen, go from there (e.g., push the hegemony issues).

What upsets me the most is that if any one of the scholars on the committee for NCA-F had been targets of Horowitz’s ire and minions–who have assailed me with hundreds of physical threats, employment related threats (including petitions and appeals to my dean and regents), sexual violence threats, sexualized and gendered insults about appearance and “needing to get laid,” and other insults–this possibility never would have been raised. And to not include me in the discussion–as the person with perhaps the greatest individual stakes in whether and how this goes down–is also an insult.

I disagree with Hariman and Josh on the decorum question. If Joe McCarthy were to appear in our midst, how decorous would you be? Horowitz does not (yet) have the stature of McCarthy, but his agenda is the same.

I would appreciate it if folks would read the article I wrote on Horowitz at http://www.counterpunch.org/cloud03082007.html and to hit my blog’s “academic freedom section. I’ve been dealing with this for a long time. Many highly regarded professors and excellent teachers have not been buffered by tenure or supportive administrations and have fallen due to Horowitz’s efforts and the related efforts of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA). Their work is Orwellian–shut down freedom in the name of freedom. Those faculty whose jobs have been threatened or lost would be even more horrified than I to think an academic association would use Horowitz to gain publicity. If we gain publicity, he gains it too. And he is a culture warrior of the first order (not a crackpot to be lightly dismiseed).

What is crucial, I think, is to understand this issue not as an issue of free speech or academic freedom, but as a struggle for hegemony, in Gramsci’s sense. It’s about power–not about polite dialogue. Horowitz knows full well that many of his pronouncements are lies. He knows whom he serves.

Cheers,

Dana