An Equity Oriented Approach
University of Toronto Bulletin 1
Monday, July 24, 2006
Concept Of "Genuine" Doesn't Reflect Today's Universities
I am writing in response to John Furedy's comments on equity studies (Gun Related Murder Should Be Judged as Evil and Punished Accordingly, Letters, June 12).
What constitutes a "genuine academic discipline" is an interesting question, one that sociologists and historians of education have spent some time exploring. While disciplines have been one of the basic organizational components of the higher education system, how academic institutions draw the map of knowledge, through their departments, journals and associations, changes over time and varies from place to place. Departments at the University of Toronto continue to evolve, as the recent change from the Departments of Zoology and Botany to new Departments of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and Cell and Systems Biology illustrate. Disciplines and departments encompass a great deal of intellectual diversity while scholars from different departments and disciplines may see problems in the same way and approach them with similar analytic and methodological tools. Disciplines are fluid, changing and powerful but the idea that some are "genuine" and others aren't doesn't capture the complexity of universities today.
Rather than debate the true character of a discipline, the University of Toronto has stated as its objective enhancing interdisciplinary, interdepartmental and interdivisional collaborations. It has also embraced equity and diversity in all its activities to ensure that we reflect our local and global community. The Department of Sociology and Equity Studies at OISE/UT as well as the arts and science program in equity studies explore key intellectual questions about the meaning of equality, citizenship and opportunity. They draw from diverse bodies of knowledge and contribute to important debates on campus and around the world. The sociology and equity studies department is recognized for the high quality of its programs, the success of its graduates and the scholarship of its faculty, which includes two members of the Royal Society of Canada. Like any diverse intellectual community, members of the department do not agree on any particular policy approach although they do value genuine fairness, academic freedom and intellectual rigor.
Jane Gaskell Dean
OISE/UT
Web Reference: http://www.news.utoronto.ca/bin6/thoughts/060724-2484.asp
A Merit Oriented Approach
University of Toronto Bulletin 2
Monday, August 21, 2006
Letter Misses Key Point
Dean Jane Gaskell's response to Professor John Furedy's concerns about identifying "genuine academic disciplines" misses his key point. Of course disciplines evolve and, of course, interdisciplinary scholarship is to be encouraged. Furedy questions the extent to which a discipline's practitioners have become committed to particular explanations as opposed to remaining open to other ideas. A related issue is the corrupting effect of advocacy often flowing from such commitments; as Einstein once remarked: "conviction is a good mainspring, but a poor regulator." These key questions are not answered by indicators beloved of administrators, such as faculty awards. Also, to my knowledge, this university has not addressed them as part of any recent academic planning exercise.
Developments in anthropology illustrate the questions' importance. Derek Freeman's Margaret Mead and Samoa describes in devastating detail how, while establishing itself as a separate discipline in the early 20thcentury, anthropology adopted the ideology of cultural determinism that "in an actively unscientific way, sought to totally exclude biology from the explanation of human behaviour." As Freeman notes, later developments show that assuming the ascendancy of nurture over nature, or vice-versa, is as silly as trying to decide which, in the product of two numbers, is the more important.
Faculties of education have exhibited similar tendencies. Eric Hirsch's The Schools We Need and Why We Don't Have Them ascribes the decline in North American school standards to educational faculties promoting a "rigid orthodoxy masquerading as reform," manifest as absence of rigorous criticism within the field, and denigration of evidence of failure, such as the result of standardized tests. This orthodoxy can include uncritical acceptance of cultural constructivist epistemologies; Alan Cromer's Connected Knowledge: Science, Philosophy and Education discusses the resulting adverse effects on mathematics and science education. As an illustration, he describes the reactions of a group of secondary school science teachers to seminars on teaching the topic of buoyancy, first by an educator and then by a physicist. On being the exposed to the second, the teachers unanimously rejected the first, describing the contrast as "between night and day." It is not without justification that many of my colleagues in the hard sciences regard education academics as the used-car salesmen of academe.
It is in this context that Furedy and I question the combination "sociology and equity studies." One might ask: How would colleagues react if our Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics changed its name to Astronomy, Astrophysics and Big Bang Theory or the Department of History became History and the Namier Approach? Both would be making a priori commitments to particular explanations. It is well known that equity advocates favour group preferences. Their rationale is often based on a priori claims including such notions as systemic discrimination that, as I have argued in these pages on the issue of women in science, is frequently a meaningless tautology.
The development of such curious hybrids needs more careful justifications than those that have been thus far been offered.
Philip Sullivan
Institute For Aerospace Studies