Academic

Campus Listening Lines

By propertyprof

Following up on a post about a suggestion that faculty be required to post their syllabi, so that the public can figure out what's being taught on colleges these days....

This all reminds me of an email I got back in 2004 from someone who informed me that some campus group (I think it was a local version of accuracy in academia) was in the process of forming on the University of Alabama campus and that they might monitor my classes.  The email admitted of little in the way of response; they were just announcing their intentions.   I remember thinking to myself (and mentioning to a few colleagues), they are, of course, entitled to monitor (as long as they're registered for the course--I don't allow people to drop in and out; you need to be serious about my course and the reading), but they should be ready to be disappointed in what they found.  Because that coming semester I was teaching a trusts and estates class and a class in remedies.  So they better be ready for a ton of work--lots of estate and gift tax and a lot on contract damages and injunctions.  As far as I could tell, having announced their intentions, they never followed through, all of which goes to show that campus activism ain't what it used to be!  Or maybe they came to a realization after seeing my syllabi that--as the cops used to say in the movies--"nothing to see here," and they moved along.

Would have been really funny if they sent someone in to monitor the legal history seminar I taught every now and then on the Alabama campus--on property and slavery in the Old South.  They would have been reading pretty traditional histories like G. Edward White's Marshall Court and Cultural Change, Timothy Huebner's Southern Judicial Tradition, Robert Cover's Justice Accused, Ariela Gross' Double Character, and Morton Horwitz' Transformation of American Law, 1780-1860 as well as a classic of American literature--Herman Melville's Billy Budd or Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (their choice).  Then they'd be writing papers and listening to student presentations on such topics as the judicial response to dueling following an offense to honor, judges' invocation of the curse of Ham, Thomas Cobb's Inquiry into the Law of Negro Slavery, single women who owned slaves in antebellum Alabama, or the invocation of property law during the Georgia secession convention.   Just the sort of teaching that would fit into Congress' new program on teaching traditional American history.

Alfred L. Brophy

Full post as published by The Faculty Lounge on October 22, 2008 (boomark / email).