Now That’s What I Call A #Slatepitch

I suppose I should avoid being trolled by Rebecca Schuman, but really:

Many of these cases—including the ones at Berkeley, Miami, and CalTech—have something utterly unsurprising in common: The alleged inappropriate behavior took place during an “independent study” between the professor and an early career graduate student.

Not only is she generalizing from a small number of anecdotes here, she’s mischaracterizing two of the three cases. As best as I can determine both the McGinn case at Miami and the CalTech case involved the sexual harassment of research assistants, not students doing an independent study. Why is she doing this? Well, you can probably guess were this is going…

Despite an ever-growing string of high-profile cases, many allegations of sexual harassment in higher ed are met with vitriolic disbelief, bureaucratic intransigence, a legal morass, or the full trifecta. But there’s one easy solution that should please everybody, from those advocating for the alleged victims to those who assume that the accused perpetrators are victims of railroading. Here’s my proposal: End the independent study. Forever. Done and done.

Ah, yes! She needs every anecdote she can get, because the point here is not to reduce sexual harassment but to use a hook for some kind of idiosyncratic ex ante obsession with independent studies. And to argue that we should get rid of independent studies because some faculty members sexually harass their research assistants will look too ridiculous.

If I may be forgiven for belaboring the obvious, eliminating independent studies as a “solution” to sexual harassment could not possibly make less sense. It’s both underinclusive (most campus sexual harassment does not take place in the context of independent studies) and overinclusive (there is no reason whatsoever to believe that independent studies are particularly likely to be involve sexual harassment.) Sexual harassment should be forbidden irrespective of the context, and gaps in enforcement will not be solved by eliminating independent studies, particularly given the lack of any evidence that they pose a problem (or even a logical reason why they would pose more of a problem than any other form of student-faculty interaction.)

There is simply no good reason for a beginning grad student (or undergrad) to do an independent study, ever.

Yeah, no. There are, in fact, perfectly good reasons for independent studies, particularly at the smaller colleges that are rarely considered in pop higher ed writing. A student may need a particular course
to graduate that can’t be offered and had a good reason for not taking it the previous time it was offered. A student may want to study a more specific subject there isn’t enough demand to sustain a regular class in. And so on.

Of course, independent studies can be done well or badly, and all things being equal it’s better if they’re used sparingly. Sometimes, they can involve insufficient work. Students lose the benefits of class discussion, and faculty run the risk of having their time exploited (although generally faculty have discretion over whether to agree to a study.) They have strengths and weaknesses. In this, they are like…every other pedagogical tool. There’s no reason to eliminate them, any more than we should eliminated research assistantships because faculty sometimes sexually harass their assistants.