James Stacey Taylor

There’s been a lot of discussion recently about the decision of the McMinn County Board of Education in Tennessee to remove Maus from its 8th Grade ELA curriculum. Much of this discussion has focused on the claim that Board has “banned” Maus from the school; this had led some to claim that the Board did so in to move away from teaching about the Holocaust.

Fortunately, we can assess these claims easily as the transcript of the Board meeting is available online.

One of the Board members did state that the Board was considering banning Maus. (This same Board member was also skeptical that removing the text was appropriate, noting both that he was concerned about the removal based on “a few words”, and that he had read the background on this author and the series, talked to some educators, and it is a highly critically acclaimed and a well reviewed series and book context”.) But what was actually under discussion was not the removal of Maus from the school, but its removal as an anchor text in a module on the Holocaust.

The reasons for this had nothing to do with objections to teaching the Holocaust. Indeed, several Board members stated how important it was for students to learn about it, noting that the module on the Holocaust involved students reading “news articles from BBC, Los Angeles Times, Guardian, survivor stories, and excerpts from other books….. [and] There is even a section where we go to the Jewish Virtual Library and look at some selections from that.” The concern was primarily about the “objectionable” language used in the book–words that “if a student went down the hallway and said this, our disciplinary policy says they can be disciplined, and rightfully so”. Secondary concerns included the presence of a nude picture–of a female mouse!–the fact that some of the objectionable language involved a boy “cussing out” his father, which wasn’t respectful, and that the author Art Spiegelman had drawn illustrations for Playboy (!).

Possible solutions short of removing the book were suggested–such as whiting out the offensive words completely (deemed a violation of copyright, and so unacceptable), whiting them out partially (but then the kinds could guess them!) and writing to Spiegelman to ask if their removal would be permissible (that would take too long). After canvassing the possibilities the Board decided that despite the merits of Maus (one Board member said she would still teach it to her children) since the language it contained violated the speech code of the school it should be removed from the curriculum.

Note that all that was decided was that Maus should be removed from the curriculum. The Board members didn’t vote to remove the text from the school. Maus wasn’t banned.

Was this a good decision? In my view, no. Against the horrors of the Holocaust a few “damns” don’t mean a damn. But from the perspective of the Board members the “cussing” was clearly extremely offensive–and ancillary to the main message of Maus. And they couldn’t find a way to keep Maus without the wording that violated the speech code to which they required students to adhere. This wasn’t a good decision, but it wass an understandable one.

More understandable, in fact, than claiming falsely that Maus was banned because of the putative far-right sympathies of the McMinn County Board of Education.

Back in September the Urban Institute published a ‘blog post arguing that “Equitable Research Requires Questioning the Status Quo”. The author—Lauren Farrell—argued that both “objectivity” and “rigor” were “harmful research practices” that should be rectified.

Not surprisingly, this has generated a flurry of responses from persons with more conservative leanings eager to defend “objectivity” and “rigor” in research. Also not surprisingly, some of these responses have been hyperbolic. Writing for Persuasion, Zaid Jilani claimed that these claims were “emblematic of the struggle between truth and social justice that is taking place across many left-leaning institutions in the United States.”

There’s a certain irony to this response to Farrell’s argument, for in their rush to defend objectivity and rigor many of their putative proponents have abandoned both.

Farrell writes that an appeal to objectivity

“…allows researchers, intentions aside, to define themselves as experts without learning from people with lived experience. Objectivity also gives researchers grounds to claim they have no motives or biases in their work. Racism, sexism, classism, and ableism permeate US institutions and systems, which, in turn, allows for research that reproduces or creats racist stereotypes and reinforces societal power differences between who generates information… and who is a subject…”

With respect to rigor, she writes that

“…researchers often define rigor as following an established research protocol meticulously instead of ensuring data are contextualized and grounded in community experience”. This understanding of rigor, she holds, “does not guarantee trustworthiness or accuracy.”

It might be that some of Farrell’s critics have been “triggered” by her use of certain words (“objectivity”, “rigor”) without paying attention to how she is using them or her intended message. If these terms are removed, Farrell’s claims become utterly anodyne. To paraphrase:

“…researchers should not define themselves as experts without learning from people who have direct experience of the subject the researchers are studying. They should recognize that their work might be motivated by pretheoretic commitments or be biased in some way…”

And

“…researchers should recognize that established research protocols might not lead to results that are trustworthy or accurate unless the data that they gather are placed in proper context and accurately reflect the experiences of the persons who are the subjects of research.”

But these claims shouldn’t be controversial. Consider how they’d apply to Nancy MacLean’s much criticized work Democracy in Chains. (MacLean argues, in brief, that James Buchanan and public choice theory was at the heart of a stealthy conspiracy funded by the Koch Brothers to protect the privilege of rich white men.) For Farrell, MacLean should not have defined herself as an expert in this area without learning from people who knew and worked with Buchanan to ensure that she was getting her facts right. She should also recognize that her interpretation of documents and events might be biased by her ideological antipathy to libertarianism—and taken pains to correct this. And she also should have recognized that despite her extensive documentation of her sources her adherence to this established research protocol of her discipline (history) is no guarantee that her work will be trustworthy or accurate unless her data is placed in proper context and reflects the experiences of those who are the subject of her research.

But isn’t the problem with Democracy in Chains that MacLean failed to be objective and rigorous? If so, how could her methodological failures support Farrell’s rejection of “objectivity” and “rigor”? The answer is simple. Although Farrell takes herself to be rejecting “objectivity” and “rigor” what she is really arguing against are appeals to these values that mask poor research methodology.

To be sure, she should have been clearer about this. But to rush to condemn her for rejecting “truth” in favor of “social justice” on the basis of this ‘blog post is to commit the very errors in research that she decries.

Owning Civil Discourse and Social Justice