Sometimes it’s refreshingly difficult to tell where a writer is coming from; sometimes it’s maddening; other times, it makes you wonder if the writer is trying to be deceptive or, alternately, is just too clever by half. I alternated between the last two thoughts reading a recent review of the Harvard professor Louis Menand’s recent book of essays, “The Marketplace of Ideas” (“The Opening of the American Mind“). I still can’t tell if I should feel deceived…

It’s hard to disagree with the idea that a kind of low-minded professionalism has crippled U.S. higher education. We surely suffer from a profoundly self-centered institutional culture that’s sharply protective of its own material interests. I think everyone in academia has personal experiences with this phenomena. I knew a professor who hated the faculty union’s egalitarianism. Since he was the most famous person in the department, he would say, he should be better paid.

More broadly, this political short sightedness is reflected in the gulf that separates the super privileged in the richest institutions and the rest of the system. The concentration of financial and social capital at the top of the U.S. educational hierarchy– from kindergarten to graduate school– would make the most powerful corporate oligarch blush. Economic crisis seems to have only acerbated these problems. Regressive policies– from tuition hikes to furloughs– are the order of the day.

Given this conservatism, it’s hard to imagine what Menand means when he claims that the academy is liberal because, “95 percent of humanities and social-science professors voted for Kerry; zero percent voted for Bush.” Is this really a good measure of cultural or political diversity? Could it be, instead, that Bush’s often explicit anti-intellectual ethos alienated a lot of teachers? Whatever the merits of Menand’s ideas, if he sticks to this one, he’s lost my vote.

Evaluations– assessment in general– is a thorny issue for teachers and for teachers’ unions. It starts with the traditional union resistance to the merit raise. Unions, not too surprisingly, prefer to negotiate pay for all of their members at once, rather than for individual members. Perhaps most importantly, education is best served by a workforce of well paid-teachers. Too often, too, merit systems are used by administrators to reward what they consider good behavior.

Good behavior, for example, might include anti-union teachers, or teachers that support policies that favor the administration. So unions generally advocate avoiding the entire mess by letting the rising tide raise all boats. That’s only the start of the problems associated with evaluation, though. It’s also a question of power; not simply who has the final say on evaluations, but also which tools are used in the evaluation. Administrations tend to want full control over the entire process.

Unions and teachers resist this, for obvious reasons. If the administration controls evaluations, or controls the methods of evaluations, teachers can be written right out of the proses. It’s not just undemocratic, it’s arguable the least effective way to assess teaching. Teachers are the better judge of fairness, and more likely to take into account the conditions and limitations of their jobs. That’s true of all workers. Democracy– bottom up governance- works best, generally speaking.

All of this has left unions open to all sorts of absurd charges and, often, to a public perception that unions reward bad teachers or resist the idea of improving education. It’s fascinating, then, and probably good news, to hear that the American Federation of Teachers is resisting the weight of all of this history and trying to come up with a ‘union-made’ evaluation plan (“Union Chief Seeks to Overhaul Teacher Evaluation“). We all have a dog in this fight, to use the cliche.