20 January 2006 @ 4:10PM >>
Commenter Brian DeSpain
takes me to task at the
On The Fence Films website over my
Consumer Advocates at UCLA post from Wednesday, which was also cross-posted here. Brian says, “What’s a nice spin is how you gloss over what actually provoked those comments.” Since he raises some interesting points, I wanted to link to it here and include my response:
Brian,
I don’t believe I was spinning anything; I linked to the original article and to the site so that readers could make up their own minds. I still don’t believe that pointing out the classroom environment and political leanings of professors amounts to “reactionary” “McCarthyism,” “right-wing propaganda” and an “abhorrent” “witch hunt,” which is what is being charged about the Bruin Alumni Association.
That said, professors are free to hold whatever views they like, and they’re free to engage in any political activities outside the classroom that they wish. Those views and activities should not adversely affect their careers. They should not be fired or otherwise punished for their views or for their out-of-class activities. Nobody is calling for that, to my knowledge, nor should they.
But in an environment where professors overwhelmingly hold one worldview, it is relevant, because a lack of intellectual diversity means that students are being short-changed. Even the most conscientious professor is unable to present opposing viewpoints as convincingly as someone who actually believes them and understands their intricacies. And when professors go off on political rants in classes where it has nothing to do with the subject matter, students are being deprived of class time that should be spent on the topic that was advertised in the course handbook.
Perhaps you feel that the Bruin website conflates these two issues, and perhaps you believe that they are presenting their argument in a muddled fashion. Fair enough; several people have made that criticism, and I can see that point. But is it McCarthyism? When did expressing an opinion in this country become the same thing as leading a witch-hunt?
At least the members of the Bruin Alumni Association are expressing their opinions without charging anyone tens of thousands of dollars for it in some sort of educational bait-and-switch, which is what happens all too often on campus these days.
If anything, the exaggerated reaction of the professors simply serves to underscore the extremism that the Bruin Alumni Association is pointing out. Professors are not above criticism, and by comparing this criticism to McCarthyism, these professors are attempting to elevate themselves to a privileged status where they can spout whatever opinions they want—while billing other people for the time—without anyone ever disagreeing publicly. Sorry, but that doesn’t wash with me.
Thanks for taking the time to share your comments. I appreciate that you did so in a civil, reasoned fashion. I wish these professors would follow your example.
Hope all is well,
Evan
Update: UCLA graduate Gina Cobb has some additional thoughts:
The majority of the professors are politically neutral or at least fair-minded in their teaching approach, and generally stick to their course content. However, some of the professors are off-the-charts radical, liberal, socialist, collectivist and Marxist. That alone would not be a problem (the professors are entitled to believe whatever they want), but they force the entire class to listen to and parrot back their extreme politics. It’s not fair to students.
I had one professor who was so liberal that in writing down the name of the class on my notes one day I absent-mindedly wrote “Socialism” instead of the real course title, “Torts.” Socialism is what we were actually discussing just about every day.
[...]
The problem is professors who make courses having nothing to do with politics into venues for imposing their own political point of view on students.
[...]
The main thing I learned was how to “toe the line” — how to say whatever the person holding the Power of the Grade wanted to hear. This is actually a useful skill for the real world. However, since the reason that I was taking these courses was not to learn how to conform to anything, however unreasonable, but rather to learn specific subject matter and to sharpen my academic skills of research and writing, I would say that I lost more than I gained from the experience.
This new attempt by UCLA alumni to identify professors who go overboard in injecting politics into their courses isn’t a “witch hunt.” It’s an attempt to gather evidence and to rein in the professors who have gone way off the deep end in how they teach their classes. To grumble that the alumni group should not be willing to pay students for notes or tape recordings documenting the abuse is to focus on a detail about methodology in the hopes of distracting from the need for the overall effort. If the notes and tapes are handed over without payment, will that make the critics happy? (Answer: No.)
What the critics of this new effort and the fans of academic freedom need to think about is what they would consider a reasonable response if a university had a large number of its professors using their courses to promote fascism, as opposed to socialism. At some point, it would be reasonable to say, “Enough is enough. Teach what we are paying you to teach.”
