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Sunday, July 04, 2004
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UP FRONT
“Students usually prefer instructors who are up front about their beliefs,” writes Joanne Jacobs, in defense of James Tuttle, a now-retired philosophy professor at Lakeland Community College in Ohio. Tuttle was forced out of his job by administrators who disliked his overt Christianity in class and on his syllabus, a syllabus which came to include a disclaimer that announced to his students right off the bat the specific religious convictions through which he read all philosophers. [UD wrote about Tuttle while he was still battling for his job - see post dated 2/8/04]. I suspect Jacobs is wrong. Students do not - and they should not - prefer instructors who are up front about their beliefs. UD has complained a good deal about the emergence in American university classrooms of what she calls the syllabum omnium, on which (among many other unnecessary and distracting pieces of information) professors include all sorts of shit about who they are, what they believe, where they’re coming from, how important it is for them to be up front, blah blah blah. What’s wrong with this pedagogical approach should be obvious. It’s a framing, predetermining sort of move; it says to students that whatever we read, whatever we discuss, the outcome of this inquiry is already known - Christ is King; or, Women Must Liberate Themselves in the Ways that Mean the Most to Me; or, We Are Living in the Latter Days of Capitalism; or, Utilitarianism is the Only Sane Morality. It’s not that professors should not have beliefs. It is that the sanctity of the classroom consists in large part in concealing them. “A student once revealed to me the new cultic untruth,” writes Philip Rieff in Fellow Teachers, from within which there will be dispensed an unprecedented flexible exteriority: “We are all going to be - we all have to be - ’up front,’“ she said. I gleaned from her the idea of a human who exposes himself completely and reveals nothing. …What every state can best use are empty people, without the gift of self-concealment. The “true objectivity of the teacher,” Rieff goes on to say, emerges out of a “positionless understanding” which intuits “the proper distances of the feeling intellect.” Responsible professors “keep our ideas to ourselves ... for as long a time as the disciplined ego will allow…. Messages and positions are the death of teaching. As scholars, and teachers, we have a duty to fight against our own positions.” Those sympathetic to Professor Tuttle argue that he was “merely stating [his] religious beliefs,” “routinely informing classes of [his] particular perspective.” But there should be nothing routine about loading the classroom dice in this way, whether you’re doing it from a secular or a religious point of view. It’s narcissistic and it's stifling. I support the organization FIRE’s defense of Tuttle against an administration dumb enough to persecute rather than attempt to reason with the man. But I condemn Tuttle’s orthodoxies, which belong not up front but at the very back. |