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Thursday, July 27, 2006

Some of the Letters...

... the New York Times printed in response to Stanley Fish's piece arguing that professors should not advocate for positions in the classroom reveal what are pretty widespread misunderstandings of his point -- a point made by many other writers on universities, among them Philip Rieff in his book Fellow Teachers.

Two of the six letters the Times published, for instance, equate dispassion with lack of passion. They assume that unless a professor reveals her personal feelings about social and political issues, she will be a robot in front of her students. Here's one, from a Yale student (UD's comments are in parenthesis):

Students’ ability to learn from or to form contrary opinions to the teachings of an opinionated professor should not be doubted. (And no one doubts it. But this leaves open the value of the opinions. It is of course easy to form opposing opinions to someone who thinks the government did 9/11; the question is whether such an obviously stupid opinion belongs in the university classroom, represents a good use of serious university students' time. And note the repeated use of the word "opinion" in here. There are significant differences between an opinion and a reasoned belief, and the writer will elide them in this letter.)

Some of the United States’ best teachers have been and will continue to be those who hold and share strong convictions in their beliefs. (Now it's beliefs.)

So long as our professors don’t punish students for opposing views, nothing is lost in professors’ expressing their beliefs: nothing is lost except classrooms dead from intellectual boredom and hallways silent of enlivened debate. (Note that we've decisively moved from opinions -- which don't imply a reasoned ground -- to beliefs; and, more importantly, we've asserted that in fact the withholding of opinions/beliefs in the classroom creates boredom and silences debate. In fact, opinion/belief/conviction neutrality on the part of professors, combined with a demeanor of intellectual seriousness, allows students to feel comfortable contributing to discussion and to question their own insufficiently grounded but often very emotional opinions. Announcing your personal beliefs on your syllabus and then trumpeting them in class diverts the students' attention from the intrinsic value of various beliefs to your particular valuing of a particular belief. It's ultimately a form of narcissism.)

Inquiry without judgment is not the role of the American scholar. (Now we've jumped all the way from opinion to judgment. Reasoned and informed judgment of intellectual and political positions is of course the desired and difficult to attain outcome of education altogether. Maturation out of holding unexamined opinions and toward the holding of considered judgment is the crucial transition of the educated person. It is a difficult, slow process, and it is utterly short-circuited when a professor from the outset tells you what your judgments should be.) If our universities are truly to be places of learning and scholarship, and not of mere training or rote instruction (again the equation of dispassion with death), professors should be encouraged in their diverse and divergent views; college students should be trusted to make their own opinions; and our nation, a nation of ideas, should be left to benefit. (Again, we know students will have opinions; but are they "their own"? The nature of opinions among the young is that they don't represent considered, dispassionate, autonomous thought; and this is precisely the sort of thought that professors should model in the classroom.).


Another letter writer expresses the common view that it's impossible to present ideas dispassionately: "When Mr. Fish discusses academic freedom in the coming semester, will he miraculously be able to distance himself from his opinions, which are now part of public discourse?" It doesn't take a miracle to avoid pressing your opinions in the classroom. Does it take a miracle for a psychiatrist to assume neutrality in the analytic setting? A judge in the courtroom?

A third common attitude about all of this, expressed in a third letter, is the "everybody in -- the water's fine" approach, in which all ideas and opinions are cool: "[Maintaining] diversity within the idea pool ... increase[s] the chance of discovering what is actually true." That's so actually not true. That's the spurious defense administrators at Wisconsin are trying with Kevin Barrett. It's exactly the role of seriously conceived universities to have curricula which reflect rigorous selectivity relative to forms of thought worthy of consideration among educated people.