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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.) 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. |