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Monday, December 12, 2005

All Quiet on the Dispositional Front

Via Robert KC Johnson at Cliopatria, here’s an intriguing article in the Chronicle of Higher Education about the ongoing “dispositions” mess. It’s not intriguing for its content, which simply and helpfully reviews what you already know (if you hang around UD) about the efforts of educational bureaucrats to enforce a dullard’s conformity on the profession by tossing out of ed schools student teachers who question liberal orthodoxy.

No, the article’s intriguing because of the sudden silence of the major players in this drama. All the dispositional heavies, the professors and the deans who expelled students because they didn’t like their social attitudes -- they’ve suddenly clammed up.

The dispositionally non-conforming students, now, they’ve got plenty to say in the article. But the professors at the University of Alaska who made it virtually impossible for a woman who didn't go all the way on abortion rights to stay in the program “did not want to speak to the Chronicle.” The dean at Washington State, and all the WSU professors, who tried (almost succeeded, too, until FIRE got wind of it) to kick out a guy who likes to shoot guns in his spare time, “did not return telephone calls and e-mail messages.”

What sort of commitment to social justice does it demonstrate that, called upon to defend your part in keeping the nation’s teachers ideologically pure, you’re unwilling to step up to the plate?