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Freedom to Teach
By Michael Bérubé
InsideHigherEd.com - Sept 11, 2007
<http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2007/09/11/berube>
[The full report of the American Association of
University Professors, Freedom in the Classroom, is
available online at:
http://lyris.eresources.com/t/1009724/729744/409/0/
-- moderator]
In the morning class, an undergraduate survey of
American literature since the Civil War, I used The
Beverly Hillbillies as an analogy, asked students for a
short list of classic American film directors, and
reviewed the disputed election of 1876. I had opened
the class by writing on the board things like "Food and
Drug Administration," "Securities and Exchange
Commission," "unemployment insurance," "Antitrust Act,"
"Social Security," and "the weekend." "These," I
explained, "are just some of the things we take for
granted today -- and that didn't exist when the action
of The Rise of Silas Lapham opens in 1875."
In the afternoon class, a senior seminar on recent
American fiction, I spoke of the ubiquity of television
-- in automobiles, convenience stores, elevators, and
even refrigerators; I mentioned the Union Carbide
chemical disaster in Bhopal; I explained the school of
thought in communications studies, which links mass
communications to totalitarianism; referenced the
importance of Chuck Yeager in Tom Wolfe's The Right
Stuff; and responded to a student's remark about 9/11
by talking about aspects of Don DeLillo's White Noise
-- for that was our assignment -- that look either
dated or prescient after the events of that day.
It was just an ordinary day in the classroom, in other
words.
Every time college professors enter their classrooms --
any one of the thousands of classrooms on the thousands
of campuses across the United States -- they know they
are presiding over an extraordinary and potentially
volatile space. Not all classrooms are charged with
drama, of course; some contain students sitting in
remote corners of the lecture hall, catching up on some
much-needed sleep. But classrooms that depend on
student discussion, commentary, and debate are quite
another thing -- and seasoned teachers know what every
inexperienced teacher dreads: Class discussion can go
in any direction whatsoever. Students can pick up on a
professor's analogy -- for example, my slightly
facetious comparison of Silas Lapham to the Beverly
Hillbillies, or my more serious comparison between two
characters' discussion of American literary figures and
our own sense of the "canon" of American directors --
and run with it anywhere they like; every day, they
bring to the classroom their own analogies, obsessions,
fully-formed arguments, and passing concerns, as well
as the ideas that just popped into their heads a few
minutes ago. And in response, professors can pick up on
students' responses and take them wherever on the
syllabus -- or wherever in the world -- seems most
pedagogically promising.
This is so common and ordinary a feature of college
classrooms that it should need no defense. Quite
literally, it should go without saying that college
classrooms are places where students and professors can
pursue illuminating analogies, develop trains of
thought, play devil's advocate, and make connections
between past and present.
But, for reasons well known to readers of Inside Higher
Ed, these things no longer go without saying.
Conservative ideologues (whose names escape me at the
moment) have tried, in recent years, to redefine
"academic freedom" as a shield that protects
conservative students from the opinions and convictions
of their professors; they have introduced bills in
state legislatures that would mandate "intellectual
diversity" in college courses and curricula --
presumably to give conservative interpretations of The
Rise of Silas Lapham and White Noise a fair hearing, or
perhaps to require the assignment of texts more
congenial to the conservative world view. And these
initiatives have spawned a minor cottage industry of
Student Protection Plans, as state legislators craft
bills that would make it illegal for professors to
challenge students' cherished beliefs, or require
professors to "respect" students' determination to
defend their opinions, however misinformed these might
be.
In response, the American Association of University
Professors' Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure
has drafted a 5500-word statement on "Freedom in the
Classroom," explaining just what it means that -- as
the AAUP 1940 Statement of Principles says -- "Teachers
are entitled to freedom in the classroom in discussing
their subject." The document will be published in the
forthcoming issue of Academe, and it is -- in the
humble opinion of this longtime AAUP member (who had no
hand in its composition) -- as clear and as compelling
a defense of academic freedom in the classroom as one
could wish.
The statement takes up the right's four most prominent
complaints about professors' classroom demeanor: "(1)
instructors 'indoctrinate' rather than educate; (2)
instructors fail fairly to present conflicting views on
contentious subjects, thereby depriving students of
educationally essential 'diversity' or 'balance'; (3)
instructors are intolerant of students' religious,
political, or socioeconomic views, thereby creating a
hostile atmosphere inimical to learning; and (4)
instructors persistently interject material, especially
of a political or ideological character, irrelevant to
the subject of instruction." In its discussion of
"indoctrination," for example, the statement argues
that: "It is not indoctrination for an economist to say
to his students that in his view the creation of
markets is the most effective means for promoting
growth in underdeveloped nations, or for a biologist to
assert his belief that evolution occurs through
punctuated equilibriums rather than through continuous
processes. Indoctrination occurs only when instructors
dogmatically insist on the truth of such propositions
by refusing to accord their students the opportunity to
contest them. Vigorously to assert a proposition or a
viewpoint, however controversial, is to engage in
argumentation and discussion -- an engagement that lies
at the core of academic freedom."
This, too, should go without saying -- but because it
doesn't, conservative ideologues (whose names are just
at the tip of my tongue) have been able to mount
campaigns against individual professors and entire
campuses based on the most specious of assumptions. In
North Carolina, for instance, a group calling itself
the Committee for a Better North Carolina complained
bitterly that the University of North Carolina had
assigned Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed to
incoming students. Do such people really need to be
told, in the words of the AAUP statement, that "it is
fundamental error to assume that the assignment of
teaching materials constitutes their endorsement"? Do
we really need to explain in so many words that
"classroom discussion of Nickel and Dimed in North
Carolina could have been conducted in a spirit of
critical evaluation, or in an effort to understand the
book in the tradition of American muckraking, or in an
effort to provoke students to ask deeper questions
about their own ideas of poverty and class"? Yes and
yes. In recent years, I've dealt with any number of
people (none of them my students) who find my
contemporary American literature syllabus
objectionable, as if my assignment of writers like
Ishmael Reed, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Richard Powers
is incontrovertible evidence of liberal "bias." And
last year, a conservative organization (whose name I
forget, but whose acronym is ACTA) released a shameful
little pamphlet that used course descriptions as prima
facie evidence of imbalance and indoctrination -- even
in the case of a course entitled "American
Masculinities," which apparently set off ACTA's alarms
because there seemed something kind of queer about it.
The AAUP statement also addresses another common right-
wing shell game. Lately I've been told by conservative
critics of academe that they don't want to restrict
professors' academic freedom in the classroom; they
merely want to point out abuses of the classroom that
masquerade as "academic freedom." This is a dicey
matter, because sometimes these critics have a point:
there are indeed college professors who think that the
principle of academic freedom covers everything they do
and say in the classroom, regardless of whether it has
any bearing on the course material. (Those professors
need to read the AAUP statement, as well.) Certainly,
no professor of analytic number theory has any business
subjecting his students to a soliloquy about the war in
Iraq, and no professor of introductory cosmology has
any business fulminating about illegal immigrants. And
no professor of anything has any business haranguing or
intimidating students -- for any reason.
But here's where the shell game comes in. The 1940 AAUP
Statement of Principles notes that professors "should
be careful not to introduce into their teaching
controversial matter which has no relation to their
subject." In 1970, the AAUP clarified this guideline,
explaining that "controversial" matter, in an of
itself, is not a problem; rather, irrelevant material
is the problem.
The intent of this statement is not to discourage what
is "controversial." Controversy is at the heart of the
free academic inquiry which the entire statement is
designed to foster. The passage serves to underscore
the need for teachers to avoid persistently intruding
material which has no relation to their subject.
Time and again, conservative critics of higher
education have paid lip service to this principle,
claiming that they object only to the persistent
intrusion of material that is irrelevant to the course.
But then -- sometimes in the same breath -- they go
after entire disciplines, from women's studies to
ethnic studies to Middle Eastern studies, which they
regard as illegitimate. Some critics, for example, are
willing to countenance women's studies so long as it
does not involve "feminism" -- which, they think,
crosses the line into advocacy and indoctrination. Yet
it is not clear -- to anyone who takes education
seriously, that is -- why the history of feminism (just
to take one possible subject) would not be appropriate
material for a women's studies course.
Some critics make a superficially more careful case,
arguing that the criterion of "relevance" should be
determined by the course description (and studiously
ignoring the fact that outfits like ACTA routinely
attack course descriptions). But, as the AAUP statement
demonstrates, this is an exercise in literalism so
extreme as to amount to pettifogging: "The group
calling itself Students for Academic Freedom (SAF), for
example, has advised students that '[y]our professor
should not be making statements ... about George Bush,
if the class is not on contemporary American
presidents, presidential administrations or some
similar subject.' This advice presupposes that the
distinction between 'relevant' and 'irrelevant'
material is to be determined strictly by reference to
the wording of a course description.... But if an
instructor cannot stimulate discussion and encourage
critical thought by drawing analogies or parallels, the
vigor and vibrancy of classroom discussion will be
stultified."
The course description is not a contract signed by
professors and students; it is not an advertisement for
a bill of goods or a demarcation of rigid intellectual
boundaries. As the mundane examples of my own courses
go to show, class discussion exceeds the bare minimum
of the course description on a daily basis; I don't
indoctrinate, harangue, or intimidate my students, but
I do introduce them to all kinds of relevant material
that doesn't appear in the course description or on the
syllabus; and over the course of a day, a week, or a
semester, I try to demonstrate how and why this
material is relevant to the discussion. I am aided in
this, I have to add, by bright, energetic students who
bring their own analogies, obsessions, fully-formed
arguments, and passing concerns to class, and who try
to show me (and their peers) why these things are
relevant to the course material.
I'm happy to say that so far, I haven't had any
timorous, excessively-literalist students who squeak in
distress when I bring up television sitcoms or toxic
chemical spills in class even though I haven't
mentioned them in my course description. And I'm also
happy to say that so far, I haven't had any timorous,
excessively- literalist university administrators
who've cautioned me against talking about presidential
elections, regulatory agencies, or the events of 9/11
in class.
For everyone who has ever dealt with such students or
such administrators, and for everyone who might, the
AAUP "Freedom in the Classroom" statement is a timely
and forceful document. No other organization in higher
education could have issued it, because no other
organization is capable of enunciating and defining the
core principles of academic freedom. And though I do
not expect that all academe's critics will respond to
"Freedom in the Classroom" warmly or in good faith, I
do hope this statement will decisively clarify the
meaning of academic freedom in teaching -- not only for
teachers themselves, but for students, parents,
administrators, trustees, alumni, and lawmakers.
[Michael Bérubé is the Paterno Family Professor in
Literature at Pennsylvania State University.]
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