Professors and Their Views on Political or Social Issues in the Classroom Essay

Every college student has sat through lectures in which the professor does not say anything except how good he/she is. Sometimes it seems humanities professors think they can say whatever they want in the classroom, whether it is the leftist professor criticizing capitalism or the invasion of Iraq, or the conservative professor ridiculing “tree huggers” and global warming alarmists. In my own experience, most humanities faculty members come into the classroom with an agenda. A lot of students and their parents do not like that and have tried to get laws passed against professors who want to fill students’ head with their own ideas, and especially against professors who grade student work according to how much they agree with them. However, most people agree that making laws against free speech can be dangerous because those laws can be abused by parents, students and other faculty members. It will be argued in this essay that indoctrination in the classroom must be stopped but diversity must be encouraged. In other words, professors should be allowed to advocate their own political and social views in the classroom, but must never try to force their students to accept them.

On the liberal left of the academic freedom issue is Professor Michael Bérubé who describes his classrooms as “places where students and professors can pursue illuminating analogies, develop trains of thought, play devil’s advocate, and make connections between past and present” (2). He says the conservative right is the real threat to academic freedom because it wants to limit his freedom of speech by making it illegal for professors to show any disrespect for students’ religious or political opinions no matter how “misinformed these might be,” says Bérubé (2). He analyzes the statement issued by the American Association of University Professors’ Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure, “Freedom in the Classroom,” which he says seems to defend professors against attacks by the right wing but actually helps the right by insisting that everything a professor says must be “relevant.” In other words, Bérubé approves of the statement but worries that it might be used to suppress freedom of speech by setting criteria that other groups can use against professors like himself.

The statement by Committee A centers on what Bérubé calls the right’s four most common complaints:

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;
4. instructors persistently interject material, especially of a political or ideological character, irrelevant to the subject of instruction. (Finkin 2)

He completely agrees with all four points, adding that “no professor of anything has any business haranguing or intimidating students — for any reason” (3). What he fears is that these complaints may lead to outsiders controlling what professors may and may not say. Bérubé suspects that the conservative right and various student organizations such as Students for Academic Freedom might use the relevance issue as a way to get rid of courses such as women’s studies or Middle Eastern studies. He has his own political agenda, as the next article points out.

Professor Erin O’Connor sees “Freedom in the Classroom” as an attempt to protect professors’ rights without defining their responsibilities, or as she puts it, for professors to say to outsiders, “Don’t mess with me!” (1). There have been a lot of complaints by students “that their professors are compelling them to adopt certain viewpoints in order to complete assignments, earn good grades, and even graduate” (2) but she does not say whether those professors are right or left. However, she does say that the biggest problem with Bérubé’s argument is that he won’t admit that the academy is no longer a place of diversity. “College teachers,” she says, “are overwhelmingly oriented toward one side of the political spectrum” (4) meaning the left, and she sees evidence of that in the professors’ statement because it does not come out strongly enough against cases in which leftist professors abuse their freedom of speech in the classroom. She uses women’s studies professor Julie Kilmer as an example of a propagandist, saying that she “discusses the threat of conservative student activism and openly reflects on the importance of proselytizing in the classroom” (9), meaning that Kilmer believes professors should be converting students to their own beliefs. She is doing exactly what Bérubé says the right is doing. For that reason, O’Connor wants professors to use their freedom of speech responsibly, regardless of their politics, and believes that the university itself should protect students against all forms of indoctrination.

Stanley Fish also takes a strong stand on the issue. He refers to two professors who promoted the idea that 9/11 was “an inside job” as part of their courses. The public protested but some academics defended the professors on the grounds of academic freedom. Fish disagrees. Academics can teach anything they want but they cannot “embrace or urge it,” says Fish. That would be “appropriating the scene of teaching for partisan political ideas” (2); in other words, Fish wants professors to teach their courses without pushing their personal agendas on students. As far as he is concerned, university administrators should be on the lookout for professors who try to indoctrinate their students and get rid of them if they do. That would prevent critics on the left and right from attacking the university system and would provide students with a better education.

In conclusion, new regulations are not the answer because, as Commitee A says, “education cannot possibly thrive in an atmosphere of state-encouraged suspicion” (Finkin 8), and yet we also have to deal with professors like Kilmer who want “to take back the classroom” (qtd. in O’Connor 5) from everyone who wants them to teach more responsibly. More conservative educators such as O’Connor and Fish insist on the value of freedom of speech in the classroom but remind educators that with rights come responsibilities. They don’t want to pass laws against indoctrination but they want it clearly understood that a professor’s job is to teach students how to think about a subject, not what to think about it.

Works Cited

Bérubé, Michael. “Freedom to Teach.” Inside Higher Ed. 2007. Web.

Finkin, Matthew W. et al. Report on Freedom in the Classroom. 2007.

Fish, Stanley. “Conspiracy Theories 101.” The New York Times. 2006.

O’Connor, Erin. “AAUP to Critics: What, Us Biased?” Minding the Campus. 2007. Web.