Academic Freedom and Me...

Well, folks! It has been over a week since I have been able to make the time to communicate with you.

This evening, my university is having David Horowitz speak, famed mentor to Students for Academic Freedom, www.studentsforacademicfreedom.org. So there has been a big push from both sides of the political spectrum to attend and voice opposition/support.

I feel that I must weigh in here for two major reasons. First, this blog is at least ostensibly about issues of intellectualism in the academy, and this might be the biggest issue at the moment on that particular table. Secondly, I co-author and sponsored a bill (click http://www.bgnews.com/vnews/display.v/ART/2005/02/21/42196b25bff71?in_archive=1 for the news reporting the bill's passage) in my school's Graduate Student Senate that expressed opposition to Ohio Senate Bill 24 ( see http://www.legislature.state.oh.us/BillText126/126_SB_24_I_Y.pdf for the exact text).

The problem as I see it is multivariate. First, many professors are in fact or in appearance taking as part of their mission as teachers the goals to inform/force students' views on political issues in such a way as to make this information tangential to the course topic and to cause students to fear reciprocity for writing on, researching, or otherwise expressing views that the professor find naive or ill-informed.

I have been in a number of classes over my twenty-year history in the education system that I have felt that the teacher presented their own personal view as the correct one without much room for discussion. At the same time, I have had numerous professors who spent a great deal of time fostering a useful and lively discussion of ideas. In some ways this might result from divergent types of professors, and in some cases there are fundamental problems with instructors.

In other cases, though, the problem lies with students who have not been taught in elementary or secondary schools how to investigate, reason, and present controversial opinions. There is next to no instruction on critical thinking, a process not assisted by "No Child Left Behind"/test-based assessments of progress. Therefore, oftentimes students reach the college level and are surprised when they are confronted by an oppositional viewpoint that a professor has had years to craft and form. The students are unarmed for intellectual combat, and the question becomes, "How do we best teach individuals how to fight mental fights?"

There seem to be two basic camps presenting solutions. Members of both the left and right inhabit both of these solutions, and each brings their own set of presuppositions and biases.

1. We challenge the students openly by questioning and interrogating their presentations of unformed viewpoints. This approach can take the form of lectures, class discussion, responses to speeches/presentations, or the grading of papers.

The problem with this is that students often feel attacked and assaulted throughout their class day. This places them on their defensive posture. Rather than drawing the student out and forcing them to fortify their ideologies with thought and research, they more often either retreat and accept the point of view in order to get a good grade or turn to outside sources for reinforcements.

2. We present the student with facts that support a variety of different perspectives and encourage them to draw from these texts in an effort to construct a personal viewpoint that is more open to considering differences. This is attempted in survey courses.

The problems with this sort of approach basically rests on time and money. In order to adaquately present the vast quantities of perspectives that exist and could come to bear on any one issue would take an equally vast class-length.

It also assumes that students have the ability and desire to truly test and research on their own. This process of self motivation and discernment would require a preknowledge of critical thought. In my experience, students prefer to be told what they need to memorize for a test and then just given a test on that material.

Furthermore, it assumes an ability of instructors to equally and deftly present viewpoints with which they might personally disagree and which does not become merely a multitude of canons from which the student must choose. This is an extremely difficult proposition and is not very easily accomplished.

What I advocate is a combination of the two. I think that the benefits of a truly Socratic style of teaching are huge, but I also know that many times professors have no real desire to hear the opinions of the students but prefer to undercut them or show them how wrong they are.

Therefore, graduate students and professors must be taught how to guide students to find the errors in their own and each other's arguments. This requires confrontation with facts and texts that force a process of questioning. It also requires an openness on behalf of the instructor to being interrogated with equal ferocity, something that causes many professors to shut down into a mentality I call "Agree OR Else" aka "Well I Have a Doctorate and Am Teaching the Class".

Fundamentally, I agree with authors such as Ellul and Levinas who advocate that society as a whole needs to shift a focus from seeking answers to seeking the right questions. I think that judgements must be made, grades must be given, but how we gauge that process might look much more different than A's= 92-100%.

Short of a complete change in society (something I am aware is utopian), all members of this discourse must become more accountable to each other and to themselves. There must be more sources of communication and feedback. There must be something like a campus ombudsman created for students to have an advocate who is not directly affiliated with any particular department or program.