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i am really not sure of the point of this legislation.
i do not think it necessary, nor do i think it would stand if it was passed.
in the interest of full disclosure, i teach at a university.
i find it curious the gap that seperates how university teaching is understood from outside as over against how it is understood inside....
anyway, the bottom line so far as i am concerned is this: if you teach in a university setting, you have a tremendous amount of coercive power that the students hand you as a function of their orientation toward Grades. there is little that you can do to counter this. one result is that it is all too simple to impose your beliefs on students--all you have to do is let yourself forget about the coercive nature of being in a classroom setting. because it is so easy, it appears as something to fight against.
secondly, students do not seem to enter university with any particular skills at thinking for themselves. it is simply not something that is emphasized in high schools. what they are good at is following directions. most of my teaching works at a philosophical level and is aimed at trying to help them along the process of thinking for themselves. i try to isolate, clarify, and pull apart the systems of thinking that inform various works. ideally, i try to bring them to a point where they have to choose to continue functioning in an unexamined way. but i have no committment to the content of that choice--it can go in any direction.
i try to emphasize a critical relation to texts that i assign. i am explicit about the fact that politics informs the selection of texts, but also that there is a distinction between politics as they inform a historical analysis, say, and politics as is understood in the big wide flat world of american life. in formal argument, you can and should expect the frames to be explicit, the chain of deductions coherent, etc. it si fair game to criticize texts for what their assumptions force out of consideration, for example. in the big wide flat world of american politics, you rarely get to that level.
i have and have had conservative students. they do not constitute a particular target for me--i do not remember any pattern in terms of how these students fare. sometimes they object to what i being done in class--if their objections are well-formed, that's fine. it makes things a bit more interesting to tangle with them. at the level of their work, what matters is that they think about the premises of the arguments that they make--there is no real distinction between conservative and other students at this level--i could not imagine penalizing a student for their politics as such.
but what i find curious is the number of mediocre students who try to claim that the problem lay not with the mediocrity of their work, but in the "fact" that they are being persecuted unfairly for their conservative beliefs.
more curiously still, i know a number of conservatives who teach at universities and they tend to be more rigid, more doctrinaire than their "left" counterparts. sorry, but that seems to be the situation. i dont see a whole lot of complaining about that. i dont see much in the way of legislation proffered to counter it, either. go figure.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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