By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK
Recently, I came across a syndicated column by Marvin Olasky that focused on letters from conservative professors who document the unfair treatment they have received from their colleagues: ostracism and denial of tenure, for example. These professors write about the need to “bite my tongue,” to “keep my mouth shut,” of discovering that “graduate students are urged by my colleagues not to work with me.”
It is a sad state of affairs. If professors feel compelled to bend to left-wing peer pressure in this manner, how can we expect 19-year-old undergraduates to confront it?
Over the years I have heard many young men and women call Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity to ask for advice about dealing with left-wing professors who express an intolerance for conservative views. The young people frequently say that they fear their professors will retaliate against them with bad grades if they don’t “go along” with the opinions being taught.
I have found Limbaugh and Hannity to be very good on this topic. They understand that we all have been told since childhood to “stand up for our beliefs.” Catholics are taught to “bear witness to the faith.” But Limbaugh and Hannity understand that these injunctions need to be applied differently in a classroom setting. They tell the young people that there is no reason to make themselves martyrs by confronting the professor and risking bad grades and damage to their future educational opportunities and job prospects. We must choose our battles.
Hannity and Limbaugh will frequently urge the young people who call them to “hold their noses” and regurgitate the “liberal drivel,” unless, of course, the professor is genuinely open to hearing the other side on the topic. There are such liberal professors, individuals who genuinely practice what they preach about the free exchange of ideas. Students will have to determine for themselves what the reaction will be if they challenge the liberal consensus on the matter at hand.
My own experience has been that this dilemma is manageable. Almost all my graduate school professors back in the 1970s and 1980s were liberals, hard-core new leftists in many cases. Still, I was always able to maintain my grades without compromising my beliefs.
How did I do it? The key is to bring up the conservative and Catholic side to a topic as another angle to the debate, without being confrontational with the professor. We should keep in mind that one of our goals in attending college is to learn what left-wing theorists have to say.
We want to acquire an accurate understanding of what Marx, Jean-Paul Sartre and the leading secular leftists have to offer to intellectual history — if for no other reason than to be able to intelligently disagree with it. Why be disrespectful toward a professor who is providing us with the information, even if he is a close-minded boor? “Learn” does not mean “concur with.”
We are not compromising out beliefs when we do not speak out against what we feel is an affront to our beliefs in an academic setting. Not necessarily, at any rate. It would profit anyone who is troubled by that thought to watch the movie A Man for All Seasons, especially those portions where Paul Scofield, playing St. Thomas More, articulates what is implied when we are silent about something we hear: Silence does not imply assent.
We are in a classroom to learn, sometimes to learn about ideas hostile to our basic beliefs. We want to know what we are up against; we want to see opposing beliefs at their best, so that we can formulate our response, a response that we may not be ready to articulate until months or years after we graduate from college.
Am I saying that students should pretend to believe the left-wing views of their professors? No. There is no reason to do that. We can answer test questions, for example, by prefacing them with statements such as “Leading theorists hold that. . . .,” or “Recent analysis by social scientists maintains that. . . .” Adding these disclaimers makes clear that we have read and understand the ideas that were assigned by the professor, without specifically indicating our agreement with them.
We have to be reasonable about this issue. We cannot object if a left-wing professor gives us a poor grade when we do not display in our answers — either orally in class, or in written form on an examination — some indication that we understand the left-wing theories that were taught in the class. A conservative Christian student has an obligation to demonstrate, for example, that he or she understands what Marx meant by economic determinism or why a New Left historian viewed the United States as the aggressor in the Cold War, in classes where these issues are taught — even though that student may be convinced these theories are in error.
To paint with perhaps too broad a brush, criminologists who study what led Charles Manson to behave as he did, do not do so for the purpose of promulgating his ideas.
The bottom line: Conservative and Christian students should feel no obligation to take the floor to challenge every opinion a left-wing professor expresses on political and cultural issues. Certainly not if doing so results in retaliation from an unfair and close-minded professor at report-card time.
If we are worried that the professor’s left-wing views are winning over gullible classmates, we can talk to them after class, explaining where we think the professor is in error. Students shoot the breeze about topics that come up in class all the time. What is taught by left-wing professors is fair game. We can take a stand for our beliefs in that setting.
Please do not misread me. I am not being critical of students who feel an obligation to speak their piece in opposition to a professor who is being offensively one-sided in his handling of a topic. My point is only that they should not feel honor-bound to do so. A professor has too many advantages in a classroom setting; it is not a fair fight. If Catholic students decide to “lay low” to get a good grade from a left-wing professor, it strikes me that they are doing nothing dishonorable.
Perhaps readers of this column can provide some “war stories” of their own to illustrate how they have dealt with this problem. Fire away.
+ + +
Readers are invited to submit comments and questions about this and other educational issues. The e-mail address for First Teachers is fitzpatrijames@sbcglobal.net, and the mailing address is P.O. Box 15, Wallingford, CT 06492.
Powered by WPtouch Mobile Suite for WordPress