Juan Cole Again on Politicized Teaching
Last week I noted Juan Cole’s criticism of a New York Times editorial about Columbia University’s response to allegations that professor Joseph Massad intimidated pro-Israel students. Cole amplifies those remarks today in a Salon article called The New McCarthyism. I was struck by this part, where Cole blasts the Times for complaining that Columbia’s investigation committee did not explore whether Massad’s teaching was “fair”:
The fact is that you will never get agreement on such matters of opinion, and no university teacher I know seeks such agreement. The point of teaching a course is to expose students to ideas and arguments that are new to them and to help them think critically about controversial issues. Nothing pleases teachers more than to see students craft their own, original arguments, based on solid evidence, that dispute the point of view presented in class lectures. That is why the New York Times editorial is so wrong, and so dangerous. University teaching is not about fairness, and there is no body capable of imposing “fair” views on teachers. It is about provoking students to think analytically and synthetically, and to reason on their own. In the assigned texts, in class discussion, and in lectures, the students are exposed to a wide range of views, whether fair or unfair.
Cole reminds me of my own university teaching experience. My views were often clear, even as I sought to teach students how to reason and write more analytically. To remain “objective” or always provide even-handed “balance” in courses dealing with the interplay of psychology, law, and justice or the dynamics of racism and sexism would have seemed misleadingly artificial. But, as Cole says, I too relished clear-headed disagreement, much more than the mushy agreement with my politics that some students mistakenly thought would guarantee an A. I tried to teach students that there are almost always both good and bad arguments on both sides of controversial issues. The key to disputing is not to demolish the other side’s silly arguments but to wrestle with their good ones while improving your own less persuasive points. That’s not so easy, either in a university classroom or in the broader world of political engagement.
Unfortunately, my view of teaching, and Cole’s, and from what I can tell Joseph Mossad’s as well, is under attack, as Cole notes briefly toward the end of his Salon piece and as I’ve written about many times previously. That teaching is designed, as Cole says, to expose students to new ideas and help them think critically about controversial issues makes sense to many of us, but not to the forces behind the wave of “educational reform” that continues to re-shape American public education. The federal No Child Left Behind Act and its many state antecedents are designed, through a combination of intention and side-effect, to refocus teaching on memorizing facts rather than challenging ideas, on superficiality rather than substance, on narrow job training rather than critical thinking. Efforts have already begun to move this sort of education reform upwards into the university. The attack on Joseph Mossad, on Ward Churchill, on other lefty professors is only the beginning.