A Place for Teaching, Not Indoctrination
Jay Bergman, Central Connecticut State University


College professors sometimes make perfect fools of themselves, when they comment on issues of public interest.

This happened at Duke University last year. Three white Duke lacrosse players were accused, falsely and in flagrant disregard of their constitutional rights, of raping a black woman.

Before their culpability had been determined legally, and even before the public had information on the facts of the case, Houston Baker, the George D. and Susan Fox Beischer professor of English at the university, wondered "how many more people of color must fall victim to violent, white, male, athletic privilege" before Duke finally will be a place "where minds, souls, and bodies can feel safe from agents, perpetrators, and abettors of white privilege, irresponsibility, debauchery and violence." Baker assumed the players had raped the woman because they were white, male, and athletic. According to Baker, that is what males who are white and athletic do, or secretly wish they could do.

Of course, professors are citizens and like everyone else are free to express their opinions, no matter how repugnant or foolish these may be, outside the classroom.

But within the classroom, teachers' freedom is limited, and not just in the obvious requirement that they teach their subjects, so professors of mathematics cannot teach Spanish and professors of Spanish cannot teach mathematics.

There are other, more substantive and significant limits that exist, or should exist, on what professors can say and do in the classroom. According to the 1940 Statement of Principles of the American Association of University Professors, "teachers are entitled to freedom in the classroom in discussing their subject, but should be careful not to introduce into their teaching controversial matter which has no relation to their subject." In other words, professors are prohibited from indoctrinating their students and are required, correspondingly, to teach their students. There is a profound difference between the two activities.

At Central Connecticut State University where I am a professor, this distinction is sometimes ignored. Last fall, a professor sent the students in one of her courses more than 100 e-mails containing articles advocating the professor's opinions on matters entirely extraneous to the course -- for example, that Israel committed war crimes while fighting Hamas in Gaza last summer, and that comparisons between the Bush administration and Nazi Germany are reasonable. She also invited students to join her in attending seminars, such as Workshops on Peace, that were designed to advance the professor's political agenda.

What is even worse, during one class, as a way of demonstrating how the American colonists stole Indian land, the same professor took a student's backpack without permission and in front of all the students emptied its contents onto the floor, naming each item one by one. It is hard to imagine a more egregious violation of a student's privacy, or a more flagrant abuse of the power professors have over students by virtue of their grading them and writing recommendations for them for jobs after they graduate.

Unfortunately, this is not uncommon. In my 17 years at CCSU, about half of my students have told me, on their own initiative or in response to my asking them, that one or more of their professors not only interjected their political opinions in class on a regular basis, but did so in an effort to convert their students to their point of view.

This figure is consistent with the results of a survey -- admittedly of a small number of students -- the student newspaper conducted in 2005: 54 percent of those polled agreed "some professors use the classroom to present their personal political views," and 53 percent agreed "there are courses in which students feel they have to agree with their professor's political or social views in order to get a good grade."

The remedy for these abuses is oversight, followed by appropriate action when necessary, by administrators and trustees. In the case of state institutions, legislators and other government officials whose responsibilities include the supervision of public education can make clear their disapproval without dictating the content of the courses professors teach, or how they teach them.

Perhaps because they consider what they do beyond the intellectual abilities of ordinary people, professors like to think of universities as autonomous and self-regulating. They condemn as "McCarthyism" efforts by David Horowitz, through his Academic Bill of Rights, and organizations such as the American Council of Trustees and Alumni and the National Association of Scholars, to publicize the politicization of college classrooms. Indeed, the mere possibility that the public would be concerned enough about this politicization to register their objection to it evokes cries from professors that the dark night of fascism is about to descend on American college campuses.

The unwillingness of professors to subject themselves to external scrutiny brings to mind what the late Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis wrote in 1933, namely that in righting societal wrongs, sunlight is the best disinfectant.

May the sun shine brightly on American colleges and universities.
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