A Tale
of Two Colleges
Disruption
in the Lecture Hall
Wednesday marked the third day of classes at the
university for this fall term. The UCF
Future, the student paper, published an article and accompanying editorial about
an event which occurred in a psychology class this past spring term. During a lecture
on “the validity of religion” in a cross-cultural psychology course, a student had
stood up in the 400 seat auditorium and loudly advised fellow students “not to
feed into the devil,” going on to say that “Christianity was the only valid
religion that existed.” While the professor acknowledged the comment and
allowed the ensuing discussion among students to run its course, his antagonist
refused to yield the floor and the professor eventually dismissed the class
early.
The professor’s response was a fairly temperate email
sent to the students of the class in which he asserted that the purpose of such
“courses is to struggle intellectually with some of life's most difficult
topics that may not have one right answer, and try to come to some conclusion
about what may be ‘the better answer.’” He concluded by thanking the
student who disrupted the class and
his supporters for “demonstrating to the rest of the class what religious
arrogance and bigotry looks like.”
Given that I was not present, I have no opinion one way
or the other on the event that precipitated these events though in principle I
largely agree with his response. I will readily say that had a student pulled a
stunt like that in my class, I would have asked him to be seated and speak with
me after class. Failing that, I would have asked him to leave and had he
refused, I would have left and begun proceedings to have the student removed
from the class. I’m a strong believer in freedom of expression but I will not
accept this kind of rudeness from anyone. Life is too short to unnecessarily endure
screaming meemies.
I can also say that a former student whom I know to be a
fervent evangelical Protestant noted on my Facebook discussion of this event that
he has personally observed the professor as prone to deride students in class
when they disclose their religious faith. I have always experienced this young
man as thoughtful and, above all, respectful and so I tend to take his
impression fairly seriously.
Even so, it has been my experience that many students
often are unable to make distinctions between critique of their ideas and
attacks on their persons. Unfortunately I also observe that in such cases,
students rarely take the responsibility to come to their instructors to talk
about their disgruntlement which would allow for either a better understanding
of the exchange or perhaps even an apology from the instructor. But when we
instructors do occasionally stray across that line from critique of ideas to ad hominem, our conduct becomes
worthy of criticism. The person of the student – just as that of the instructor
– should never, ever be a target.
“The
purpose of the university is…”
The Future did
a particularly good job of reporting and editorializing on the event. It is the
latest black eye for America’s second largest public university whose recent
history has included being proclaimed by Newsweek
as the least rigorous university in America, losing a lawsuit over the
death of a football player (this in a program placed on probation by the NCAA
last year) and for a massive cheating scandal in the business school which made
national news last year.
The online edition of the Future
provides a comment function in which anyone can leave their thoughts on
the topic at hand. Wednesday’s online edition included this comment:
After
much critical thinking, I have concluded the professor is a pseudointellectual
malcontent and a religious bigot himself. He is also wrong in several other
areas: University Purpose, Critical Thinking, Tyranny of the Majority, and
Anti-Intellectualism. This isn't the forum for a detailed discussion, but I
will state the purpose of the university is to increase knowledge in both
general and specific areas: everyone uses critical thinking although not to
undermine their beliefs but to reinforce them; tyranny exists by the minority,
not the majority; and lastly, anti-intellectualism is a debunked thesis
advanced primarily by the late Richard Hofstadter!
I had to smile as I read the first line. One can almost
hear George Wallace’s deep Southern drawl as he derided the pointy headed
pee-sue-dough-intellectuals back in the 1960s who actually dared to question
the practice of racial segregation! Moreover, given what followed in the
student’s comments, it’s pretty hard to imagine that much critical thinking occurred
prior to making them.
But the line that caught my attention was this: “….I will state the purpose of the university…”
Really? Upon what basis? And you
have been appointed by whom to do so?
Of course students have always been willing to offer
unsolicited and largely unwarranted opinions about “THE purpose of…” any number
of things including life itself. Some learn to use the intellectually honest
preface of “I think that…” or “I believe…” but most simply cut to chase and
pronounce their own take on things as the revealed absolute truth about any
number of subjects. I know I did it as an undergraduate and I seem to remember
I had plenty of company in those late night alcohol-sodden bull sessions at the
frat house. And I was, on a good day, partly right, just like our would-be
Wallace here.
It is true that an important purpose of a university is
to “increase knowledge.” That is particularly true in designated research
universities such as that which UCF aspires to become. But public universities have
historically been designated as places where the public can become educated,
where state citizens learn to think, research, solve problems and express their
understandings in a number of ways to serve the people of their state.
“[E]veryone
uses critical thinking…”
As the professor noted in his email, most students do not
come to the university with capacities to “struggle intellectually with some of
life's most difficult topics” already well honed. Contrary to the student’s
assertion that “everyone uses critical
thinking…,” the reality is that such
skills must be developed over time with lots of practice. And some never learn
them at all.
Becoming skilled at critical thinking requires the
ability and the willingness to hear the viewpoints of one’s peers, often in the
context of class and group discussions, to recognize that one’s own way of
interpreting the world may not be the only possible understanding. Ironically,
the student’s comment that critical thinking somehow serves to reinforce
existing beliefs actually describes a dysfunction of critical thinking called
the confirmation bias. Perhaps this kid should actually take the professor’s
class where such detours from critical thinking are identified.
The remaining comments are not worth of a lot of comment.
Contrary to the student’s assertions, the propensity for any majority to become
tyrannical with its subject minorities is a perennial problem in human
societies as observers from Plato and Aristotle to John Stuart Mill have noted.
Moreover, Hofstadter’s magnus opum on American anti-intellectualism has hardly been “debunked.”
Indeed, these very comments – not to mention the preceding administration in
the White House – well illustrate that anti-intellectualism is alive and well
in America today. These comments also evidence a common confusion among
undergraduates between a thoughtful, reasoned response to ideas with which one
disagrees and a rather mindless dismissal of those ideas and their makers which
seeks to avoid the hard work of formulating a reasoned, well-supported
argument.
Were this simply the rantings of a young sophomore
engaging in the expectable narcissism of adolescence, there would be little
more to say about it. As I noted above, we’ve all been there. But in a day
where “student perceptions of instruction” from such students are taken
seriously in everything from hiring to raises to firing and where distorted,
self-serving comments about instructors are readily published on public
websites where truth is not a requirement and response is not an option, these kinds
of comments become a lot more problematic. What continues to trouble me as I
read these comments is not so much that students feel entitled to make such
pronouncements – as they always have – as that the responses of universities,
politicians, parents if not the general public itself have suggested to them
that their notions of entitlement are indeed well-founded.
This is a recipe for disaster.
Different
College, Different Experience
I pondered these thoughts after my last class at the
university Wednesday afternoon as I drove the 35 miles down the expressway to
Valencia College’s Osceola Campus for the welcome event for adjunct instructors
there. After playing the incredibly arbitrary game that marks the Teaching
Incentive Program award at UCF and losing a second time, I decided I simply can
no longer trust the university to be fair or responsible when it comes to my
salary (not that I expect it to be either of those things otherwise). I
realized that if I am to earn the additional income I need to finally pay off my student
loan, I will have to do so with the certainty of an earned adjunct salary. It’s
part of a long range strategy which will hopefully offer me a lot more freedom after
this year when it comes to early retirement or finding the next stage in my
career.
A humanities departmental meeting preceded the general
session for all the adjuncts. The departmental meeting at Valencia was a stark
contrast to the tense nuclear meltdown of budget fears and administrative pressures
that marked our first departmental meeting of the year at UCF last Friday.
Perhaps Valencia is still largely untouched by budget woes that have seen UCF’s
state funding decline by 49% over the past six years and now lurches toward even
more cuts this year. And perhaps Valencia is a bit more insulated from the
pressures of a new online university and the political scalpels in Tallahassee being taken to
General Education Programs which threaten to decimate many departments at the
university.
For whatever reason, the tenor of the Valencia Humanities
departmental meeting was positive, congenial and focused on actual pedagogical
concerns such as textbook adoptions and plans for art fairs and 911 memorials. Indeed,
budgets and political pressures simply never came up.
As I stood in line at the fruit and cheese reception
table between meetings, the familiarity of this place (I taught there five
years until 2001) and these former colleagues came streaming back to me. What
always struck me about Valencia-Osceola was how the faculty and staff
interacted. They genuinely seem to like each other and they appear to enjoy
working together.
That’s a key word here: together. Indeed, what most struck me during the welcome back
meeting in the auditorium which followed was the constant refrain of “Let us know what we can do to help you,”
an offer made by every speaker from the provost of the campus to the
audio-visual and internet technology offices. As I drove home that evening I
thought how different that sense of togetherness and helpfulness is from the
ethos of an overcrowded, factory process mega-university which makes it very clear to all
parties early on: “You’re on your own.”
An
unexpected gift
This event was a healing balm at the end of a long day
which began with those comments from the UCF sophomore presuming to dictate to
the university what its job should be. Given that context, it’s no surprise
that the remarks from the Valencia-Osceola student government president at the
general session that night caught me completely off-guard.
The young Latino student was the first speaker up. Dressed
up in coat and a tie that appeared to be just a little tight, he began making his
comments rapidly, almost inaudibly, his nervousness dancing just below the
surface of his polished appearance. He began with the typical student
government touting of past accomplishments and promises of events to come. But
about halfway through his comments, I found myself sitting up, wide-eyed,
listening intently as he said the following:
On
behalf of all the students here at Osceola, I want to thank all of you who work
so hard on our behalf, especially our teachers. We are very grateful for all
that you do for us. Without you our dreams could not be realized.
Gulp.
I glanced around the auditorium to make sure I had not suddenly been transported to a different world, resisting the urge to pinch myself. It’s been a very long time since I’ve heard a student
representative make those kinds of comments at a public meeting. Indeed, thank
you is not a phrase I hear often from students generally. When I do it’s almost
always in response to a favor afforded them. Expressed gratitude for our role
in helping students realize their dreams has simply not been part of the
reality of these past 11 years of teaching at the university from any of the parties involved.
Those of us in higher education have long known that it
is the moral rewards of teaching which make our often demanding jobs bearable.
We know that a society like our own - which Hofstadter rightly observed 50
years ago to be anti-intellectual as a general rule - reflects its relatively
low valuation of education in the meager pay it offers those of us who make it
possible. And we know that in an inverted Republic
like our own - where the appetites of the artisans and merchants class, protected
by the power of the guardians, drive our society - we would-be philosopher
kings will inevitably find ourselves safely locked away in ivory towers and
pilloried in public discourse.
We live in a day when students feel entitled to disrupt
our classes with impunity and to dictate to us the very nature of our work. In that context, it
is remarkable how powerfully rewarding something as simple as a young student
government president expressing gratitude on behalf of himself and his peers
can be to those of us in a vocation of ever diminishing returns.
And so I thank this young man for that unexpected, generous
gesture and for his kind words that brought unbidden tears to my eyes. It was
without a doubt the highlight of an incredibly trying week. And it was a welcome
respite from what often feels like an ongoing assault for a very weary veteran teacher
nearing the end of his days in public higher education.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The Rev. Harry Scott
Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.
Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino
Real, CA)
Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy
of Law
University of Central Florida, Orlando
If the unexamined life is
not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or
political, is not worth holding.
Most things of value do not lend themselves to production in sound
bytes. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
