EDUCATION BEYOND POLITICS
383
Association of University Professors' Statement of Rights and Freedoms
of Students, wruch says in part:
The professor of the classroom and in conference should encourage
free discussion, inquiry, and expression. Student performance should
be evaluated solely on an academic basis, not on opinions or conduct
in matters unrelated to academic standards.
In preparation for this meeting, we were asked about effective ways
of countering political positions without engaging in the politics behind
them. One of the most effective ways to emphasize students' freedom to
learn is to emphasize good teaching. Other tactics fail. We remember
what happened to the debate about the canon. People became con–
cerned about what was being taught under the rubric of literature. Sev–
eral observed that there was more Alice Walker than Shakespeare in col–
lege English classes. The counterargument was inevitable, as illustrated by
the press release on the MLA's survey of nineteenth-century British and
American literature courses. The MLA pointed out that "there is no evi–
dence that college faculty members have abandoned traditional texts."
Indeed Dickens, Melville, and Whitman do appear on most reading lists.
However, the approaches that teachers employ, as reported by the same
survey, left no doubt as to how the works are presented: sixty-two per–
cent of professors said they used a feminist approach, and twenty-eight
percent said they used a Marxist approach.
Students exposed to single, polemic approaches to literature are de–
prived of their freedom to learn. They have no way to engage ideas if
they are told what
to
think. Students merely come away from literature
classes with an adroitness for examining artifacts as manifestations of
hegemonic oppression, or with a skill for translating words and images
into sexual fantasy. If they have been harangued, they most often have
been bored. They have no experience with considerations of value, con–
siderations of beauty, of truth. We can say of these classrooms - as we say
in federal government - that in there is waste, fraud, and abuse. Waste of
money. Why should parents have to pay for soapbox oratory? Fraudulent
scholarship. Why should our fine research institutions harbor the bogus
scholarship that sometimes goes by the name of feminist theory? And
student abuse. Why do some faculty abrogate students' freedom to learn?
Now we are embroiled in talk about political correctness. And the
counterargument is again predictable. We have people saying - among
them the Teachers for a Democratic Culture - there's no political cor–
rectness. There's only your politics and my politics. A way to leap over
classroom politics and begin constructive discussion is to focus on aca-
