Web site a forum for victims of professorial arrogance

December 21, 2002

In a week when the world of web-logging has "claimed its first scalp," as John Podhoretz wrote about the Internet drumbeat that brought down Trent Lott, let us consider the effect of online protests against another arrogant institution mired in the politics of the past -- the American university.

Luann Wright, whose son attended the University of California at San Diego, became concerned about the narrow focus of the readings in the composition course he took.

"All the essays they had to read were race-related," Wright told The Chronicle of Higher Education, "and I thought that was a little odd for a writing course."

Well, yes, but not for a writing course designed by Linda Brodkey, director of the Warren College Writing Program at UCSD. She's been down this road before, when a writing syllabus called "Writing About Difference" she created for the University of Texas briefly hit the headlines a few years back. A reviewer of her book of essays, Writing Permitted in Designated Areas Only, describes it as "dispatches from the front lines of the culture wars."

Wright set up a Web site called noindoctrination.org, where students can post their experiences with professors or programs they believe are inappropriately pushing a political agenda. The professors, or their schools, can post rebuttals, though to date only one has chosen to do so and that rebuttal was later removed, at the professor's request.

Do they believe, as Lott once did, that if they ignore this it'll blow over?

Most of the complaints -- there are about 30 so far -- are about left-wing bias, though the site itself does not take a political position.

One student from the University of Michigan, taking a class required for resident assistants, got through most of it by keeping quiet.

"But I had no choice when an activity called for full participation," she writes. "We had to go around and talk about at least one way in which we have been/are oppressed. When my turn came up, and I answered that I have never been oppressed, the instructor corrected me, saying that I must have been, as I'm female."

After class, she continues, the instructor told her that her classroom behavior was "disruptive," and "that I would be kicked out of class and would thereby lose my job and my housing for the next year unless I learned to be more cooperative."

Forcing people to testify against their true beliefs is a staple of re-education camps. Is this happening in accordance with university policy, or in opposition to it? Michigan should respond.

The Chronicle did a story about Wright's site in its Dec. 13 issue, and also has an online discussion forum on the subject. One issue is whether anonymous postings should have any credence. That would be more salient, in my view, if universities didn't already use anonymous student opinions, in the form of student evaluations, to make decisions about faculty. At least online they can respond.

But it is striking how many of the responses are "insulting put-downs, and flippant dismissal(s)" as one forum post put it. "If it does not bother them that they are intellectual cowards, why should it bother me?" sniffed one.

Another (anonymous) reader said, "Given the move toward facism [sic] in the U.S. represented by Mr. Bush's 'Total Information Awareness' program and other aspects of the 'Homeland Security' legislation, I think that this website is much more dangerous than most of the dialogue here suggests."

Mary Gravitt, from the Department of English at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, said in the forum, "Some parents should send their children directly to church and skip college. This way they can ensure a proper message is being sent. Isn't this what they do in the Madrasa in Pakistan? It worked for Bin Laden, why won't it work for them."

Actually, very few of the student reports say anything at all about religion, so this is high off the left-field wall. But beyond that, if you were a student in a class whose professor let loose with volleys like that any time someone said something she disagreed with, would you want to put your grade and your academic career on the line with a signed protest?

One person responded, "Students posting to noindoctrination.org aren't complaining because the professor expressed his opinion; they are usually objecting to the exclusion of conflicting opinions, both in materials presented and in discussion."

And one post summed the controversy up neatly. "Your post is Exhibit A for why this site is necessary."