Strangling Dissent, Muzzling Whistleblowers

On one occasion a few students told me that they think it is my job as their professor to be “fair and balanced.” I told them that it’s not my view of my job that I provide equal time to all sides, even though I try to provide the different sides as much as possible and where useful, not because it’s obligatory, but because vigorous contention between ideas is much more pedagogically effective than presenting ideas as if in a hothouse, cradling them with trembling hands lest those precious ideas wilt in the face of the elements. No, it’s not my job as their professor to protect them, to provide a long-past post-partum womb.

I think here of Billy Collins’ poem, The History Teacher, in which the teacher, in order to protect his students’ innocence, tells them nonsense such as that “The Spanish Inquisition was nothing more/than an outbreak of questions such as /’How far is it from here to Madrid?’”/What do you call the matador’s hat?’” and that the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki consisted of dropping but one tiny atom, and so on. The children, given this sanitized history, run off to the playground “to torment the weak and the smart.”

It is my job, as I see it, to do my best to help students learn, to teach them things that they don’t already know. This is quite different from allotting half of class time to the conventional perspectives that they hear all, or nearly all, of the time, and half the time to competing perspectives that they never or very rarely have heard. If I was teaching someone how to become a Thai cook, would I feel obligated to devote half of the time to teaching him or her how to make American comfort food?

Max Weber, one of sociology’s founding figures, called this process of bringing people to seeing things they didn’t know and probably don’t want to know “inconvenient truth” – exposing people to things that are true, yet inconvenient.

Sometimes people get riled up or feel uncomfortable when they confront an inconvenient truth. Encouraging people to think and to question is our job as educators and it should be the job of journalists and opinion-makers. The once proud profession of journalism has become increasingly a world of stenographers to power and on radio and TV, a world of pundits and yelling contests. There was a time when the iconic newsman or woman as investigators, digging for the truth, was not merely a comic book hero. Watergate and Bob Woodward before he sold himself for access to the corridors of power seems a distant memory now.

Today, the Washington Post that dared to antagonize the Nixon White House and breached a barrier that the New York Times wouldn’t continues to attack Joseph Wilson as if he’s to blame for the Iraq War and syndicates the horrid ideas of Michael Kinsley who on November 8 claimed without a trace of irony that Lawrence Summers, Obama’s appointment for heading up the White House’s Economic Council, was right to assert in a memo that he signed that “the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that.”

Says Kinsley, who used to play the “liberal” on CNN’s Crossfire: “If an industrial plant that causes pollution is going to be built somewhere, it ought to be built where life is worth less. This sounds brutal, but it isn't.”

Kinsley is not a liberal. He is a neoliberal. Look around you at the world that neoliberalism has wrought: tens and hundreds of billions being disbursed like candy from Santa’s sleigh to the leaders of the capitalist corporate world who have driven us collectively into the gulch, while the average person wonders how they’ll pay their medical bills, worries that they can’t find a job or are about to lose their job, millions of them losing their homes, and through relatives or friends, finding out firsthand how cheap their lives are as soldiers from the lofty “homo economicus” perspective of the Kinsleys and Summers of the world.

Encouraging students to complain about being brought face to face with truths that they didn’t know - and/or truths that they find discomforting or annoying or personally affronting of their lifestyle or belief systems - sabotages what education is all about. It creates, as Horowitz intends, an atmosphere in which faculty are afraid to offend students’ sensibilities, lest they lose their jobs.

What are you being educated in, if you’re not being educated? Who’s in charge if the full-grown adults don’t take charge?

Opposite Poles of the Same Stupidity

What these two stories have in common – Matthew Miller’s OpEd and the institutionalization of student complaints against professors who “stray” - is the preservation of privilege and insularity by attempting to muzzle those who have truths or at least alternative ways of considering things to reveal. On the one hand, Miller wants the prerogatives of high office to be protected against criticism by former officials and on the other hand, several universities want to preserve the insularity of their students who might – lord save us - be exposed to material that is “one sided” or not sufficiently “germane” to the course subject matter. Anything but that!

It’s alright if our country’s leaders and our nation’s newspapers, radio stations and television channels tell us and the world over and over and over again that Iraq had links to Al-Qaeda, for this wasn’t a one sided account – not at all – and it was certainly germane that Iraq be linked to Al-Qaeda. But of course!

But have a university or college professor say in class that Al-Qaeda and Iraq were enemies and that Al-Qaeda had issued a fatwa against Hussein, in other words, speak some truth, and well, that’s one sided and not germane and students should complain! God forbid that academics stray too far from their course subject matter into issues that might relate to our lives collectively. Far better that they talk in political science classes about how the separate branches of government are supposed to work rather than how they are actually working (e.g., that the executive branch has usurped power). Better that classes on statistics don’t cover topics such as the unaccounted for discrepancies between the exit polls and the official election tallies, resulting in the wrong people taking office in 2000 and 2004. Better that psychologists stick to talking about mental health in the abstract than broach the subject of PTSD among veterans from the Iraq war.

It’s ok for the media to repeatedly minimize torture by calling it  “abuse” and for those like John Brennan - who Obama was considering for the new CIA chief  - to be said to be “allegedly” involved in rendition and torture, but not ok for teachers to call it torture or point out that there is no alleged here any more than 1+1 allegedly = 2.

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