“At my own college, an English/Education co-major wrote a letter to the then-chair of the English department explaining that she would neither read nor submit to testing on Beowulf because its Paganism was in opposition to her Christian faith; she also requested substitute readings. My department didn't give in to her demands; several people did try to suggest that she might find it helpful and educational to consider a work outside what she already knew, but she wasn't buying it, and she ultimately left the school.”
The problem with the culture of criticism that Segal cites isn’t that there is too much criticism. The problem is that there isn’t enough criticism - of the right kind. Criticism originating from an overblown sense of entitlement and/or from a sense of certainty about what is true and right (the kind of smug, ignorant, uncurious certitude that Sarah Palin so exemplifies) based on faith or unquestioned authority and/or a sense of close mindedness that refuses to entertain ideas contrary to one’s own, is the source of criticism that there is far too much of.
Criticism, however, that is based on a passion to find out what’s true, on systematic doubt, on insisting on evidence and rigor of argument and logic, criticism that calls out injustice, deceit, and unfairness, that discomforts the comfortable and comforts the afflicted, this is the kind of criticism that we need much, much, more of. For that is what education and especially higher education should be about: the pursuit not of credentials per se, and not turning university education into the academic equivalent of Staple’s big red EASY button, but knowledge and a heightened capacity to learn and to analyze.
That this kind of criticism and this sort of education is under fire from an unholy alliance between David Horowitz - who has made his career a la good ole Joe McCarthy going after people he doesn’t agree with and trying to get them fired rather than engaging in open and principled debate with competing ideas – and “liberal” (or even in some instances “radical” academics), indicates the perils of the landscape we see before us today.
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.
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