OPINION & EDITORIAL
Lecturers can opine as well
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Also by Rob Hunter:
- Patient Abandonment Bill targets women's rights (April 21, 2005)
- Read ID Act goes too far infringing upon civil liberties (April 28, 2005)
- Gay rights needed to protect equality (May 5, 2005)
- Evolution not about free speech (March 17, 2005)
Related Stories:
- A politically charged Madison, split down the middle (September 1, 2004)
- City politics worth your time (November 14, 2001)
- Get involved in a city committee (November 14, 2001)
- Last Thursday's Student Council meeting never happened. (October 7, 2002)
- Picking politics over students (March 19, 2002)
by Rob Hunter
Wednesday, September 1, 2004
At this time of the year, you will often hear the familiar complaint that Madison is a politically charged city. It’s assumed that Madison is, well, more political than most.
UW-Madison has a long history of political involvement: it is the birthplace of the Wisconsin Idea, the belief that education is a public good to be shared by all Wisconsin citizens; in the 1960s it became a hotbed of Vietnam-related demonstrations; and it is home to countless student groups working for change (or continuity) in various policy areas.
What accounts for such a political climate? UW students offer up an incoherent list of complaints and compliments: Madison is (too) progressive. Regressive. Radical. Complacent. Stifling. Everyone believes that either their opinions aren’t getting enough exposure or they’re getting too much exposure to others’.
This complaint often surfaces in the classroom: we all either know — or are — somebody who has perceived a suffocating atmosphere in a given professor’s course, where certain opinions either weren’t welcomed or were unduly criticized. Many disciplines in the humanities and social sciences will naturally be fraught with questions about the political persuasions of students’ instructors. But are students’ toes being stepped on so much that it has become necessary to police the opinions of faculty?
In fact, an entire industry has sprung up to protect students from acquiring knowledge that might be harmful to their opinions. Groups like Campus Watch and Students for Academic Freedom encourage students to submit the names of professors who endanger their “intellectual freedom” through mercurial grading policies or adversarial classroom debate. And every so often a wave of concern will pass through the government as policymakers scrutinize public universities, taking professors to task for failing to be more supportive of current public policy in the classroom.
Calls for the “intellectual freedom” of students usually mask a desire to see higher education structured along more ideologically desirable lines. When utterances about the need for the “disinterested pursuit of knowledge” abound, it can be inferred that the knowledge currently being pursued is not compatible with the interests of the speaker.
As strange as it may sound, the academic freedom that insulates professors from public opinion and government pressure is the best guarantee that you will receive an unbiased and intellectually sound education this year. It is often argued that academia is a closed system that resists change and outside influences. University professors are solely in charge of who will receive PhDs, who becomes tenured, the formation of curricula, and the ways in which their fields develop. But these restrictions help to ensure that public education is not in the hands of politicians, clergy, businesses, or others who would shape education to serve their own interests rather than those of American citizens in general. The restrictions stand to benefit more from research and instruction that strives to arrive at conclusions independent from any one group’s interests.
UW-Madison’s history offers many instructive examples. In 1894, UW professor Richard Ely was tried for favoring labor’s right to strike. Ely championed the case of Edward A. Ross, an economist whose eugenicist leanings caused the trustees of Stanford University to force him to resign. Ross eventually found both a chair and fame at UW, but the publicity surrounding his expulsion at Stanford eventually led to the creation of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), whose mission, in part, is to protect academic freedom in American universities. In the 1950s, UW, unlike other American research institutions, stood up to McCarthy’s charges of academic “Marxism.” And not many years ago, UW abandoned a restrictive speech code that punished “offensive” speech on the part of faculty.
While we may not always agree with our professors (few today would agree with Ross’ claims), it is important to remember that the diversity of knowledge they offer to us is more than a ticket to a job after graduation. The skills we acquire in the shared pursuit of knowledge also enable us to become engaged and informed citizens and to better understand our world. The only bias in a curriculum like that is common sense.
Rob Hunter (jrhunter@gmail.com) is a senior majoring in political science and philosophy.
