Skills and Bias

Erin O'Connor links to a fascinating post at the Writing Program Administration list-serv. The gist of the story: three students in an introductory composition class complained to the university ombudsman (a position that lots of schools don't even have) after a male, African American TA penalized them for disagreeing with his opinions on race in America. Contrary to the assignments listed on the syllabus, he spent three weeks of his course"showing films about government conspiracies to keep inner city blacks addicted to drugs and about police brutality against blacks." The administration at the institution seems to have handled the issue well after the students complained, although originally, the director of the program (who looked into the matter and discovered that the students' complaints seemed meritorious) was chastised by his department chair for, in his words,"a)questioning the motivations of the undergraduates who were complaining and b)expressing surprise that someone with my political views (I'm fairly easily identified as very liberal in my department) would question a teacher trying to expose students to racism in our country."

The comments at Erin's post suggest that few of her readers are particularly surprised by this tale; I'm not, either. At Brooklyn, we have a two required composition courses, taught mostly by grad students. Because the courses are skills rather than content-oriented, instructors have considerable leeway about what material they bring into the classroom; from the varied reports I receive from students, many instructors simply use the course to assign papers oriented around whatever political crusade has captured their fancy that term. (The worst single example I encountered came after an English 2 adjunct chastised a student, in writing, for quoting from the"Jew York Times.")

Brooklyn, obviously, is extreme on such matters: we have a provost whose written mantra is"teaching is a political act," while, as Derek Catsam noted the other day at Rebunk, lots of institutions and departments, such as his own, don't view the ideological agendas of their faculty as preeminent in their concerns.

That said, skills courses strike me as particularly vulnerable to improper use by instructors who see little wrong in bringing their non-academic political and ideological preferences into the classroom. It is for this reason, I suspect, that organizations such as the AAC&U, which advocates restructuring college curricula around such goals as training"global citizens" or"teaching diversity skills," so aggressively champion a greater emphasis on skills in teaching. For, in the end, all courses must have content. But while there's only so far anyone can range in teaching, say, a US history survey or any other course organized around a specific content set without violating academic norms, a course devoted solely to teaching students skills such as critical writing or reading can have as its subject matter virtually anything. Students can just as easily write a short essay analyzing Shakespeare as they can write a paper discussing why, say, academic organizations should boycott Israeli universities. In an ideal world, peer pressure, if nothing else, would exist against the kind of teaching reported in the WPA link. I wish I were more confident that, in the real world, such peer pressure actually existed.