Badly Disposed at Washington State
Events at Washington State—which have attracted the attention of FIRE—have a depressing similarity to what we saw last spring in Brooklyn’s School of Education. At WSU, the controversy has raged around a self-described hunter and conservative Christian, an A-level student named Ed Swan. In an account that WSU hasn’t disputed, Swan made a terrible mistake in two of his Ed classes—according to one of his professors, he said that he does not believe that “white privilege and male privilege does not exist” in contemporary society to such an extent to justify affirmative action. Some of Swan’s opinions, continued the professor, expressed “primarily though written papers”—papers that received grades of A—contradicted the Education Department’s “cultural norms,” chiefly its commitment “to equity, diversity and social justice.”
As a result, Swan received a substandard dispositions evaluation. Another Education professor, Mira Reisberg—an ABD who states on her webpage that “after 21 years in San Francisco (primarily in the Mission district) I was called [she doesn’t say by whom] to come to Washington State University"—went even further. She labeled Swan a “White Supremacist,” hoped that the department could “find a way to prevent Ed from becoming a teacher” because of “emotional problems that are manifested in his racist beliefs,” and urged her superiors to accomplish this task without giving Swan a chance to defend himself. On the same form, ironically, she admitted, “Ed [Swan] never made any personally threatening comments to me and was an excellent student apart from his comments and choices.”
The original FIRE letter, written by program officer Robert Shibley, is worth reading in its entirety—WSU went beyond simply attacking Swan from the dispositions angle but pressured him into signing a contract to attend what amounted to a diversity” re-education seminar; and also summoned him to meetings with administrators who browbeat him for his political beliefs. Again, this was all done to a student received grades of A from even his faculty critics.
The reaction to the WSU story has been remarkable. A reporter asked WSU’s Dean of Education, Judy Mitchell, if, given his views on affirmative action, Antonin Scalia would receive a satisfactory “dispositions” evaluation. Mitchell’s response? “I don’t know how to answer that.” In the 1998 elections, 58% of the voters in Washington state passed Initiative 200, which eliminated race- or gender-based preferences in education. By Mitchell’s standards, nearly three-fifths of the state would be disqualified from becoming a teacher simply because they voted in a manner of which the WSU Education faculty disapproved.
A few political science professors on campus publicly questioned the abuse of the “dispositions” criteria; and one of the local papers recently published an editorial terming Washington State’s treatment of Swan “absurd and downright offensive to those of us who believe in a hearty exchange of ideas,” and affirming that “there shouldn’t be a litmus test for political and social opinions attached to an education degree.”
The WSU and Brooklyn cases are simply the tip of the iceberg with regard to “dispositions” theory. There simply is no way that a politically imbalanced faculty, as most Education departments are, can implement NCATE’s requirement to individually assess each proespective public school teacher's “disposition to promote social justice” without the standard becoming an ideological litmus test.