It is a time of fear in the face of freedom, a time for the widening of previous roads and the opening of new paths, a time of an emptying country and swelling cities, yet a time when these paths are mined by knowing algorithms of the all-seeing eye. It is the time of the warrior's peace and the miser's charity, when the planting of a seed is an act of conscientious objection.
 | The Turn In Your Professor Webpage, Updated |
Some four years ago, ultraconservative David Horowitz created a webpage on which college and university students could report their professors for the offense of differing with them. All over this land, Horowitz said, we’d have students coming out of the woodwork to rat their undergraduate instructors out for exposing them to new and disagreeable ideas. Ideas! At a University! Horror!
The last time we’d looked, Conservative students had turned out in dribbles to file reports on:
} A professor who noted correctly that the new flag created for Iraq by American officials had the same colors as the Israeli flag.
} An English instructor who gave her student a D minus on a paper… even though the student spell-checked it twice.
So far during the year of 2007, Horowitz’s Report-Your-Professor page has received thirty-two reports. Here’s a sampling:
} “descrimination” at San Diego Mesa College when the student body president asked College officials to distribute a questionnaire quizzing all faculty on their political allegiances, and the College officials declined to do so.
} a Philosophy major at SUNY Stony Brook who got a D minus after he didn’t show up for his robotics class, then built a robot that didn’t work.
} A Nursing student at Tennessee State University who failed the school’s exit exam and wants to have a nursing degree anyway.
} A student at Bloombsburg University who is upset that a professor showed the video “Control Room” for a class entitled “Communication and Conflict.”
} A former student at Louisiana State University-Shreveport who is upset that after she or he left the University, the University nonetheless pursued a case of academic misconduct against him or her.
Add to that two “reports” which are actually defending a professor’s right to wear a political t-shirt on campus. Then there are these sorts of entries which are transparently satirical.
There’s been a lot of time for David Horowitz’s enterprise to build up a database of a substantial trend, if a substantial trend actually existed. Instead, Horowitz seems mostly to have accumulated students poking fun at the enterprise, students who don’t like being graded poorly when they fail, and students who don’t like being exposed to different ideas. Oh, kids, just you wait until you graduate, when finally everyone will agree with you and your bosses will cut you some slack.
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Hee, hee, heeeee…check out this one:
The “nature of complaint”was “Other, made me read and think”!!!!! Can you imagine, they are making students read and think now?
http://www.studentsforacademicfreedom.org/comp/viewComplaint.asp?complainId=592
It’s getting harder and harder to find a class where you don’t have to show up or do the readings.
BTW, our school forbids political expression on the part of staff, anything from a candidate rally to a political button. A question of “ethics”.
Comment by Anonymous — 9/18/2007 @ 4:59 pm
is your school in the U.S.? I wouldn’t work at such a place. I hope that school isn’t getting any government money — if they are, that’s one the the 2008 reasons to elect a progressive president, right there. Progressives take our freedoms seriously, and would abhor government funded violations of our basic rights.
Comment by Vynce — 9/18/2007 @ 5:28 pm
Anonymous, what school is that? I’d really like to know, because that’s simply nuts.
Comment by Jim — 9/18/2007 @ 6:06 pm
http://www.ccc.edu/HR_FORMS/files/ethicspolicy.pdf
Comment by Anonymous — 9/18/2007 @ 11:30 pm
the list on page 3 looks pretty scary, but that’s just a definition and doesn’t say anything about how that definition is applied. on pages 7 and 8, they describe the rules about those activities — an they are that the activities cannot be done while on the clock or using the school’s resources. they also prohibit making others engage in those sorts of political activities as part of their jobs. these seem fairly reasonable, though the wording of the document could be construed as more draconian than they really are. (and i admit that the wording of “solicit votes for” or “campaign for” int eh definitions is perhaps open to some level of interpretation — but were i a teacher in such an institution, i would wear political buttons and t-shirts and dare them to fire me for it. mmm, lawsuit.)
it’s a scary-looking contract, but i think that if your teachers interpret it as “not allowed to wear buttons” it’s because they didn’t read it all.
Comment by Vynce — 9/19/2007 @ 1:25 pm
I agree with Vynce. The spirit of the code seems to be that you should not use your position or the resources you control within the college to campaign or promote a candidate. That’s reasonable, and I think it’s part of a good code of ethics for any educator. When I taught I quickly learned that it’s counterproductive to try to engage in direct political dialogue when in a position of pedagogical power. The smart students tend to know when they’re being manipulated and if anything resist it and push the other way. The best thing to do strategically is also the best thing to do pedagogically, and that is to provide students with the analytical tools they need in order to examine and answer questions for themselves.
BUT in that ol’ code phrases like “political activities” are scarily vague, however, and I can see the danger of that part of the code being used to prevent someone who is especially in a professional position and not an hourly wage earner (always on the job in a sense) from expressing her or him-self on any issues of the day whatsoever. Is that where the difficulties come in?
Comment by Jim — 9/19/2007 @ 2:38 pm
Not a contract, Vynce, a policy. The details came out in a question/answer session, as this was also part of an on-the-clock staff development presentation. I don’t have a problem with it myself, as I tend to be publicly apolitical, but there was some heated comment about it at the time. I don’t know of any situation where it’s been enforced, but I don’t know of anyone who was wearing campaign buttons or making political statements before the presentation. After one civil service job where I sat near an employee who never appeared to do any work for the agency but was always on the phone for “The Congressman”, I can appreciate the need for something like this.
The school is not necessarily apolitical, they seem to align with certain issues and local community leaders, but not with current candidates.
Comment by Anonymous — 9/19/2007 @ 3:28 pm
Shame I can’t use your site in my paper. You don’t have any information on who wrote this, you don’t have a link to the actual Horowitz site, just individual complaints. I can’t email you guys for the info because the email you provided can’t be viewed. Shame Shame. I was going to write a correlation between Dr. Britt’s 14 signs of Fascism and American politics but now I guess I’ll just have to write another paper on teen smoking. Way to ruin it for everyone! gosh.
Comment by Kristina — 10/16/2007 @ 3:17 pm
Kristina, there are numbers of links to the actual Horowitz website provided in this post, and in the column to the left there’s e-mail contact information. Use both for your reference.
Comment by Jim — 10/16/2007 @ 3:27 pm