Two sides of the same coin: politics in the classroom

Community College Enterprise, The, Spring 2005 by Berg, Steven L

David Horowitz is an author, professor, and President of the Center for the Study of Popular Culture headquartered in Los Angeles, California.

Karol King is an adjunct professor of theology at Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio, and manager of the Cinergy Foundation, also in Cincinnati.

Interview with David Horowitz

Berg: Although our feature is called "Two Sides of the Same Coin," it's not a pro and con piece. We want to stimulate discussion and education. Thank you for talking with us today. Is it desirable to try to make the classroom politics-free? Is that what you're trying to do?

Horowitz: I would rephrase that. I'm trying to make the classroom free from political advocacy by teachers. It's very different. That doesn't mean that politics shouldn't be discussed in the classroom, it means that professors should not be political partisans in the classroom. They should not use their authority of the classroom backed by the authority of grades-the professor has huge power advantages if I can put it that way. One is the grading power, the other is that the professor presumably has read more in the subject, knows more. The professor also has professional obligations which have been recognized for nearly 100 years in the profession itself. The obligation is to teach students, not to indoctrinate them. The difference is that even on a political issue-let's take abortion-you can be on either side of the left-right divide and be pro- or anti-abortion. It's a professor's task, if this is a relevant issue, and it could be in certain classes, to teach the students how to reason, how to think, how to express their thoughts.

The students should be made aware of the arguments on both sides of the issue, and of course within the two sides there is a spectrum of argument. The students should be taught how to marshal evidence in defense of their positions and how to argue logically. That's the task of the professors, to make students aware of the universe of ideas around a particular issue, perhaps some of the history of an issue, an informative aspect of the teaching process, and to enhance the students' abilities to marshal evidence and to reason. It is not the professor's place to tell the student what to think, in other words to try to enforce a conclusion. The professor should not be using his or her authority to get students to be pro-choice or pro-abortion. We have a case of a liberal student who was pro-choice and who had to sit in a class with a pro-life professor who compared women who have abortions to Andréa Yates, the deranged mother who drowned her five children, and who gave the student a D in the class for disagreeing even though he was an A student.

That's reprehensible and it would be the same if it were on the other side of the issue. It obstructs the teaching process. The professor puts him or herself down on the level of the student, and it gets into a fierce partisan debate over an issue. The student isn't learning from that, the student is defending whatever point of view he or she brought into the class and whatever prejudice they brought in. They're not learning anything. Political advocacy in the classroom-for example, we have a case at the University of Cincinnati of a professor-and this doesn't even qualify as political advocacy; it's just venting political prejudice-referring to the President of the United States as a "douche bag" regularly. That's wrong.

Now let me say that these ideas are not peculiar to me or to my academic freedom movement or my Academic Bill of Rights. They were first articulated in 1915 in the general report of the American Association of University Professors regarding the principals of tenure and academic freedom, which said that there is a difference between education and indoctrination, and teachers should be there as educators. It was reiterated in a principle adopted in 1940, and I think I can quote this pretty much to the letter. "Teachers are entitled to freedom in the classroom in discussing their subject, but they should be careful not to introduce into their teaching controversial matter which has no relation to their subject" (http://www. studentsforacademicfreedom.org/). I was just in the state of Ohio, and Ohio State University has this identical regulation that says professors should not introduce matter irrelevant to the subject. It's very difficult to articulate this as a law, but I think it's easy to understand. The professor should not be a partisan of any political or controversial viewpoint in the classroom.

Berg: One of the things we're interested in is where the line is drawn. Something in the last presidential campaign that made news was when Davis March was suspended for showing Michael Moore'5 Fahrenheit 9/11 in his English class. I don't want to get into the specifics of that case ...

Horowitz: I'll answer that. The issue is very simple. Let's say, good judgment aside-I reserve my judgment of the film and of a professor who thinks this is a worthy film-if you are going to introduce a controversial film and one that is certainly very partisan in its political advocacy, then you minimally need to require the students to read critical articles on the film and on the person who produced it. The Web is just full of articles written both by liberals and conservatives about the, shall we say, unscrupulous methods of Michael Moore. You can find at spincanity.com-which is a liberal site, for example-59 distortions in the film Fahrenheit 9/11. It is totally irresponsible and unprofessional for a professor to bring a film like that into the classroom without having a critical commentary for the students, just as it would be to present a Holocaust denier without presenting counter-evidence. If possible, it would be appropriate to show Fahrenhype 9/11. That would be a teaching experience. We're talking about education. Professors are citizens. They have the right to be fanatically political, but outside of the classroom.