At DKos, Thursday's Abbreviated Pundit Round-Up included an excerpt from Cal Thomas:
Here is the way I believe it works at liberal universities. Some professors require their students to repeat back to them on test papers and in theses what the professors believe. Unless students hate Republicans, revile George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan, renounce God, support abortion and gay rights, they can sometimes expect a lower, even a failing grade.
This was part of an argument attacking the Washington Post for running a story about the GOP's candidate for Governor of Virginia, Robert F. McDonnell, and his Taliban-like thesis at Pat Robertson's univeristy that's come back to haunt him. In order to repel scrutiny of "conservative" indoctrination Thomas invokes the groundless claim that liberal universities are hotbeds of liberal indoctrination, so there!
Ah, but maybe it's not so groundless, after all! The rest of the paragraph continues:
When my wife studied for her master's degree in counseling, she felt pressured to repeat her professors' beliefs instead of stating her own. A friend with a Ph.D. told her, "Write what they want and get the degree. Then you can counsel the way you like." This is academic freedom? It sounds like indoctrination. Why is it OK at liberal universities to tell professors what they want to hear, but not OK at conservative ones to do the same?
Contrary to what Thomas may believe, a single anecdote doesn't prove a damn thing about "liberal universities" in general, even if it could be verified, and there were no other side to it. Since I don't know his wife, or where she went to school, I can't begin to comment on it. But I can comment on the pattern of thinking that it reflects, in part because my sister has taught critical thinking skills at a community college for many years, and has encountered hundreds, if not thousands of students who seem cut from exactly the same cloth as said wife and her friend. Indeed, my sister has described such students as having precisely the same attitude, using almost exactly the same words.
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| Thomas may be totally clueless about what's wrong with this sort of reasoning, but we should not be. The whole aim of liberal education-in the liberal vs. servile sense-is to fit one for a life of intellectual independence, and moral autonomy. Critical thinking is central to this. One cannot freely choose anything if one is ignorant of, and therefore slave to, unexamined prejudices and assumptions. That is why students are challenged to defend what they believe, it is why they are "forced" to learn views that they don't agree with, too. It's not enough to say, "I hate liberalism." You actually have to learn something about it, and then give some reasons for your hatred-at the very least
Plenty of students fiercely resist this. They don't want to think. This isn't limited to any one political view. Our entire popular culture is orientated away from thinking. Thinking gets in the way of non-stop consumption. But the resistance to thinking is especially strong among conservatives, in part because it has this particular form of a reinforcement-the argument that liberal professors are trying to brainwash conservative students. Of course, that's not what my sister wants, nor is it what any form of liberal pedagogy I've ever heard of teaches.
Indeed, I've written before about William Perry's model of cognitive development in the college experience (here, for example), which was only discovered by Perry in the 1950s and 60s, but which reflects processes that clearly have been around for a very long time, and that reflect necessary changes in cognition in order to pass from the kinds of thinking that are commonplace among young adults to those that are required to be a contributing member of a scientific or professional knowledge-generating community. Briefly recapitulating, this involves passing from the initial level of dualism:
- Dualism/Received Knowledge:
There are right/wrong answers, engraved on Golden Tablets in the
sky, known to Authorities.
- Basic Duality:
All problems are solvable;
Therefore, the student's task is to learn the Right Solutions
- Full Dualism:
Some Authorities (literature, philosophy) disagree;
others (science, math) agree.
Therefore, there are Right Solutions,
but some teachers' views of the Tablets are obscured.
Therefore, student's task is to learn the Right Solutions
and ignore the others!
Through multiplicity:
- Multiplicity/Subjective Knowledge:
There are conflicting answers;
therefore, students must trust their "inner voices", not external Authority.
- Early Multiplicity:
There are 2 kinds of problems:
- those whose solutions we know
- those whose solutions we don't know yet
(thus, a kind of dualism).
Student's task is to learn how to find the Right Solutions.
- Late Multiplicity:
Most problems are of the second kind;
therefore, everyone has a right to their own opinion;
some problems are unsolvable;
therefore, it doesn't matter which (if any) solution you choose.
Student's task is to shoot the bull.
(Most freshman are at this position, which is a kind
of relativism)
At this point, some students become alienated, and either retreat to an earlier ("safer") position ("I think I'll study math, not literature, because there are clear answers and not as much uncertainty") or else escape (drop out) ("I can't stand college; all they want is right answers" or else "I can't stand college; no one gives you the right answers".)
Through relativism:
- Relativism/Procedural Knowledge:
There are disciplinary reasoning methods:- Connected knowledge: empathetic (why do you believe X?; what does this poem say to me?)
- vs. Separated knowledge: "objective analysis" (what techniques can I use to analyze this poem?)
- Contextual Relativism:
All proposed solutions are supported by reasons;
i.e., must be viewed in context & relative to support.
Some solutions are better than others, depending on context.
Student's task is to learn to evaluate solutions.
- "Pre-Commitment":
Student sees the necessity of:
- making choices
- committing to a solution
And on to commitment:
- Commitment/Constructed Knowledge:
Integration of knowledge learned from others
with personal experience and reflection.
- Commitment:
Student makes a commitment.
- Challenges to Commitment:
Student experiences implications of commitment.
Student explores issues of responsibility.
- "Post-Commitment":
Student realizes commitment is an ongoing, unfolding,
evolving activity
Whatever else happens at college, one must come out the end of the process ready to start participating in a knowledge-generating community as a committed participant, if that should be your choice. Those who so choose then go on to graduate school. Those who do not should still have the capacity to do so, if that were to be their choice.
Ensuring that students successfully navigate this journey is the primary classroom responsibility of college professors. Of course there are all sorts of other factors involved in faculty selection and promotion. There are research agendas, there are image-building agendas, there are please-the-alumni agendas, etc. It would be ludicrous to pretend that these other agendas do not have classroom impacts as well. However, if a student actively resists the very development of critical thinking skills that stand as central to the process Perry outlined, and if they adopt a rationalizing ideology to justify such resistance, a teacher is simply fulfilling their primary pedagogic duty if they do not reward such behavior.
It's just that simple.
What Thomas and legions of other conservatives have done is to take a few baubles from the liberal tradition-such as fairness and balance-and stripped them of context to advance their own highly unbalanced and unfair approach to politics, knowledge and life itself.
They create their own "conservative" educational institutions that really are operated along the lines of a propaganda model, together with servile instruction in the development of particular skill sets. The development of autonomy is not part of their agenda, because, quite frankly, they do not even know what it means. They equate it with licentiousness, lawlessness and disobedience to authority, and have done with it.
And then they complain when their propaganda institutions come in for critical scrutiny. "'Tain't fair!" they cry. Everything's against them. Evolution is a plot! Carbon dating, too! And math! Who let all those odd numbers in?
It's enough to make you weep.
Or die laughing.
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