Henry Gonshak
English
Montana Tech-UM
The debate over classroom "advocacy" is one of the major battles in our on-going academic "culture wars." It's no surprise, then, that so much has already been written about it--from books claiming that most professors are extreme P.C. advocates, such as Roger Kimball's Tenured Radicals and Dinesh D'Souza's Illiberal Education, to left-wing defenses of the university like John K. Wilson's The Myth of Political Correctness. Also, the subject was brought to the local level by William McBroom in his commentary, "Bringing Causes Into the Classroom" (Mt. Prof., Winter 1994). However, to my knowledge, Advocacy in the Classroom: Problems and Possibilities, edited and introduced by Patricia Meyer Spacks (a University of Virginia English professor and ex-president of the Modern Language Association) is the most comprehensive treatment of the subject to date. Growing out of a 1995 conference on "The Role of Advocacy in the Classroom," the anthology includes essays by thirty-nine contributors, representing a range of academic disciplines and political persuasions.
Unfortunately, Advocacy in the Classroom is extremely uneven. Part of the problem seems a result of the book's format. Almost all the essays are quite short, usually eight or nine pages, the abbreviated length demanded by most conference organizers. The result is that Advocacy in the Classroom, a really long book filled with lots of really short essays, is fairly dizzying. In the anthology's final section Spacks has placed a pair of "responses" in which Gerald Graff and Andrea A. Lunsford comment on the selections--a fine idea, except that I found it nearly impossible to recall most of the essays Graff and Lunsford were referring to. Although awful essays (and there are a few of these, as I'll discuss) rarely go on very long, several excellent pieces end far too abruptly, with intriguing issues skimmed over or left hanging. Spacks should have picked only the best conference papers (half the number chosen) and then encouraged the authors to develop their ideas more fully.
Even more problematically, neither in her introduction nor in her book's organization has the editor accounted for the fact that different contributors define that slippery term "advocacy" in very different ways. Most of the academics discuss advocacy in the terms I'd expected--that is, whether a professor should advocate his or her own views, political or otherwise, in the classroom. However, several contributors, most of whom are either public school teachers or college guidance counselors, write of advocating on behalf of students--i.e., by helping them, one way or another, to make the most of their educations. Needless to say, advocating to students and advocating for students are fundamentally different pedagogical activities--the former highly controversial, the latter much less so, in theory anyway. At the very least, Spacks should have divided the two kinds of essays in separate sections of her book.
As for ideological balance, while Advocacy in the Classroom does include more liberal than conservative contributors, Spacks has managed to bring aboard two distinguished conservative academics, Gertrude Himmelfarb and Jeffrey Wallen--who, predictably, see classroom advocacy as a huge problem in academia today. Himmelfarb connects classroom advocacy to the catastrophic rise of an academic orthodoxy of postmodernism, which she defines as "a denial that there is any such thing as knowledge, truth, reason, or objectivity, and a refusal to even aspire to such ideals, on the grounds that they are not only unattainable but undesirable--that they are indeed authoritarian and repressive" (97). The tie Himmelfarb discerns between postmodernism and professorial advocacy is that "the suspicion of reason as 'phallocentric,' or logic as 'logocentric,' of objectivity as 'patriarchal' or 'masculinist' lends itself to a subjectivism that exalts feeling, sensation, emotion and personal experience" (99). In other words, if one no longer believes in the possibility of teaching objectively a body of core knowledge, then the only thing left to put forward is oneself.
While it's a provocative point, Himmelfarb never considers what led to the ascent of postmodernism in the first place--namely, the steady, centuries-long eroding of traditional truths, absolutes, certainties, resulting primarily from the inter-related decline of religion and rise of science in Western culture. How are professors to base their teaching upon "knowledge, truth, reason [and] objectivity," if they no longer believe in the epistemological foundations that historically bolstered these concepts? Moreover, while Himmelfarb assumes postmodernism leads inevitably to professors haranguing students with their personal beliefs, in fact, it could lead as logically to a student-centered pedagogy. That is, a professor acutely aware that he or she is not some privileged purveyor of "truth" might actually become less dogmatic in the classroom, while encouraging students to share their multiple perspectives on the material.
Jeffrey Wallen's essay describes his generally dreadful experiences teaching English at a small, elite liberal arts school, Hampshire College--an institution that, in the words of its president at an inaugural address, is dedicated to "educat[ing] for social justice" (226). As a result of this institutional philosophy, Wallen contends, classes at Hampshire that "do not have 'social justice' as their endpoint, or that even may employ a different notion of 'social justice' are ipso facto deemed to be poor teaching and a failure to fulfill the educational mission" (226). When an ideology like Hampshire's dominates a college, Wallen argues, the consequence is usually both bad teaching and bad scholarship. In such classrooms, he contends, "championing advocacy...does not lead to everyone joyfully advocating highly diverse opinions but results instead in getting rid of those who don't advocate whatever views are deemed most 'productive' for contemporary pedagogy, and it also discourages dissent by students" (228). As for politicized scholarship in the humanities, such scholarship, Wallen asserts, is generally predictable, shallow and conformist, since, because it "discredits in advance any position other than 'resistance' to those forms of 'domination' that it seeks to dispel, there is little possibility of a dialogue in which competing ideas can be scrutinized and contested" (229).
I agree with Wallen that the educational environment he describes at Hampshire (which sounds right out of a satirical novel about academe by David Lodge or Richard Russo) leads almost inevitably to an anti-intellectual fundamentalism opposed to everything the university should embody. But Wallen's contribution contains a curious omission. Neither in the essay itself, nor the author's capsule biography, does Wallen reveal that he is president of the American Academy for Liberal Education, a conservative academic organization that in 1995 (a year before the publication of Advocacy in the Classroom) was authorized by the US Department of Education to accredit liberal arts colleges, an accreditation AALE will bestow only if the school under consideration makes its humanities students study a traditional liberal arts core curriculum. (See "A New Power in Accreditation," New York Times, William H. Honan, August 6, 1995, p.21.) True, AALE's mission may seem laudable, even to some liberal academics, since clearly there is much of worth in a traditional liberal arts curriculum. Still, doesn't a return to such a curriculum mean, by definition, junking most of the changes in the humanities that have occurred over the last several decades, at least some of which, surely, have value: e.g., the inclusion of more female and minority writers in the canon, the increased study of non-Western societies, the analysis of popular as well as high culture, the addition of Gay, Women's and African-American Studies? As Lawrence W. Levine shows in The Opening of the American Mind, canons and curricula are not fixed but mutable, always evolving (as they must to remain relevant) in response to changing cultural and historical circumstances.
Such concerns about AALE's objectives may explain why, when the administration of Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee, sought accreditation from the organization, the faculty voted to oppose the move, citing fears that AALE affiliation would brand the college as more conservative than it really is, and that the Academy might try to change the Rhodes curriculum, as well as complaints that neither AALE nor the school administration had involved professors in the decision-making process. "There is the perception that the AALE's board has a fairly narrow political agenda," said Ellen Armour, professor of religious studies. (See "A College Debates Whether New Accreditor Promotes Rigor or Curbs Intellectual Diversity," The Chronicle of Higher Education, Robin Wilson, April 4, 1997, p.A10.) If the fears of the Rhodes faculty are valid, then, contrary to what's implied in his essay, Jeffrey Wallen may only really object to the repression of academic freedom when it comes from the left.
While the majority of the contributors to the collection defend professorial advocacy, most of these authors also draw a firm distinction between advocacy, which they support, and indoctrination, which they reject. It's valid, indeed crucial, they maintain, for teachers to express their views in class (provided, of course, these views relate to the subject matter of the course), but it's unethical and unprofessional for professors to pressure students to conform to their instructors' opinions. Some essays, however, unabashedly flout this distinction. In the process, they inadvertently exemplify everything Wallen and Himmelfarb are complaining about.
For example, in "'Judge' or'Advocate'?, Scholars, War, and Protest in the Anti-Vietnam War Teach-ins of 1965," Tom Jehn analyzes an interesting debate that occurred in 1965 at the University of Michigan among faculty seeking a way to share their opposition to the Vietnam War with students. Originally, the faculty had decided to stage a strike during normal classroom hours by turning their classes into anti-war "teach-ins." However, a moderate faction among the professors, arguing that such action would unfairly coopt state-run facilities, successfully convinced the rest of the group to hold the teach-in, instead, at night and off campus. To Jehn, this compromise was a traitorous cop-out. Believing that "the university is...inscribed with the ideology of the capitalist state," he insists that unless professors are overtly countercultural in their teaching (as he thinks the on-campus teach-ins would have been) they are, wittingly or not, doing the bidding of the powers-that-be (168). Like most sweeping arguments, Jehn's is persuasive only on the level of grand abstraction. In my own fairly traditional education, for example, I was repeatedly exposed to canonical writers (Plato, Voltaire, Thoreau, Tolstoy, to name just a few) whose ideas, enthusiastically explicated by my instructors, inflamed me with the most radical passions imaginable. Unlike Jehn, I think the compromise backed by the more moderate University of Michigan faculty was eminently reasonable, evidence that the anti-war movement may have been less extremist than it's commonly portrayed today by the right.
Another example from the anthology of P.C. inanity is Michael D. Yates' "Teaching College Students, Teaching Workers," in which Yates discusses lecturing to two very different audiences--traditional students, as a college economics professor, and "working people...in a labor studies program run by Penn State University" (377). Of the two settings, Yates greatly prefers the latter, largely because when speaking to workers outside a traditional classroom he feels free to preach hard-core Marxist economics without "feel[ing] pressured by the canons of academe...to maintain an air of objectivity" (380). All else aside, Yates' attack on academe seems misguided given that this labor studies program is run by Penn State University. But logic evidently isn't Yates' forte. Elsewhere, to give another instance of his screwball reasoning, he cites as an example of the alleged "timidity of many radical economists," their failure to use "the collapse of the Soviet Union as a springboard for an all-out attack upon capitalism" (376). Apparently, Yates' point is that the failure of the world's largest communist economy revealed glaring deficiencies in capitalism! In general, Yates seems oblivious to the possibility that teaching economics from a monomaniacally Marxist slant may be less than ideal. If, indeed, the "canons of academe" restrain such professorial propagandizing, that seems a virtue, not a vice.
As I've said, most contributors to Advocacy in the Classroom reject such indoctrination in favor of a more open-minded kind of advocacy that doesn't try to turn students into clones of their instructors. However, these authors also reject the stance of professorial neutrality, disinterestedness, objectivity, that conservative academics like Wallen and Himmelfarb champion. A recurrent argument raised by this group is that professorial advocacy is unavoidable, that nearly every decision an instructor makes--from choosing certain texts to constructing syllabi to framing classroom discussions--implies certain perspectives, points-of-view. As Helene Moglen states categorically in "Unveiling the Myth of Neutrality: Advocacy in the Feminist Classroom," "intellectual neutrality is obviously a myth and ...pedagogical partisanship is dangerous not when practiced in the open but in its pernicious invisibility" (204).
Along similar lines, Penny S. Gold argues in "A Teacher Is Either a Witness or a Stranger" that since teachers are role models, a professor who acts neutrally in class risks inducing students to do the same, and that "neutrality on issues of deep moral and political import is not something I want to encourage in my students" (261). However, rather than attempting to persuade students to share her beliefs, Gold says she tries to present herself in class as a "witness." That is, by advocating her views she seeks to offer students a model of intellectual engagement, one she hopes they'll emulate, whether they agree with her or not.
In the rather ponderously titled "Some Implications of the Faculty's Obligation to Encourage Student Academic Freedom for Faculty Advocacy in the Classroom," Ernst Benjamin takes a comparable stand, claiming that a university in which teacherly advocacy is discouraged risks becoming a mindless "apologist for the status quo" (312). In place of such conformist campuses, Benjamin urges the assembling of a "diverse faculty, some of whom are likely to advocate aggressively their diverse, heretical views" (312). Challenging the anti-advocacy views of such academics as Pace Wallen and Himmelfarb, Benjamin argues that "advocacy tempered by mutual respect is the antidote to, rather than the instrument of, indoctrination"--in the university, and, indeed, "any free community" (313).While I agree more with this position--advocacy yea, indoctrination nay--than with either the far-right stances of Wallen and Himmelfarb or the far-left ones of Jehn and Yates, I think that Moglen, Gold and Benjamin (and the many others in Advocacy in the Classroom who echo their views) underestimate how easily intimidated students often are by professors. During my own many years as an undergraduate and graduate student, most of my professors impressed me simply because they were professors, wrapped in the authority bestowed by an institution of higher learning--a mystique so strong it even extended to instructors I knew were clearly incompetent.
The pro-advocacy contributors to the Spacks' collection also don't sufficiently acknowledge how much fear of bad grades stifles student expression, both in and out of the classroom. In general, students are so nuts about grades that I suspect most worry that disagreeing with a professor will get them downgraded, even when the professor explicitly assures them that it won't. It takes an extremely self-possessed student indeed to openly challenge a professor in class, and few young students are that independent-minded.
My point is not that professors should never be advocates. In my own classes, I do, at times, tell students what I actually think about the material. Given their educational training (and, usually, their intelligence), professors often have views worth sharing, and are doing their students a disservice if they remain silent. It's also valid, I think, for instructors on occasion to voice their political views, when they relate to the topic under discussion. While the radical chic slogan that "everything is political" is nonsense, politics, broadly defined, does often come up in the humanities, and thus it is intellectually limiting to scour any taint of politics from the classroom. However, it's vital that when professors do speak their minds in class they make clear that their opinions are just that--opinions, not Biblical Truths hauled down from Mount Sinai.
I also agree with Gerald Graff, in "Advocacy in the Classroom--Or the Curriculum?", that "many who might readily agree in theory that advocacy is good and indoctrination is bad would disagree in practice over what should count as one or the other" (427). When trying to determine exactly where in class that line between advocacy and indoctrination should be drawn, professors should remember the timid, conformist, grade-obsessed personalities of most students and err on the side of caution. Generally, teachers should be less advocates than facilitators of student-centered learning: asking good questions; pushing students to clarify and develop their views; summarizing the key issues of in-class debates; playing "devil's advocate" and espousing any important counter-positions that haven't already come up. In short, an instructor's primary role is to teach students how to think for themselves. Within this pedagogical model, there is a role for professorial advocacy, but it's quite limited and circumscribed.