Opinons seem to hold sway at CU today, and students suffer
By Rabbi Hillel Goldberg
Rocky Mountain News
February 26, 2005
Rabbi Hillel Goldberg, Ph.D., the executive editor of the Intermountain Jewish News, taught intellectual history at The Hebrew University.
The Ward Churchill controversy has exposed the underbelly of undergraduate education in the social sciences and humanities today. The problem is not Churchill per se, nor even the supposed imbalance between liberal and conservative professors on many college campuses. A university worth its salt would not care whether its faculty were 100 percent Republican or 100 percent Democratic.
Both supporters and critics of Churchill miss the point in one vital area: the role of the professor in the liberal arts.
Perhaps nowhere is this more poignant than in the seemingly reasonable position of David Horowitz, who maintains that universities need more conservative faculty members to "balance" the preponderantly leftist bent among faculty. Ironically, under this vision, Horowitz and Churchill agree: a professor's primary role is to advance his personal philosphical agenda.
Not so.
The role of the professor is to teach - to enable students through careful tutelage in critical reading and careful research to reach their own conclusions. The role of the professor is not to spout off, and the definition of a good university is not a place where the spouting is equally balanced between left and right.
Wherein, then, lies quality and diversity in the social sciences and humanities? Not in the university as a whole. Not in a faculty equally liberal and conservative. But in the integrity of every single classroom. Professors in a genuine bastion of the social sciences and humanities expose their students to a variety of interpretations of history, politics and literature, without favoring any particular position.
The professor with integrity in, for example, political science can teach an entire course without his students being able to guess at his political predilections (at least based on his classroom performance).
The professor with integrity can debate, at least to a draw, any religious, political, or cultural position diametrically opposed to his own.
Such a professor will grade his students not on any position they take, but on thoroughness of research and felicity of expression. This professor will, with no twinge of conscience, award an A to a student he disagrees with, provided only that the student's knowledge rises to excellence. Real professors rejoice in their students' advancement, regardless of the direction of their reasoning.
Of course, professors should be free to advance their viewpoints - but outside the academic context. The pertinent pedagogical criticism of Ward Churchill is not for his opinons, but for espousing them in the classroom. If one defends Churchill, the teacher, on grounds of free speech, one perverts the purpose of the university classroom, which is not professor-focused, but student-focused. It is not a professor's free speech, but the student's rigorous, unbiased training, that is the university's purpose. If a professor must fall back on free speech or academic freedom to defend himself, it's usually because he violated his mission: focus on the student.
I shall not burden a single soul besides Ward Churchill with the responsibility for his own intellectual grotesqueries, but they do arise in a context - the derogation of critical thinking in the classroom, in favor of partisan viewpoints and an accompanying lowering of standards.
One wonders what successive presidents and humanities' deans at the University of Colorado think they have been presiding over during the many years of Churchill's tenure. In significant measure, opinion has replaced rigor, and partisanship has supplanted standards.
I write this with considerable sadness because our daughter just graduated from CU, where she received a superb education - in the sciences. It is time for all concerned to speak out, to state what should be obvious: Standards are not just for the sciences. Liberal arts are not a free-for-all. If a 9/11 victim is a "little Eichmann," then nuclear physics is "Twinkle, twinkle little star, how I wonder what you are."
Indeed, many are wondering about the subversion of liberal arts standards at CU. The acceptance of Ward Churchill there indicates that the problem is far larger than he.
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