Yesterday's post on Michael Berube's Chronicle of Higher Education piece about his experience teaching a course that was "derailed" by a conservative student has grown legs, it seems. A number of readers have written in to respond to both Berube's piece and to my take on it.

One such reader was Professor Berube himself. Berube does not like my reading of his essay--he calls it "fraudulent" and "unscrupulous." He writes:

There really is no question in my essay that the primary problem with "John" was that he was a blurter, and that this problem was compounded by (a) the fact that he blurted some exceptionally provocative things (I would hope, by now, that there is something like a consensus that a defense of the AJA camps is provocative), and (b) the fact that I was reluctant to challenge him precisely *because* his views differed from mine, in a pedagogical context where conservative students often do feel silenced by liberal professors.

Like so many other conservative critics I've dealt with this week, you also refuse to acknowledge the fact that I prevented liberal students from ganging up on John.

It's hard to see how a post that links to the piece it comments on, thus enabling readers to assess for themselves the legitimacy of the commentary, could be fairly labelled either fraudulent or unscrupulous, but in the spirit of full disclosure I thought Critical Mass readers should know that this is Berube's position. Many of them have, after all, committed a similar act of unscrupulous, illiterate fraudulence by also deciding that Berube's piece is a deeply disturbing example of academic cant.

Some of those readers have posted their thoughts on Berube's piece on their own blogs. See John Rosenberg's Discriminations, Michael Tinkler's Cranky Professor, Tightly Wound, and Eric Rasmusen's blog. Other readers have written to me directly. I reprint some of their comments below.

From a conservative student at Bucknell:

Your "fisking" of the Berube piece in the Chronicle made me want to stand up and cheer. I read Berube's garbage the other day and there was just so much there that made so little sense that I couldn't even bring myself to write a response for the conservative e-mail list here at Bucknell. Kudos to you for having it in you to give it the treatment it deserved.

BTW...I can already hear Berube's piece whizzing around the faculty listservs as one of those "Ah, yes! Of course!" moments.

Thank you for your blog; I read it daily. As a non Marxist, non-Bush-hating, non-French-theory subscriber, I can't tell you how comforting it is to find I'm not alone in the academic wasteland. Good takedown of Berube's essay, too.

The BerubeÝsermon reveals more than one could ever argue in so many words about the moral laziness of the academy. Do you suppose that A LDaily linked to it for this subversive reason? Nah, I expect many findÝthe sermonÝgenuinely wise -- aÝreaction that itself speaks volumes.

Great coverage of the story and some good reader comments too. One thing that struck me is that lit crit as currently practiced seems inherently susceptible to politicized and overheated discussions. As you have pointed out repeatedly, many profs in the area essentially talk about and teach things they know very little about: history, economics, etc. Berube's class seems just rife with this stuff. For example, I wonder if anyone in the class, instructor included, know much of the facts surrounding internment camps. And as someone who has written a bit of game theory and uses it sparingly in class, the class' treatment of the prisoners dilemma and game theory is almost pure butchery. The idea that peace can only exist when there is real trust between countries tosses out any real lessons that one could come by using game-theoretic reasoning.

Interestingly, I often encounter challenging students like John, except that they will be arguing that quantitative analyses are useless for decision making. These students are sometimes just innumerate and defensive people, but more often are intelligent and honest people who have seen numbers and quant analysis oversold and misused. They are about my favorite students 'cause they force you to honestly deal with the limitations of your analysis but also to highlight where you have actually made progress. I am sure that good English teachers can do the same!

You are precisely right, Erin, to point out the most egregious trait of BerubÈ's essay: his conflation of the student's behavior with the student's political stance. To BerubÈ the former is so obviously caused by the latter that he never makes an argument for the linkage. (This is just incidental, but I wonder if BerubÈ thinks that support for the internment of Japanese-Americans in WWII is a common conservative position. I doubt he would be disappointed if his readers drew that inference.)

I'd just like to add a point about another feature of his essay: the line "I have never seen a conservative student on any of the campuses I've inhabited . . . penalized by a professor for his or her beliefs." How do you suppose BerubÈ would respond if he read an essay which contained the sentence, "I have never seen an African-American student treated with less respect than white students"? Or, "I have never seen a disabled student penalized for his or her disability"? I think such statements would bring an instant sneer to his face -- and rightly so. First of all, how many of us who teach have any idea what really goes on in our colleagues' classrooms? I get a glimpse when I'm called in to do a teaching evaluation or a guest lecture; otherwise I'm clueless, as no doubt is BerubÈ. On those grounds alone his statement is a silly one.

But wouldn't he also see such a statement as a wonderful illustration of what it's like to be in the grip of ideology, to be a prisoner of false consciousness? *Of course* maltreatment of dissenters and the marginal is invisible to those who have internalized, and are even proselytizers for, the standards of the existing power/knowledge regime. What would Foucault do with the assumption that the "problem" students are those who have failed to meet adequate standards of "reasonable" behavior? One would think that BerubÈ has never read _Discipline and Punish_. The extent to which his rhetoric has left him open to the very critique which is the academic left's stock-in-trade is rather comical.

I found the essay hilariously patronizing, and impossible to believe (his descriptions of himself as endlessly patient and tolerant are so over-the-top it's hard to imagine him writing them with a straight face). But even if I take the author at his word that he's overly accommodating of diverse views, he never explains how he reaches his conclusion that all leftist (his word) English teachers share his preternatural tolerance.