On Sunday, I posted about the story of Kendall McCook, an adjunct professor of English who was fired after turning in his grades last week. McCook claims he was fired because a conservative student complained when he assigned Michael Moore's film, Fahrenheit 9/11. In the comments to my initial post, readers express doubt about whether that's the whole story; they also express skepticism about whether McCook really is the politically evenhanded teacher he makes himself out to be.

One of McCook's former students has written in to address that question. Here is her comment:

As a former student of Professor McCook's I was stunned to open the paper and read of his dismissal from TCC. He was one of the best professors that I have ever had and while I may not have agreed with all of his political views-myself being what some would call a staunch conservative-I never felt that he was pushing his political beliefs on me. Instead he nurtured a love for politics and encouraged us to question this wonderful, nonsensical thing we call government. As a young college student I think that society has stifled the ability to think, to question, to change. If a college fires him for asking students to formulate their own ideas and views of the world then I think that we have to ask ourselves-what is really wrong here? Professor McCook was an outstanding teacher and his dismissal is a sad reminder that formal education is just a didatic barrage of useless facts and not knowledge. The student who complained is one that has no interest in knowledge and harbors
no desire to see beyond the world that we build around ourselves. What is so wrong with asking people to question what they believe, to not blindly accept what we are told. What are they afraid might happen-that people might start thinking?

The letter from this student perfectly explains the dilemma of the professor who hopes to engage his or her students. Making humanistic inquiry exciting to students -- and think of the challenge of doing this at a County College -- means engaging controversial matters. Doing so, though, has obviously become too risky when political watchdogs (from both the left and the right) roam the campus. The alternative, of course, is dull pedagogy.

I'd like to ask this student whether she knows the student who complained, and whether she is in a position to know if McCook was fired for the reason he gave. It's very strange if he was, since the student was given an alternative assignment.

... and I am not convinced that this is the real or only reason for the termination....

I read the comments from a couple of days ago on this subject and was amazed at the degree of contention there was about showing a film that deals with current events, to group of college students.I guess I just don't get it. What is a liberal arts eduction supposed to be? Compartmentalized facts and figures that a body can spout off when they want to show how smart they are, or a vehicle that helps one integrate knowledge so that it can be used in the real world to make real decisions about the real stuff of being human? Some of the best literature stems from social and politica satire. Although one may not agree that Moore's film comes close to being art, what is the harm in exposing college students to it? Have we raised a generation of such mush-brains that they can't think for themselves enough to know they don't agree with him? Or is it just fear that someone else in the classroom might see merit in what he has to say? Professors aren't in a position to brainwash or indoctrinate their students and the issue, whether it's OK to show a controversial film to those students, is insulting. Academic freedom is important for teachers so they don't lose their jobs over a notion that censoring unwanted information is somehow beneficial but it's more important for students because it gives them the right to think for themselves and to be exposed to a variety of ideas.

"What is so wrong with asking people to question what they believe, to not blindly accept what we are told. What are they afraid might happen-that people might start thinking?"

Although I know very little about the facts surrounding the teacher's dismissal, this quote did not reassure me that an injustice was done.

What is this stuff that people "blindly accept?" Who says people aren't thinking?

There is an assertion within this post that a unanimity of opinion exists of which I am unaware. Take a look around the web.

Why do I get the feeling that the underlying theme here is rebellion against perceived adult authority? And why would anybody think that this is virgin intellectual terrority. That motif has been the standard BS of the past 50 years. Is it the job of a college instructor to lead young people into rebellion against parental and adult authority? Why?

"Food for thought"?

Michael Moore is a verifiable propagandist, distorterer of the truth, and liar. His films only ask viewers to think, if thinking means learning how to spot a piece of political fiction masquerading as information.

Why not show Stone's "Kennedy" and engage the student-viewers in a discussion of the history surrounding the President's assasination to get them "thinking"?

The fact that Moore has a following conspiracy theory-loving deadheads and half-literates does not make his work worthwhile.

Kyle

"Michael Moore is a verifiable propagandist, distorterer of the truth, and liar. His films only ask viewers to think, if thinking means learning how to spot a piece of political fiction masquerading as information."

And where do you suggest people learn that skill? It cuts both ways, you know. There is as much political fiction on the right as there is on the left (though neither side will admit to its own spin)--how are people to learn to recognize propaganda if they are never exposed to it and shown how it works, how it is structured, etc.?

Once again, in the war between the liberals and conservatives, it sounds very much like "meet the new boss, same as the old boss." Demonizing the other side is the favorite sport of both sides. Silly me, though, because somehow I thought the "conservatives" (who it turns out, aren't really conservative at all--just activists with a different agenda) would have been different when their turn came. Guess not. Maybe after the purges are finished, eh?

Ayn Rand was a propagandist as well--should her loosely philosophical novels be banned from classrooms because of that? (Those are probably OK, though, because they are usuually thought of as right-leaning.) John Milton was a propagandist. Should Paradise Lost be banned? (He was pretty left-leaning for his day...)

Are classrooms now to be held hostage to the political discomfort of a single student? Should a course on American poetry skip Ezra Pound because he aligned himself with the Facists (and that makes "the right" look bad)? Who gets to decide this? Should we have an official board that judges all classroom content, syllabi, book orders, discussions, etc., checking them for approved "conservative" content?

Honestly, how is that different from the left-wing propaganda you complain about? And how will anyone ever learn to "spot a piece of political fiction masquerading as information" if all they ever get is one approved point of view?

And reductive insults ("deadheads and half-literates") do not make an effective argument. But they do make the beginnings of effective propaganda...

There is a difference between banned and required.

And there is a difference between teaching the political thought of Milton or even Rand, and the professor pushing *his* views of *current* politics on his captive audience.

Anyway, as I posted below, the professor likely wasn't fired for assigning that wretched movie, but rather for blowing off a meeting that the dean requested that he attend. The issue was resolved to his satisfaction, so he didn't see the need to go. Apparently as long as he thought things were OK they were, despite what the student and the administration might think. Does that still make him a victim of the wicked conservatives?

My question got drowned out in the bombast, so I'll ask again:

Is it the job of a college instructor to lead young people into rebellion against parental and adult authority? Why?

I think that this is a question that goes beyond liberal or conservative. It seems to me that liberal arts instructors have, for 50 years, assumed that it is their job to encourage this type of rebellion. I think that the question I'm asking has more to do with the priorities and responsibilities of a job. Why do college instructors so often arrogate this job, encouraging rebellion against adult authority, to themselves?

I'll pose a theory. The pay is so terrible, particularly for TAs and adjuncts, that prattling on about rebellion and critical thinking is a sort of side benefit of the job, a sort of extra pay to compensate for the dreadful wages. Instead of pay, you get to pontificate. Or, as the old saying goes, "The competition was so fierce precisely because the awards were so small."

"There is a difference between banned and required."

But what is the difference, assuming a teacher is not allowed to *require* a student to read (or view) something on a syllabus that might make him or her uncomfortable?

And is currency really the issue? Is an instructor *allowed* to require students to read, say, Naked Lunch, or the Communist Manifesto, or Mein Kampf (all things that ought to make at least one student uncomfortable) only because they are from times past? It sounds like assigning something current is being equated to pushing one's own politics.

McCook's individual case is a drop in the bucket compared to the issues it potentially raises. He blew off a meeting (as a part-time employee), and he got fired--again, assuming that there is not more to the story, say the union-organizing angle that was mentioned somewhere. But the questions raised about classroom content are, at least for me, much more interesting than McCook's individual case.

And my basic question remains the same: if McCook, or any other instructor, had assigned a piece of right-leaning propaganda, would anyone be complaining? Based on the comments I see here, I think the answer is no. And that, if I am correct (a leap to be sure), would seem to make the "wicked conservatives"--as you put it--just as censorious as the "dead head and half-literate" liberals (to borrow a phrase from a previous poster).

If each side merely wants to insulate itself from criticism, to ensure that no one ever "pushes" their "politics" at them (because only the other side has "politics" of course), then what is the difference between them? Two sets of censors, distinguished only by *what* they want to make sure cannot be spoken in a college classroom (and later, in the larger world)--that's what we're dealing with.

Again, it seems that what is being trotted out is the "right not to be offended" argument. And that is always going to lead to the imposition of orthodoxy--the sentiments approved by the prevailing majority--and the stifling of any dissenting point of view (right, left, or otherwise).

Michael Moore's movie isn't the point, nor is McCook's individual situation--what is at stake here is whether or not education in this country is going to be required to hoe to a particular political line. And one of the most telling criticisms conservatives have made over the last several years is of an unofficial orthodoxy of liberalism in university humanities departments. After having made that excellent and necessary critique, are they now simply going to try to replace one orthodoxy with another?

I had hoped that the conservative critique of college education would open things up, but I am afraid that what I am seeing is simply a reversal of the hierarchical relationship. Instead of a liberal orthodoxy (where conservative points of view are dismissed, even sneered at), we will now be treated to a conservative orthodoxy (where liberal points of view are dismissed, even sneered at).

How is that an improvement? It's the same game--the only difference is which team currently has the ball.

"Is it the job of a college instructor to lead young people into rebellion against parental and adult authority?"

Well, for my part, the answer is no. No, it is not the job of a college instructor to lead young people into rebellion against parental and adult authority. I think that it is the job of a college instructor (in the humanities, for example) to do two basic things: 1) teach a body of material (whatever that might be--17th century British lit, 20th century European history, the 16th century Reformation, whatever); and 2) teach what is often referred to as "critical thinking," by which I mean the skills required to see the material in the context of its time and place (and the issues of that time and place), as well as the ability to deal with evidence by making intelligent and independent judgments about sources of information. The second job is much harder than the first, and in my experience, that was the area in which failure--sometimes disguised as political advocacy for one or another point of view--was most often to be expected. The instructor should, ideally, be a guide to the information, but not an arbiter of what conclusions should be drawn from the information. That journey is the student's own.

That's my take, anyway.

My econ prof, a hardcore Marxist, wouldn't hand out an "A" for Econ 101 unless the student had carefully read Miltoni Friedman, Friedrich von Hayek, and the Wall Street Journal -- and, yes, some Marx as well. No one begrudged that prof his political views, because no one had to internalize them or regurgitate them. We did, however, have to consider them.

I strongly believe that the root cause of the recent proposals to "balance" academia is the failure of so many profs and so many departments to have the self-discipline to encourage critical thinking rather than encourage "thinking like I do." Academics from both sides of the spectrum have common ground and common cause to address this issue.

"And my basic question remains the same: if McCook, or any other instructor, had assigned a piece of right-leaning propaganda, would anyone be complaining?"

If a professor who said the ugly, hateful things about Clinton that McCook said about Bush required his students to read "Year of the Rat", you bet I'd be complaining.

Fair enough.

Thanks for pointing out "Year of the Rat" BTW. I just read some of the reviews on Amazon, and they are nothing short of hysterical (in every sense).

Perhaps we could construct a film, documentary or fiction - even Moore's 9/11 is now entered in the Academy Awards as fiction - depicting partial birth abortion somewhat realistically and somewhat not. Then we could "teach" it in an English class, because it would have been judged by the teacher as the "most important" film of the year.

Would anyone not see this pba production as propaganda, or at least totally contradictory to the purview of an English course?

Can anyone not imagine that students would wonder if their take on the pba film would somehow have a bearing on their success in the course, to the extent that they might be very hesitant to even ask this question?

The thinking behind the answer, "Well, duh", cannot be taught in this case.

Or perhaps the Latin course should include these films, too, so that "critical thinking" can be improved by this tactic?

Then the students could also study the questions of what are the facts of the procedure, when a person exists, what is murder, and so on, into infinity. But they would also have to answer in Latin, making it therefore even more acceptable as the purview of the Latin course. Sounds good to me!

I have no idea if McCook was fired for the right reason.

And your point is?

Any and all use of classroom time to pontificate and propagandize is wrong?

Or

Criticism (even unfair criticism) of a sitting president is somehow equivalent to an "unbalanced" discussion of partial birth abortion (complete with images, no doubt)?

While the scenario you outline would make a wonderful--if disgusting--Candid Camera scene, the analogy you're suggesting seems a little strained.

And what, exactly, is the "purview of an English course"? Beyond notions of a student being offended, or fearing for his/her grade, at the structural level of what you think an English course should be doing, why is the film outside the bounds? What *should* McCook have been doing? What material *should* he have been covering? If F 9/11 is out, what should be in?

"What *should* McCook have been doing?"

That depends on what the class was that he was teaching, of course, which isn't clear. Wish it was.

The discussion regarding the power dynamics of the teacher/student relationship and the clash between conservatism and liberalism is all well and good, but my question is: why is a movie being shown in an English class?

I would argue that all video materials basically constitute a form of propaganda, since they prevent the viewer from thinking critically in the same way that they would when reading a book. Author Jerry Mander discusses this idea at length in his book "Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television." Another example of video materials inducing passivity can be found in Dr. Thomas Mulholland's experiments during the 1970's, which proved that television alters brainwaves, making the viewer more receptive to being easily influenced. Even US Army PsyOps documents have stated that the most effective propaganda materials are audiovisual (read: film/video).

"I would argue that all video materials basically constitute a form of propaganda, since they prevent the viewer from thinking critically in the same way that they would when reading a book."

How about a Shakespeare course--especially one dedicated to Shakespeare in performance, highlighting the different ways characters can be conceived, scenes can be staged, etc.?

My 10th grade English teacher taught all about propaganda and didn't once need to drag modern politics into the discussion. After all, there are about 100,000,000 commercials on TV and in magazines that are chock-full of propaganda, and won't upset a single student. Why not use them? Or use literature concerning OLD political propaganda--Nazi videos and the like. Why drag politics into what should be a politically-neutral class?

I'd like to take a shot at answering Stephen's question from an unusual perspective, or at least one I haven't often encountered in discussions of this kind.

One of the most frustrating aspects of my experience in graduate school was realizing that students weren't going to have enough time to truly master a body of literature along with the major critical and theoretical approaches to that literature. The academic publishing glut, along with TA or RA commitments, means students must settle for skimming the scholarship instead of engaging with it, idea by slow idea.

Furthermore, the professional requirement that prospective academics be heavily published, to have a book or maybe two in the hopper, and even to have made an "original" contribution to the scholarship via their dissertations, deforms the scholarly enterprise itself. The pressure to be "original" so early in a scholar's career is, I think, responsible for a lot of the trivial junk scholarship that clogs the profession (e.g., learning a theoretical approach and applying it to pieces of text without understanding anything else about the text).

Finally, it's wrong to put young, relatively unread, panting-to-keep-up-with-reams-of-junk-scholarship grad students in front of Composition and Intro classes. They haven't had the decades of immersion in literature that distinguishes the best old professors, who can spin mesmerising, fact-filled lectures out of stuff they're so familiar with they've half forgotten it.

Instead, these young ones have to captivate a restless class with stuff they're just getting acquainted with, stuff they haven't lived with for years and years but are, rather, still struggling to grasp. They may not have even read some of the works on the syllabus in their entirety.

And--and this is the major point I'm driving at--because they're young, they're drawn to opposition and conflict, revolution and rebellion. The theoretical trends of the last thirty years are filled with pseudo-revolutionary formulas: question this, deconstruct that, challenge everything.

The longer I'm out of graduate school, the less the problems of the academy strike me as being ideological. I think the ideological skew may be the symptom of a much deeper structural problem: The sudden expansion of the student body in the fifties and sixties, and the concomitant scramble to get bodies in front of those students at a price that wouldn't bankrupt the university.

Michael, my point was exactly as I originally stated it.

Another example from real life: my daughter just graduated from a top ten Nursing School. Among the things which were just plain bizarre, such as one teacher singing the "Itsy bitsy Spider" and another reading Dr.Suess to the class in Spanish, was the introduction Bush's depravity as a pontification in class. My daughter wondered what this had to do with anything, and some others thought they were being taken advantage of, apart from the total irrelevance of the comments by the teacher.

Another 40+ year old acquaintence of mine decided she wanted to take a night class on English Literature at another prestigious University. In the first class she was informed that Hemmingway would not be studied because he was a Sexist. She, an extremely vulnerable but bright soul, became frightened and did not attend another class.

Well, J., if your point can't be put into other words, even in order to clarify it, then I'm not sure how effective it is. I can certainly agree with you this far: a film on PBA would, indeed, be a form of propaganda (for the right or the left depending on how it was done, what was presented, etc.). But so what? That's low-hanging fruit. How exactly does that easy, and exaggerated, example relate to the decision (and I agree with you--a foolish decision) by McCook to show F 9/11?

Showing a film that criticizes a politician (fairly or unfairly) and showing a film that contains graphic depictions of surgical procedures, blood, infants/fetuses (choose your term depending on how you view the issue, of course) are not equivalent acts. Both films may fairly be characterized as propaganda, but after that the comparison breaks down. The politician is not helpless, and is not being shown while being physically cut into pieces. The politician can fight back (and often does).

And the teacher with whom your friend took the night class was a moron--but an all too common variety these days. So what if Hemingway was (or was not) sexist? Your friend was probably right not to go back to that class.

In many areas, there are a variety of textbooks (in business, we have a series called "Taking Sides") which introduce controversial topics and have readings from both sides of the issue. If the readings are selected without too much bias, both sides bring up relevant arguments. This allows the introduction of some level of debate without having to be an expert and understand all possible issues related to the argument.

I teach staffing, and one issue which obviously comes up (for better or worse) is affirmative action. Quite frankly, I need to improve my facilitation skills in order to adequately address all the different issues involved without "preaching" pro or con. One thing that has helped has been discussing other "preferences" in college admission, such as legacies. Still, it is torture, because I want to get students to think but I don't want to offend anyone. It helps to realize that many if not most of my minority (black, specifically) students are similarity conflicted -- if not more so than I -- about this issue. We don't come up with any easy answers, because there aren't any, but we do raise issues that people in HR need to understand.

So this doesn't really relate to the 9/11 movie -- but I would think that it has about as much to do with an English literature class (assuming it is literature and not composition - a big assumption) as would a film on affirmative action! (If you want to teach in another area, you should have gotten a different degree!)