Arizona State was in the news this week for offering two sections of ethnically segregated freshman English--and did the right thing by telling the professor offering the two Native American-only "rainbow sections" of composition that he can't do that: "All of our classes are open to all students," said a university spokesperson. "That was a mistake by a faculty member. That was not the university's position." But that's not the end of the story--or it shouldn't be. Journalists who have looked into Lynn Nelson's course offerings have found additional cause for concern. A peace activist who seeks to "teach English in such a way that people stop killing each other," Nelson's writing pedagogy appears to be far more focussed on therapeutic consciousness-raising than on the nuts and bolts of composition.

The New York Sun prints a typical Nelson writing assignment:

Tell me a story--and then tell me another--and I will tell you mine--and we will sit in the feather circle and listen carefully to each other. And then we will write thank-you notes to each other for gifts given in these stories. And then we will do it again, anew. And we will continue doing this--until we heal ourselves, until everything begins to become properly precious, until we stop killing each other and destroying the Earth, until we care for it all so much that we ache, until we and the world are changed.

The feather circle is central to Nelson's teaching philosophy. In an essay called "Writing from the Feather Circle," Nelson explains how, in essence, the feather circle has helped him abandon traditional concepts of composition: "I must confess, I have come to care little for the kind of writing--critical, left-brained, technical writing--that I was primarily trained to teach and to produce." Instead, Nelson is devoting his composition classroom to Native American advocacy--"We're turning around what's been done historically for 400 years"--and to violence prevention: "Mr. Nelson describes himself as a force for peace because he encourages his students to share personal stories in writing assignments that he believes relieve tension and encourage social harmony. Untold stories, he argues, translate themselves into violent acts."

Nelson's penchant for segregation--which he claims to have been doing with composition courses at ASU for ten years--appears to be part of a larger problem, one that involves the unapologetic abandonment of academic rigor for an embarrassingly pseudo-scientific and anti-intellectual sort of group therapy, and that abuses the college classroom by opportunistically substituting an activist agenda for an educational one. That Nelson has been happily going about the business of the feather circle for years now in turn raises questions about the overall seriousness and integrity of ASU's writing program. ASU's dean would do well to look more closely at the department that supported and sustained Nelson's suspect pedagogy so unquestioningly for so many years.

UPDATE: A reader whose graduate work centers on cognitive psychology writes:

He lists among his research interests as "right-left brain differences." Needless to say, anyone involved in neuroscience research would have difficulty suppressing a chuckle at this. I'd love to know what this research consists of.

His thinking to me is embarrassingly unscientific. Not in the "science is the supreme discipline sense," but merely with the idea that any academic should offer a hypothesis, find data that support it, explain contradictory data, and honestly advocate his or her argument. He seems to offer merely bland cliche assertions, and to mistake vanity for a real sense of purpose.

"The very power of [the textbook authors] depends on the fact that they are dealing with a boy: a boy who thinks he is 'doing' his 'English prep' and has no notion that ethics, theology, and politics are all at stake. It is not a theory they put into his mind, but an assumption, which ten years hence, its origin forgotten and its presence unconscious, will condition him to take one side in a controversy which he has never recognized as a controversy at all. The authors themselves, I suspect, hardly know what they are doing to the boy, and he cannot know what is being done to him."

C.S. Lewis, "The Abolition of Man"
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/augustine/arch/lewis/abolition1.htm

I am fearful, lest my ASU diploma become a hindrance, rather than an asset. I'll send back my diploma if they'll send back my money.

What constitutes academic rigor? This, indeed, is a troubling question.

Is academic rigor achieved in a semester-long reading of Coriolanus or King Lear? What if every student is asked merely to "bring his ideas to the table," but there are no exams? What if the paper is graded based on the force of the ideas and not on the strength of presentation? What if Geoffrey Hill or David Bevington teachs one of these classes, do we dare even ask these questions?

Many professors nowadays REQUIRE that students attend all classes. Fair enough. Yet these same professors often "grade" students on class participation. Has any student ever seen a standard for "participation" set? What about the faculty? Do you endeavor to clarify such standards among your colleagues?

What are we to do about these lovely courses (I have taken or dropped a few of these) taught by the Nobel Prize winner in X who brings prestige to a department, yet has never met one of his undergraduates face to face? Is the non-English speaking TA (TF at the posh schools) supposed to deliver the magic pill of knowledge?

Regarding the world of Economics, how many graduates from our elite schools can hold up their end of a conversation dealing with normative applications of //economic science//? If my experience at three of the best schools is representative, the word "normative" is relegated to the freshman core sequence-stuck somewhere between the Phil or Soc requirement. Economics professors have loads of data demonstrating how even the distribution of their grades are, what the objective standards are, and the level of additional information a student has picked up in his or her course. Unfortunately, such information says nothing about whether such "academic rigor" translates into knowledge.

The likes of Mr. Nelson may, indeed, be intellectually pernicious; there is, however, little evidence that he achieves a different end than many, many of his colleagues. The only test remaining is to find out how many of his students choose to continue studying with him.

Since Mr. Nelson is suppose to be teaching his students the skill of writing a successful expository essay--that is the goal of every freshman composition course, whether the instructor chooses to honor that common goal or not--I think we can safely say that his feather circles and the explicit statements he has made disparaging expository writing are indicators that there is a severe problem in his composition courses, and that he is not doing the job he is being paid by the university and the taxpayers of the state of Arizona to perform.

Mr. Nelson either needs to revise his individual courses so that they at least make the attempt to hone student skills in the area of expository writing, or he needs to step down from his position and find one that is more suitable to his own personal philosophies.

There are hundreds if not thousands of well-trained and qualified Ph.Ds out there who would happily perform Mr. Nelson's job, and would strive to teach their students what the university expects them to be teaching, rather than perverting the composition classroom into a combination of cult of personality and political activism.

The comments by Basil above are disingenuous. Common sense--a notion rejected by the oh-so-wise postmodernists, I know--can provide us with the answers we need regarding academic rigor.

"...he is not doing the job he is being paid by the university and the taxpayers of the state of Arizona to perform."

And there it is.

Furthermore, Nelson makes the point that Native American students may feel intimidated by large lecture-style classes. Well, guess what, kids of every stripe may feel that way, especially if they come from small high schools. You don't go off to college to stay in your comfort zone. I understand wanting kids to feel that they have a safe place, but I don't know why he can't serve the Native American equivalent of tea and cookies when the kids come to see him in his office, for moral support, and then tell them to get back out there and go to class. He'd be doing them a huge favor if he would do that, but it wouldn't be serving his agenda.

this is hippie nonsense. those students are being done a disservice.

i teach composition and while i'm open to new methods of teaching, that paragraph about story telling is garbage--as far as comp classes go. unless there is a lot more to that assignment, it's pure crap. a comp paper should be about the ideas (does the student have one) and its strength of presentation. who says learning should be a "feel good" experience? learning is work and work isn't always pleasant.

Yeah, this is like the hippie teacher in Beavis and Butthead who has the class get in a circle and sing "Lesbian Seagull".

What was that line years ago from the Paper Chase? "You come in here and your heads are full of mush" or something to that effect.

Undergrads need fundamentals. They surely are not going to get them from a public school system these days. They need to learn to crawl before they fly, leap, run, or walk.

In many ways this is a remedial type course because the public schools are so worthless. As such, a bunch of hand waving touchy feely mystic bullshit is not useful at all.

It appears things have slipped badly since I was a college freshman ~25 years ago. It used to mean something. If a degree means you just showed up somewhere for 4 years, that is not saying much -- a prison inmate can do that.

I take back some of my comments in the earlier report for *this* particular case. All in all, this is not someone to whom I'd send ANY student based on my agendas as a prof. I also know professors specializing in minority development who would love to introduce him to the oppressive “social constructs” of gravity and inertia. Oral Tradition may be important to NAs (and for some, “writing it down” is bad form or worse -- all the more reason to leave the feather circle OUT of a*writing* class), but OT is better supported elsewhere in the NA student’s college experience either in or out of the classroom.

My broader concern is that this case spends too much time hemming and hawing over segregation by race and not segregation by need -- whose recipients may wind up falling along class and race lines. And NA students are in that class of at-risk students which, unfortunately, do not always get the prep of more privileged classes of Anglo students. Additionally, do we really want to block out women’s-only self defense classes as a PE elective? After all, that is discrimination by gender, but sure as heck wouldn't want any men in those sections aside from chivalrous members of the football team willing to TA as proxies for attackers. Or smaller freshie sections for rural students (or other at-risk student groups) for freshman skill-development courses (for me, these are important for some of my incoming students)?

I’m afraid that babies are gonna be thrown out with the bathwater on this one -- all because of a lame feather and a lamer [white] English prof.

Bill, I think that if a remedial section of English comp turns out to be mostly or virtually 100% NA that's OK. I don't think they have to set up a quota to make sure it's not. The problem - well, there are two problems. First, as the university says, they can't exclude students by race. Second, this feather circle nonsense is cheating those kids. It's not making up in the least for their lack of preparation and it's wasting their time and money.

(Why not have men in a self-defense course? Men never get attacked or mugged?)

Laura,

First, yeah, the moment I read the feather circle crap, I knew it had no business in being part of a required coures in composition even if you could choose to count it as such... The idea is to WRITE. You can have a feather circle class that features oral tradition and the like but classify it as an elective and not part of the BS/BA core. It's not an issue of it being "segregated;" it's about the class not conforming to the rubrics of the general ed program. Plus like I said, I'm worried that this bad example will make [serious and "real"] specialized courses with low prerequisites touchy.

For example, as I said in the other thread, if a seriously NA-oriented class (like one that discusses NA oral traditions, or NA issues in social work, or multigenerational education, etc.) fills with the Birkenstock brigade who want to prostrate themsevles before the First Nations for their grandfather's crimes at the expense of NA students who are serious about the material, I'd start wanting to put in some locks down so that the lead professor can establish a quota on white warm fuzzy hairshirt models.

I'd see it as no different from having a course with ten slots to cover severe storm field research (e.g., one for freshie and sophomore majors and minors so the prereqs would be light.) that would only have room for the prof's current crew of meteorology and adjacent majors/minors just keep out the people who just want to pretend that they are in the movie "Twister" and play storm chaser and ruin things for the students who are in the program.

Finally, Women who are victims of sexual assault may want a male-free zone. Additionally, as I understand it, there are some "dirty fighting" approaches that are tailor made for the typical member of the "fairer sex" against a male attacker. Yeah, you could have [heavily-padded] guys in it, but only for target practice!

So sometimes it IS a good idea to "segregate" a "real" class to make it viable. And that decision should rest with the lead professor and department chair, not a university ombudsman. I'm hardly a member of the PC brigade on this and I'm otherwise a $upporter of FIRE. For me it's about making the best course for my students. If it means "segregating" by using the "permission of instructor" gate, that's a go for me.

Bill, your Birkenstock brigade example is a toughie. I understand your point, but I guess I'm still not comfortable with the idea of excluding people by race, in a state-sponsored school. (I don't have a problem with it in a private school.) If the Birkenstock folks truly want to learn about NA culture, why not? Where are they going to, outside a university? Conversely, why would a NA kid go off to college to learn what he already knows or should be asking family members about? If the culture is so foreign to him that he has to learn about it in school, he's not really different from the Birkenstockers.

I keep encouraging my daughter to attend the self-defense classes her school offers, but I'm always kind of concerned that some of the attack stuff just isn't realistic once you get away from a controlled setup. Maybe having men in class for the women to practice some of the moves with would keep them from developing a false sense of security. And are there THAT many women who are victims of sexual assault, to the point that they are afraid of men and don't want to be around them? That's really a horrifying thought.