Purdue Calumet's Sociology 100 course presented itself as a neutral overview of the field -- until the last unit on on race and ethnicity, when the instructor began confusing teaching the issues with telling students what to think about the issues. Similar problems seem to have arisen at North Carolina State University, where a philosophy course on contemporary moral issues has not only failed to address the issues the course description assures students it will address, but has also, according to this student, failed to present the moral issues it broaches as moral issues. Like the Purdue sociology instructor, NCSU's philosophy 221 instructor--Christine Pierce--has reportedly chosen to urge particular viewpoints about controversial issues on students rather than encouraging than to grasp all sides of those issues before making moral assessments.

Philosophy 221 promises to apply "philosophical analysis and theory ... to a broad range of contemporary moral issues, including euthanasia, suicide, capital punishment, abortion, war, famine relief, and environmental concerns." But according to one student in the class, the class neither covered all those issues nor did much in the way of demonstrating how they might be analyzed from a philosophical perspective. This student notes that in failing both to match the syllabus to the course description and to match the actual course content to the syllabus, the instructor violated NCSU's policy on faculty rights and responsibilities:

The title and description of this course do not at all reflect the content. Suicide, capital punishment, war, and environmental concerns were not even on the syllabus. Famine relief was not covered either, except for one philosopher's opinion that starvation could become obsolete if everyone became a vegetarian. Euthanasia was listed on the syllabus, but we did not cover it. This bait and switch course description flies in the face of the University's "Faculty Rights and Responsibilities" policy statement which claims "intellectual honesty in teaching" as a "specific" responsibility of its faculty members. This teacher misused her authority to decide course content/materials such that they didn't even reflect the course description, which is a gross misuse of one of the University's "primary elements of academic freedom" -- the right "to participate in academic program development and determine appropriate curriculum and course content."

The student also questions the moral integrity of a course on moral issues that consistently failed to acknowledge more than one side of the issue as valid:

One month into the course and with the first exam approaching, I became curious as to why we only studied one side of every issue, that being the liberal side of course. How were students to engage in higher education's loftiest goal of critical thinking with only half of the story? So I asked the professor why we were only getting the liberal viewpoint on these issues, and her response was that she was not aware of any relevant material by conservative philosophers. (I didn't realize that the Philosophy Department had such a limited research data bank!) If the topic of the class is moral issues, a dilemma with at least two arguments, I found it hard to believe that there was no philosophical support for another viewpoint. However, the data must not exist if a professional researcher who has based her life's work on these issues is unable to locate it, right? I even mentioned the Opposing Viewpoints series to her; she said that maybe she would look into it.

The student's critique of Philosophy 221 concludes by offering an alternative course description, one that would at least have the virtue of truth in advertising, if not actual intellectual substance:

The course would have been more appropriately entitled "Contemporary Liberal Viewpoints" and the course listing should have read:

A study based largely on modern liberal thought, Utilitarian Theory, the occasional dose of Rights Theory and covering a narrow range of topics including animal rights, factory farming, abortion, and gay rights.

Hopefully, the preceding paragraphs give some indication as to how this class is misrepresented in the course catalogue and how it was used to further the teacher's own interests rather than provide students with quality educational tools for critical thinking.

As a former PhD student in history (I decided to leave the program with my MA), I've encountered this type of "teaching," as well. I'm ashamed to admit that I, too, gave up expressing viewpoints that challenged class reading material, because I got tired of the tension and agitation that ensued. It's so sad and frustrating that our institutions of higher education are such defeating and uninspiring places for thought and intellectual growth.