From CBS4Denver:

Metro State College is investigating a professor who asked students to write an essay critical of Republican vice presidential candidate Gov. Sarah Palin. One student said the instructor singled out Republican students in the class and allowed others to ridicule them.

The adjunct professor, Andrew Hallam, stayed silent Thursday as he took his class on a field trip to an art museum. Hallam said he would issue a statement Thursday, but none came.

The college said Hallam will continue working during the investigation.

"I was shocked, I was holy cow, this is just an open door for him to discuss politics with us," Jana Barber first told CBS4 Wednesday, a student in the class.

Barber shared the class' first assignment with CBS4 Wednesday. Hallam asked students to write an essay to contradict what he called the 'fairy tale image of Palin' presented at the Republican National Convention.

Barber filed an official complaint with the college which triggered the investigation.

"What the faculty's responsibility is to provide opportunity for critical thinking and civic engagement so bringing something of relevancy into the classroom was the faculty's goal," said Cathy Lucas Wednesday, spokeswoman for Metro State. "Should he have broadened it and included all the political figures, yes."

Metro State officials are investigating claims of bias, harassment and bullying.

Barber and another student appeared on KOA's Mike Rosen talk show Thursday to discuss the issue.

"I said something to him like, 'well, there may be five of us, but we're ready to debate this and he cussed us out," student Ben Faurer said Thursday. "He's trying to avoid all this, go along like nothing is happening."

"The F-you should definitely not be said to them," fellow student Alyson Brooks said Thursday.

Brooks said Hallam is a great teacher and the controversy overblown.

"He definitely makes it known he's a Democrat and prefers that and wishes everyone else would, but he knows there's Republicans in class and lets them speak out and have their opinion and doesn't put them down or discriminate against that," she said.

Metro State College Professor Norm Provizer said Thursday the issue has moved well behind whether or not the assignment was appropriate. Provizer calls it a political firestorm now.

"So it isn't just a straight question, well is this a biased assignment?" he said. "It also has all of these political implications and it'll be used for that."

The chair of Metro State's English Department is not taking sides yet. He sat in on Thursday night's class by Hallam to provide students an opportunity to express their opinions.

There is one formal complain about Hallam, who is in his first semester at Metro State.

A former student of Hallam's emailed CBS4 Thursday and said he or she could understand how the professor's style could be misunderstood. Hallam often picked a topic for students and asked them to write a specific viewpoint as an exercise in critical thinking, the student's email said.

Hallam has revised the assignment.

Students may now write about any of the candidates.

Is this the clumsy pedagogy of an inexperienced but well-meaning teacher? Is it a flat-out attempt to use the classroom to impose political opinion? Neither? Both? Does it matter? Could we ever even tell? From the article, it sounds like there is a considerable case to be made for both Hallam not knowing / respecting the boundaries of his job, as well as for students not really grasping the "devil's advocate" position many professors legitimately take with regard to controversial issues.

It's certainly true that the college classroom is a total set-up for bad faith and ignorance on both sides. We are well aware of the confusions that students have about what classrooms are for, about what it means when professors challenge their views or require them to read material that makes them uncomfortable. It's also true, though, that many college teachers are operating from a profoundly uninformed position as well; they may know their subject matter, but they have had minimal, if any, real training in the ways and means of pedagogical practice. Combine that with the ambient expectation that professors ought to be in the business of awakening students to issues of social justice, teaching them to be change agents, and so on, and you have a recipe for very real, if, in many cases, genuinely accidental, malfeasance.

Best case scenario: Hallam thought he was being daring, challenging, and current; he never imagined that his students would see him as an ideological autocrat trying to dictate their point of view. Worst case scenario: Hallam yielded to the high political emotions of the current moment, and succumbed to the pedagogic equivalent of poor impulse control. Either way, as FIRE's Robert Shibley notes, Hallam does have the right not only to assign students to write on controversial topics, but even, for the sake of intellectual exercise, to require them to take certain positions on those topics--just as long as he isn't also using those assignments to require students to publicly lobby for or advocate certain positions. (He also notes that the bit about haranguing Republicans in class is a different issue entirely.)

Whatever happened, I do think the assignment was so narrowly conceived and telegraphic as to be extremely ill-advised, particularly in this political moment. But I note, too, that Hallam is an adjunct--which means he does not have the academic freedom that could see his career through a rough patch. And as any teacher will freely admit--it's the mistakes you make in the classroom that help you learn to be better at a delicate and difficult job. Regardless of his intentions, regardless of his talent, regardless of whether he learns a valuable lesson and becomes a better teacher for it -- he's probably done.