The price of dissent
Most of the time, when students disagree with their professors, healthy debate ensues. Generally instructors consider that a success, for even if the majority don’t come around to her point of view, minds have been stretched and all have been exposed to new ideas.
However, in Priya Venkatesan’s English class at Dartmouth, she considered it “subversiveness” when some students in her class expressed skepticism of her literary theory. She claimed that such disbelief was “intolerant of ideas” and it “questioned her knowledge in very inappropriate ways.”
So she sued her class for creating a hostile work environment.
I know we’ve got several academic folks here — how do you handle disagreement in the classroom? Where do you draw the line and table a discussion? What follow-up do you do? Are limits different in English than history? Is history different than science?
Have you ever felt your classroom was a hostile space?
May 7th, 2008 at 12:51 pm
Ms. Venkatesan’s scholarly specialty is “science studies,” which, as she wrote in a journal article last year, “teaches that scientific knowledge has suspect access to truth.” She continues: “Scientific facts do not correspond to a natural reality but conform to a social construct.”
The agenda of Ms. Venkatesan’s seminar, then, was to “problematize” technology and the life sciences.
What does this mean?
May 7th, 2008 at 3:06 pm
This is one of the goofiest, most disturbing stories to hit academia in a while, frankly and it exposes all kinds of nasty fault lines: demographic, political, intellectual, institutional. There’s been a lot of discussion of it, here and here
I’ll come back later when I have more time and actually try to answer some of the questions….
May 8th, 2008 at 8:28 am
Thanks for the links - this situation is even more bizarre than it appears on the surface.
My thought on history is that not all opinions are equally valid. At the far end of that spectrum would be holocaust denial, which I don’t believe should go unchallenged, or be accepted as just another viewpoint. Most things, though, do exist on that level.
Thoughts?
May 8th, 2008 at 12:24 pm
As one graduate school friend put it: In history there are no right answers, but there are wrong ones. The trouble with history is that the sources are always incomplete, flawed, particularly with regard to issues of causation, which is what’s actually interesting about history most of the time. So there is a lot of wiggle room for personal judgement about big questions (whose policies won the cold war; was McCarthy really nuts; did the Confederacy have a good case for states rights; was US intervention in WWI a good idea, etc.) most of which are actually moral questions rather than simple histories.
That said, there is, as you note, argumentation in bad faith, and postmodernists like Venkatesan take the position that there is no such thing as “fact” and that established interpretations always represent the power systems in which they are created rather than attempts to develop something like “truth.”
Venkatesan’s attacks on science are the cutting edge of postmodernist pseudo-skepticism (e.g.) and the net effect of these theories is to privilege really dumb moves like the hyper-politicization of science and history.
May 9th, 2008 at 12:12 pm
Getting back to your earlier question, I do think that the limits are different in different classes. It’s not just a disciplinary difference: the range of discussion in a composition class like Venkatesan’s is going to be wider than the range in a Shakespeare class or other topical focus; similarly, my World History discussions range more broadly than my Asian history ones (though I also like to connect Asian history to world history as explicitly and clearly as I can, so the discussion sometimes becomes comparative and can actually wander quite a bit).
I haven’t had a lot of trouble with discussions getting out of hand in terms of tone or denialism, but that has a lot to do with the kinds of questions I ask and the way I focus discussions. First of all, unlike in English, in History there is actually a body of knowledge which my students just don’t have, most of the time, so they’re somewhat less likely to challenge my authority (it helps, in this regard, that I teach World and Asia, instead of US). Second, being more of a pragmatist than a theorist, I’m more likely than Venkatesan to admit that there are multiple ways of reading evidence and arguments which are ultimately indeterminate, which blunts the effect of some of these issues; I’m also more likely to present both (or more) sides of an argument and be vague about where I come down, or admit that I’m not entirely convinced by one side or another. Third, I prefer to focus on issues which are historically interesting, instead of just controversial, building the skills necessary to deal with the difficult questions without getting distracted by the passions of argument. I also spend time, often, talking about how different people view historical events differently, and how nationalism, in particular, is usually based on a false history, so I lay a foundation in which openly discussing the political biases in an historical position is possible, but without arguing that all historical positions are necessarily political.
I have had a few interesting discussions over the years, though, like the student who believed that the 9/11 attacks were faked (and so were the moon landings!).
May 10th, 2008 at 12:00 pm
Wow. Wish you were teaching at my school. I think you’ve got a great point that acknowledging multiple interpretations does a lot to defuse violent disagreement as well as facilitate learning. That’s why I was so puzzled over Venkatesan’s situation - it sounds to me as if it could have been a great opportunity, particularly in a writing class. But it sounds like she’s got too much of her self-concept wrapped up in her theory. She should be invested in it some, yes, but to the point where disagreement is a personal attack?
That’s one thing that’s changed since I was in school 30 years ago. Then, freshman writing was basic rhetoric with no frills. But now, my writing class this winter is framed with Racism and Sexism. That would be fascinating in the classroom, but I’m not sure how it will work in an online format. I’m sure there will be discussion on the bulletin boards, but that tends to be more static than dynamic. And I have no idea how the instructor will approach it. I hope s/he is a little more involved than my stats prof.
May 10th, 2008 at 1:13 pm
This is the thing in rhetoric/writing these days. Not sure when the change took place (I never actually took writing in college, though my intro English classes were certainly rigorous exercises) but most classes take some focus about which students are supposed to be passionate and engaged — on the perfectly reasonable theory that people do better when they care about their topic — and then dive into all kinds of controversial issues in which the instructors have little or no training outside of “how to teach with race” and reading a bunch of “rhetoric of race and gender” articles.
To be completely frank, this is one of the issues that conservatives love to use when they attack “liberal professors who impose their views on students” because some of these rhetoriticians take their social change missions very, very seriously. Postmodernists are another breed entirely, just as attached to their theories as fundamentalist Christians are to their highly selective literal approach.