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Volume CXXXIII, Number 13 |
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Not necessarily a non-issue
To the Editors:
I read the faculty responses to the Orient's article on the paucity of Republican professors at Bowdoin with a certain amount of disappointment. I was disappointed because, though I too find the idea of seeking to balance the number of Republican and Democratic professors on campus absurd, I feel that the responses settled too easily for rebutting this silly idea and ignoring the real issue that lurks behind it. The real issue has nothing to do with the political party affiliations of the Bowdoin faculty but with the degree to which political ideology shapes the content of courses and determines what goes on in the classroom; the degree to which education becomes politics by other means.
Henry Laurence is right to reject the assumption that conservatives and liberals can only reflect their political ideologies in the classroom and cannot deal with opposing opinions in a fair and balanced manner. He is on less solid ground, however, when he denies that this ever takes place. My reading of the current situation in higher education is that there is a fair amount of politicization of the curriculum in the humanities and the social sciences. I agree with Professor Laurence that "a good professor should be able to discuss all the controversies within her field and be receptive to the different viewpoints of her students, regardless of what views she holds personally." But I am less optimistic than he that the vast majority of professors in the humanities and social sciences currently fulfill this lofty aspiration.
One of the serious dangers posed by the politicization of higher education is that it gives rise to conservative complaints of the sort expressed in the original Orient article as well as to calls for greater "representation" of Republicans on the faculty. Again, let me reiterate that I disagree with this idea and see it more as a symptom of the current predicament than as a solution to it. Nevertheless, I do think there is something to be done and this is where I find the claims by faculty that political diversity on college campuses is a "non-issue" and "not necessarily a problem" most unhelpful. We must strive to be the "good professors" Professor Laurence speaks of and make our classes more open to the whole spectrum of political ideas and not mere reflections of narrow ideological agendas.
Sincerely,
Paul Franco
Professor of Government
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