[lit-ideas] Re: What's wrong with Campus Watch for all?
- From: Scribe1865@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 21 Mar 2004 14:06:00 EST
In a message dated 3/21/2004 4:30:36 AM Eastern Standard Time,
Robert.Paul@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx writes:
Eric is apparently comfortable using such language as ''inflexible and
blind,' to characterize 'academics,' and to talk of 'unopposed demagogues,' who
force 'biased nonsense. on impressionable students' who are 'easily cowed by
professors into parroting radical or marginal views,' yet is disappointed to
find my response 'edgy'--?.
Yes, because I was characterizing some academics, some students, and some
professors, not engaging in wholesale denunciation. How to characterize the
negative?
Regarding the inflexibility of some academics, I was thinking of the
well-known issue of learning styles and their accompanying deficits. Those
whose
response to the world is primarily intellectual tend to possess (in general)
the
deficit of inflexibility--the world is often forced to fit their ideas, thus
validating those ideas. No big deal. I'm sure everyone is familiar with
learning
styles theories--not that we should inflexibly parrot learning styles theories
either.
What does not seem fair here is that in presenting an issue (albeit in a
hasty draft) I am being tagged as siding with one side of the issue. Not so. I
can
see justice in academic freedom and in professors being held accountable for
course content and presentation. How one navigates past the Scylla and
Charibdis is my question.
Let me pick a nonpartisan example. I took an introductory art survey course
as an undergraduate, and the professor's main hobbyhorses -- the Greek Kore and
Marcel Duchamp's "Nude Descending a Staircase" -- were the fixed poles
between which all course content was nailed. Everyone knew -- it was a laughing
point among some students -- that referencing either of these in a paper on
Vermeer or Rodin or whatever, assured higher marks than presenting the topic in
context. The instructor was not only tenured but a well-known artist, someone
not
about to be canned for incompetence. To more advanced students, this trait was
laughable and a guide to composing papers. Less advanced, more impressionable
students left the class thinking Western art consisted of pre-Golden Age
Kores and Marcel Duchamp, with minor figures like Giotto and Vermeer and
Michelangelo standing on the sidelines, remembered for their relation to Kore
statues
or to Duchamp readymades.
What can be done in a case like that? Certainly the instructor had a right to
his freedom, but shouldn't he also have been accountable for leaving his
extremely eccentric footprint in the art memories of undergrads?
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