This thread made me wonder just how timorous college students these days really are when getting a political or opinion based rhetorical beat-down.
Are you guys (male and female) really such a bunch bunch of sniveling pussies? Do you dare to go toe to toe with your professors? Is it the fear of academic reprisals down the line which keeps you quivering and unable to respond? Do you fear you don’t have enough rhetorical horsepower or information and you’ll make a fool of yourself? What? Speak up!
I always give a short, controversial news article to the students so they can write about it during exams; and I encourage them to explore controversial issues when writing essays, especially the research paper. All I ask is that they provide empirical evidence to back up their assertions and not to rant and rave uncontrollably.
However, I tend not to spew my views all over the students for several reasons:
some may think that they have to agree with me (which they certainly don’t);
some may think I’m trying to indoctrinate them (which I have no intention of doing); and
although I would never behave like the maniac in the Pit thread OP, I wouldn’t even want to get close to doing it.
For one thing, profs have a gradebook, and there’s always the fear that speaking up will affect their grade. This has not been true for me, and I’m the one who’s most likely to speak up in the classroom.
For another, there’s a politically-charged atmosphere as it is, and profs are sensitive to charges of indoctrination.
That said, however, my profs have actually been receptive to debate in the classroom.
I have not had a negative experience with a professor doing this, but I have had friends who have. One of my friends in HS and college had a bad experience with this. He was a fairly smart kid, 1470 on SAT, generally got A’s, did well in English, etc, but one of his problems with speaking out a bit much. One semester he had a raving feminist English professor (I feel like I’m promoting stereotypes), and he presented his contrasting opinion a bit often. In the end, he got a C, something he had never had to deal with before.
OTOH, I’ve had experiences that are fairly opposite. Even subtle flattery such as voluntarily taking a professor twice has in my opinion helped my grade.
Check. English class, freshman year of college. Quickly decided that if I wasn’t going to be graded fairly, I shouldn’t have to write fairly, and abandoned all standards of literary integrity and wrote drek that agreed with the teacher. Got an A on a paper to which I would not have given a C.
Conversely, in my philosophy classes, I argued with my professors a lot. It does depend on whether or not you expect the professor to downgrade you if you speak up, because for most people, being right is less important than not being academically smacked around.
There are some professors who are capable of grading based on the quality (and not the point of view) of the argument. There are many, many, many more who are not and simply want to be agreed with and have their egos stroked.
If you care about your grade, but don’t know which kind of professor you’ve got, it’s better to err on the side of caution and get the good grade.
Any professor who pays the slightest attention to students’ opinion for grading purposes needs to find another line of work.
Sometimes I assign topics on which I hold strong opinons, and it’s so obvious to me that I must guard carefully against downgrading some poor slob who holds contrary views that my biggest problem in assigning grades is to make sure that I haven’t over-corrected for this issue, i.e., that I haven’t given someone a much better grade than his writing deserves because he expressed opinions with which I disagree.
Unless he feels that his own views are somehow ordained to be the correct ones, I don’t see how a professor could possibly adopt a different policy and still look at himself in the mirror.
“What do you do for a living?”
“I punish people for disagreeing with my opinions.”
Nah. My professors have tended to take it all in good spirit, so I’m not afraid. It’s not like they’re going to call down the wrath of God on m… hey, is that a tornado outsi–
I’m not denying that there are egomaniacal college teachers out there who want their students to agree with everything they say. But i think that the extent of this problem is far smaller than some paranoiacs would like to believe.
I’ve said this before on this board, and i’ll repeat it now: You know what the biggest problem for most college professors is? Apathy. Students who won’t do the reading, or won’t participate in class, or just want to do the absolute minimum necessary to get by.
I know it feeds some people’s insecurities to believe that college teachers are all left wing nutjobs who expect every student to mimic their politics, but it’s just not true. Anyone who’s spent any time arguing with me on this board will know that i am, in fact, a man of the left. But, if given a choice between a student who’s an apathetic leftist, and one who is a committed and engaged conservative, i’ll take the latter every time, because it makes class more initeresting and shows that the student is doing the work.
Also, while i like to challenge the preconceptions of my conservative students, i like to do exactly the same thing with my liberal and leftist students. And i do this because i find that it makes class more interesting and more useful for me and for them. I do my absolute best not to take sides, and to makes clear that students do not have to agree with my position. And, whether they agree with me or not, they are going to be asked to justify their positions.
I’m wondering if anyone else out there has ever experienced the problem coming from the students against the professor, instead of the other way around.
It hasn’t happened to me, but I’ve known a few people whose students reacted with anger towards the profs because they were given articles to read that didn’t sit well with them. Some simply find it impossible to differentiate between the author of an article and the person who made copies of said article and handed it out. I suspect that the reading material took them out of their comfort zone or preconceived notions, and they didn’t like it. I don’t know that this happens frequently, but it does occur.
Well, it’s been awhile now, but when I was in college and I didn’t argue with my professors it was usually because I knew what my opinion was or I knew that I disagreed with something that the professor or another student had said, but I hadn’t thought carefully enough about the topic to be able to back it up.
I knew if I couldn’t justify an opinion the professor or another student would quickly expose that.
Actually this was the most valuable part of college for me. Wanting to speak up in class forced me to think through things, research things, carry assumptions to logical conclusions, etc. All valuable skills for life and hanging out at the SDMB.
About 8 years ago I wrote a letter to one of my professors about how learning to think this clearly in his class made my life better (specifically in a realm which was part of his current research) and made me a better person.
Just a few weeks ago he called me out of the blue. He’d recently retired and had been going through his papers and came across my letter (which he’d answered at the time) and wanted me to know it was one of the most important letters he’d ever gotten in his life.
I loved classes where we’d get into a debate with the professor. Most of my professors loved it when you’d show interest in a subject, and they’d help you learn to develop good cases supporting your argument. But there was this one…
This was a professor who believed there was no way you could come to any conclusion other than hers. You could build a strong case, support it, and argue it well, only to hear her say that no sane person could support that point of view. I have no idea whether she marked you down for having opinions that differed from hers. I dropped her class before the first exam. The sad thing is she used all the bad debate tactics (ad hominem attacks were her specialty) that get people slaughtered in GD.
There is one reason I will not argue with a professor:
If I have not thought about the issue enough to have a reasonably well supported opinion.
As for grades? I really couldn’t care less. If I have a major issue with a grade I was given, then I would take it up with them or their immediate supervisor, provided I felt the work I did was was better than they gave me credit for. (or if they did not give a reason for giving a grade below a 100/A)
Bias is more insidious than simply saying, “I’ll flunk anyone who disagrees with me.”
Even if a professor is completely open-minded and willing to entertain all viewpoints, the fact is, if he already has an opinion on an issue, he’s going to think that arguments that take the same opinion are more valid. In other words, if you take the default position, the burden of proof is generally lighter than if you take a position that the professor initially believes is wrong.
You can see that effect in Great Debates, where a quote from a left-wing hack like Eric Alterman is accepted as a valid cite by many on the left, whereas if you quote from anyone on the right you’re automatically guilty of shoddy research and/or presenting biased opinion as fact.
I have right-wing beliefs, and it doesn’t strain my imagination to believe that if a student wrote a paper essentially agreeing with what I believe, and citing it with quality right-wing thinkers like Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, or Ludwig Von Mises, I’m likely to read the paper in a more favorable light than a paper which disagrees with what I believe to be true and backs it up with a cite from Paul Krugman. Even if I’m doing my best to be fair. This is just human nature. It’s why scientists do experiments double-blind. Bias is a difficult thing to control, so many students find it easier to simply go with the flow and let the bias work for them rather than against them.
I can provide three personal anecdotes:
When I was in high school, a social studies teacher went on a long rant about how evil the U.S. is (I live in Canada), and she made the claim that the U.S. is the only country to have used a nuclear bomb against ‘totally innocent people’. I pointed out that the Japanese were hardly innocent, given that there was a war and all, and she said, “The U.S. was at war with Germany, not Japan!”. I corrected her again, at which point she backpedaled and said, “Well yes, technically there may have been a ‘war’ between them, but it was trivial compared to the war in Europe, and there was no need to drop a bomb”. I had to correct her again, rattling off numerous statistics from memory. The result: I was thrown out of the class and got a terrible mark.
In college I had a feminist professor of English. For our final exam, we had to write an essay on one of six books we had to read that semester. I only had time to read four of them, so I took a chance that I’d hit one that I’d read. No luck. I was given ‘Pride and Prejudice’, a book of which I had only read the liner notes and had only the vaguest of notions of what it was about. So I wrote an essay on the plight of women from that era, and how their relationships with men had to be seen from the perspective of the woman’s inability to better herself other than through marriage due to the patriarchal culture of the times. I got an “A” on the essay and in the course.
I had a professor of philosophy who had written one of the books we were to use in his course. I aced the course simply by writing papers that agreed with the premises in his book. Piece of cake.
You are confusing the aims of debate like that which occurs on the SDMB with the sort of things that teachers are looking for in student papers. I can remain unconvinced by a student’s overall position and still give him or her an “A” if the student’s position is based on a good reading of the sources and a logical and coherent explanation of his or her position. If the paper is well-written, all the better.
The first course i TAed here in the US, i gave one of the few A’s in the class to a student whose politics i strongly disagreed with, and who wsent on to intern in the Bush White House.
No-one’s saying that people like this don’t exist. She’s a bad teacher.
These anecdotes prove exactly nothing.
To make any claim about biases and how they might have affected those professors’ teaching, you would have to demonstrate that you would have received a worse grade if you had disagreed with the teachers, or that other students who wrote good papers that disagreed with the teachers’ point of view got worse grades.
I don’t argue with my professors because I don’t want a bad grade in the class. I don’t argue anyway, but if I did I would still keep my mouth shut and agree with everything they said. If they wrote a book I would agree with everything they said just so I don’t have to repeat a class again. I don’t have time or money to take the same class twice.
I get this all the time in my myth class. Well, every time I say “In Christian mythology…” that is. Inevitably someone will become irate, insisting that the stories in the Judeo-Christian tradition have nothing in common with those of classical mythology, because, you know, “People still believe this stuff! No one believes in Zeus any more!”
And no one’s saying that good teachers like you don’t exist. They do. But there are plenty of pig-headed, arrogant professors on campus who just love to give suck-up marks to students who blow sunshine up their ass. And then there’s the rest of the faculty, who try to be unbiased but can’t help it when their subconcious bias swews their interpretation of what is and isn’t sound thinking, just like a scientist can’t help letting experimental bias creep in to an experiment unless it is done blind.
Then there’s another kind of bias - indoctrination. The student may truly decide to write a paper on liberal themes because the student has been convinced that liberal ideas are the correct one by the professor who lectures from that viewpoint. Again, not all of them do this, but plenty do.
Imagine if you studied at the conservative Chicago school of economics. If you turned in a paper glorifying John Kenneth Galbraith to a right-wing professor, would you expect him to be more demanding of your proofs and logic than he would be if you wrote a paper glorifying Milton Friedman? Probably.
Sadly, I’ve encountered this among a handful of my classmates, particularly in some of the social science classes I’ve taken with them. They’re not interested in anything that challenges their worldview; they want their grade and their credit and their degree so they can get the job.
For example, I had a guy in my intro to political science course a few semesters ago who felt that the prof’s liberal bias was inappropriate in the classroom. Now, this was a political science course during an election year. We had the opportunity to earn extra credit by attending various political events. This gentleman attended the annual College Democrats political extravaganza, then had the nerve to claim that it should’ve been more “balanced”. The prof pointed out that the College Republicans were also having an event, and if the student so chose, could attend that for extra credit. This guy genuinely believed that anything that challenged his conservatism was a threat to him.
I’ve since met others like him, both liberal and conservative, who feel that anything that challenges their views is somehow invalidating them as people. That’s not the case; most professors will throw out a provocative statement in the hope that it will spark some debate. I’ve had profs who will argue something against their own beliefs just to get some discussion going. Hell, I’ve had LOTS of profs who didn’t advertise their political and social leanings at all.
(Strangely, during all my years as a prof I never had “me” as a student.)
E.g., for a Western Civ course, the prof was the most notorious lefty on campus. He was going thru a tenure battle because he was even too far left for even a notoriously open minded college.
When it came term paper time, I wrote one that had the exact opposite theme he had been promoting and got an A, no problem. There’s something liberating about writing a term paper that is completely different from one’s own view.
I say “grow a pair.” Don’t worry about it. Most profs like well-reasoned arguments. Just avoid the “well, that’s not the way I was raised” attitude. Thinking is good.
