Imagine being confronted, as everyone is from time to time, with someone who makes your blood boil: They believe everything you don't. Their every conviction so conflicts with yours that you either want to argue with them or be in a position where you don't have to listen to them anymore. Now imagine that you have neither of those two options, because the person is your professor, and you have no choice but to listen, take notes and be graded on the beliefs he or she is stuffing down your throat.
Everyone who's ever been in that position knows it's a horrible one to be in. Professors who inappropriately politicize their classrooms and lecture halls are a problem, and forums in which students can air complaints about such professors are a vital way -- really, one of the only ways -- for students to express their frustration and attempt to make professors realize the negative effect their behavior has on students.
Two such forums -- Web sites called NoIndoctrination.org and Campus Watch -- have been coming under fire recently from members of academia, who charge that the sites hamper freedom of expression by having a "chilling effect" on instructors' free speech. The sites are, critics say, "akin to McCarthyism" ("The Great Tattling Scare on Campuses," The Chronicle of Higher Education, Jan. 31).
There are a couple of problems with this claim. First, these forums are just that -- forums. They are not setting up or advocating the establishment of a police state in which proselytizing professors are hauled in for an inquisition. They're simply a place for students to air complaints. According to the founders of NoIndoctrination.org, the site's goal is to give college students a place to "report courses and programs that in their opinion contain severe bias or amount to indoctrination." Campus Watch (www.campus-watch.org) is run by the Middle East Forum. It "monitors and critiques Middle East studies in North America," with an aim to improve them by seeking to address five problems: "analytical failures, the mixing of politics with scholarship, intolerance of alternative views, apologetics, and the abuse of power over students."
If the claims made on the forums were backed by some kind of enforcement mechanism they certainly would have a "chilling" effect on free speech, but they are not. The forums themselves are examples of free speech being exercised. Students' free speech is countering professors' free speech, and the result isn't threatening -- it's just free expression at work, something the forums' critics should applaud rather than censure.
The forums deal with the problem of overly political professors informally, bypassing the legal system. They use the power of speech rather than lawsuits to try to change professors' behavior, which is the appropriate way to handle such situations. There are no "rights" involved in these situations, really. The professors aren't harassing students by infusing politics into their classrooms; they're not violating students' liberties. There are no laws against being a bad teacher or failing to treat people over whom one has power with the respect they should be afforded as adults.
There are limits to what school administrations can do about such professors, particularly when they're tenured and complaints in student evaluations can't do much to affect them. The fact that people have felt the need to create such Web sites -- and that people are using them -- suggests that they are filling a void that formalized administrative procedures cannot. And it's probably not a void formal procedures should fill -- if there were sanctions against professors' expressing any kind of political opinion in class, there would be a "chilling" effect on speech, with instructors living in fear of accidental slip-ups or anything that could be construed as biased. Policies like that would be more burdensome than beneficial.
Web sites like NoIndoctrination.org and Campus Watch are a good alternative to formal sanctions: They have the potential to make professors aware of how students feel about their behavior, and professors are free to address the grievances or ignore them as they choose. The forums are examples of virtually powerless students using the only weapon they have in such situations: appeals to professors' consciences through letting them know their actions have created a negative learning environment for students. If nothing else, the students using these Web sites to complain will feel better from having vented their frustration.
Of course, in an ideal world there would be a tacit understanding through which all professors recognized that they should not inject their personal beliefs into their teaching. It would be nice indeed if every professor knew, as most of them do, that their job is to teach students how to think rather than what to think, and that most college students come to college with opinions and beliefs of their own, some of them deeply felt.
Tacit understandings are great, but when they're too tacit for some professors, students should have recourse against professors who abuse their power by using a classroom for proselytizing to a (literally) captive audience.
Informal forums on the Internet like NoIndoctriation.org and Campus Watch are the best way for students to take action without speech of any kind being effected by the "chilling effect" the forums critics' fear.
(Laura Sahramaa's column appears Tuesdays in The Cavalier Daily. She can be reached at lsahramaa@cavalierdaily.com.)
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