PC composition

Forget Middle Eastern Studies, guess where college students are most likely to run into agitprop--and likely suffer bad grades if they disagree?

The answer is English comp, according to Robert KC Johnson of Cliopatra.

At Brooklyn, we have a two required composition courses, taught mostly by grad students. Because the courses are skills rather than content-oriented, instructors have considerable leeway about what material they bring into the classroom; from the varied reports I receive from students, many instructors simply use the course to assign papers oriented around whatever political crusade has captured their fancy that term. (The worst single example I encountered came after an English 2 adjunct chastised a student, in writing, for quoting from the "Jew York Times.")

Johnson was commenting on this anonymous post on the Writing Program Administration listserv, in which three students complained about a TA to both the program administrator and the university ombudsman.

It seems the teacher had made clear his own point of view and
engaged in arguments with members of the class who publicly disagreed with him. His assignments, despite the curriculum focused on textual analysis and critical argument, were all "take an opinion about x" or "agree or disagree with x" and he had told students that he couldn't help but read those essays that took a position counter to his own more critically because he "knew the facts" and had thought through the arguments. These students felt they were in a hostile, racially and politically charged atmosphere, and had already gone to the university ombudsman to complain. The instructor had spent considerable class time (the students claim as much as three weeks, the syllabus showed about a week's worth, the instructor eventually admitted to more than what was in the syllabus but denied three weeks) showing films about government conspiracies to keep inner city blacks addicted to drugs and about police brutality against blacks (none of these were named in the
syllabus). The students had put up with it all until the term was over because they didn't think they had any power to make anything different happen, but when the teacher said to them on the last day of the class, "you should all just suck it up and take whatever grade I give you without whining about it because I'm the teacher," they had finally had enough.

The program administrator brought the matter up with his department chair, who questioned the motivation of the students and subsequently called the administrator a racist behind his back.

Now, why tell this story and why tell it anonymously? Some of the recent conversation about racism in the classroom has suggested to me that we believe that only students can be racists or have ill-founded positions. I'm not saying that anyone has said that, and I don't mean to be accusing anyone here. I think accusations of racism are serious matters and shouldn't be thrown around lightly, and I think sometimes accusations of racism are used as another way of gaining power, especially when the usual balances of power have been upset (as they are when women serve as WPAs). And, I think that these issues are so difficult, so charged, that it's very difficult to tell the counter story - the ones where it is the teacher who is behaving inappropriately. Personally, I'm ashamed of my institution, especially my colleagues for the way they've handled this situation. But I'm also embarrassed to have been accused of being a racist, even indirectly.

Read Erin O'Connor, and the comments to her post, too.