Fighting Words in College Classes
Re “Campus Free-Speech Tests,” editorial, April 1: As a graduate-student instructor at UCLA, I feel that doing my job well is not simply a question of balancing “academic freedom” and “academic responsibility,” as your editorial suggests. Rather, it is my academic responsibility to protect academic freedom by bringing information and viewpoints into the classroom that are in short supply in this era of embedded (read in-bed) journalists and corporate-controlled media.
No matter what subject they are teaching, all educators have the right to tell their citizen-students how many people their tax dollars are helping to kill. This obligation is especially urgent when the mainstream media consistently downplay such collateral “details” as civilian deaths in favor of flashy video-game graphics and a presentation of the war that glorifies and obfuscates the violence that it creates.
David Fieni
Los Angeles
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Perhaps The Times’ editors need a refresher course on academic freedom, and another one on logic. [For a college administrator] to warn professors not to discuss the Iraq war betrays an egregious disregard not just for academic freedom but for one of the central aims of higher education: to cultivate thoughtful, critically thinking citizens. Vice President of Instruction Dennis White apparently has no understanding whatsoever of what is appropriate to a college environment.
In hopes of providing desperately needed, reasonable conversations that avoid the jingoism of public debates, decent institutions of higher learning are encouraging professors to open up those very discussions that White would censor.
As to logic, opening up a discussion and guiding an evenhanded conversation is a far cry from “forc[ing one’s] opinions down a captive audience’s throat.” Also, “spouting [one’s] views on the war” and encouraging inquiry into the reasoned arguments on all sides of the subject are entirely different activities. And spouting views or shoving them down someone’s throat is a far cry from offering a well-reasoned argument for one’s own perspective -- something that any college student should be exposed to and trained to do through practice.
Kathie Jenni
Professor of Philosophy, University of Redlands
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Faculty members at Irvine Valley College are certainly justified in getting up in arms over the attempt at censorship. The memo from their administration suggesting that their class discussions stick to the subject they are being paid to teach is clearly a violation of their rights to free speech.
After all, who cares if the students who have paid fees to learn a subject are being shortchanged by having the instructor use up class time with expositions of his or her views on Iraq when it has no relevance to the announced topic?
William Bunyan
Venice
