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Letterbox
Another letter ACTA received from a reader of How Many Ward Churchills?:
Sent: Sunday, May 28, 2006 11:40 AM
To: info@goacta.org
Subject: are you all CRAZY?!?most of the classes you attack in your little witch hunt manifesto look fascinating and awesome!!! i wish we had more classes like that back when i attended stanford in '89-93 and that i had had the slack to take them! i am appalled by your report. what next, are you going to take to evaluating websites for their "correctness"? i took years of social studies in public schools and i never saw nor heard of Columbus' dark side, nor did I hear about the millions of native americans the whites killed in their conquest of this continent, nor about the systematic oppression of minorities that has passed for government and economic development in this country. that is a shame - and it is only fitting that academics do their part to involve students in the shady truths behind the current social structure. i spit on your report. i am a graduate student right now, and i will do everything in my considerable power to ridicule your report and your organization until you provide me more information; maybe i am reading this wrong, but i am stoked that these classes exist (although admittedly "joining an activist theater group" as a course requirement is a bit much...)
in general, history and literature as it is currently taught is pathetically undiverse and deceptive and classes like this give me hope that there exist academics who are willing to buck the trend of homogenization of our common academic base. these people are INNOVATORS; furthermore, none of them is precluding any of you from teaching whatever twisted courses you want to teach! is there anything i could possibly say to reconfigure your puny minds? or do you still believe that Columbus was a good person and deny the American Holocaust of Native Americans? what greatness this country has achieved has nothing to do with oppressing minorities - it is ABSOLUTELY GREAT that universities continue to promote professors willing to speak of these matters!!!
What's most remarkable about this missive is not its tone (that, unfortunately, is all too typical of debates about higher education) but that its writer clearly agrees with ACTA that undergraduate education is not only deeply politicized, but that it is intentionally so.
What angers this writer is not a conviction that ACTA's report is wrong about particular courses, or that it misrepresents the academy, as others have argued. What angers this writer is that ACTA sees the academy for what it is and dares to criticize what it sees. Beyond the belligerent tone of this email lies a profound confession, one that other, cagier respondents to ACTA's report have been careful to avoid: that activist pedagogy has strong roots in the academy, and that this pegagogy wilfully seeks, in its most ideologically corrupt forms, to use the classroom to proselytize rather than to teach.
It's worth noting that the correspondent is a graduate student. One wonders whether this individual simply has not received pedagogical training (many graduate students don't), or whether s/he is being trained to approach teaching as a form of activism.
Posted by acta online at June 14, 2006 08:18 AM
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Comments
How about a reply to Michael Berube's interesting post today over at his blog?
Posted by: Karen Elliot at June 14, 2006 02:40 PM
Clearly this reader's letter is a parody.
Posted by: Doug Leins at June 14, 2006 04:25 PM
"How about a reply to Michael Berube's interesting post today over at his blog?"
Yet another 5,000-word diatribe about why taxpayers should pay for his kind's unproductive lifestyle? I could write 5,000 words as a rejoiner, but I work for a living, so let me cut to the chase.
Charter higher education. Let Mr. Berube, Ward-o, Grover Furr, Timothy Shortell, Elyse Chrystall, et al., take on the burden of providing education to their minions, not taxpayers. Let them show their courage, if they really have any.
I seriously doubt Mr. Berube, et al., could run a lemonade stand. But they want freedom -- let them have all the freedom they want. Including the freedom to fail and plead for salvation from starvation. The taxpayers are tired of their unproductive prattle.
Posted by: Bart J. at June 14, 2006 07:29 PM
The student's letter is proof again that the most powerful way to fight corruption is to simply observe the corruption itself: observation alone will draw the sicknes out.
The letter also disproves another point of the critics of the report. They said that mere descriptions don't mean anything, but clearly they mean great deal: for this student, the descriptions alone tell him that he is welcome in a certain classroom, that certain ideologies will be raised up above others, and that he will not have to suffer ideas that might dirty the purity of his thought.
Posted by: McKreck at June 15, 2006 12:11 PM
" .. the descriptions alone tell him that he is welcome in a certain classroom, that certain ideologies will be raised up above others .. "
If only all course descriptions were so clear ..
In my 20 years in higher ed, I have seen so much bull, deception, and outright bias against the average working-class American, I tell my students that on Class Day 1, if the instructor is NOT 100% clear, pleasant, and engaged -- drop the course, immediately, and get a better instructor.
Forget the phony "nice" instructor stuff -- look for competence. Anything else is just B.S.
Posted by: Bart J. at June 20, 2006 07:13 AM