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Curricular confusion at UCSD
At the University of California at San Diego, a debate about the curriculum has raised a host of questions. From ACTA's vantage point, the most notable ones revolve around professional standards and the difference between education and indoctrination.
UCSD's Thurgood Marshall College is one of its six undergraduate colleges; each college has a distinct identity and mission, and the mission of this one is to introduce students to issues of diversity and social justice. Toward that end, every student in the College must take a year-long social science course that satisfies the university writing requirement. The Dimensions of Culture sequence consists of three quarter-long courses that together focus on the College's unique theme; that focus in turn forms the backbone for the freshman composition curriculum that anchors and justifies the program. Thurgood Marshall College attracts students who wish to study issues of social justice and diversity; it then requires those students to do so in part by taking a year-long composition course devoted to those themes.
It all sounds great in theory. But in practice, the program has run into snags. In 1999, UCSD's Committee on Educational Policy recommended that the Dimensions of Culture program "add a greater range of viewpoints in course readings." In 2003, as Inside Higher Ed has noted, students complained that the course was ideologically one-sided, that it perpetuated "the ideology that the United States is nothing beyond a despicable and hypocritical country that continues to oppress minorities and the disadvantaged," and that students with dissenting views did not feel comfortable articulating them. These last complaints tally with the findings of a nationwide scientific poll of students that ACTA commissioned in 2004.
Since then, program administrators have tried to diversify the readings by incorporating alternative views. This year, for example, Allan Bloom and Milton Friedman were assigned and read right alongside Audre Lorde and Jonathan Kozol. As a result, the program is now being attacked for promoting an "uncritical patriotic education that fails to interrogate the injustice integral to the founding of the U.S. and the current state of U.S. society." Led by two graduate students who teach in the program, a coalition of graduate and undergraduate students is demanding change. At the same time, the program's administrator is resisting what he sees as an attempt to "turn this into a program of political indoctrination." He decided not to bring the two graduate students back to teach in the program next year, arguing that their campaign has damaged the program.
And now the story is making headlines.
Amid all the uproar, it is worth noting that UCSD has found it challenging, to say the least, to reconcile the program's viewpoint with the prerogatives of responsible teaching. The university is to be commended for trying to address the criticisms leveled at the program by students and administrators, and its director is correct when he distinguishes between educating students about issues and pushing them to take specific actions:
The T.A.s who have been so critical of the program have argued that this should be a program in political indoctrination; that it's supposed to lead our students to political and social action. That's not the purpose and it never was: This is social sciences, humanities, writing, with social justice as the backbone of the readings.
The director is right: the program should present issues in a rounded, scholarly way so that students can learn about them and decide for themselves what they think. Discussion about the future of the program should bear this in mind. The syllabus should be designed with this goal, and all teachers within the program should have a clear understanding of the program's mission as well as of their obligations as teachers to present material fairly, without ideological bias or political agenda.
Posted by acta online at May 8, 2007 02:15 PM
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Comments
English graduate programmes at all but a few doctoral schools in the States are beneath contempt and nearly beyond satire. Merely far-left political and social indoctrination combined with post-human, sway-dough intellectual posturing conveyed de rigueur through a turgid babylonish "critical" jargon. Most "perve-essers" of this meretricious rubbish don't believe in it themselves, but feel obligated to require it from their students as they all sleepwalk together toward the terminal abyss of ignorance.
Posted by: Jacques Albert at May 9, 2007 04:47 AM
The TAs are wrong to want these courses to promote a single idea of what constitutes social justice.
But surely, the administrator is wrong to punish two TAs for their viewpoints.
If these TAs were fired for demanding that the syllabi be more inclusive to a wider variety of viewpoints, we'd all be up in arms. ACTA and FIRE would blow their tops.
But because the TAs are airing a viewpoint with which liberals and conservatives disagree -- that coursework should indoctrinate students -- no one seems to object to their firing. If these TAs were dismissed because they wanted to institute a core curriculum, they'd be heroic martyrs.
It's one thing if they were dismissed *because* they indoctrinated students in their own courses. (Then again, they should first have been warned and given a second chance.) But the administrator makes it clear that they were dismissed precisely because they criticized the program. And that's wrong -- even if I disagree with the TAs themselves. If an academic cannot safely criticize or seek to change his or her program, then we're all doomed.
Posted by: Linval Thompson at May 9, 2007 09:04 AM
If the TAs were indeed working outside program guidelines, they were properly terminated. In terms of intellect and professional experience, grad students are not qualified to run such a program and should not be undermining curricular decisions made by professional educators. They are apprentice teachers, nothing more.
Posted by: Federal Dog at May 9, 2007 04:17 PM