Dangerous Learning

"Our instructional mission includes undergraduate, graduate, and continuing and distance education informed by scholarship and research. Our research, scholarship, and creative activities promote human and economic development through the expansion of knowledge and its applications in the natural and applied sciences, social sciences, arts, humanities, and the professions."

The above is taken from Penn State's mission statement. What's not spelled out, however, is the question of how that mission is carried out. In certain disciplines, such as mathematics, empirical facts exist and generally are not challenged. But in many other disciplines, particularly in the liberal arts, issues have multiple perspectives and are open to a certain amount of subjective interpretation. David Horowitz, a nationally known writer and activist, says that this interpretation is colored by liberal political agenda on the vast majority of college campuses, and that this agenda undermines academic free speech. In his book, The Professors, a compilation of the most "dangerous"—i.e., most liberal—professors in America, Horowitz cites two members of the Penn State faculty, Michael Bérubé and Sam Richards, both in the College of the Liberal Arts.

Michael Bérubé Paterno Family Professor in Literature

Horowitz visited Penn State in April and spoke in front of an audience of over 300 people.

"It's the professor's responsibility to provide his or her students with all sides of an issue in order to challenge them," he said. "I believe many of you are getting indoctrinated at this university.Your professors are teaching you what to think, not how to think."

Horowitz openly accused Richards, a lecturer in the Department of Sociology, of bringing his ideology into the classroom. For his part, Richards agrees and says he is very open about bringing his ideology into his classrooms.

"Being completely free of ideology is impossible in any classroom—or really in any situation," he explains. "The films we select to show students, choosing what to wear, what to read—all those things define our individual ideology. It's each person's belief in how the world is or should be organized. And that's exactly what I tell my students at the beginning of each semester, although I do my best to present multiple sides of issues."

Sam Richards senior lecturer in sociology

Richards, who has been teaching Sociology 119 on race relations for fifteen years, first encountered Horowitz two years ago, when Horowitz was a guest on " Radio Free Penn State, the student-run radio station on WKPS." After hearing Horowitz assert that Cuba was the second most developed country in the Western Hemisphere before Castro took over in 1959, Richards, whose background is in political sociology with an emphasis on Latin America, disputed this claim.

"That is patently wrong," recalls Richards. "When I asked him where he found that information, he couldn't tell me."

That incident, speculates Richards, probably put him on Horowitz's list.

Michael Bérubé, the Paterno Family Professor in Literature, who was also listed in Horowitz's book, has a different take on Horowitz's charge.

"He has deliberately confused the issue by misconstruing academic freedom as freedom from liberal professors," says Bérubé. "Part of your job as a professor is to have and explain your convictions. The only real question is: are you closed off to other opinions and biases?"

As a teacher of literature, Bérubé says politically controversial issues such as abortion or war in Iraq virtually never come up. Cultural issues, however, are always present.

"We were discussing My Antonia, by Willa Cather," he recalls. "A student who hadn't said a word in class all semester pipes up and asks if Cather is trying to 'queer' the prairie. I said I first wanted to explain to the class why you use 'queer' as a verb and then we would go back through the novel and have a discussion."

Bérubé says the fact that he took the question seriously signaled to the students that his was a gay-friendly classroom.

"The best statement I've heard on this subject of liberal bias in the classroom, came from an e-mail correspondent," said Bérubé. "He said that although he never experienced outright persecution, it was understood that there is a moral mist in which certain positions are better than others—and that to make the other positions you had to argue twice. One, to make the point; and two, to make the point that the point is worth making."

Bérubé does say that on most campuses there's no question that liberals outnumber conservatives, but that people like Horowitz exaggerate the numbers.

"Besides," he argues, "Conservatives complain about bias in the faculty ranks, but it's not as if they're flooding graduate schools with applications for academic positions."

Another question he has is whether liberal professors really "brainwash" their students, as Horowitz and others have claimed.

"I've asked conservatives about this: show me some students who, confronted with the liberal professors, suddenly slap their foreheads and say, 'You're right—suddenly, I see that I've been wrong my entire life'."

Christopher Clausen, another professor of English whose most recent book is a critique of modern culture, has a different perspective. He says that, in fact, the more politically slanted a course becomes, the more it turns off students, a fact he learned during the 1960s.

"I did my share of ranting about the Vietnam war in my classes," he recalls. "It was completely ineffective and alienating to students."

The purpose of a university, Clausen says, is to convey knowledge of a subject. Realistically, there are always certain areas within topics, especially in the liberal arts, that can be open to interpretation. However, the focus should be on evidence-based information, which does exist, even in disciplines such as 19th-century literature.

Clausen cites the writing of Jane Austen, as an example. Austen wrote about relationships between men and women of her age. Based on the relationships between the main characters in such books as Sense and Sensiblity and Pride and Prejudice, it is obvious that Austen felt the sexes should be equal. Her letters from that time reaffirm her belief. Clausen says that this is one useful kind of evidence.

"We professors should teach a respect for evidence," he says. "Any opinion or ideology unfettered from evidence really doesn't belong in a classroom."

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