The administration at NC Wesleyan shrugs and says, “We don’t tell professors what to teach.” That just won’t do. They had to approve of a course devoted solely to rantings about 9/11 and an alleged vast conspiracy to take over the world. They might have and should have said, “No, do that stuff on your own time. We want our academic offerings to entail the teaching of some body of knowledge, not simply yacking away about wacky political notions” Instead, NC Wesleyan gave the green light to the course.
The bigger picture here is that it now seems quite acceptable for colleges and universities to sanction courses where all that goes on is the discussion of various “issues.” Profs and students like free-wheeling courses like that, but they aren’t what higher education should be about. To quote former Duke professor Stanley Fish (with whom I disagree on most things), “Teachers should teach their subjects. They should not teach peace or war or freedom or obedience or diversity or uniformity or nationalism or antinationalism or any other agenda that might properly be taught by a political leader or a talk-show host.”
Sure, there are lots of very important issues in society, but as Fish says, we have talk-show hosts and politicians who can lead discussions of them. And profs can, too. They ought to do it on their own time, though.
Wouldn’t you like to see the final exam for the NC Wesleyan course? Perhaps an essay question like this: Compare and contrast at least three different explanations for the ways the Bush Administration and the International Zionists planned the 9/11 attacks. The only wrong answer would be to scoff at the question.
