- Joined
- Mar 30, 2021
- Messages
- 28,605
- Reaction score
- 44,758
- Location
- Hiding from ICE
- Gender
- Male
- Political Leaning
- Liberal
I found this story in The Atlantic but it's paywalled. You can read it free here:
Conservative state legislatures and ideologically-driven boards want to dramatically change America’s colleges.
Several studies have shown that, across disciplines, college faculties do tend to lean left, but as Samuel J. Abrams, a nonresident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and Amna Khalid, an associate history professor at Carleton College, wrote in 2020, “we should be careful not to assume that the mere disparities in the political composition of campus communities are responsible for shaping campus climate.” Still, the fact that so many professors lean liberal leads many Republicans to say, per a 2021 Pew Research Center study, that colleges have a “negative effect on the way things are going in the country” (nearly two-thirds of Republicans surveyed in the study agreed with this assertion). “In my view, as a legislator looking out for higher education—and we provide a heck of a lot of funding for higher education—I don’t believe it’s our role in the legislature to just write checks,” Cirino told me. “We should also have a little bit of say, so we can have a seat at the table in terms of what kind of job they are doing.”
“What we’re saying simply is that different sides of issues, like the Holocaust-denier thing that I mentioned earlier, should be given open discussion,” he told me in July. He was referring to a question that he’s gotten several times since his bill first came out: What should professors do if a student continues to present dissenting views about the Holocaust? Earlier this year, Cirino was admonished by a colleague, State Representative Casey Weinstein, after he refused to unequivocally say that Holocaust denialism is outside the realm of legitimate classroom debate.
“There’s no question that it happened, but if I were teaching a class, and somebody came up and said they doubted whether it really happened the way everybody had reported it, the choice for the professor is that you can throw that student out of class, you can fail them, you can tell the other students to harass them, or you can persuade the student with the preponderance of evidence that the Holocaust happened,” he told me. “You may or may not convince the student, but that’s the kind of dialogue that should be happening.”
Of course, there are other options: The professor could have the student come and speak with them during office hours; a conversation intended to persuade a single student about the reality of a human atrocity does not need to occur during class, and certainly not if it risks legitimating Holocaust denial. But in Cirino’s formulation, even if a conversation verges on devolving the classroom into a glorified debate forum where one side is arguing with facts and the other with one of history’s most harmful conspiracy theories, as long as the argument remains respectful in tone if not in content, it should be had.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Welcome to The Fascist Playbook: Chapter 1.
Conservative state legislatures and ideologically-driven boards want to dramatically change America’s colleges.
Several studies have shown that, across disciplines, college faculties do tend to lean left, but as Samuel J. Abrams, a nonresident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and Amna Khalid, an associate history professor at Carleton College, wrote in 2020, “we should be careful not to assume that the mere disparities in the political composition of campus communities are responsible for shaping campus climate.” Still, the fact that so many professors lean liberal leads many Republicans to say, per a 2021 Pew Research Center study, that colleges have a “negative effect on the way things are going in the country” (nearly two-thirds of Republicans surveyed in the study agreed with this assertion). “In my view, as a legislator looking out for higher education—and we provide a heck of a lot of funding for higher education—I don’t believe it’s our role in the legislature to just write checks,” Cirino told me. “We should also have a little bit of say, so we can have a seat at the table in terms of what kind of job they are doing.”
“What we’re saying simply is that different sides of issues, like the Holocaust-denier thing that I mentioned earlier, should be given open discussion,” he told me in July. He was referring to a question that he’s gotten several times since his bill first came out: What should professors do if a student continues to present dissenting views about the Holocaust? Earlier this year, Cirino was admonished by a colleague, State Representative Casey Weinstein, after he refused to unequivocally say that Holocaust denialism is outside the realm of legitimate classroom debate.
“There’s no question that it happened, but if I were teaching a class, and somebody came up and said they doubted whether it really happened the way everybody had reported it, the choice for the professor is that you can throw that student out of class, you can fail them, you can tell the other students to harass them, or you can persuade the student with the preponderance of evidence that the Holocaust happened,” he told me. “You may or may not convince the student, but that’s the kind of dialogue that should be happening.”
Of course, there are other options: The professor could have the student come and speak with them during office hours; a conversation intended to persuade a single student about the reality of a human atrocity does not need to occur during class, and certainly not if it risks legitimating Holocaust denial. But in Cirino’s formulation, even if a conversation verges on devolving the classroom into a glorified debate forum where one side is arguing with facts and the other with one of history’s most harmful conspiracy theories, as long as the argument remains respectful in tone if not in content, it should be had.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Welcome to The Fascist Playbook: Chapter 1.