Rethinking progressive pedagogy.

To what extent do right-wing attacks on the academic left have some legitimacy, or at least some rhetorical unavoidability, and how can we respond to their arguments forthrightly, with political and pedagogical effectiveness? It's a mistake to act as though criticism of us is reducible to just another campaign by the Republican attack machine (though that's the major source, to be sure), and thus to blow it off. Horowitz & Co. pretend to be the champions of Joe Lunchpail, who can't understand why his hard-earned tax dollars should go to support tenured radicals who belittle everything he believes in. H & Co. are of course demagogues, but there are in fact many citizens who are not henchmen of the far right but have a legitimate concern about how their tax dollars are spent in public universities. Radical teachers who advance their views in their courses and professional roles should be willing to justify them to students or a public audience, and to present substantive refutations to conservatives, rather than just assuming the rectitude of their political viewpoint and giving the impression of imposing it unilaterally on students.

I think few of us who identify with Radical Teacher condone teachers' interjecting tirades, say, against the Iraq War or President Bush that have nothing to do with the subject of their courses; maybe some do, and if so, they should express their justification, but the rest of us should express our disapproval audibly. All of us also need to be more explicit about what general and specific aspects of our academic disciplines warrant addressing political issues within their context, and how. I will come back to my own method of doing this, but I want to get to it by way of addressing some related problems.

As Sophia McClennen and others in this issue have suggested, the intensified right-wing assault on the academic left obliges us to rethink some of the assumptions of critical pedagogy that most of us have embraced since the sixties. These assumptions included the value of empowering students through Freirean and other student-centered practices that challenged teachers' authority and professional standards, seen as "elitist." Critical pedagogy encouraged "resistance and transgression" against the dominant culture and a multicultural polyphony of voices in classrooms, imagined as "safe spaces" where students (especially female, minority, and working-class) would feel at ease to contest issues and "negotiate meaning" among themselves.

Now we confront a coordinated and well-financed right-wing movement against precisely our old nemeses, now identified with us: leftist authoritarian teachers, professional elites, foundational principles and standards, and the stifling of diversity--which is now redefined to include an equal voice for authors like Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh, fundamentalist Christians, white and male pride, and so on. Well, I hate to say I told ya so, but for nigh on twenty-five years now, I've been voicing friendly disagreements in RT and elsewhere with advocates of critical pedagogy, based on my long experience teaching in conservative communities and colleges with students who are overwhelmingly white, middle-class, Christian Republicans. I found that applying principles of critical pedagogy in that setting often ends up "empowering" such students simply to reconfirm their prior prejudices and drown out progressive voices.

I also have long realized that other sixties-vintage student empowerments like open admissions, teacher evaluations, and relaxation of grading standards, intended to benefit nontraditional students, have been widely exploited by the most traditional students along with a new pool from the most inadequately-schooled, rightwing segments of the working class. These empowerments have also been perverted toward a consumerist view of college--abetted, to be sure, by skyrocketing college costs and declining financial aid. This tendency puts pressure on teachers to go easy and give high grades just to give student customers their perceived money's worth, and this has frequently become the main criterion on which students--and consequently administrators--judge teachers. These patterns would seem to confirm the old Marxist principle that cultural superstructural changes, including attempts at liberal reforms, almost inevitably get bent to the shape of the economic base, i.e., corporate capitalism. This is not to suggest that we abandon the original goals, but only that we need to think hard about how to salvage them from their corruptions.

These long-time problems with conservative student bodies have intensified ferociously in the past decade, largely through the organizational campaigns of groups like the College Republicans, Young America's Foundation, Young Americans for Freedom, and David Horowitz's Students for Academic Freedom. Last year I used my textbook for the first time in an advanced composition class at Tennessee, in which most of the students turned out to be Business majors, all white. Every day was like walking into a tank of sharks "resisting and transgressing" everything I and my textbook said. It was obvious that this is a generation of students primed with ready-made rebuttals to every liberal or left argument and research source, provided by websites like townhall.com, intellectualtakeout.com, and Horowitz's discoverthenetwork.com. In yet another instance of what I termed, in a Chronicle of Higher Education column a few years ago, "the chickens of deconstruction and diversity coming home to roost," these students were quick to dismiss all arguments or evidence on the left as subjectively biased, and any attempt to demonstrate their logical superiority to conservative counterparts as "coercion," "stifling diversity," "leftist ideological hegemony," "fascist indoctrination," etc.

I am a more-than-senior faculty member, securely retired with my pension, and currently teaching part-time just to keep my hand in, so I have been able to face these students down (in ways described below) with the prerogatives of an old, white, Ivy League male, and with knowledge that the worst consequence of student complaints to my department (which in fact have been surprisingly few) would be forced full retirement, bringing blessed relief from Valium and blood pressure medication. However, many stories have emerged lately about younger, nontenured faculty being hounded from their jobs by conservative attacks on them and of administrators caving in to those attacks--stories that are of course suppressed from conservative accounts of how it is always leftist teachers who intimidate conservative students.

Well, maybe it is time to think the unthinkable about some of the assumptions of progressive pedagogy, including our views on elitism and populism, professional authority, and academic standards. Since the sixties, cultural leftists have tried to act in behalf of the left-wing populism of the working-class, minorities, and women. But I have long argued that this aim frequently underestimated the realities of rightwing populism and the capacity of conservative demagogues to manipulate it in turning the tables on us, in the manner of Horowitz writing, "I encourage [fellow Republicans] to use the language that the left has deployed so effectively on behalf of its agendas. Radical professors have created a 'hostile learning environment' for conservative students. There is a lack of 'intellectual diversity' on college faculties and in academic classrooms. The conservative viewpoint is underrepresented' in the curriculum and on the reading lists. The university should be an inclusive and intellectually 'diverse' community." Now, the fraudulence of Horowitz's game here may be obvious to us, but it is not to conservatives or the general public. The only way to illuminate its fraudulence, and that of rightwing polemics in general, is to mount point by point refutations, with logical reasoning and empirical evidence. (I have written forty pages of such a point by point refutation of Horowitz's books, to which I have invited him to respond in a dialogue; for anyone interested in my text, write me at [e-mail].) Many leftists have disdained this effort, either because they consider responding to such nonsense below their dignity or became they have bought into vulgar versions of poststructuralist theories denying objectively demonstrable truths and intellectual or moral value judgments--attitudes that play right into conservatives' hands. (To be sure, at times attempts at refutation do seem futile against the right's game of producing new waves of accusations, which keep us on the defense and oblige us to piss away our energies researching rebuttals, which by the time it takes to produce them, are ignored by both the right and the media as "old news." Maybe our time would be better spent hiring public relations agencies, like conservatives do, to produce attack campaigns against them.)

In broader terms, maybe we need to get over certain tendencies on the left toward antiintellectualism and skepticism toward verifiable truths, professional authority, and academic standards. If conservatives play the "relativism" card against the reasoning and evidence we present in support of left positions, we need to demonstrate the demonstrability of verifiable truths. If conservative politicians and students challenge our professional authority, we need to stand up for the standards of professional accreditation and expertise, including upwards of ten years of graduate study for a Ph.D, and another seven years of peer evaluation before tenure--and more importantly, we need to demonstrate the body of our knowledge on the subjects at hand, perhaps even if that means a reversion toward the lecture and "banking" modes of teaching. If students have come to think that they can get away with tossing ill-informed, prejudiced opinions off the top of their heads in class discussions and papers, we need to "coerce" them into doing extensive research in sources on the right and left and close analysis of their rhetorical soundness. Maybe it is even time to reverse grade inflation, to demand more rigorous study for earning grades, and to eliminate student course evaluations that have been perverted into consumer-satisfaction surveys and a means for flaming left teachers.

My suggestions will sound "elitist" to some radical teachers. Well dammit, although the left historically has been preeminently populist, it has also included a tradition of high intellectual and scholarly standards, which have remained more constant in Europe than in America of late. We simply need to press for establishing standards that are consonant with progressive politics. A good model was the draft for National History Standards in 1994, which was both rigorous in factual knowledge and critical thinking criteria, and fully multicultural in recognition of working-class, women's, and minority histories--but which was shot down by Lynne Cheney and the United States Senate. Also see my account in "Postmodern Pluralism" of national standardized curricula and testing in other current democracies that actually promote progressive political consciousness. We should not allow conservative forces like the National Association of Scholars and the American Council of Trustees and Alumni to pose as the champions of high academic standards against their alleged abandonment by the left. We should simultaneously defend those standards and struggle for the socioeconomic and educational justice that will enable students from all backgrounds to meet them.

Certainly, I am troubled that my position here marks a shift away from student-centered teaching and back toward the banking model, which I know is not effective in pedagogical terms, but I also know that it is even less effective to surrender to student-centered teaching that only empowers right-wing loudmouths. I welcome debate on this excruciating problem, and have sought in my own teaching to strike a middle position.

I have laid out my approach in a 1992 article "Teaching the Political Conflicts: A Rhetorical Schema" and other articles like "Ground Rules for Polemicists," which I have developed into a textbook for argumentative writing, Reading and Writing for Civic Literacy. The terminology of critical thinking, semantics, and rhetorical analysis provides the disciplinary framework for addressing political issues, e.g., prejudice and stereotyping, semantic slanting and emotional appeal, ethnocentrism and national chauvinism, authoritarianism, special interests, special pleading, and patterns of political polemics. (In my literary survey classes, I stress the continuities between the political concerns of past authors and present-day controversies, and the way present polemicists try to "spin" history).

Gerald Graff's notion of "teaching the conflicts" informs my pedagogical approach. It frees up teachers to disclose their own political viewpoint, by identifying and defending it as precisely that--one viewpoint among other possible, opposing ones, to be understood, studied, and evaluated in relation to one another. For example, in that traumatic writing course last year, when the conservative students produced a barrage of conservative sources on economic issues, which the few vocal liberals in the class couldn't counter, I asserted professorial authority, first in presenting evidence that most of the conservative websites they were citing are subsidized by corporate-front foundations, think tanks, and other special interests, with their predictable biases, and then in producing a list of left rebuttals to their arguments and of supporting left sources. I then assigned a term paper in which they evaluated the left rebuttals against their conservative sources, and then I required that they dig further in the conservative sources for counter-rebuttals. Here is the preliminary assignment toward the term paper, which is based on readings in Reading and Writing for Civic Literacy.

According to Susan Searls Giroux (and her source, Business Week), "the pay gap between top executives and production workers grew from 42:1 in 1998 to a staggering 419:1 in 1998 (excluding the value of stock options [which in some cases are at least as valuable as salary]," and top executives "received a 36% increase" between 1997 and 1998. Conservative students suggest that the cause of the increased gap in recent decades between the rich and working class, between CEOs and their employees, is that wealthy stockholders and executives have been working that much harder than their employees (for whom the work year "has expanded by 184 hours since 1970"), or that they have become that much more skillful. (Can anyone explain logistically how the ratio of how much executives work compared to their employees, or how much more skillful they have become, could have increased by nearly 1000%, from 42 to 419, just in terms of the number of hours in a year?)

How about considering an alternative hypothesis, along Giroux's lines?: Isn't it possible that these discrepancies have resulted instead from the sheer exercise of power by MANY (not all) of the largest, or Fortune-500, corporations and Forbes 400-level wealthiest individuals, simply because no one has stopped them from doing it? (Remember Catch-22: They'll do everything to you that you don't stop them from doing.) Specifically, this hypothesis goes, large numbers of the corporate wealthy have bought influence with both Republican and Democratic politicians (mainly through campaign contributions and lobbying), to rig laws in their favor on taxation, wages, working conditions, cutting funds for access to higher education, profiteering from military spending and war, and deregulation of monopolies, environmental irresponsibility, and other shady business practices (like those of Enron, which took place partly because of weakened accounting regulations by the Securities and Exchange Commission pushed through by corporate lobbies). And, in this hypothesis, corporations have been able to drive workers' salaries down and increase their working hours because of the reduction in job options due to automation, the weakened power of unions, the removal of jobs to other countries with cheaper labor and fewer regulations, or the threat of that removal used to intimidate workers and government regulators.

Finally, in this alternate hypothesis, a sufficient number of the wealthiest corporations and individuals have been able to get away with all this because these realities have been largely suppressed, or drowned in the flood of celebrity-catastrophe-sports journalism, in media owned and supported by the advertising of the same corporations.

Does this hypothesis over-generalize about corporations, or even the Fortune-500 largest and Forbes 400 richest individuals, implying that ALL of them have engaged in this power grab? OK, how about toning down the generalization level (see textbook p. 183), to say, no, not all have, but ENOUGH of them have to produce these results.

To the conservative students who react to this hypothesis with hoots of laughter--"No way corporations would do all that!"--I pose a simple question: What is to STOP them from doing it, if the mass of citizens are kept (or keep themselves) ignorant of information about "all that"? How well informed of "all that" have most of you been prior to this course, from the media and school? What does that say about conservative claims about the "liberal bias" of media and teachers? And if you yourself have been ignorant of "all that," isn't that the ultimate proof that this hypothesis is correct?

Your Challenge for the Rest of the Semester

For the final paper, and intermediate assignments and discussions, you should be searching for the best conservative rebuttals you can find, from any source--the readings in the textbook, the Internet (especially townhall.com, intellectualtakeout.com, or David Horowitz's blogs), books, your professors, the Wall Street Journal and Weekly Standard, the College Republicans or Campus Libertarians, your parents, wherever.

In the end, most students acknowledged, willingly or grudgingly, that the conservative sources tended to be strong in initiating arguments but very weak in responding to left rebuttals. Nevertheless, the assignment left it open to their initiative to find the best conservative rebuttals they could, without my twisting their arms toward a predetermined conclusion, and they came to better understand the nature of partisan sources and the open-ended, ever-continuous cycle of argument-rebuttal-counter rebuttal.

WORKS CITED

Giroux, Susan Searls. "The Age of Irony?" Journal of Advanced Composition 22 (2002): 960-76.

Lazere, Donald. "Ground Rules for Polemicists: The Case of Lynne Cheney's Truths." College English 59 (1997): 661-85.

--. "Postmodern Pluralism and the Retreat from Political Literacy." Journal of Advanced Composition 25 (2005): 257-91.

--. Reading and Writing far Civic Literacy: The Critical Citizen's Guide to Argumentative Rhetoric. Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2005.

--. "Teaching the Political Conflicts: A Rhetorical Schema." College Composition and Communication 43:2 (May 1992). 194-213.

Nash, Gary B. History on Trial." Culture Wars and the Teaching of the Past. New York: Knopf, 2000.