When I was in graduate school, a couple of colleagues and I, unhappy with the choices we had in essay anthologies which we could use in our Rhetoric classes, got together and whipped up our own. We called it “An Alternative Reader,” and included the kind of essays we were not finding in the commercial readers then available. I was proud that I proposed an excerpt from “Soledad Brother” George Jackson.
Our text sparked a lively debate within the department about the nature of readers, and the virtues and flaws in our reader. We ran a pilot program so that colleagues who used our text could meet weekly, share experiences we had and exercises we used in teaching the text, and consider how the text could be made better. This was done under the gaze of the department’s tenured faculty. Imagine my surprise when I learned that three young men, none of whom had actually taken a Rhetoric course where the text was used, lodged a formal complaint with the University of Iowa’s Educational Policy Committee (EPC). The complainants not only objected to the text itself, but also complained to the EPC that one of the editors (that would be me) was “a known Marxist.”
I met with a tenured faculty member in the Comparative Literature department who told me not to worry. As he put it, the complaint was clearly unfounded and politically motivated, and making my Marxism an issue, in his words, made the complainants out to be “book burners.” That faculty member, as did many of my Rhetoric department colleagues, did ask if the text could really achieve what we wanted to achieve. I learned many valuable lessons from editing and teaching that text. Ironically, the innate conservatism of the academy enabled and constrained our project. We had a department which was willing to let us experiment with our teaching, so long as we accepted oversight from tenured faculty. The academy, always jealous of its independence, protected us from the three young men and their complaint by hearing them out, then doing nothing to stop us.
I was reminded of that incident by the confession another blogger made in this forum today, that he had contacted the president of Kirkwood Community College, Mick Starcevich, to report that I am a Marxist who is teaching constitutional law in my English composition course. I’m not worried: I have heard nothing from my department dean, who is my immediate supervisor. And, my use of the Iowa Supreme Court decision in Varnum v. Brien has been very successful: the unit I’ve built around that decision challenges my students to read and interpret difficult language, research US Supreme Court precedents, work collaboratively with their peers, and report their research findings on cases such as Brown v. Board of Education or Loving v. Virginia. Some of my peers agree, too, since I presented my exercise during an in-service teaching practicum at Kirkwood.
When does our behavior in the real world, based on our disagreements in this forum, cross a line beyond which a blogger may not go? I will speak my mind, then open the floor for discussion:
When a blogger here freely admits that he or she has contacted another blogger’s employer in order to interfere with that person’s employment relationship, he or she has committed a grave transgression. Let’s note that I have talked about a teaching exercise. If I had written here about an inappropriate relationship with a student, boasted about how I punish students for deviating from what I consider correct politics, uttered unprofessional criticisms of my colleagues, students, or college, or otherwise defamed myself, then the other blogger would have had every right to pursue his complaint. But that’s not what happened. The person in question, unhappy that I did not simply surrender to his constitutional fundamentalism, had to go to my employer because he disagrees with my politics and presumes to tell me how I should teach. Given that person’s conduct, I think his Patch account should be indefinitely suspended, not for what he has said, but for what he has done.