Category Archives: Social Studies

‘Teach Them to Challenge Authority’

Inside Higher Ed: ‘Teach Them to Challenge Authority’
‘Teach Them to Challenge Authority’

Stanley Fish may be telling academics to keep their opinions to themselves, but Gregory S. Prince Jr. thinks it is time for colleges to stop trying to make their classrooms neutral. Prince, the former president of Hampshire College, argues for professors to take all kinds of positions — as a tool for challenging their students. His new book, Teach Them to Challenge Authority: Educating for Healthy Societies (Continuum) outlines this view, and Prince responded via e-mail to questions about the work.

Q: What’s wrong with a neutral stance in the classroom?

A: A neutral stance in the classroom is appropriate as one of many pedagogical approaches. When it becomes the only pedagogical approach, it deprives students of the chance to learn how to challenge those who have power over them — a skill that is essential in any career, that is essential for the health of any institution and that is critical in a democratic society. Higher education should have been very concerned that at a place like Enron, where almost all of its senior departmental and corporate leadership were college educated, only two at most challenged what was taking place.

Q: You note the criticism that conservatives hurl on liberal academics. Do you think academics have adequately defended themselves?

A: Academics have not adequately defended themselves. Too often they have ignored the critics or taken the position that there is no problem. As the first step in mounting an adequate defense, they should acknowledge that the conservatives are right about the principle that students should not be ridiculed for disagreeing with their professors. They should acknowledge that students should be encouraged to disagree with the politics of their professors. They should acknowledge their responsibility to listen respectfully to opposing points of view and to guide students to sources that support such views.

What happens all too often is that they deny there is a problem rather than challenging the proposed solution to the problem. The problem always will exist because there always will be individuals who cannot or will not master the difficult art of effective teaching. In contrast, I accept that the there are undoubtedly many cases where the critics are right but that to whatever extent the problem exists, the solution that the conservatives propose — having the faculty always maintain a position of neutrality — is the wrong one. Faculty need to take positions so that students can learn how to challenge those in authority. How a faculty member takes a positions is what is critical. It is an art both to take positions and to create an atmosphere in which students will learn how to challenge those positions

Q: What advice would you give to professors who agree with your book, but who teach at institutions where students are more conservative than those at Hampshire?

A: I would give them the same advice that I would give to Hampshire faculty and to faculty in any university. Acknowledge the differences where they exist, listen well to the students, create an atmosphere where they can challenge your positions, respect the students enough to take their positions seriously and be willing to state your own positions and to engage the students in discussion and debate about those positions.

Q: How can you tell if a university is “engaged” in the way you advocate?

A: Universities that test themselves by asking constantly whether they are doing enough and then push themselves to do more are engaged in the way I advocate. What made Hampshire such an exciting place for me was its culture that made asking whether we were doing enough in the classroom, with individual students and with the community outside the college a perpetual part of the educational conversation. Often what we were doing was good, but measured against what was needed, it was rarely good enough. Students are an important part of that conversation because they so often are impatient and feel that so much more can be done. They helped fight complacency that all too often is the greatest danger to delivering a quality educational experience. As a completely different kind of example, land grant institutions, with their explicit service missions that have served this country so well, generally are and have to be, in constant conversations with their legislatures and the public whom they serve about whether “they are doing enough.” Those conversations, difficult as they are sometimes, benefit the academy and the public.

Q: How can presidents protect the freedom of their professors to teach as you suggest — and encourage it?

A: The most effective way is to model in their own behavior what they expect of the faculty, to articulate and practice the principles of discourse that make it possible simultaneously to take positions and to encourage students to challenge those positions and pursue a review and reward system that supports the principles. Confront constructively and fairly and do not ignore those situations where the practices of faculty do not support the core value of the principles of discourse — that what matters is the strength and integrity of one’s argument and rhetoric, not the political hue of the opinion being defended.

— Scott Jaschik
The original story and user comments can be viewed online at http://insidehighered.com/news/2008/09/04/prince.

Gustav and the Dome…This time officials padlock Superdome as hurricane sweeps through New Orleans

Here’s a short piece from David Zirin, author of Welcome to the Terrordome, on Hurricane Gustav and the response of officials in New Orleans:

Gustav and the Dome
By Dave Zirin

Witness the massive padlock, tightly hugging its doors. That will tell you all you need to know about Hurricane Gustav and the federal government s carefully orchestrated response. The padlock, roughly the size of a Frisbee, is set firmly around the doors of the Louisiana Superdome. The padlock articulates a message that would be clear to even a Bush or a Brownie: this storm will not be Katrina. By that I don t mean, We ve learned a lot in the last three years or whatever talking points the White House is putting out.

The padlock makes clear that the public relations hurricane battle has been well engaged. There will be no photo ops of 30,000 people herded into a luxury stadium that magically morphs into a homeless shelter from hell. There will be no opening up the stadium to the poor and unwashed, not after spending 185 million bucks.to rebuild the dome and not with the NFL season right around the corner. There will be no one left behind, even if it means putting people on buses, taking them hundreds of miles away, and not even telling them the destination for them and their families. And, more than anything else, the padlock in all of its glistening, metallic glory, is a self-incriminating indictment. It is an admission that despite what we were told three years ago, a stadium isn t really shelter; that the act of forcing people at gunpoint into the dome was a criminal act; and that believing any stadium could have redeeming social value as an emergency evacuation center, is a lie.

The padlock on the Superdome prevents any more ugly backdrops for When the Levees Broke II , and preserves the pristine field for Drew Brees, Reggie Bush, and the rest of the Saints. But it also raises more questions than answers: if people aren t in the dome, then where are they?

Where are New Orleans 12,000 homeless residents, double the pre-Katrina numbers?

Where are the 17,000 residents of greater New Orleans still living in FEMA trailers?

Where will people live when they return? Why won t the city call for the suspension of the planned bulldozing of the city s four largest housing projects? How will the people being bussed out, be able to move back if their homes have been flattened? If people can t make it home, will they find their residence somewhere even more frightening than the dome?

New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin said over the weekend, “Anybody who’s caught looting in the city of New Orleans will go directly to Angola [Louisiana State Penitentiary]. You will not have a temporary stay in the city. You go directly to the big house, in general population.

Considering that many of the so called looters after Katrina, were fighting for their lives, and considering that the media had color-coded looters, with white residents classified as heroes, the implications of Nagin s dictate is chilling. It s horrifying to think that they could be laying their head in the former slave plantation known as Angola.

And what will the fate be of the hero as of now, the wetlands? The wetlands absorbed the worst of Gustav, before the hurricane slammed into the great city. As New Orleans resident and comedian Harry Shearer said, We re losing Wetlands at a rate of a football field every 45 minutes.
The padlock is also a reminder of all the people, 25% of the pre-Katrina population, who haven t been able to return to the city. How can they have the hope of return when rents have gone up 46% in the last two years? When will this ever be addressed?

The future of New Orleans will depend on our ability to answer these questions. And no amount of shameless political posturing can avoid this.

[Dave Zirin is the author of the forthcoming A People s History of Sports in the United States (The New Press) Receive his column every week by emailing dave@edgeofsports.com. Contact him at edgeofsports@gmail.com.]

Zirin: The 2008 Olympics: Subterranean Rot

Here’s a good column by David Zirin, one a the very few journalists willing to challenge the Olympic hokum that the massive propaganda machine that is China and the mainstream media in North America have been churning out about Beijing 2008.

See EdgeOfSports.com for more Zirin’s writing on sport and society.

The 2008 Olympics: Subterranean Rot
By Dave Zirin

Not since Marco Polo has anyone traveled so far up China’s Silk Road with such amoral élan. But there was Jacques Rogge, president of the IOC, knight of the court of King Leopold’s Belgium, three-time Olympian in the grand sport of yachting – standing astride Beijing at the close of the 2008 Olympic games. In front of a stunning 90,000 at the Games’ closing ceremony, he said, “Tonight, we come to the end of sixteen glorious days which we will cherish forever. Through these games, the world learned more about China, and China learned more about the world.”

But what did the world really learn? From NBC’s ratings-rich coverage alone, not all that much. We learned that China is remarkably beautiful, Michael Phelps can really swim and Usain Bolt is truly quite fast. Oh, and there are pandas there. some of whom died in the Sichuan earthquake. We can’t forget about the pandas.

As the Washington Post’s veteran columnist Thomas Boswell wrote in his last missive from Beijing:

“In all my decades at The Post, this is the first event I’ve covered at which I was certain that the main point of the exercise was to co-opt the Western media, including NBC, with a splendidly pretty, sparsely attended, completely controlled sports event inside a quasi-military compound. We had little alternative but to be a conduit for happy-Olympics, progressive-China propaganda. I suspect it worked.”

I applaud Boswell for his honesty, but it is hard to not have contempt for the aside that “we had little alternative” but to dance the infomercial shuffle.

Boswell and the press made a choice the moment they stepped on China’s soil.

They chose not to seek out the near two million people evicted from their homes to make way for Olympic facilities.

They chose not to report on the Chinese citizens who tried to register to enter the cordoned off “protest zones” only to find themselves in police custody. (A shout out here to all who will find themselves shortly in similar “protest zones” in Denver and Minneapolis-St. Paul.)

They chose not to report on the Tibetan citizens removed from their service jobs by state law for the duration of the games.

They chose not to ask what $42 billion, the price tag of the games, could have meant to earthquake ravaged Sichuan.

They chose to not point out the bizarre hypocrisy of seeing Michael Phelps–with full media fanfare–taking a group of Chinese children to their first meal at McDonalds. (Even though Phelps famously eats 12,000 calories a day during training, I can’t imagine much of it comes from Mickey D’s.)

They chose not to report on the foreign nationals who as of this writing, are still being held in Chinese prisons for daring to protest. (According to the Associated Press, the US Embassy pleaded with China to free protesters, gently suggested, that China could stand to show “greater tolerance and openness.”)

They chose not to ask why George W. Bush was the first US president to attend the Olympics on foreign soil, and why the State Department last April took China off its list of nations that commit human rights violations.

They chose not to ask whether it was a conflict of interest for General Electric to both own NBC and be one of the primary sponsors of the games as well as the supplier of much of the games’ electronic security apparatus, including 300,000 close circuit cameras. All indications are that these cameras will most likely remain in place once the world has turned its attention elsewhere.

They chose not to ask and re-ask the question of why the games were in Beijing in the first place, considering that Rogge and Beijing organizing committee head Liu Qi both promised that the Olympics would come alongside significant improvements in human rights.

As Sophie Richardson of Human Rights Watch said:

“The reality is that the Chinese government’s hosting of the games has been a catalyst for abuses, leading to massive forced evictions, a surge in the arrest, detention and harassment of critics, repeated violations of media freedom, and increased political repression. Not a single world leader who attended the games or members of the IOC seized the opportunity to challenge the Chinese government’s behavior in any meaningful way.”

The legacy of these games will be in no short order: China’s dominance, in winning more gold medals than the US; the aquatic dominance of Phelps; and the blistering triumph of Bolt and the Jamaican sprinters. But we should also remember the ravaging of a country, sacrificed at the altar of commercialism and “market penetration.” And we should recall a mainstream press, derelict in its duty, telling us they had “little alternative” but to turn this shandeh into a globalization infomercial.

Liu Qi called the Olympics “a grand celebration of sport, of peace and friendship.” Not quite. Instead it was a powerful demonstration of the way the elephants of the east and west can link trunks and happily trample the suffering grass.
England, you’re next. And you thought the blitzkrieg was rough.

First published at thenation.com

[Dave Zirin is the author of the forthcoming “A People’s History of Sports in the United States” (The New Press) Receive his column every week by emailing dave@edgeofsports.com. Contact him at edgeofsports@gmail.com.]

Folksinger and storyteller Utah Phillips, a “national treasure” if there

Folksinger and storyteller Utah Phillips, a “national treasure” if there
ever was one, died last Friday, May 23.

His performances featured the songs, jokes and lore of hobos, tramps,
cowboys, migrant workers and Wobblies. Although he made a number of fine
recordings, he was most truly in his element in live performances, where he
knew how to draw the audience into a song or story and would leave us
cracking up with laughter at some outrageous punch line that would
unexpectedly pop up in the middle of his apparently rambling reminiscences.

Here is his famous “Moose Turd Pie” story —
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSlPJOfnJZk

A few more video clips can be found here, along with various other
performers doing some of his songs —
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%22utah+phillips%22

For more recordings and links, see http://www.utahphillips.org/
The obituary below is drawn from that site.

* * *

“Folksinger, Storyteller, Railroad Tramp Utah Phillips Dead at 73”
Nevada City, California:

Utah Phillips, a seminal figure in American folk music who performed
extensively and tirelessly for audiences on two continents for 38 years,
died Friday of congestive heart failure in Nevada City, California, a small
town in the Sierra Nevada mountains where he lived for the last 21 years
with his wife, Joanna Robinson, a freelance editor.

Born Bruce Duncan Phillips on May 15, 1935 in Cleveland, Ohio, he was the
son of labor organizers. Whether through this early influence or an early
life that was not always tranquil or easy, by his twenties Phillips
demonstrated a lifelong concern with the living conditions of working
people. He was a proud member of the Industrial Workers of the World,
popularly known as “the Wobblies,” an organizational artifact of early
twentieth-century labor struggles that has seen renewed interest and growth
in membership in the last decade, not in small part due to his efforts to
popularize it.

Phillips served as an Army private during the Korean War, an experience he
would later refer to as the turning point of his life. Deeply affected by
the devastation and human misery he had witnessed, upon his return to the
United States he began drifting, riding freight trains around the country.
His struggle would be familiar today, when the difficulties of returning
combat veterans are more widely understood, but in the late fifties Phillips
was left to work them out for himself. Destitute and drinking, Phillips got
off a freight train in Salt Lake City and wound up at the Joe Hill House, a
homeless shelter operated by the anarchist Ammon Hennacy, a member of the
Catholic Worker movement and associate of Dorothy Day.

Phillips credited Hennacy and other social reformers he referred to as his
“elders” with having provided a philosophical framework around which he
later constructed songs and stories he intended as a template his audiences
could employ to understand their own political and working lives. They were
often hilarious, sometimes sad, but never shallow.

“He made me understand that music must be more than cotton candy for the
ears,” said John McCutcheon, a nationally-known folksinger and close friend.
In the creation of his performing persona and work, Phillips drew from
influences as diverse as Borscht Belt comedian Myron Cohen, folksingers
Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, and Country stars Hank Williams and T. Texas
Tyler.

A stint as an archivist for the State of Utah in the 1960s taught Phillips
the discipline of historical research; beneath the simplest and most folksy
of his songs was a rigorous attention to detail and a strong and
carefully-crafted narrative structure. He was a voracious reader in a
surprising variety of fields.

Meanwhile, Phillips was working at Hennacy’s Joe Hill house. In 1968 he ran
for a seat in the U.S. Senate on the Peace and Freedom Party ticket. The
race was won by a Republican candidate, and Phillips was seen by some
Democrats as having split the vote. He subsequently lost his job with the
State of Utah, a process he described as “blacklisting.”

Phillips left Utah for Saratoga Springs, New York, where he was welcomed
into a lively community of folk performers centered at the Caffé Lena,
operated by Lena Spencer.

“It was the coffeehouse, the place to perform. Everybody went there. She fed
everybody,” said John “Che” Greenwood, a fellow performer and friend.
Over the span of the nearly four decades that followed, Phillips worked in
what he referred to as “the Trade,” developing an audience of hundreds of
thousands and performing in large and small cities throughout the United
States, Canada, and Europe. His performing partners included Rosalie
Sorrels, Kate Wolf, John McCutcheon and Ani DiFranco.

“He was like an alchemist,” said Sorrels, “He took the stories of working
people and railroad bums and he built them into work that was influenced by
writers like Thomas Wolfe, but then he gave it back, he put it in language
so the people whom the songs and stories were about still had them, still
owned them. He didn’t believe in stealing culture from the people it was
about.”

A single from Phillips’s first record, “Moose Turd Pie,” a rollicking story
about working on a railroad track gang, saw extensive airplay in 1973. From
then on, Phillips had work on the road. His extensive writing and recording
career included two albums with Ani DiFranco which earned a Grammy
nomination. Phillips’s songs were performed and recorded by Emmylou Harris,
Waylon Jennings, Joan Baez, Tom Waits, Joe Ely and others. He was awarded a
Lifetime Achievement Award by the Folk Alliance in 1997.

Phillips, something of a perfectionist, claimed that he never lost his stage
fright before performances. He didn’t want to lose it, he said; it kept him
improving.

Phillips began suffering from the effects of chronic heart disease in 2004,
and as his illness kept him off the road at times, he started a nationally
syndicated folk-music radio show, “Loafer’s Glory,” produced at KVMR-FM,
and started a homeless shelter in his rural home county, where
down-on-their-luck men and women were sleeping under the manzanita brush at
the edge of town. Hospitality House opened in 2005 and continues to house 25
to 30 guests a night. In this way, Phillips returned to the work of his
mentor Hennacy in the last four years of his life.

Phillips died at home, in bed, in his sleep, next to his wife. He is
survived by his son Duncan and daughter-in-law Bobette of Salt Lake City;
son Brendan of Olympia, Washington; daughter Morrigan Belle of Washington,
D.C.; stepson Nicholas Tomb of Monterrey, California; stepson and
daughter-in-law Ian Durfee and Mary Creasey of Davis, California; brothers
David Phillips of Fairfield, California, Ed Phillips of Cleveland, Ohio and
Stuart Cohen of Los Angeles; sister Deborah Cohen of Lisbon, Portugal; and a
grandchild, Brendan. He was preceded in death by his father Edwin Phillips
and mother Kathleen, and his stepfather, Syd Cohen.

The family requests memorial donations to Hospitality House, P.O. Box 3223,
Grass Valley, California 95945 (530) 271-7144
www.hospitalityhouseshelter.org