ENEMY PROFESSOR (No. 12) - Clarence Taylor

No. 12 in the series that outs those professors who should not be taking their paychecks for teaching. They are indoctrinating and pushing their agenda.
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Volume: 21 Issue: 2
3/11/2004

Academic Freedom’s Thin Line
Web site challenges perception of academia as a safe place for the exchange of ideas, opinions

Luann Wright, founder and president of NoIndoctrination.org, a Web site devoted to policing professors accused of harassing conservative students in their classrooms, firmly believes that what she’s doing is a public service.

“The university should be a marketplace of ideas, a safe place to explore a variety of perspectives,” she says. “But I don’t see that happening.”

What she sees, she says, is fear — “There’s so much of it out there.” Everyday, Wright, a writer of science curricula for the gifted and a mother, says she talks to the fearful: the students scared they won’t get the recommendations that would pave their way to graduate school or the professions; the professors who dare not speak freely in their own departments.

“I have posting after posting where people just write in to say, ‘Thank you. Thank you just for being there,’” she says.

Dr. Alvin Tillery, assistant professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame, agrees about the fear and intimidation. The catch is that he thinks Wright and her Web site are their source.

After a student complaint landed him on NoIndoctrination.org in early July, Tillery says he found himself not only unable to refute the posting (due to what Wright calls a server error, the rebuttal did not post until Feb. 17, 2004) but also exposed to a barrage of e-mail from conservative readers apparently unconnected to but certainly angered by what they read on the site.

A typical example read, in part: “…one-sided ideologs like you are finally being exposed for what you are. thought youd (sic) like to see what the rest of the world thinks. “harvard” — where Tillery earned his Ph.D. — “would be proud of you. wouldnt it be easier to earn your money by actually teaching?”

The Front Lines
Welcome to the front lines of the latest skirmish in the apparently never-ending cultural war for the academy’s soul. Fired by what they see as overwhelming evidence of liberal group-think in the professoriate, conservative-leaning individuals and groups are taking the battle straight to those whom they deem most culpable.

On Feb. 10, the Duke Conservative Union stirred debate with an ad in the campus newspaper that used voter registration records to make claims of overwhelming liberal bias in the eight humanities departments. The ad claimed there were 142 registered Democrats and only eight registered Republicans among the group of humanities professors.

Meanwhile, the Young Conservatives of Texas made headlines as spring enrollment got under way at University of Texas-Austin by publishing a “Professor Watch List,” naming those “who push an ideological viewpoint on their students through oftentimes subtle but sometimes abrasive methods of indoctrination.” Professors from government, economics and humanities were prominent among those named.

And the campaign by activist David Horowitz for an “academic bill of rights” continues to gather steam. A version of the bill, championing “intellectual diversity” — i.e., more conservative representation — in hiring and teaching practices, was introduced in the Colorado legislature last month, joining one introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives last October.

‘Not All That Conservative’
Discussions of academic freedom usually revolve around a professor’s right to be free of intimidation by departments, administrations, even state legislatures in formulating their ideas or theories.

Web sites such as NoIndoctrination.org turn the discussion to the students’ rights — to be free of intimidation or coercion in the classroom.

For Wright, a soft-spoken woman who insists she is “not all that conservative,” the call to action came in fall 2000, when she began hearing “alarming” reports about her son’s required writing course at University of California-San Diego. There were stories of students being polled about their beliefs on the use of affirmative action in admissions — then browbeaten if they dared to dissent from the teaching assistant’s view.

Wright says she might have tended to dismiss the accounts as exaggerated, until she saw her son’s reader. Four of the five essays dealt with the “what they called the ‘ruinous pathology of Whiteness,’” she says. In the only dissenting essay, the African American economist Dr. Walter Williams of George Mason University “was set up as the straw man, and his ideas were totally ridiculed.”

Wright says she spent a year and a half trying to get results from departmental and administration officials at UCSD — and also researching the depths of the problem at other schools. Stymied — “(UCSD) didn’t do anything; they just shelved my complaints” — Wright was determined to use technology to “make them step up to the plate.”

NoIndoctrination.org accepted its first posting in September 2002: a complaint against the Warren College Writing Program at UCSD. And in the year and a half of its operation, the number of complaints has swelled to … 113.

Scrolling through the complaints on the Web site, most of which are unaccompanied by rebuttal, one gains an overwhelming impression of a professoriate that is by turns arrogant, incompetent or just plain aggressively abusive toward its charges.

There are horror stories: for example, the Penn State student whose humor columns in the school paper met with this response from a teaching assistant: “ALL THESE ARTICLES CONFIRM YOUR [sic] A RACIST MOTHER F****.”

A Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy?
But one returns again and again to that number — 113.

Wright stresses that the numbers are so low because, unlike sites like RateMyProfessors.com and RateaProf.com, she thoroughly investigates each complaint — and throws out around 70 percent of them.

Dr. Jonathan Knight, director of the American Association of University Professors’ department of academic freedom, tenure and governance, is encouraged to hear that. But he adds, “There are just over a million teachers in higher education, something like 14 or 15 million students, something on the order of 3,600 colleges and universities and each academic year there are literally hundreds of thousands of courses. It would be surprising if amidst this vast, complex enterprise there weren’t occasionally students who felt things weren’t going right.

“I don’t see what this Web site really accomplishes,” Knight concludes. “Even if — and this is a big if — there is evidence that academics in the humanities and social sciences are more progressive than the general population, it’s hard to see that English majors are taking over the corporate structure of the world. And there’s no suggestion that schools of engineering, law, medicine, architecture, business, etc., are producing anything but the very best practitioners of those respective professions in world.

“So to misquote a famous poet, there seems to be no there, there.”

So what precisely is “there”?

On the Web site, in the e-mails of targeted professors, one finds a whole fuzzy world of impression and anecdote, of passionate conviction and hurt feelings.

Read the postings without benefit of rebuttals and one is astonished at the level of casual cruelty and abusiveness visited on innocent youth. Read the posting with rebuttals, and the picture … shifts.

A student at Western Kentucky University complains of a “Marxist agenda” in an introductory sociology class in January 2004. One is concerned, until the professor points out in his rebuttal a few days later that, in an introductory course, an emphasis on Marx, one of the “founding fathers” of sociology, is appropriate.

A student at Miami University of Ohio, unnerved by writer and activist Barbara Ehrenreich’s appearance at a freshman orientation event, writes in November 2003, “I felt bombarded with left-wing views. Everywhere I turned, I was being scorned for holding a conservative ideology. I couldn’t help but feel as though my republican partisanship was being threatened … I cannot recall one instance where a conservative view was presented by any university event or faculty.”

One is appalled, until a rebuttal by a university official appearing a few days later points out that P.J. Rourke, Pat Buchanan, Alan Keyes and Rudy Guiliani all made appearances on campus that semester.

Read the postings alone, one hears the cry of pain and can’t help but respond. Read the postings with rebuttals, one sees the same events, radically different points of view and what appears to be no possibility of reconciling them.

Irreconcilable Differences?
On March 9, 2003, Serrena Stallmo, then 26 years old and a student at Long Beach City College, wrote to Wright’s site to complain about Dr. Adrian Novotny, the professor in her physical anthropology class.

Her posting read: “He would consistently interject his personal views, ie: The White race should be ashamed of itself, I’m ashamed to be White, The system should be more socialistic — Take from those who have and give to those who do not, Women are too lazy to breast feed, We should be ashamed of our government, Our government is nothing more than a giant warmonger, Democracy is nothing more than a disguise for colonialism, The rest of the world has just cause to hate us, We should pay reparations to All African Americans, etc...”

When she dared to argue with him on reparations, she added, “he yelled at me.”

Stallmo missed an exam due to illness and still managed a grade of 89.9 in the course. She’s convinced if she had kowtowed to Novotny she would have gotten the 10th of a point bounce to a 90. But when she complained about her grade to the department head, she discovered Novotny was the department head.

For Stallmo, whose mother is Apache and whose father is Norwegian, the issue was not liberal versus conservative ideologies — it was “abuse of power,” she says firmly.

“Some people consider themselves to be above reproach,” she says. “Student concerns should be taken more seriously and thoroughly investigated by an uninterested third party. In my particular situation, Dr. Novotny was the department head and, therefore, the initial contact by which to address my concerns. Needless to say — refer to Dr. Novotny’s rebuttal — he was neither an impartial nor disinterested party.”

Novotny, on the other hand, remains convinced the issue was one of clashing ideologies. Dismissing NoIndoctrination.org as “just another reactionary right-wing ‘witch hunt’ site,” he says he quickly grew bored with debating the critics who were inflamed by the strongly worded rebuttal he posted.

Novotny concludes the site has no value: “Neither the critic nor the webmaster bothered to identify themselves so that I could respond to them by name. In effect, I was the only one in the exchange whose identity was known. They hide behind their anonymity — might as well wear sheets over their heads and bodies.”

Indeed, it’s probably worth noting that Novotny received five glowing ratings on RateMyProfessors.com around the same time as his dispute with Stallmo.

Meanwhile, Tillery of the University of Notre Dame’s political science department winced at the caricature of himself that appeared on the Web site:

“Professor Alvin Tillery (Ph.D. Harvard) made it very clear from day 1 that he was a liberal democrat, and that liberal democrats were ‘right’ and ‘the light side of the force.’ His stated goal was to win students over to the cause of liberalism. Every single issue was tied into how Republicans and conservatives are evil and responsible for every problem in America….”

The student was particularly anxious to take up the cudgels on behalf of another youth in the class.

“One student mentioned that he was in the NRA. After that, Prof. Tillery mocked him for his political views every class. Every time Tillery pushed one of his liberal points on the class, he would turn to said student and say, ‘don’t shoot me now.’ It became so bad, this student dropped the class.”

Tillery rebutted the criticism, noting, in part, “I am truly sorry that the young man who posted does not believe that humor is an appropriate teaching tool.”

As for the “NRA member,” Tillery noted that “not only did he remain in my class, his absences resulted from his holding an off-campus job to pay for school, … he also invited me to attend a party in honor of his graduation from Notre Dame because, although he remains a ‘committed conservative,’ my challenges to his belief system, he asserts, had a ‘profound impact’ on him.”

After his rebuttal was finally posted to the Web site on Feb. 17, Tillery expressed regret the student in question never challenged him, as other conservative students at Notre Dame have.

“I doubt if we will ever have a conversation about his issues, which really is too bad,” Tillery says. “But if he does come forward, I hope that he will be able to leave behind the hostility that he brought into my classroom.”

That seems unlikely. After finally seeing Tillery’s rebuttal, the student sent this e-mail to Luann Wright:

“I am very upset to tell you that Prof. Tillery outright lied in his rebuttal. He tried to play off his attempt to indoctrinate his students as humor, which is a gross misrepresentation of what occurred. Mr. Tillery is an extreme liberal and his stated mission is to win as many converts as possible. He turned the classroom into his pulpit, which is the very essence of indoctrination.”

And so the culture wars continue.

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