UNIVERSITY DAILY
Tuesday, March 7, 1995
6A
was taking the class from a graduate teaching assistant who worked in the department.
One day, as Shirk was reading the text, he ran across a passage that jumped out at him: "A person would have to have the brain of a newt to still be pushing the ameliorative aspects of trickle-down economies for the working class. Trickle-down economics didn't work for poor and middle-class people, and it made a lot of rich people richer, and it was based on greed and a malignant indifference to people in need."
No way, Shirk thought
Perfect for a Jesse Jackson speech, perhaps, but did such opinions have a place in a sociology textbook?
"It was such a blatant display," he said. "That has no place in the classroom."
But Evans' textbook wasn't the only biased source of information, Shirk said.
The instructor of the class and most of the students, he remembers, didn't stray far from liberal orthodoxy.
Shirk, who graduated from KU and now is a student at Washburn University in Topeka, can't say whether he was the lone conservative in the class. But if he wasn't, he never would have known.
"There probably were people who agreed with me," he said. "But they were afraid to raise their hand because they didn't want to get shot down."
Is instructor bias a real problem or merely the figment of
"The university has become an agent of politics."
Dennis Quinn professor of English
a hypersensitive imagination?
When do instructors cross the line between academic freedom and deliberate stumping for a cause? The answer is not always clear. But the consensus among many critics is that instructors everywhere from the City
New York to the University of Karsas line.
— from the City University of — are crossing the
For the most part, complaints about instructors' ideological biases come from conservatives.
Allan Bloom, in his book "The Closing of the American Mind," lamented the triumph of multiculturalism and relativism against more traditional curricula at American universities. Roger Kimball, in his book "Tenured Radicals," blasted the professors and administrators responsible for that triumph.
But instructors with conservative viewpoints get their share of complaints.
Consider one reaction to Ann Jurcyk, a former Western Civilization graduate teaching assistant now living in Kansas City, Kan.
Russell Abbott, a KU graduate now studying law at the University of Oklahoma, remembers the confusion of a friend in one of Jurryk's classes.
The friend, a Native American, didn't quite know what to make of Jurcyk's insistence that Christianity was a "superior cultural model." The student was hesitant to raise her hand in class for fear of being ridiculed for her Native American spiritual beliefs, Abbott said.
"Her input wasn't as valued," he said. "She didn't feel like she had the right to speak up in class."
To find out what his friend was talking about, Abbott got a copy of Jurcyk's class syllabus. The problems described by his friend, he found out, had their basis in Jurcyk's strongly held beliefs.
The syllabus read, in part: "It is the perspective of this instructor that Western Civilization and the history thereof is in fact better represented by the phrase 'The Rise and Fall and Subsequent Renewal of Christendom'. It is the purpose of my course to give credence to the fact that objective Truth is a real and knowable, and thus qualifiable, fact. In fact, Christian culture best represents this objective Truth, and that had said culture not been derailed by the 'Reformation', many of the great evils of the world would not have come into existence."
An approach such as that was bound to rub someone the wrong way, Abbott said.
"Her entire approach to the course was so biased, there was no possibility of it being taught objectively," he said. Jurycik denied that she ever shut out students' view-points.
Jurcyk said her approach served to offset the presentations offered by other Western Civilization instructors, whose beliefs ran the gamut from feminist to Marxist.
"I went out of my way to give students the floor," she said. She has no memory of Abbott's friend, the Native-American student.
"Higher education is about developing a perspective," she said. "In my last semester, that's what I attempted to present. It's nothing less than what I ask of my own students — to develop and synthesize a perspective and defend it."
Otherwise, she contends, education is reduced to a mindless regurgitation of facts. In her view, a student's task is to develop a comprehensive world view.
But her unorthodox approach, she says, was enough to get her fired.
"Why do we study this, anyway?" she asked.
James Woelfel, director of Western Civilization, denied
that Jurczyk's beliefs had anything to do with her dismissal. Her only ideological transgression, he said, was her class syllabus, which Woelfel called "inappropriate for a general education class."
Jurcyk continues to defend her teaching style
Some of her former students also have defended her.
In a letter to the University Daily Kansan, one student said Jurcyk was hardly the first instructor to use personal beliefs as a context for class material. Jurcyk was just more honest about her beliefs, the student wrote.
"During my years at KU, I have heard Marxism, Capitalism and Monarchism all extolled as ideal systems of government. I have heard lectures offered from extremely feministic to extremely male-chauvinistic viewpoints. I have heard virtually every religion's praises sung, with exception of Christianity (until now). In fact, this semester alone I have been told in lectures that Christianity was responsible for scientific ignorance, that the Catholic Church persecuted and tortured the mentally ill, and that mystics and prophets were simply outdated terms for schizophrenics. All of these remarks were expressed by instructors without any fear of offending the 'cultural sensitivities of diverse students.'"
Like Jurcyk, Daryl Evans scoffs at the accusation that he forced his political beliefs on students.
The letter written by Derek Shirk, he said, blew the trickle-down economics incident out of proportion.
Shirk, Evans said, seemed to be worried that he would be tested over the passage about trickle-down economics.
"Obviously, you can't have students taking tests over my opinion," Evans said. "But I do believe that trickle-down economics didn't work."
Evans now jokes that if he had capitalized the word "newt" in the phrase, "A person would have to have the brain of a newt to still be pushing . . . trickle-down economics," it would be a factual statement.
The new speaker of the House notwithstanding, the passage has been excised from the latest edition of the textbook, Evans said. At the time, the passage was included to spark debate, not to convert students to his way of thinking, he said.
"I have to give students a few insights now and again to let them know how I look at the world," he said. "It gets the dialogue going."
But the onset of political correctness has slowed some of that dialogue.
"We '60s folks are responsible for political correctness," he said. But, he said, "To be politically correct undoes what a university is all about. To me, universities are forums of institutionalized doubt. You're here to try and work things out, and there shouldn't be any consequences for trying on different ideologies."
"No one knows where I am politically in the introductory class," he said. "But in upper level classes, I let on more of my opinions. Those people can take care of themselves and can put up a good scuffle. I love it when they take issue with me."
Evans makes a distinction between what is proper for introductory sociology students and what is proper for advanced sociology students.
But what if instructors aren't willing to entertain dissent?
In his sociology class, Shirk remembers the graduate teaching assistant taking a more critical view of his papers because of his beliefs.
In Jurcyk's Western Civilization class, the superiority of Christianity was a foregone conclusion, Russell Abbott said.
"My papers were held to more scrutiny," he said. "I'd look at other papers and see red marks for grammar. With me, it had more to do with my interpretation of the material."
"Teaching a course by emphasizing a narrow ideology as better than others is discrimination against those who do not share that ideology," he said.
"Professors are using their educational soapbox to proselytize the student body," he said.
The problem of ideologically biased instructors goes beyond the discomfort of students, Shirk said. It can affect students' grades.
Derek Shirk agreed.
Kelly Staples, a graduate student in European history, said that younger undergraduates were more likely to be targets of professor bias.
But, he said. "If you have an 18-year-old kid, and a professor with a Ph.D. who's shoving feminism down his throat and making him look like a Neanderthal, then I'm sure there's some pressure."
Staples, who once wrote for the now-defunct conservative student newspaper The Oread Review, said his graduate-level classes were mostly free of instructor bias.
Most students today, though, are savvy enough to recognize professor bias, Staples said.
"I'm not so pessimistic," he said. "Some of these kids coming up here are pretty conservative. They're better informed, and they're not taking things at face value."
David Shulenburger, vice chancellor for academic affairs, downplays criticisms of professors' ideological biases.
"We don't get many complaints in this office about the ideological bents of professors," he said. "Maybe three or four a year."
A student at KU, he said, isn't likely to be indoctrinated into one belief system or another.
"There's a fair amount of balance across the faculty," he said. "Across one year, a student is as likely to get someone who leans right as left."
However, Shulenburger acknowledged that there was a limit to the views that could be expressed in the classroom.
"Academic freedom doesn't include my right to say that Christianity is absolutely right," he said.
The way to ensure diversity of opinion at a university, he said, was to encourage different kinds of inquiry.
"There's very little objectivity in the world," he said. "That's why I'm in favor of areas like women's studies. The closing of the American mind would occur when we deny scholars the opportunity to approach subjects from different angles. That's when civilization starts to slide backward."
Harry Shaffer, a recently retired professor of economics at VU, eenpun
at KU, acknowledged that keeping personal views out of lectures could be difficult.
Sh a f f e r described his own views as "liberal, to put it mildly. "In but in his introductory classes, that bias didn't come through, he said.
"When you teach at a university, you're supposed to be objective," he said. "In the natural sciences, that's not hard. But in the social
"Academic freedom doesn't include my right to say that Christianity is absolutely right."
David Shulenburger
vice chancellor for academic affairs
sciences, it's a little bit different."
Different, but not too different, he said. Instructors still are obligated to distinguish between fact and opinion.
Even so, problems arise. After all, he said, instructors can reveal their political biases by carefully selecting which facts they present—and which facts they don't.
"In economics, we emphasize the benefits of the free market," he said. "A conservative will explain those benefits. A liberal economist will do the same but will ask, 'Do we really have a free market, when in most major industries, the three or four largest firms control 90 percent of the market?'"
Shaffer does not approve of instructors who use their classrooms to push their beliefs.
"Anybody who plugs an ideology doesn't make a very good professor," he said. "Whenever possible, what I've tried to do is show both sides. One tries to be objective, but it's hard to do."
Still, he acknowledges that sometimes, instructors feel the temptation to let their obligations as human beings override their obligations as educators. If a policy would mean certain harm for society, he asks, isn't it all right for a professor to say so, as long as the criticism is presented as opinion?
Dennis Quinn, professor of English, takes just as dim a view of pushing political views in the classroom.
Students in the program studied Greek, Roman, medieval and modern authors across a four-semester span. The program was scuttled after administrators received complaints that the professors who ran the program were brainwashing students into joining the Roman Catholic Church.
In the 1970s, Quinn was one of three professors who ran the ill-fated Integrated Humanities Program. He is the only one still teaching at KU.
"We told the students, 'We do advocate certain things,'" he said. "We were in favor of a more traditional society." But, he said, "We weren't trying to talk anyone into anything."
Other less-controversial reasons contributed to the program's demise, Quinn said. But while he and his colleagues never advocated plans of action, they did take stands, he said.
Today,it's a different story.
"The views people express today are largely political ideologies," Quinn said. "The university has become an agent of politics."
And those politics must be the "right" politics, Quinn said. Because he doesn't share the same interests, he wouldn't have much luck if he were searching for a teaching position today, he said.
"I'm not interested in feminism or multiculturalism," he said. "I'm interested in poetry."
Stories like Derek Shirk's aren't uncommon, he said.
"Students come to me and complain: I've got to write this essay, and it's got to conform to the teacher's beliefs," he said.
Eventually, the politicization of American universities will collapse on itself, Quinn predicts.
"It's one of those things we'll have to live through," he said. "It's self-defeating. I can't believe students put up with it."