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We ask them to do a pretty complicated thing in these papers; it’s not surprising that they would throw dogma in with all the other hoops they think we’re making them jump through. And there are some real mixed messages in the academy about dogma, not least because some of our colleagues are indeed on a moral mission to sort the good people from the bad people, as opposed to showing students how such sortings work.

For a more subtle example, and I know you just tossed this off, I wouldn’t want to tell students to assume that discrimination against gay people is bad. I won’t even let them assume Hitler was bad; too easy to write off the ‘ordinary men’ who did the actual killing that way. I’ve got plenty of students who don’t think discrimination against gay people is bad, and the ones who do often can’t say why, so their views are pretty nearly useless.

If I told them to assume homophobia is bad, then whether they agree or disagree they’d learn that dogmatic performance is indeed a requirement of the course, but of course they’d be no closer to enlightenment on the substance of the issue. I might tell them that if they want to assume it’s bad on the way to another point they should say so, but that every time they make that move they restrict the persuasive field of their writing to people who agree with them already or are willing to suspend disbelief. If the paper isn’t about whether homophobia is good or bad but about Kushner’s use of language, that seems like the right thing to tell them.

I want to teach my students to think more deeply and broadly. I want my conservative students to be thoughtful conservatives and my liberal students to be thoughtful liberals. My own politics are pretty well hidden. The standpoints and ideological orientations of the texts I select are part of our analysis of them. I want students to learn to recognize and bracket ideologies when they see them, including their own.

In one of my world history sections the other day I teased a student who wanted to know if they could get out early by predicting that she and the vast majority of students who thought I was keeping them there were going to vote for McCain (on the Lakoff theory). Bullseye on that one, so later when we were talking about the spectrum of political preference a student pressed me on who I was going to vote for. I redirected the question to the class – who did they think I was going to vote for? Half said McCain, half said Obama. So I asked them, how many of you assumed I’d vote the same as you because you sort of like me? Heehee!

Anyway, eventually students who pay close attention should note that there is, or should be something sneakily liberal about valuing open inquiry and diverse views. So I’ll agree with John Smith that there are plenty of faux liberals in academe, but if he really wants what he says he wants he is in fact a liberal (I think he’s an ideologue with sour grapes); and I agree with Tim that he needs to think and work much, much harder about his practice.

Your mention of politics makes me think of certain C- papers I’ve graded. There have been a couple of occasions when I’ve TAed English classes. In one of these, the students had to read Angels in America. A whole lot of the essays assumed that what the instructor wants is dogma, and so trot out six pages of “And therefore we can see how discrimination against gay people is bad.”

By the end of that batch of papers, I really wished that either I or the professor had had a brief talk before the essay and said, “Let’s take as a given that discrimination against gay people is bad and talk about Kushner’s use of language.”

And then there’s papers on stuff by Native authors.

All of which is to say that I think that a side effect of a lot of grousing about liberal academia is that in the culture at large, it creates a sense that professors want to have people espouse the right dogmas. So a first year student naturally assumes that what s/he needs to do is make a dogmatic pronouncement that conforms to his/her expectations of what the professor holds as orthodoxy.

Don’t get me wrong, industry can be a fine place to be — it can even be a fine place for ex-academics to be. But I hope John is more resilient than he’s letting on, or he’s going to get eaten alive.

“My partisan colleagues are universally National Public Radio listeners. They do not hear the other side, so it is easy to demonize the other side. Their students are listening, and sadly think of conservatism in its many forms as horrific.”

Now, this is ironic because I just the other day posted on recent studies that find students to be largely refractory to professors’ ideological influence. The conclusion being that although professors may be liberal, they’re doing a very bad job of passing it along. So sad that they’re not little robots awaiting their programming.

To me the diagnostic frame for this piece comes in the first section, where he reflects on his anxious outsider status in grad school. He just screams petty-bourgeois wannabe, and don’t we all know a few of those. His picture of academe is idealized and phantasmic, he’s got no feel for the nuances, and he’s outraged that, as you quoted Doris Lessing on African politics a while ago, it’s run by human beings.

Given his conservatism and if I’m right about his class background, he may actually be much happier in the business world, in which the field of distinctions will seem more familiar and less will be required of his cultural goodwill.

If the college in question isn’t under a hiring freeze, that is…