Indoctrination on Campus II
This is my response to a comment on the previous posting sent by a former student of mine who writes anonymously. The anonymity makes it difficult to respond as effectively as I might if I knew the context of our previous conversations. However, I’ll try my best. The real issue is not the linked website itself but the fact that in liking it I seem to associate myself with a political agenda of which the writer disapproves.
[I]f not “ideological,” then what kind of indoctrination are you committing? Am I to understand that you are teaching the “true doctrine,” while those leftist-college professors are teaching the “false?”
I would not claim to know “true doctrine” in the sense that a Marxist believes Marxism to be true. C.S. Lewis’s distinction (in The Abolition of Man) between propagation and propaganda is useful here. I believe in the reality of certain universal values that cannot be proven but that must be assumed in order for any value judgment of any kind to be made. This is true of literary values as of moral ones. And I believe that part of my role as a teacher is to propagate the espousal of those values.
By contrast, much of the teaching of humanities by leftist professors abandons belief in those fundamental universal values in favor of the one or more of the fashionable dogmas of the day (or rather of the sixties, when these people were uncritically absorbing them)—Marxism, feminism, post-modernism, Freudianism, socialism, etc. Then, like modern Manicheans, they divide the world into the sons of light (true believers like themselves and most of their students) and the sons of darkness (those few who must have recourse to the linked website in order to gain a hearing).
If so, such rigid thinking and faith in one’s own ability to discern the truth resembles the worst excesses of dogmatic Marxists or religious fundamentalists.
Of course I completely disagree with this statement. First of all, the "worst excesses" of dogmatic Marxists and religious fundamentalists have been the wholesale disruption of cultures and the murder of millions of people. Surely I am not accused of that.
But to the point: What makes my thinking rigid? I have never claimed that I know or could possibly learn the whole truth about anything. I do claim to believe, and to have good reasons for believing, that there is such thing as truth and that we ought to strive for it. I do not believe that American popular culture or Freudianism or Marxism or feminism or post-modernism or post-colonialism or any other –ism has all the answers. If believing this—and being willing to discuss counterarguments at length and often with anyone willing to be reasonable—makes me rigid, I guess I am rigid.
I say there are some universal absolute values and that it is mankind’s calling to strive to adhere to them. If you disagree, then on what grounds do you disapprove of dogmatism and rigidity?
Of course literature is about life, just as is any humanistic and social-scientific scholarly enterprise. That is exactly the point many of the students on noindoctrination.org fail to recognize: that the teaching of a subject, even in the choice of topic to study or questions to answer, is inherently political and moral. They complain that literature courses are too oriented to postcolonial studies, as if there is some non-biased place from where one can study and teach literature. (As one professor eloquently responds on the website, that may work for studying neutrinos, but not for nuclear families; but even neutrinos enter the realm of morality, as critiques of science, including your own musing on the compatibility of scientific and religious thought, have rightly pointed out).
Certainly humanistic studies have a political dimension. My reason for linking the site was to offer an alternative to those students who feel their teachers to be demanding nothing but blind faith in one particular political agenda.
I admit that the title of the website is a little misleading. The argument is not between doctrinal and non-doctrinal teaching. Any teacher worth his pay has a point of view and wants to share it. The argument is between better doctrine and worse, truer and less true or totally false. There is no position of total detachment or objectivity from which one may judge anything. Any judgment at all is founded on underlying assumptions. But there is a difference between dogmatism, whether left or right, and Socratic free inquiry, which itself is founded on the shared assumption of fundamental universal values like truth, goodness, justice, kindness, and intellectual honesty. If it is rigid and dogmatic to say that, I suggest that the burden is upon my accuser to suggest what kind of teaching he or she would approve of that is not based upon these values.
Undoubtedly there are [doctrinaire] professors (and high-school teachers) that crush dissent and otherwise abuse their position of authority. But let’s face it, this website is not just an innocent and unbiased place for students to fight such abuse: there are channels enough for that, including student newspapers, online professor ratings, and complaints to the administration (and I should note, that despite much publicity and many years online, that website has rather few justifiable complains, especially given its national scope); rather, like the recent scandal at UCLA, it is part of the Right’s attempt to diminish academic freedom and push the academy rightward—to shift the type of questions scholars study and the answers they find, to turn them from critics of the system into cheerleaders.
The right may wish to move the discourse on college campuses from left to right, but to say that in general such an effort is an attempt to diminish academic freedom is simply slander. It also reveals ignorance of the many instances in which conservative speakers with unexceptionable credentials have been barred from college campuses, shouted down by mobs, even physically threatened when trying to engage in rational discourse. I have not heard of this happening to liberal speakers on what few generally conservative campuses there are. The real violence against academic freedom in the colleges and universities of the nation in the last two decades has come not from the right but from the tyrannical left.
I have no desire to diminish academic freedom or to turn students from “critics of the system” into cheerleaders. But doesn’t the assumption that being a “critic of the system” is on the face of it a good thing reveal a leftist bias? What system is meant? The democracy that makes the modern college and university possible? The oppression by villainous capitalists of the naturally good but downtrodden proletariat? In what ways does whatever the word “system” refers to need criticizing? From what point of view? How is it better or worse than other “systems”? On what grounds is the “system” to be criticized? Aren’t these the kinds of questions that ought to be asked before one assumes that being a “critic of the system” is unquestionably good? Behind such a phrase are a hundred unexamined assumptions that may or may not be valid.
College should be a place where one can question such assumptions without fear of being cast into the role of demonic obstructionist or mindless cheerleader. The website offers the opportunity for both reasonable complaint and rational rebuttal, and the reader is free to side with whomever he or she pleases, or to disagree with both. Where is the villainy in that?
I wonder how you and other proponents of this and related efforts would feel about students who complained that economics and business departments—with their paeans to the wondrous efficiency of market capitalism—were inherently ideological and indoctrinating. Where are the Marxist or postcolonial critiques in courses on “International Monetary Markets” and “Marketing Theory”?
Well, such critiques are everywhere, and I have read or heard of no place where those who present them are ostracized or oppressively shouted down (unless they themselves have attempted to hijack the conversation with propagandistic harangue). They are argued with. Or is argument itself it a form of capitalist oppression? And if that’s the case, why would you argue with me? I would not have the least objection to there being a website to offer leftist rebuttals of capitalist business school teachers, nor would I accuse someone who linked such a site of trying to diminish academic freedom.
In sum, I do not blame you for morally engaging your students, nor from teaching from a certain perspective—an unavoidable, in fact essential, aspect of teaching. But I do find it ironic that you—one of the most morally pedagogical of high-school teachers, ever eager to make pronouncements to impressionable high-school students such as . . . [I’ve cut an incendiary remark here, supposedly a quotation from me, one which I don’t remember to have said and which, if in fact I did say it, has been taken so totally out of context that its meaning is entirely misleading.] . . . advertises a website and therefore aligns yourself with a movement that pretends to promote free inquiry even as it conceals a deeply politicized agenda. Is the problem really that college professors and their work are biased, or that you just don’t like the particular “truth” (or to use your language, “false doctrine”) they peddle?
I do not think the website’s agenda is concealed in the least. Nor is my own. I try as often as possible, in my teaching and on this blog, to understand and reveal my agenda, a developing thing, responsive, I hope, to legitimate argument and to the needs of my students and my audience. The problem is that many college professors promote their bias through propaganda and injustice. Many have never graduated from what I consider to be adolescent assumptions about the world they (and I) absorbed as adolescents in the sixties. Based on those assumptions, like modern Manicheans, they believe those who disagree with them to be the sons of darkness and consequently treat their questioning and disagreement with contempt. This kind of fear of disagreement is almost always a sign of unacknowledged inner doubt. To paraphrase Jane Austen (in Northanger Abbey), such doubts ought to be examined that they may know themselves.
In sum, I link the website through no secret agenda but because of my observation that it is slanted, if at all, against a deeply destructive trend of college life—not indoctrination itself, not even leftism itself, but the tyranny of the left. If you think it unnecessary or unfair, don’t read it.
[I]f not “ideological,” then what kind of indoctrination are you committing? Am I to understand that you are teaching the “true doctrine,” while those leftist-college professors are teaching the “false?”
I would not claim to know “true doctrine” in the sense that a Marxist believes Marxism to be true. C.S. Lewis’s distinction (in The Abolition of Man) between propagation and propaganda is useful here. I believe in the reality of certain universal values that cannot be proven but that must be assumed in order for any value judgment of any kind to be made. This is true of literary values as of moral ones. And I believe that part of my role as a teacher is to propagate the espousal of those values.
By contrast, much of the teaching of humanities by leftist professors abandons belief in those fundamental universal values in favor of the one or more of the fashionable dogmas of the day (or rather of the sixties, when these people were uncritically absorbing them)—Marxism, feminism, post-modernism, Freudianism, socialism, etc. Then, like modern Manicheans, they divide the world into the sons of light (true believers like themselves and most of their students) and the sons of darkness (those few who must have recourse to the linked website in order to gain a hearing).
If so, such rigid thinking and faith in one’s own ability to discern the truth resembles the worst excesses of dogmatic Marxists or religious fundamentalists.
Of course I completely disagree with this statement. First of all, the "worst excesses" of dogmatic Marxists and religious fundamentalists have been the wholesale disruption of cultures and the murder of millions of people. Surely I am not accused of that.
But to the point: What makes my thinking rigid? I have never claimed that I know or could possibly learn the whole truth about anything. I do claim to believe, and to have good reasons for believing, that there is such thing as truth and that we ought to strive for it. I do not believe that American popular culture or Freudianism or Marxism or feminism or post-modernism or post-colonialism or any other –ism has all the answers. If believing this—and being willing to discuss counterarguments at length and often with anyone willing to be reasonable—makes me rigid, I guess I am rigid.
I say there are some universal absolute values and that it is mankind’s calling to strive to adhere to them. If you disagree, then on what grounds do you disapprove of dogmatism and rigidity?
Of course literature is about life, just as is any humanistic and social-scientific scholarly enterprise. That is exactly the point many of the students on noindoctrination.org fail to recognize: that the teaching of a subject, even in the choice of topic to study or questions to answer, is inherently political and moral. They complain that literature courses are too oriented to postcolonial studies, as if there is some non-biased place from where one can study and teach literature. (As one professor eloquently responds on the website, that may work for studying neutrinos, but not for nuclear families; but even neutrinos enter the realm of morality, as critiques of science, including your own musing on the compatibility of scientific and religious thought, have rightly pointed out).
Certainly humanistic studies have a political dimension. My reason for linking the site was to offer an alternative to those students who feel their teachers to be demanding nothing but blind faith in one particular political agenda.
I admit that the title of the website is a little misleading. The argument is not between doctrinal and non-doctrinal teaching. Any teacher worth his pay has a point of view and wants to share it. The argument is between better doctrine and worse, truer and less true or totally false. There is no position of total detachment or objectivity from which one may judge anything. Any judgment at all is founded on underlying assumptions. But there is a difference between dogmatism, whether left or right, and Socratic free inquiry, which itself is founded on the shared assumption of fundamental universal values like truth, goodness, justice, kindness, and intellectual honesty. If it is rigid and dogmatic to say that, I suggest that the burden is upon my accuser to suggest what kind of teaching he or she would approve of that is not based upon these values.
Undoubtedly there are [doctrinaire] professors (and high-school teachers) that crush dissent and otherwise abuse their position of authority. But let’s face it, this website is not just an innocent and unbiased place for students to fight such abuse: there are channels enough for that, including student newspapers, online professor ratings, and complaints to the administration (and I should note, that despite much publicity and many years online, that website has rather few justifiable complains, especially given its national scope); rather, like the recent scandal at UCLA, it is part of the Right’s attempt to diminish academic freedom and push the academy rightward—to shift the type of questions scholars study and the answers they find, to turn them from critics of the system into cheerleaders.
The right may wish to move the discourse on college campuses from left to right, but to say that in general such an effort is an attempt to diminish academic freedom is simply slander. It also reveals ignorance of the many instances in which conservative speakers with unexceptionable credentials have been barred from college campuses, shouted down by mobs, even physically threatened when trying to engage in rational discourse. I have not heard of this happening to liberal speakers on what few generally conservative campuses there are. The real violence against academic freedom in the colleges and universities of the nation in the last two decades has come not from the right but from the tyrannical left.
I have no desire to diminish academic freedom or to turn students from “critics of the system” into cheerleaders. But doesn’t the assumption that being a “critic of the system” is on the face of it a good thing reveal a leftist bias? What system is meant? The democracy that makes the modern college and university possible? The oppression by villainous capitalists of the naturally good but downtrodden proletariat? In what ways does whatever the word “system” refers to need criticizing? From what point of view? How is it better or worse than other “systems”? On what grounds is the “system” to be criticized? Aren’t these the kinds of questions that ought to be asked before one assumes that being a “critic of the system” is unquestionably good? Behind such a phrase are a hundred unexamined assumptions that may or may not be valid.
College should be a place where one can question such assumptions without fear of being cast into the role of demonic obstructionist or mindless cheerleader. The website offers the opportunity for both reasonable complaint and rational rebuttal, and the reader is free to side with whomever he or she pleases, or to disagree with both. Where is the villainy in that?
I wonder how you and other proponents of this and related efforts would feel about students who complained that economics and business departments—with their paeans to the wondrous efficiency of market capitalism—were inherently ideological and indoctrinating. Where are the Marxist or postcolonial critiques in courses on “International Monetary Markets” and “Marketing Theory”?
Well, such critiques are everywhere, and I have read or heard of no place where those who present them are ostracized or oppressively shouted down (unless they themselves have attempted to hijack the conversation with propagandistic harangue). They are argued with. Or is argument itself it a form of capitalist oppression? And if that’s the case, why would you argue with me? I would not have the least objection to there being a website to offer leftist rebuttals of capitalist business school teachers, nor would I accuse someone who linked such a site of trying to diminish academic freedom.
In sum, I do not blame you for morally engaging your students, nor from teaching from a certain perspective—an unavoidable, in fact essential, aspect of teaching. But I do find it ironic that you—one of the most morally pedagogical of high-school teachers, ever eager to make pronouncements to impressionable high-school students such as . . . [I’ve cut an incendiary remark here, supposedly a quotation from me, one which I don’t remember to have said and which, if in fact I did say it, has been taken so totally out of context that its meaning is entirely misleading.] . . . advertises a website and therefore aligns yourself with a movement that pretends to promote free inquiry even as it conceals a deeply politicized agenda. Is the problem really that college professors and their work are biased, or that you just don’t like the particular “truth” (or to use your language, “false doctrine”) they peddle?
I do not think the website’s agenda is concealed in the least. Nor is my own. I try as often as possible, in my teaching and on this blog, to understand and reveal my agenda, a developing thing, responsive, I hope, to legitimate argument and to the needs of my students and my audience. The problem is that many college professors promote their bias through propaganda and injustice. Many have never graduated from what I consider to be adolescent assumptions about the world they (and I) absorbed as adolescents in the sixties. Based on those assumptions, like modern Manicheans, they believe those who disagree with them to be the sons of darkness and consequently treat their questioning and disagreement with contempt. This kind of fear of disagreement is almost always a sign of unacknowledged inner doubt. To paraphrase Jane Austen (in Northanger Abbey), such doubts ought to be examined that they may know themselves.
In sum, I link the website through no secret agenda but because of my observation that it is slanted, if at all, against a deeply destructive trend of college life—not indoctrination itself, not even leftism itself, but the tyranny of the left. If you think it unnecessary or unfair, don’t read it.
posted by G.Rap | 2:18 AM
9 Comments:
kind regards for zach skaggs, dr. rap! i'm sure you're still rocking the CS Lewis and all that good stuff!
All the college profs I ever met wanted me to drink some Kool-Aid. . . especially their Kool-Aid. In fact, the quickest way to an A+ in college was two steps: 1) Find your professor's doctoral dissertation in the library; 2) Write essays that vaguely agree with it. And then they'll say, "How'd you know Hedda_Gabler was all about women being imprisoned by pregnancy? You brilliant student, you!"
If you want to know the ultimate end-game of endless indoctrination, I invite you to attend any Modern Language Association (MLA) convention, where the some of the sharpest minds in the country have been rendered completely ineffectual, and Power-Point presentations regarding the triginometry behind the angles of Emily Dickinson's en and em dashes can go on for hours, and brilliant men have been crushed into dust because they have never been allowed to get on a soap box and scream, "I READ Kate Chopin's Awakening, AND IT WAS TERRIBLE! WHY DO WE KEEP MAKING PEOPLE READ IT?"
The modal college professors will say that if you're not a Democrat and a feminist and a Wiccan, then you're a fascist zealot seal clubber. And this isn't entirely their fault; they had to drink a lot of Kool-Aid to be professors, and professors who encourage free thinking are usually the bane of any university administration. University adminstrators like to hire tweedy professors who will teach teenagers to be so completely agreeable that said youths will eventually be forced to work for corporate America or man the phone bank for NPR's Annual Pledge Drive.
If you have just one professor who gets you to be a DISCIPLINED, free thinker, then you're exceedingly lucky. Universities that used to produce iconoclasts now produce sheep. Baaaaaaa.
Why limit rankings to college when you could have so much fun with it while still in high school? See, all the Bishop's kids are already at it:
http://www.ratemyteachers.com/schools/california/la_jolla/the_bishop%2527s_school
I've posted the previous comment, but I want to add that I don't really approve of the "Rate My Teachers" system. Unlike the college site I linked, this one is all about numbers, and its categories are limited, to put it kindly. There is a big difference between criticizing a teacher's ideas in prose and rating a teacher's easiness, clarity, and popularity with a number from 1 to 5. Though I value statistics as evidence, I value rational argument far more, and I hope my readers do too.
Dr. Rap –
Apologies for taking so long to respond to your last posting. Work delayed me.
You ask if I believe in “universal absolute values,” but that question is beside the point. I can criticize dogmatic and rigidity on a variety of epistemological grounds, from universalistic rationalism to pragmatism.
I agree with you that there is a very real difference between teachers who allow for debate and dissent, and those who are primarily concerned with converting their students to a set of belief through heavy handed techniques. Like you, I deplore those teachers who abuse their positions of authority (however ineffectively: they rarely win converts) and violate the basic foundations of intellectual thought such as the free exchange of ideas. And I dare say, a great majority of leftist, liberal, and conservative professors agree (excepting those at religious institutions like the hundreds of Christian colleges in the South). In my own studies, I have yet to encounter a professor who has not welcomed disagreement in the classroom, even if it has sometimes resulted in heated exchanges. Certainly, as with all professions, abuses exist and should be punished. And while there are those who believe that the various –isms (or for that matter, religious beliefs) have delivered the absolute truth, most academics are far too imbued with skepticism about the production of knowledge to think that their modes of analysis are anything but productive means of looking at the world.
My concern with your position was that you were obscuring your deepest criticism of the academy—the fact that they are teaching “false doctrine,” or ideas with which you disagree—with a focus on the method in which that material is taught. NoIndoctrination.org and related movements, for instance David Horowitz’s recent campaign, deceptively conceal their agenda of shifting academic discourse rightwards by claiming that they want either “bias free” or “balanced” teaching. They often resort to rhetoric that pretends that there exists just such a neutral place from which subjects can be taught.
Of course what they really want are their own ideas and opinions inserted into textbooks and lectures. By why is such “balance” better? Ideas and the academic production of truth need not validation in mass popularity contests to authenticate them as true. A surprisingly large percentage of the population may think that evolution is bogus, or that racism does not exist in the United States, but that does not make it so, and teachers (I hope we can agree) should not be forced to legitimate such beliefs in their lectures. Does the _Origin of Species_ need to be balanced with _Darwin on Trial_? Do courses on existentialism need to make time for fundamentalist theology?
You disclaim a belief in the potential for bias-free thought, but by endorsing this website, you are really partaking in a much larger campaign (why, after all, of all professional matters, have academics’ political affiliations become such a focus of talk radio?), one that conceals a disagreement about values in the rhetoric of bias and balance. Except through explicit qualifications otherwise, you can not disassociate your endorsement of NoIndoctrination’s concern with teaching techniques from its greater political significance, just as a link encouraging your students to pursue articles at the Discovery Institute would convey a deeper agenda than an innocent search for scientific truth.
The real question, as you say, in “where truth lies.” I laude your desire to contest what is and is not true, but that is better achieved in debate with intellectuals and academics than by endorsing an heavily politicized movement predicated on problematic beliefs and deceptive strategies.
-Dancing [apologies for the anonymity]
Dancing does not admit that the "intellectuals and academics" in whom he or she believes have in large part so slanted the discussion to the left that the center looks to him or her as if it were far right. I grant it's not really a discussion about techniques or objectivity. It's about differences in premises. But nothing stops the left from setting up another such a website to allow leftist students to vent about such schools as Bible colleges in the South. Instead, the left-leaning academy has for so long and so thoroughly pretended to be objective, disinterested, dispassionate, etc., that any expression of a desire for balance, sanity, or justice in the mouth of a right-leaning person cannot but sound to the left like fundamentalist or rightist propaganda.
In any case, these back and forth comments are really pointless. We are venting. Instead of arguing about whether I should have linked the site, why not address some real and particular issue, like the decline in reading for pleasure among teens, or the culture of death that gave us Kavorkian and the court-enforced killing of Schiavo, or grade inflation, or the vilification of Israel by mainstream Protestant churches and members of the faculty at Harvard, or the hiring of a former Talibanist at Yale. Can such things be discussed in peace and reason on any of the college campuses Dancing is actually familiar with?
As for the anonymity, Dancing knows where he or she can send an email to reveal his or her identity to me without going public.
I would just like to say a few words about the accusation made about "rigid thinking." In the past few years, I find myself constantly confronted by comments such as this one. As a former student of Dr. Rapp's, I feel it incumbent upon myself to provide some defense grounded in personal experience. Like many others, I have had many different teachers with many different viewpoints. I generally consider this to be a good thing, because I think it is important to be challenged both intellectually and spiritually. Indeed, I have developed close relationships with teachers that have very different views than my own.
But I have to say that I have also had many teachers that have offended me in a most deep and personal way. Each one of these teachers has been a self-professed liberal who seems to triumphantly place him/herself above the intolerance and prejudice that has plagued our world from the beginning of time. They carefully use "CE " and "BCE" instead of "AD" and "BC" and seem to always support the oppressed underdog. But a closer look at these individuals reveals a gross hypocrisy. I have witnessed countless smug comments directly offensive to the beliefs and values that I hold dearest. These comments are NOT made in expressive forums for sharing opinions and fostering discussions; they are passing comments often filled with sarcasm and aimed at getting a laugh out of the class. To make matters worse, these situations make defending yourself not only intimidating but disruptive.
Now let me speak about Dr. Rapp. Like other teachers, he certainly has his own opinions and beliefs. But the important difference lies in the fact that he creates an environment in which there is mutual respect and where all are invited--and encouraged--to express their beliefs. And yes, if Dr. Rapp thinks you are wrong, he will argue with you. But this is GREAT! This is the kind of probing that every student should want. This is how true education takes place. And while this experience may be challenging, it is never offensive, humiliating, or forceful. It has its roots in love--not bitterness, cynicism, or egotism. I have noticed several students who, though they have very different opinions than those of Dr. Rapp, have nevertheless sought him out as a mentor and a friend. Perhaps it is because Dr. Rapp respects us enough to CARE about disagreeing with us in a direct and honest way that shows a genuine concern for our continuing search for truth.
Now if a "rigid thinker" is defined as anyone who does not have a wishy-washy, "couldn't care less" outlook on morality and truth, then I genuinely wish rigid thinking on everyone. But I think the real question is about rigid hearts. Because true tolerance is not about being opinionless or beliefless or being able to say "there's no right or wrong; that's your way, this is mine"; it is about respecting the common humanity of others enough to agree or disagree with them in a loving and civilized manner. As a college student, I know just how rare it is to find true tolerance. I can only hope that those who still have the benefit of being in Dr. Rapp's class know how fortunate they are to even experience it once in their lifetime, because--believe me--most students don't.
I would just like to say a few words about the accusation made about "rigid thinking." In the past few years, I find myself constantly confronted by comments such as this one. As a former student of Dr. Rapp's, I feel it incumbent upon myself to provide some defense grounded in personal experience. Like many others, I have had many different teachers with many different viewpoints. I generally consider this to be a good thing, because I think it is important to be challenged both intellectually and spiritually. Indeed, I have developed close relationships with teachers that have very different views than my own.
But I have to say that I have also had many teachers that have offended me in a most deep and personal way. Each one of these teachers has been a self-professed liberal who seems to triumphantly place him/herself above the intolerance and prejudice that has plagued our world from the beginning of time. They carefully use "CE " and "BCE" instead of "AD" and "BC" and seem to always support the oppressed underdog. But a closer look at these individuals reveals a gross hypocrisy. I have witnessed countless smug comments directly offensive to the beliefs and values that I hold dearest. These comments are NOT made in expressive forums for sharing opinions and fostering discussions; they are passing comments often filled with sarcasm and aimed at getting a laugh out of the class. To make matters worse, these situations make defending yourself not only intimidating but disruptive.
Now let me speak about Dr. Rapp. Like other teachers, he certainly has his own opinions and beliefs. But the important difference lies in the fact that he creates an environment in which there is mutual respect and where all are invited--and encouraged--to express their beliefs. And yes, if Dr. Rapp thinks you are wrong, he will argue with you. But this is GREAT! This is the kind of probing that every student should want. This is how true education takes place. And while this experience may be challenging, it is never offensive, humiliating, or forceful. It has its roots in love--not bitterness, cynicism, or egotism. I have noticed several students who, though they have very different opinions than those of Dr. Rapp, have nevertheless sought him out as a mentor and a friend. Perhaps it is because Dr. Rapp respects us enough to CARE about disagreeing with us in a direct and honest way that shows a genuine concern for our continuing search for truth.
Now if a "rigid thinker" is defined as anyone who does not have a wishy-washy, "couldn't care less" outlook on morality and truth, then I genuinely wish rigid thinking on everyone. But I think the real question is about rigid hearts. Because true tolerance is not about being opinionless or beliefless or being able to say "there's no right or wrong; that's your way, this is mine"; it is about respecting the common humanity of others enough to agree or disagree with them in a loving and civilized manner. As a college student, I know just how rare it is to find true tolerance. I can only hope that those who still have the benefit of being in Dr. Rapp's class know how fortunate they are to even experience it once in their lifetime, because--believe me--most students don't.
All I can say in response to the last comment is I thank Anonymous for saying so. Whatever flaws I may have as a teacher (and my students know them better than I do), the comment describes what I am at least trying to do.
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