Many of my students this semester like to throw around the term “bias” when evaluating library and Web sources for their essays. Certainly, it’s a useful category of analysis, but the increased interest in the term here (as compared to the interest at UMass or Pitt) is remarkable. At the same time, though, it’s something I should have expected, given the highly conservative politics of much of the student body here: “bias” as a category of analysis will of course take on more importance for those whose politics construct liberal open-mindedness and the privileging of engaging a diverse range of perspectives as somehow problematic.

The next major essay assignment in my syllabus asks students to do close, careful analytical work with two difficult texts (published essays of around 20 pages or so) and develop a response that “wrestles” with the difficulty of those texts and creates something new and interesting out of that “wrestling.” In the past, I’ve paired an excerpt from Brothers and Keepers with an excerpt from Discipline and Punish (yes, I was a new teacher; the choice of assignment came out of the intersection of Bartholomae and Petrosky with what was going on with my brother), paired Mark Edmundson’s “The Uses of a Liberal Education” with Wesley Shumar on the commodification of higher education or Jean Anyon on the class structure of high school, paired Susan Sontag’s “Against Interpretation” with William Gass’s “On Reading to Oneself,” paired Malcolm Gladwell on the anthropology of shopping with David Guterson on the Mall of America. So: prison, education, interpretation, consumerism.

This time around, I think I’d like my students to tackle bias. And I’m thinking about recent and ongoing blog conversations, and so one text that comes immediately to mind for me is Chapter 1 from Michael Bérubé’s What’s Liberal about the Liberal Arts: that’ll provoke some classroom sparks here, I grin and tell myself.

But, see, that immediate felt smug confidence is too often a warning sign for me. Like, You’re feeling a little too good about yourself here, Professor Mike the Would-Be Wonder-Teacher.

Where, then, to best observe the interaction of student ideologies and professorial ideologies at my new institution? If I’m going to try to watch my step as a new professor here, to get a better sense of the ideological and academic climate, where might I look? Well, yeah: duh. I go, of course, to ratemyprofessors.com, and I check out my colleagues, especially those whose ideologies I know. And I find something both interesting and not altogether unexpected: “Instructor X,” the student writes, “will give you an A, as long as you discuss [Instructor X's field of scholarly interest] with him and [engage in an outdoor recreational activity in said field of scholarly interest] with him.” The student gives said instructor high ratings across the board.

For my institution, this genre of comment is unfortunately not uncommon. Nor is it unexpected: we all know that in deeply hierarchical organizations, obsequiousness can go a long way. What’s interesting, though, is the way it constructs instructor response. Here’s how to get the instructor to do what you want, it says. And it gives the instructor top scores in “easiness,” “helpfulness,” and “clarity” for being optimally labile. Which makes me wonder: even in a student-centered apparent laziness enhancer like ratemyprofessors, what criteria might they usefully add to broaden their appeal beyond the how-can-I-optimize-my-laziness crowd? How many of the students who browse ratemyprofessors might be interested, say, in an instructor who scores high in “rigor”? What if “labile” were a synonym for “helpful” and “easy”: would students go for that? Your students?

If so, how might they connect to readings about bias? And here’s the central motivation, the reason for my post, to which I hope you might respond, dear reader: what roughly 20-page text might you assign as a rigorous, careful, and interesting alternative perspective to Bérubé’s on bias in academia?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 10th, 2006 at 11:01 pm and is filed under Academia. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.