On Wednesday, March 19th, a group of USM students, staff and faculty traveled from the Portland campus to Lewiston-Auburn College (LAC) to participate in a discussion titled
“The Place of Ideology in the Classroom.” A part of the Gloria S. Duclos 2008 Convocation on Academic Freedom, this was uniquely a student-led event.
USM staff members Gabe Demaine and Pat Finn organized a “Freedom Bus” to travel from Portland to LAC for the event, and one of my professors, Dr. Wendy Chapkis, decided to take our Politics of Difference class along for the ride.
Here I present a journal I kept to document the experience.
4:13 p.m. – We “Freedom Bus” riders are gathering in the Woodbury Campus Center amphitheater. Dr. Chapkis had our class write brief essays on an assigned historical “freedom bus,” and we’ve been asked to read them aloud. Me and the other woman who wrote about Rosa Parks and the Montgomery bus decide to split up so we each get to talk.
4:42 p.m. – We’re on the bus – a cushy VIP coach – and Dr. Chapkis is getting things going by describing one of her own bus experiences. In 2003, she and other activists protesting the beginning of the war in Iraq were arrested for civil disobedience in front of Senator Olympia Snowe’s office. They were transported to Cumberland County jail in a bus.
I feel so fortunate right now to be in a learning community in which many professors are politically active, and I think that this is an important aspect of academic freedom, which is what today is all about. Employees of the university can participate in actions against what they see as injustice, without fearing the loss of their jobs.
5:23 p.m. – We have arrived at LAC and people are mingling. I have been staying close to people I know.
5:30 p.m. – Everyone is settling in their seats. Chairs are set up in comma-shaped groups of about seven, so I sense that small-group discussions will be a prominent aspect of the event.
5:45 p.m. – For the last fifteen minutes, various administrators and people involved in the planning of this event have been outlining the history building up to tonight. In fall 2006, USM closed the “Can’t Jail the Spirit” art show. Some reactions called the closure an act against academic freedom. The Gloria S. Duclos convocation committee, which chooses a theme for a series of focused presentations each year, decided to center on academic freedom this year. LAC students organized to create tonight so that students, too, got a voice in the series. Tonight’s discussion will focus on silenced minorities in the classroom, and the student-professor power imbalance this causes.
6:10 p.m. – We have been divided into small groups, as I anticipated.
7:00 p.m. – The LAC organizers made two video “vignettes” to stimulate conversation. The first is a scene showing a political disagreement in the classroom, and the difficultly students can face if they find their opinions in the minority and in disagreement with views held by a professor.
The second explores student religious convictions, and the ways in which they also can be silenced in the classroom.
After each “vignette,” the facilitators passed around discussion questions to grapple with in our small groups. In the first discussion, I was the first to speak up, but the facilitator’s body language sent the message that he was uninterested in what I was saying. Self-conscious, I haven’t said much since.
How odd that at a discussion of academic freedom, I feel silenced.
The LAC professor in my group seems very concerned with the issues raised, and asked us students what she could do to ensure that students feel comfortable to freely express their opinions in her classes. I was really touched by this, as she seemed to genuinely value our suggestions.
7:10 p.m. – One of the problems expressed by members of my group is the tendency for some professors to call on students with minority opinions to express THE conservative viewpoint, or THE liberal perspective, and so on.
This habit not only causes these students to feel as if they are being picked on, it also falsely oversimplifies matters.
In reality there is never a single conservative, liberal, or whatever opinion on an issue, but rather many, sometimes similar views held by those that identify within these categories.
Professors can improve by not presenting opinions in this flattened manner, but rather recognizing and approaching viewpoints as multifaceted.
7:20 p.m. – We’re in a planning session for future action in light of our discoveries tonight. Someone just mentioned the importance of being an ally, and this is something that has been emphasized in my Politics of Difference class as well.
One can act as an ally by standing together with someone who is being marginalized, regardless of whether one personally identifies with him or her.
In the university, this seems like an especially useful tool in building more comfortable spaces for expression, as allies can act to shift the power imbalance students face in the classroom.
7:25 p.m. – We Portlanders are back on the “Freedom Bus” and I am thinking about how impressive tonight’s program was. The LAC students organized the event successfully as an engaging dialogue, although, as in my case, which might demonstrate part of the problem, discussions may not have been as open as would be ideal.
The next convocation event, which revisits the cancellation of Tom Manning’s “Can’t Jail the Spirit” exhibit, will take place this Friday, April 11, in the Talbot Auditorium.
It will feature Svetlana Mintcheva, the art director of the National Coalition Against Censorship Arts Program; Dan Chard, a senior history major; Marie Follayttar, a senior art major; and G. Bug Swenson, a renowned Kennebunk artist displaying his “academic freedom” art work.
They will reevaluate the cancellation of the controversial exhibit and look at its implications for academic freedom for USM and beyond, based on new research into the forces and events influencing then-President Richard Pattenaude’s decision.