I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: 'O Lord, make my enemies ridiculous.' And God granted it.--Voltaire
So, I've been watching a lot of comedy specials the last week, rather uncontrollably, I thought I might have been trying to fill my life with some laughter (to clash against the darkness), but I've been listening to and watching some real "edgy" stuff, stuff people might consider "offensive," and then watching Jim Norton specials, BOOM! it hit me what I was doing: I was looking for a way to speak back at the ineffable of an experience I recently had as a professor where I felt, and I still feel, a bit censored and offended. It dawned on me that, as someone who BELIEVES in Free Speech, who believes in the democratic ideals of Free Speech, especially in the "academy," especially from professors--who should be considered at the vanguard of education and knowledge and Free Speech--I continue to be saddened by experiences, by stories I hear as well, where professors are being rapidly silenced or censored in the classroom (and sometimes, outside of it). Here's my thinking and situation:
So, the other day I'm in a classroom, I have a signed contract to teach, I've been teaching for ten years now, I have an MA and an MFA degree, three years of graduate classes beyond that, I have more credits as a graduate student than most PhD's do (and no PhD....yet: Fall 2015 that changes!), I have had over 2000 students at this point in my career, publications, sat on boards, run an academic center, been an academic consultant, a professional hired gun, so I think it's fair to say I know my stuff. In my entire ten years of teaching I have only had a problem with one student, and that student had threatened to kill an entire classroom of students when I threw him out of the class and reported him. This ratio of students and teachings to problems, changed last week.
On Friday I received an email from my boss at one of my jobs that three students had gone to the Dean and complained that I was discriminating against them because "they were Christian." Of course, the situation was blown WAY out of proportion, I had a meeting with my boss who is VERY cool, and we had a 45-minute talk, I explained how the student (the ring-leader) had freaked out when I was talking about the transition of Old English into Middle English and was mentioning Bede's and Caedmon's writings about the "genocide" of indigenous Anglo-Saxon and Celtic religion and culture, into a Catholicism, brought that into Epic and Romantic literature (the transition of Pagan literature into Christian), heading into the literature of the Crusades, and what the student objected to were the FACTS I was presenting: historical, concrete, provable, open any textbook on Medieval history FACTS. Now, as someone who teaches Rhetoric and Composition on a regular basis (or if you remember your own classes) I know that you can argue a lot of things, but you can't argue FACTS. You can't say, "No, nothing happened in New York City on 9/11, you're making that up!" because it's a FACT!
Anyway, the student was very upset, disputed facts, argued against facts with a theological debate (now, if we were arguing Theology, the student and I would have agreed on the points made--but this was history the student was debating against, not just debating, but denying and re-inventing), I tried my best to keep control of the class, show the student they didn't know what they were talking about, the student went from buffet-style Theology into some loose logical fallacy-ridden religious ramble, and when they said, "Hitler was a Jew!" I was done, shut down the entire conversation, and then of course, the next day, the email, followed by the meeting. The complaint was that I "discriminated against the student's religion." How so? "By offering facts.
Now, it's not like I am a hardcore Atheist, Secular Humanist, or even a Pantheist, out to disprove the world's religions, with an axe to grind against organized religion. I was raised Roman Catholic, I went to Seminary as a Roman Catholic, when I left Catholicism I went into Lutheranism before finding shelter elsewhere, my dominant spiritual focus and personal practice is the Judeo-Christian Mystical tradition, I have taught Religion classes for ten years, I have been a faculty advisor for Christian, Muslim, Jewish, and Pagan student groups, I am a HUGE supporter of the right to personal religious and spiritual expression, I serve as the Spiritual Advisor to several of my Christian friends, and while I think that healthy dialogue and debate is GOOD in academia, that questioning, wonder, research, even righteous indignation are GOOD things in the search for authentic dwelling in the world, that FACTS matter, that RESEARCH matters, that nothing is beyond questioning, that questions are good for developing an Intellectual capacity that have faith, or have a spirituality deeper than the unquestioned and unthinking unobserver.
While this IS my stand on the question (which, I don't think I even have to re-state to defend myself here), the last thing I am or would do is persecute my students or another person for their beliefs. I have students who have believes that I find deeply offensive (no rights for women, death to Jews, death to gay people, there is no Holocaust, that sort of shit), and while I am deeply opposed to those ideas, I would defend that student's right to believe in those things just as much as I would defend the Atheist's view to reject them.
I....BELIEVE....IN....ACADEMIC....INFORMED....FREE ....SPEECH, and I don't believe in either censorship nor silence.
I am also from the generation, rapidly dying, where a professor's education mattered for something. Their research, their teaching, their education, their ideas (what the Hell ever happened to informed ideas as golden?), their capital as an Intellectual (another dirty word these days), these things matter, they count, they are sacred to an Academic environment, and unless the professor is in the front of the classroom talking about Ancient Aliens writing the Bible, Descended Masters writing the Constitution, Yoga being 15,000 years old, talking about international Religion-based banking conspiracies, or that the earth is less than 6000 years old and science is completely bogus, unless I have gone crazy and show up to class without pants and clown paint on my nipples and begin to say that Ramses the Great had Kennedy killed, unless I am bat shit crazy and am not at the front of the room with facts, with my education, with sources, with my teacher's training, without the credentials of the institutions (#1 ranked) that I went to, NOT doing the job of education (passed down from professor to professor) that I was hired to do, then I shouldn't have to field things or suffer the disrespect from students, questioning from above me, that something I said was "offensive."
And then there is that term: "Offensive." What does that mean? How can an idea be "offensive," how can a "fact" be "offensive?" I can see telling a student a mother joke (about their mother) as being "offensive," I would agree that denigrating someone's appearance as being "offensive," I agree that being sexually suggestive or sexually intimidating to a student as being "offensive," I would 100% agree that insulting a student, defaming their beliefs directly (i.e., "Oh, you worship the Great Pumpkin, that makes you stupid, that's a stupid belief!") would be considered "offensive," but stating facts, how is that "offensive?" How can offering interpretations on historical events be "offensive?" I remember studying at Yale Divinity, John Hare, one of the greatest Philosophy of Religion professors in the world, a devoted Episcopalian, said that "Protestant Christianity is the only religion that makes logical sense," and I remember the Jewish and Muslim and Catholic students disagreeing with him, having an informed discussion with him (we were Religion Grad Students after all), but going and telling Mommy that they were "discriminated" against and "offended," in a classroom where debate is crucial, where if you don't know your stuff you don't get the right to make stuff up and debate as if you do, would have been unheard of. When I studied with Wes Widman at Boston University, in our 800-level Theology class, he called the Left Behind book series (and for that matter, a vigilant belief in the rapture), a "an intellectually dishonest theory haunting Christianity to this day," and some students in the class STRONGLY disagreed with him, no one ran to the Dean, to the Chair, to their parents, tried to get him fired, or complained "he offended me, he discriminated against me," because he (Widman) offered a theological (and logical) response to a crucial part of religious history and theology and identity. It would have been unthinkable as serious, educated students, and I believe that the administration would have thought it absurd to even mention to him if it were.
And what's with this term, "discriminated?" When a student says that a FACT discriminated against their beliefs, the REASONABLE response should be to have them do a research paper on the Civil Rights Movement, send them down to a Crisis Center in the inner city, and have them talk to people who have been DISCRIMINATED against because of their race and economic class, and see how far their, "My professor talked about the facts of the Crusades and it discriminated against me because I was offended by both the truth and his interpretation of the truth." There is so much in our society where people in this culture, if they don't have a victim-identity, they feel robbed of personhood, and yet, if they were REAL victims of discrimination and injustice and offensive behavior, they wouldn't know what to do with themselves: it would be devastating, the way Nietzsche talks about, "leveling."
And what's worse about the victim-identity existence is that it's always looking to be a victim, always looking for a way to claim a special status, not earned, as if that is the sign of existential authentic standing of personhood in our day. Discrimination is a POWERFUL word, and it's a REAL world, but if discrimination by hearing FACTS or a professor's lecture is just as bad as the Armenian Genocide, the Holocaust, Segregation, Slavery, then it downplays the real horrific injustices that those people, the dead and the survivors, suffered, really suffered.
So, I had a meeting, and again, my boss is very cool, I think very highly of them, and I know that shit rolls down hill, that no one wants a call from a Dean who should know better (who never came to speak to me despite a start of the semester speech of "I'm the person in your corner"), and have to meet with an adjunct about whether or not they were discriminating against students with Facts and their fancy Ivy League education, and the meeting went well. I told my boss the facts, they were supportive and understanding, the only suggestion to change given to me was to use "trigger warnings" in the classroom to protect sensitive students from the truth, from the material. Keep in mind that I DON'T believe in Trigger Warnings, I find them to be academically dishonest, intellectually insulting, and even to have to use them is a violation of my teaching style and beliefs.
Anyway, I gave a full account of the student, but there was a sentence that was said, a moment of truth, that stuck with me, I haven't been able to drop it (in my mind) since. I was told that, when the Dean heard the complaint from the student, after, "have a talk with this adjunct," was the thought, "now we're gonna have to call HR, break a contract," and that sentence, that idea, that HR would be called, I could have my contract broken for teaching, for speaking about facts, for being not only a Christian, but an academic, who was accused of discriminating against Christians (odd note: my student said the Inner Crusades NEVER happened), of being a thinker accused of thinking the "unthinkable" (which, according to Heidegger, is that, especially in the academy, "we are no longer thinking"), and the unthinkable being FACTS and their interpretation (a same interpretation that could be found in dozens upon dozens of books) in a classroom based on my education and research, and then I have to be a douchebag, call my attorney (and I have a childhood friend who is a GREAT ONE), contact the AAU, the media, and turn around and be forced to sue a major SCIENCE University (the irony on that is not lost for me: a Science University dismissing a professor for allegedly using facts to discriminate against a student's religion, when that professor is not only a person of faith, but is teaching provable, repeatable, unarguable facts: can the student claim "offensive teaching"and "discrimination" in their Chemistry classes because Science is provable and repeatable and questions Creationism), and a student, for breach of contract and defamation, because a student was mad at me that I said 'the Crusades happened and there were Christian clergy and knights who were a part of it.'
There was once a time when indulgences bought sin, paid for a sin, a made up, non-legal, non-scientific, non-Biblical idea in exchange for a real act of hypocritical defiance of one's belief, of the facts of law and freedom and order, and this selling of indulgences, of favors from the unfavorable that brought unfavorable results, were the valued tokens of one's inauthentic faith life, and now, these days, the lack of academic integrity, the silencing of Free Speech, the censoring of experts and scientists and professors and intellectuals is the new indulgence, the new sin tax for the uneducated and overly-zealous masses, who want nothing more, than to defy reason and faith, so that a Jerusalem can burn, yet again. We give pundits and parents and students and administrators and members of the media a free pass to violate our integrity, so that they never have to truly face themselves, alone in the mirror, with the God of their own demonized delusions, terrified of what Academic Integrity really means. This may not have been the start of the Dark Ages, but it was certainly its zenith. If the Dark Ages showed us anything, other then the futility and damage of faith to control and be in charge of academic and scientific and scholarly truths, it showed us that it's a hard struggle to regain our liberties and freedoms, when we have so easily given them up to the Inquisitors of ideology.
"Jacques deMolay, thou art avenged!"
I think of Nietzsche, teaching, writing, saying, "God is dead, and we have killed him, you and I" and how radical that would have been in the 1880's, how challenging at that time, or Marx's claim that "Religion is the Opiate of the Masses," or Darwin's work on Evolution, Einstein's Godless Physics, Russell's Logic, Dewey's Pragmatism, the advances in Science and Philosophy and all the hard research on History, the present work of Dawkins and Hitchens and Harris whose science and secular humanism I find empowering, not defeating to my inner life because I RESPECT their scholarship as experts, their thoughts, their work, and I think of 120 years of Biblical History scholarship which has given us a view of the repression of the true history of the world's religions, the rise of modern Theology, the continuity of Schopenhauer to Schleiermacher to Kierkegaard to Bardt to Boltman to Bonhoeffer to Tillich and how these great theologians could bare the Truth, could be great academics, and could rise above "cite-texting" and still remain major definers and thinkers that shake the academy to this day, who could remain defenders of the academy, of free thinking, and yet, remain men of faith. It is no accident that to this day, in every respectable Systematic Theology class, it always starts with Kierkegaard. If you aren't starting from doubt and facts, you will never end up with a strong, inner faith.
I am reminded here of Immanuel Kant, a philosopher I am not really that into, but I remember from my Enlightenment Philosophy class, a line I once read that he wrote: "One can only consider themselves a person (man) of faith, when they are willing to look at all the evidence that proves their faith disproven, accept those facts, and still, at the end of the day, believe." Maybe this is one of the many reasons I am hesitant to confess a religious ideology, but quick to defend it in others, claim a deep, defiant, honest, existential spirituality of my own. I want an Enlightenment Faith, a Renaissance Spirituality, a Post Modern Esoteric Identity, one informed by reason and logic and truth and facts, one in concert with intellectual discourse, multi-culturalism, respect for divergent beliefs and backgrounds in informed conversation, a respect for science, for research, for the essential ideals behind the creation and establishment and continuing of the academia, not one threatened by a thought. If your faith, if your religion, if your academic strangle on your position, if your entire University can be shaken by a thought, your first response should be shame, not anger, not "silence him/her."
What am I trying to say here: I feel wounded to have been questioned. I feel wounded that I had to defend the use of the Truth and Facts in my class. I feel wounded that in this day and age Republican politicians can get on TV and make fun of people with great, professional educations, as if they were choosing between Coke being better than Pepsi, I am wounded that my story is similar to so many other professors and adjuncts these days, I am wounded that otherwise smart students are "offended" and feel "discriminated" by an educated and well-prepared professor at the front of the classroom offering FACTS they don't know, I am wounded that I now teach for four months delicately balancing an egg on a spoon for a student who has no place in a classroom at a science University where facts take knee to religious fancy, interpretations they are unfamiliar with, views they have never encountered, and then that professor has to atone for being a professor, for not being some delicate sleepwalker trying to navigate a room of glass. I feel wounded that the idea of a professor who offers an academic interpretation, who offers facts, who taught 97 students that day, and encountered one who was not ready/comfortable for what they heard in the classroom, needs to respond, third hand, on whether-or-not I'm not only hurting a student's feelings by teaching facts, but that I may just be, corrupting the youth. I'm not even a fan of hemlock, but I guess, like injustice, I could get used to the taste.
Truth is, folks, professors are scared. Pseudo-news, the Crisis Cult of Victim-Identity, Over-Litigiousness, Helicopter Parents, an under-educated Administrator class, an unthinking HR bureaucracy that makes determinations on expertise without having one, the fear of adjunct faculty unity, and a disrespect of scholarship in preference for belief, has professors on the RUN. When did the educated become the bottom feeders of "educated" society? I don't know why anyone would want to be a professor (or worse, a High School teacher) anymore, outside of the love of teaching and the love of learning and wisdom (which is why I do it, still). Professors are silent, scared, we say things like, "I would never say out loud, but...." or "I'm just happy to have a job, but...." and at no other time in our Post-Enlightenment History have academics, professors, thinkers, been in more of a retreat until now. The fact that philosophy is an "unthinkable" major these days, is an absurd major, is sign-of-the-times that thinking and academic freedom is not only sick, it has taken to its sick bed and has lost all hope of recovery. I even have little hope that this post will do anything other than being a swing in the dark at a stalker who is too fast, too deadly to compete, fairly with: academic silence. For Dante, it wasn't the sin that landed one in Hell, it was loss of hope. The greater the loss of hope for truth, the greater the depths to which one found themselves not only rooted in sin, but paying for their sins: Loss of Hope Encourages Sin, Invokes Hell, Prolongs Suffering.....but that's a subject for a more devoted post.
Hell (no pun intended), if there were ever a reason to become an Atheist, if I can point to a time were inner meaning was less important than freedom, liberty, intellectual integrity, outside of my childhood, it would be now. I'm a bit done arguing this, being silent about this, and not taking to the front on this, over the last year or so, and seeing situations like mine, becoming more and more prevalent. It is stuff like this that made me leave Seminary, leave my life into the clergy, my move to a Philosophical Theology PhD (a subject I LOVED for its intellectual devotion), it is stuff like this that made me fear the faithful back then, made me realize that within the non-academic world of faith, lack of education was a blessing, education a curse, all subjects I have read widely, studied hard, spoken often about, and worked hard to reclaim from the darkness of silence, censorship, and ignorance of the material. Show me the zealously-uneducated faithful, show me the pseudo-liberals, and I will show you the death of Faith in humanity, of Hope, and of course, loss of Hope....
Here's my summary: the death of the respect of academic credentials, of research, of intellectual devotion, of academic theory, of science and facts, the return of beliefs being more important than academic integrity, is not a sign that we are becoming more inclusive, not in the least: to have unthinkable thoughts, unthinkable learning, unrepeatable facts, untreatable experts, when tattle tails and the easily offended and discriminated against threaten the integrity of the academic world, then the writings on the wall, the Enlightenment has come to an end, welcome to the new Dark Ages.
Wake me when indulgences go out of fashion again.
