Robert Jensen on Academic Freedom in Counterpunch:
All teaching -- especially in the humanities and the social sciences -- has a political dimension, and we shouldn't fear that. The question isn't whether professors should leave their politics at the door (they can't) but whether professors are responsible in the way they present their politics and can defend their pedagogical decisions. It's clear that every decision a professor makes -- choice of topics, textbook selection, how material is presented -- has an underlying politics. If the professor's views are safely within the conventional wisdom of the dominant sectors of society, it might appear the class is apolitical. Only when professors challenge that conventional wisdom do we hear talk about "politicized" classrooms.
But just because the classroom always is politicized in courses that deal with how we organize ourselves politically, economically, and socially, we should not suggest that it's all politics. Because there's a politics to teaching doesn't mean teaching is nothing but politics; indeed, professors shouldn't proselytize for their positions in the classroom. Instead, when it's appropriate -- and in the courses I teach, it often is -- professors should highlight the inevitable political judgments that underlie teaching. Students -- especially those who disagree with a professor's views -- will come to see that the professor has opinions, which is a good thing. Professors should be modeling how to present and defend an argument with evidence and logic.
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Her face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, she sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of her feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm . . . . irresistibly propels her into the future to which her back is turned, while the pile of debris before her grows skyward. (Walter Benjamin, revised)
