Dear Editor:
I would like to address your “Hey, teachers, leave those kids alone” editorial piece and the many problems I found within it. First, I would like to point out that all professors are held to a certain standard by their school and department, and their syllabi are reviewed. Now granted, this does not totally protect students from an “agenda” the professor might have, but I think it’s fair to say that generally, what is covered in class is legitimate, academic material. This leads me to my next point. Perhaps what you took to be a political rant favoring evil, warping socialism, could have been legitimate scholarly thought on the subject. Rather than sticking around and challenging your own beliefs and possibly learning a lot about something different, as well as maybe challenging the professor’s beliefs, you “ran for the hills.”
Second, I think it’s odd that you would bring up some obscure conspiracy theory regarding communism in America to drive your point home. However, I believe this points to your lack of education regarding socio-economic ideologies such as communism or socialism; perhaps you should have stayed in that class a little longer before writing this piece.
I think it is positively immoral of you to encourage students to avoid being taught by someone who views things differently. If you want to cripple your own education, then drop a class every time you disagree with the professor, but don’t tell others to do the same. The problem is not with overly opinionated professors; in fact regardless of beliefs, I prefer a professor who expresses their opinion because that often demonstrates a passion for their field of study. The problem is with students acting as if they were the ones who have been published and spent six or eight years in school, instead of the professors. You said “The truly amazing, life-altering professors on this campus understand that their job is to teach us how to think for ourselves, not what to think, or how to think like them,” and this is true for the most part. But what you left out is that the really, really good professors teach you how to think better than you did before, and often times, that means challenging every aspect of what you think now.
Taylor Dunn
Student