Freshmen Orientation

Going back to school at the end of summer vacation has always been a bittersweet experience for college students. Now it can be just bitter.

“My first class as a college student proved to be typical of my college experience,” Nicole Kooistra writes in the latest issue of Chronicles. “A mandatory course for freshmen, it was intended to introduce us to a wide range of disciplines, yet the focus was on all that is non-Western and irrelevant.”

“The one classic work we read was Plato’s Republic; the rest of the term took up everything from the poetry of Bedouin women to Chinese philosophy.” Miss Kooistra is currently studying English literature at Northern Illinois University: “Why did I exchange an elite school for a workaday state university? My reasoning was that, if I was going to get the same education at both, I should choose the one that would cost my parents less.”

Although the toll that reeducation exacted on Miss Kooistra may not come out neatly in dollars and cents, her disillusionment comes through in her account:

• “At the state university, I took an American novels class that included Hannah Foster, Kate Chopin, and Toni Morrison but had no room for Mark Twain and Ernest Hemingway.”

• “My American literature professor spent more time on race and homosexuality in Moby Dick than on any other aspect of the story.”

• “The most disturbing aspect of the university is the savage hostility of professors and administrators toward Christianity. I have had several agnostic professors and one bitter atheist but not one who is known as a believer.”

• “I once had to meet with a professor to discuss my use of a biblical quotation in a paper arguing the commonalities between a passage from Dostoyevsky’s Notes From The Underground and a passage from Scripture. Despite the fact that Dosteyevsky was a Christian and that I was using the Bible as a literary source, my professor only allowed me to use the quotation, with great displeasure, after two meetings.”

That bias which Nicole describes permeates academia, even at colleges and universities originally established as religious institutions of higher learning. Polls consistently show that professors attend worship services in inverse proportions to the public as a whole.

“As a born-again Christian since 1999, I have encountered overt and subtle forms of intimidation,” writes Carol Swain, a professor of Political Science and Law at Vanderbilt University. “Often this takes the form of openly disparaging remarks made by colleagues about the intelligence of believers.”

Professor Swain is the founding director of the Veritas Institute for Racial Justice and Reconciliation. Writing in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Professor Swain notes that the bias experienced by students is nowhere near as subtle as that which faculty members encounter.

“I have watched helplessly as bright, conservative students are victimized again and again by faculty members who use the power of grading to push them toward Conformity,” Professor Swain writes. “Those students who fight back usually end up with reduced grade-point averages and fewer opportunities to matriculate at elite professional institutions.”

To a degree that underlines the problematic, even traumatic, trends Kooistra recounts with dismay, English professors seem to take pride in their invincibility to outside influence. And not just the more flamboyant ones who strut their stuff at the annual Modern Language Association conferences that Accuracy in Academia has covered for decades.

“I also tried to teach material that I cared about deeply rather than literary works that the English department recommended,” Murray Sperber, a professor emeritus at Indiana University-Bloomington writes. “Fortunately, my boss encouraged my excursions.”

And what material did the professor care about most deeply? “The single best course I taught in 40 years was the last one: an undergraduate class on Beat Generation writers.”

Miss Kooistra gives us a poignant coda on higher education today. “Since American universities are in a deplorable state, we must learn to educate ourselves,” Miss Koositra, who was homeschooled, writes. “Perhaps that is the most valuable lesson the professoriate has to teach.” Perhaps.

Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.