During the spring of my senior year in college, I signed up for a class called "Cinema, Politics and Society in the Middle East." The professor was unabashedly pro-Palestinian, and the way she taught the region's history reflected her political bias. As the only defender of Israel in the class, I frequently found myself challenging her assertions and those of my classmates. At the same time, I also found myself exposed to the Arab narrative of modern Middle Eastern history, which was quite different from the one I had previously learned. I emerged from the course as staunchly pro-Israel as I had been before, but better able to articulate my views and to understand, if not necessarily agree with, the other side. Taking the class was among the best academic decisions I made at Princeton.
The recent exploits of Snehal Shingavi -- the Berkeley grad student whose course description for "The Politics and Poetics of Palestinian Resistance" included a warning that "conservative thinkers are encouraged to seek other sections" -- prompted me to think back to my experience studying the Middle East's politics and cinema in college. In trying to restrict the range of opinion in his classroom, Shingavi not only took a hearty swipe at important principles of unfettered academic debate, he also demonstrated a fundamental misunderstanding of the educational role of universities.
At their best, undergraduates come to class to have their views challenged, debated, and, ultimately, deepened. A course offering like Shingavi's that seeks to limit the range of views among students makes, by its very nature, for a less intellectually worthwhile class. It's not just those pro-Israel students (like me) who would have loved to take a course called "The Politics and Poetics of Palestinian Resistance" who are harmed by Shingavi's shenanigans; such behavior also harms those pro-Palestinian students who would have benefited from the intellectual confrontation that the presence of opposing views in a classroom provokes.
But if Shingavi doesn't get it, then I'm not sure his right-wing critics, so quick to seize on any example of liberal bias in the academy, quite get it either. Writing in National Review Online, Roger Kimball quickly disposes of Shingavi's trampling of academic freedom before getting to what he believes is the real problem: that Berkeley was offering a class called "The Politics and Poetics of Palestinian Resistance" -- "with a reading list featuring no fewer than three books by the Palestine apologist Edward Said" -- in the first place. For Kimball, this is a clear example of the unfortunate politicization of the academy.
Kimball, however, is unwilling to distinguish between indoctrination and provocative education. Apparently, in his view, any presentation of politically charged material by a politically charged professor is, on its face, indoctrination. I submit my own experience studying with a pro-Palestinian professor as evidence that this need not be the case. (Or my experience studying with a conservative economist. Or a radical utilitarian bioethicist.) Had these professors awarded better grades to students who agreed with them or otherwise coerced undergraduates into following their intellectual lead, they would have been crossing the line into indoctrination. But in my college experience that was never the case.
I have to confess to being puzzled by Kimball's allegation that politicized college courses are, in and of themselves, a bad thing. In even my most straightforward social-science classes, it was usually possible to discern where a professor fell on the political spectrum. I personally preferred those courses in which the professor let students know where he stood from the first day of class; those were the classes where I thought the hardest and learned the most. But to expect professors of any temperament to check their politics at the classroom door, as Kimball seems to be suggesting they do, is both impractical and anti-educational.
As for Shingavi, where he crossed the line was not in proposing to use his course as a bully pulpit for his controversial views -- provided that those views are indeed founded in serious academic inquiry and scholarship (I will give him the benefit of the doubt). Nor did his transgression lie in designing a reading list or curriculum that would support those views. Rather, it was in his attempt to ensure that no one in his classroom would ever disagree with his opinions that Shingavi's lack of respect for the educational process was revealed.
There is only one correct response now for Berkeley's pro-Israel partisans: They should sign up for Shingavi's class. They should do so both to learn from Shingavi -- by having their own views challenged -- and to teach him a lesson about the value of vigorous intellectual discourse. They should maintain an open mind in grappling with what he has to say, but they should not be afraid to retort with their own views as well.
If their experience is anything like mine, it will be well worth their time and effort. I once caught my Middle Eastern cinema professor smiling ever so slightly as she finished presenting her interpretation of some historical event and then turned toward me, anticipating that a challenge was already on its way. She knew that I disagreed with her, but she also knew that I was in her classroom because I cared enough to grapple with -- and learn from -- the opposing side. I suppose Roger Kimball would call her approach "the patent politicization of the curriculum." I would call it education.