Left-Leaning Professors and Their Writing Assignments

My students are currently working on their second essay for my Freshman Composition class, a profile. I like teaching this assignment for several reasons. First, it's based primarily on "field" research, i.e., writing based primarily on the students' observation and interviews. Though somewhat time-consuming and labor-intensive, this kind of research has its own unique set of rewards, especially if the student picks a person or place to profile that is interesting to him (or her) personally or professionally. Students who already have their career goals in sight, for instance, tend to take full advantage of the opportunity this assignment provides them to observe and interview someone in their desired profession (e.g., teaching). Then again, students who really have no idea what they want, or how to benefit from this assignment, end up basically winging it: when I ask what their profile topic is they tell me it's their mother (even after I told them not to profile their mothers), or their boyfriend (ditto) or a concert (double-ditto). Or one day it's an amateur skateboarder (who happens to be their best friend), and the next it's a Kung Fu studio where he happens to work, which is problematic since a profile by definition is not about you, it's about someone or something else.

But I digress.

I started writing about this because this morning, searching for some sample profiles to show my students in preparation for our in-class critiquing activity, I literally stumbled on a gold-mine: an English professor named Dr. June Pullia from Louisiana State University, also teaches this assignment. She obviously teaches many of her classes online because she has posted a prodigious amount of documents for all the courses she teaches (including sample student essays, among them profiles, which I am planning to use in tomorrow's class discussion). This is obviously one overachieving professor.

I bookmarked her site and plan on returning. I like a lot of what she's doing and would like to incorporate some of her ideas in my syllabus and in future assignments. She does a really cool assignment which is team-based and research oriented, but highly original, where teams are assigned a decade in the life of the university to research and then create a booklet using MS Publisher. I'm not sure this is something I could do, primarily because of the technology required, but it might be something I could adapt.

Meanwhile, though, before moving on, I noticed she also requires students to write an essay in which they "Explain an Issue." How interesting. I'm teaching this same genre after the profile. I followed the link to the assignment. Here's what she wrote:

Write an essay where you explain an issue of interest to LSU students. An essay that explains an issue doesn't so much formulate an argument (an essay that advocates one particular position) as it explores a topic in depth by examining multiple perspectives about it. Thus, your research (and quest for outside sources--you'll need three, by the way) should lead you to find multiple points of view about this issue.

Very nice. Similar to my assignment. But then she starts talking about topics for this assignment. Like me, she's tired of essays that deal with the uber-controversial (and always poorly written) hot topics: gay marriage, abortion, death penalty, gun control, and the like. So she offers some suggestions that concern their own locality (Louisiana). I like that too. I wonder if I can think of similar local issues to steer my students to? Then she writes this:

At any rate, a good topic choice would be something that is currently in the news (so start reading newspapers and listening to NPR, and stop listening to Fox News! It's crap!).

Hmmm. NPR (good), Fox News (crap). Besides the fact that I find her word choice to be inappropriate in an academic setting (I always write "avoid slang, colloquialisms, and vulgarity" on my students'
papers), I'm not impressed with this professor's singling out Fox News as the type of news source to avoid. It can't be that it's because this professor is socially and/or politically liberal, could it? Even if that were true, professors are professionals. They are there to instruct, not indoctrinate, right? If Dr. Pullia believes stations like Fox News (italics used deliberately) should be avoided, she should explain why. There are plenty of reasons why I would steer my students away from Fox News, one of them being a conservative bias, but the more important one being the lack of depth in its reporting. However, I would in the same breath or paragraph include stations like MSNBC for the exact same reasons, with its liberal bent and its superficial reporting. I'd gladly direct my students to something like the PBS NewsHour with its fairly comprehensive coverage and intelligent debates.

I've drafted a personal email to Dr. Pullia but I haven't drummed up the nerve to send it yet. Here's what I wrote (after a fawning personal introduction):

It occurs to me that you could have been more precise in helping your students understand what your criteria for "crappiness" are. While I don't necessarily disagree with you about Fox News being "crap" in the sense that it does not go into depth about issues the way NPR might and also the fact that it has a conservative bias, to be consistent, you might also have included comparable news programs that represent a left-leaning bias, such as MSNBC. In this way, students would be taught to understand that it's not the political leanings of a program per se that warrant its being deemed "crappy" but how information is presented. I believe it's important to teach our students how to think, not what to think, and as such, to be careful about exposing our own biases in our classes. Presumably you agree?

Well, that's actually somewhat disingenuous. Presumably she won't agree. I know it, and I know she'll know I know it.  So it's all a little game, which is why I'll probably chicken out.

Besides, some measly adjunct from across the country shouldn't have to be the one calling this woman to task. Someone in her department--her superiors, her colleagues--should be challenging her. Even if she's tenured, there should be some level of accountability. But that's the problem, isn't it? Her colleagues no doubt share her views, and as a result they would be utterly baffled by the distinction I'm trying to make here.