I found lots of school assignments to be personally offensive, as they all infringed upon my right to sleep.

Seriously now, it's marvelous that there are people who want to opt of something before they know what it is. Not very clear on the whole concept of "education", are they>

I decided a while ago that I was only willing to be concerned about works that someone found personally offensive and could explain why. I do not care what you think someone else may find offensive. I also do not discuss the quality of a film or book with someone who has not seen or read the work in question, or if I haven't seen/read it myself.

That said, there is an argument to be made that at least one section of a required class have a "non-controversial" syllabus. If sex and swearing bother you, there are large pastures of literature in English that you may study.

As to the non-required courses, students are free to not read a required text. Professors are free to grade them accordingly.

This is just plain nuts. Some people apparently define education as 'learning stuff that doesn't make me feel uncomfortable'.

Can we apply this to the teaching of other subjects? Southern whites upset about histories that mention the Klan can demand that those histories be replaced by works that don't? Comparative politics students who don't want to learn that other countries have systems that are just as democratic as the US but don't work in the same way (and I've had some) can demand books that take their feelings into account? Political theory students can demand that they not be taught Marx or, say, Nozick?

Where does this line get drawn?

"A lot of students are being forced to choose between their personal or religious beliefs and the demands of education"

Is this really about literature? Or could this possibly be an anti-evolution law disguised as an anti-pornography law? Maybe I'm being overly suspicious, but if you get a few fundamentalist students to take courses on biology and demand alternative materials any time the professor mentions evolution, I suspect this will really be disruptive. And even in Arizona, being anti-pornography is probably a much more popular stance than being anti-evolution. I wonder what group originally wrote this bill.

'They' used to say that California is filled with silly people with silly notions, but ever since Dubya took over, the real weirdness has been coming from the red states.

Scraps: Sure, by some of them. Others think it's better to develop an immune system.

what peeves me about this, is the assumption recording is the same as permitting. I like ice storm, i think its a great novel. I also think that it is one of the more sexually conserative texts ive read. It condemns behaviour in a way neo-cons would seem to like

That said, there is an argument to be made that at least one section of a required class have a "non-controversial" syllabus.

How would this work, precisely? At most schools, there are more people in any given section than would be offended by any given work, and it's not fair to those other students to force an inferior education on them.

I teach Introduction to Psychology every fall. Should one of our sections avoid discussing evolutionary psychology and gender identity formation? And do you honestly want to work with the therapist who's always picked the "safe" section?

As to the non-required courses, students are free to not read a required text. Professors are free to grade them accordingly.

You said it. Frankly, I'd say the same applies to the required courses. Probably 90% of the value of college is in challenging your assumptions. The choice to get the education is a choice to deal with that.

We are talking about college here, right? In college, students are supposedly learning higher-order critical thinking and communication skills. I've always told my students (and my own children) "You don't have to like it: you just have to have a coherent opinion about it and express it well." Honestly, it's easier to express a negative opinion than a positive one, when it comes to literature.

Although when it came to the third time my kid was required to read The Lord of the Flies, she did try to get out of it, and I supported her. It's a nasty little piece of work in the first place, and requiring students to read it three times in the space of three years is a bit much. But that was eight, ninth, and tenth grades, not college.

My reaction is "if they don't want to learn, why are they in school?"

I thought part of being a college student was experimenting with ideas that are not accepted by your parents, at least when they aren't around to frown at you.

Are there situations in which a student can justifiably refuse to read a required text?

Teresa's point-by-point post reminds us that it's ALL about definitions...

Education is challenging, that's the way it works for crying out loud.

“There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all argument, and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance. This principle is, contempt prior to examination."

I was going to suggest that if you knew more about the denizens of our beloved state Legislature, this would come as no surprise. But, sadly, this tells you all you need to know about them. Sigh.

Probably 90% of the value of college is in challenging your assumptions. The choice to get the education is a choice to deal with that.

Lucy - Your daughter must have found that maddening. I was forced to read Washington Square twice in High School, and again in college - Lord how I hate that book, although I do see how people could like it or find it valuable.

When I got serious about finishing my undergrad degree, I took a class (a six-credit class, too!) that had a mammoth reading list, pretty much a novel a week. And, at a Catholic university, nobody complained about any of the themes, at least that I was aware of. But, this was also in NYC. (Quite a few did complain about the workload - to which the prof said, "Tough noogies! This is a required class.")

What I mind about the idiocy in Arizona is not so much that some students may be able to duck reading things that challenge their world-view, but that by objecting, they may very well deny others the opportunity to grow.

Maybe we can find some students in Arizona who would be willing to violently object to the pablum that the (presumably conservative Christian) students comprising "some people" want everybody to read.

Lucy - Sorry, I just realized that I assumed that the kid in question was a girl while you indicated no such thing. My bad.

Larry, I think pronouns are okay grounds for assigning other sex-specific referents. :)

Is this really about literature? Or could this possibly be an anti-evolution law disguised as an anti-pornography law?

It's an anti-education law, designed to be extensible to any curriculum or concept that someone doesn't want presented. Naughty literature, evolution, cosmology, socialist thought (or any particular stripe of political or economic thought that varies with a Received Wisdom), and sooner or later physics (to avoid a Godwinian Moment, I will observe that all sorts of people, in all sorts of places, who can't parse relativity decide that it must, for that reason, be incorrect; they'd apply the same thing to differential calculus if they could get through the front door on it).

Opposition to what we broadly consider "higher education" isn't remotely new. In America, it's always existed, but wasn't very potent when only the sons of the aristocracy attended college, and there acquired mainly a "classical" education. It expanded slowly, with a partial bye for physicians and lawyers, since people generally wanted their doctors to know something about the craft, and law was considered what we'd now call a skilled trade, but things didn't really hit the impeller until the turn of the (last) century, when large numbers of European immigrants arrived, many with university educations, and far more with the idea that a university education was a positive good, regardless of class. They started getting their kids into college, and colleges started expanding. The nativists (as well as the immigrants-turned-nativists*) lit into this with their typical psychomotor fury, and it has not subsided. The present Horowitzian subsidized fraud-o-rama draws much of its support from this direction. A development is the root idea that education is supposed to indoctrinate** with Exact Truth, rather than stimulate the self-directed desire to learn, and therefore if any idea other than Exact Truth is being presented, in whatever context, the students are being "indoctrinated" with it.

*Yes, I know this is in a sense redundant, but we are talking about what Lazarus Long might have called "the heritage peasantry."

**The nicest word I could plausibly use.

Well, as someone who majored in English, I'd like to nominate the following works for censorship -- excuse me, opting out:

1) The Great Gatsby. I was raised by commie pinko hippies. As such it is morally unacceptable for me to read about boring whiny rich people.

2) Paradise Lost, because Adam and Eve have sex in Eden, thus requiring a lot of teenagers to discuss sex in front of their professors. This isn't just morally unacceptable, it's unspeakably mortifying, especially when they turn out to know more about it than you do. On the same grounds we should eliminate Shakespeare, Marlowe, and anything at all written in the Restoration, particularly the poetry.

3) James Joyce. Turning my brain into tapioca veeery sloooowly over the course of umpteen million pages is definitely morally unacceptable.

4) Any author of whom I announced, upon closing the book, "Well, he was getting paid by the word." Dumas and Thackeray are prime offenders.

5) Thomas Hardy, because he made me cry and then refused to make it All Better in the end.

6) John Dunne, because really, people, only an academian could love this man, he's a misogynistic creep, and sometimes "unappreciated" happens for a reason, OK? I'm lookin' at you, Professor "Compare the Poetry of Dunne and Shakespeare", and I only said it nicer than that at the time because I needed to pass the exam.

7) Walt Whitman. BOR-ing.

8) Any large, unwieldy, and dull-looking book assigned to me at the same time that I have a Chem exam coming up.

Now, some of you down there in Arizona may be saying that this isn't what you had in mind. Well, guess what? These are MY "personal or religious beliefs". I strongly believe, as a college student, that I shouldn't have to read anything I don't want to or can't understand, especially when it's inconvenient to me to do so. This is a belief shared by many college students, one that I think you'll find passes the litmus test which currently defines religion (i.e., "belief held in the utter absence of facts to support it.") It's right up there with the belief that professors are obligated to give you a good grade no matter how late the paper was and the belief that grading for grammar is an insult to your creativity.

Up until now, of course, students have been forced to either abandon their beliefs or be martyred for them (aka "flunk out"). As a former student, I want to thank you for giving them this chance to be true to the faith and only read things they want to. I am sure none of them will ever dream of abusing the enormous latitude you have shown them merely to blow off the night's studying and get drunk on cheap beer instead.

Cheers, Arizona Senate Committee! See you in the bar!

It's bad enough when these sorts of "rules" are made for kids in public school. These rules now apply to COLLEGE STUDENTS! This is completely insane.

This seems like just another shot in the ongoing right-wing battle to remove "threatening" content from higher education. ("Threatening" being any content that might dislodge the power of fundamentalist indoctrination on the minds of future voters.) Reference many posts by Michael Berube, and this one in particular. (Patrick linked to it, last month.)

It's disheartening to see these campaigns succeed in tricking a confused student into shooting herself in the foot -- and Dobson-intimidated legislators seizing on the confusion.

Just this morning, my wife and I were talking about the fact that the middle east used to be a center of education and culture, and wondering who was due up for a Dark Ages next.

Still, Kat has a point. I could have gotten out of reading One Hundred Years of Solitude, the most appropriately titled book that I've ever had to write a meaningless essay on. What's the fall of western civilization, compared to that?

yeah, and once I started reading Catcher in the Rye, I was wishing my old man HAD signed the permission to opt out slip. I was a sophmore in high school.

A parent made quite the flap because she had the time to count the dirty words in it and didn't want her kids reading 'that crude trash.' The solution was to send out a permission slip, the alternate book was Huckleberry Finn which I'd read two or three times and written a paper on.

My Conservative (as in John Birch) father asked me what this was all about, shook his head and said, "if a book could corrupt you, I didn't raise you right. And you're already read all of Mr. Twain's works twice at least."

I thought it sucked. Holden Caulfield is a self-centered whiner and it was much easier to write an essay about someone I loathed.

Sigh.

Larry, Lucy wrote "I supported her", which indicates gender.

Short as it is, I struggled mightily with getting through Lord Jim, there was just something that went against my grain, but found Heart of Darkness (not on the reading list) fascinating. Perhaps it was the reverse with many boys, some certainly chafed at Emma, though it sent me off to read the rest of Austen. Don Brown was one of those teachers who could change your life. I think everyone had troubles with The Tree of Man, so that formed a kind of bond across the whole class.

We also did Lord of the Flies, and it was confronting, but good to discuss & think about. It was also closer to my personal sf reading than most of the books on the syllabus. It impressed me enough that I read The Inheritors (name?) later on my own time.

But it puzzles me how, unless you are moving around a lot, one book could get repeated in consecutive years. A school surely wouldn't have an English Department so stupid as to do that? In a benignly-neglected Australian public school we were moved through from straightforward & exciting Shakespeare to more complex ones, and similarly with non-Shakespeare books. I don't remember ever having to study one work twice in the six years (late 60s - early 70s).

Richard: Up here in Sodom-on-the-Rideau, err, Ottawa, CORE texts are not easy to opt out of, and as I am in religion, it is in fact IMPOSSIBLE to opt out of a text or movie on religious grounds, but.

Nobody was required to stay and watch Dead Man Walking for Death and Dying. Which is good, as I would have dropped or failed the class rather than watch it. That movie offends my very personal but utterly non-negotiable belief that I will not watch depictions of brutal violence.

I trooped into office hours, explained I was opting out, and agreed to read several articles by Sister Prejean and take the alternative essay question. No problem.

I believe similar offers are made over other movies, and I think once or twice with texts. Witch Craze/Inquisition stuff is sort of a known issue.

Usually if something is considered to be a potential problem, either it's optional, or it is addressed in the first class, well before drop date, or it's offered with an alternate. The alternate may be more boring, more work, or both.

The English department requires you to read Leonard Cohen for the Modern Can Lit course. You do NOT have to read Beautiful Losers; Favourite Game is acceptable. It's not as good a book, but hey.

IOW, I don't actually understand why this policy is NECESSARY. You can't just, you know, drop half a course's reading and walk away whistling, but in my experience, if there's a real issue, you go see the prof.

Oh, my. There are many offensive books. I know. I read them.

Why doesn't she just say: "The book is terminally boring. Real people aren't like that. My professor has his head in the sand. I think he owns stock in the publishing company, or the author's his cousin. A second rate book doesn't further my education. The poor prof. is living in the dim and distant past. I should have enrolled in WSU and gotten a 'world class' education (go cougs!)." Then just read the book.

There seems to be something mildly odd here having to do with the nature of electives.

When I was in University there was no required course. Required courses for a major, yes, but no courses that I had to take no matter what.

If I elect to take a given subject, some baggage comes along with it, even if I don't like it. My personal view is that nobody should be able to get a degree in English without having studied Paradise Lost and Lycidas, at a bare minimum; my undergraduate university required either one seventeenth-century course (Milton; or C17 lyric) or one eighteenth-century course (Augustans plus Johnson), which was a rather wider latitude. But you couldn't major in English without an exposure to some subset of those books.

By the same token, I dislike Charlotte Bronte to a high degree, but I had to take both Jane Eyre and Villette in a course on the Victorian Novel, and I agree that it's ridiculaous to study the Victorian Novel (or anything later) without exosure to at least Jane Eyre.

If you strongly object to something that's central to your major, maybe you should have a different major. If it's not central to your major, then you should be able to avoid it in a moderately well-structured curriculum. (If you can't, due, say, to some crazed faculty member's forcing his own idée fixe onto the curriculum (everyone has to read the Confessio Amantis!) maybe you want to reconsider the match between your college/university and what you want to take; another one may have a set of course requirements more suited to the subject.)

If your college requires shared reading for everyone regardless of major, well, I'd argue that that's what a good primary and secondary education is about. Tertiary education is about specialization (although not to the degree of a post-graduate course). Look for another school.

In none of these cases should problems the legislation seems to envisage come up. The reader with a tender conscience which will be affected by anything racier than Vanity Fair can avoid having to read Ulysses by giving the English department a wide berth and majoring in European History or Classics.

James: Well, we had to take a course offered by the Philosophy department that was half formal logic and half ethics.

That material is non-optional and University wide. Including some disturbing stuff, but it was sensibly and sensitively handled. (We do NOT show the Stanford Experiement movie at the end of a class just before a two week break. It is SUPPOSED to disturb people; plan for them to be disturbed.)

You know, really, I basically agree with you, however stubborn I am sounding. But I do think that if it's not tempered by some willingness on the part of faculty to be sensibly flexible when someone comes in three quarters of the way through a text and says 'look, this is vile, I can't finish it', that's a recipe for disaster too.

Also, while this may not be an issue in English departments, where 90 percent of the core texts can be picked up at Chapters, you don't always know what the texts are until the bookshop calls to tell you what they can actually GET this term. What do you do when the texts change after the drop date, and suddenly you're doing, for another example now burnt forever into my memory, recently-released stuff on Waco that the PROF hasn't read yet?

Sodom-on-the-Rideau, err, Ottawa

Are we talking of Canada's Ottawa, Marna? Can't be.

Serge: yes, and why not? People only think we're boring because we know how to keep it out of the news :)

everyone has to read the Confessio Amantis!

Everyone SHOULD read the Confessio Amantis.

One of my college instructors came up with a clever solution to a student's objection to Catcher in the Rye. The student told him her parents had said she wasn't allowed to read the book because it had bad stuff in it. He didn't argue with her, he just went ahead and assigned another book...Sula. Of course, her parents had never heard of that one, so they were fine with it.

I'm moving there! I find everything that is required reading offensive! I'll graduate fasters har har!

Or could this possibly be an anti-evolution law disguised as an anti-pornography law?

Perhaps not in intent (although there have been some notable victories against anti-evolution of late) but I bet that will be a major application if it goes through.

I don't really get why they think reading the book is the same as subscribing to its values, but whatever. If it's a compulsory course, I'd be inclined to let them out of it *sometimes*, on the condition that they made a class presentation or essay of equal or greater workload to whatever they were avoiding, on the subject of why they didn't want to read this book.

It should require research. In some cases it might require them to be familiar with the body of criticism surrounding the work, and be very difficult to do without reading the book. That would be too bad, but their own choice. Above all, it should require them to learn something.

In year eight, and then at another school, in year nine, I opted out of dissection on conscience grounds. I think there's a place for dissection, but I question its educational value at that context and at that level of study, and I think it's wasteful of animal life.

Instead, in year eight I did a research project on human anatomy, and in year nine I used a computerised simulation of a dissection. My year eight school wasn't really prepared, and the vague project they gave me actually involved more work than an afternoon's dissecting. But you know what? That was fine. Ideally it'd be equal, but I don't mind doing a bit more work if it's that important to me. (If it was a *lot* more work, that'd be something else.)

Unfortunately, this doesn't make things any easier on the teachers, and as Teresa said, harassing the teachers is what they're doing. It might make it more unattractive, though. And it doesn't change the fact that doing this at a tertiary level is *ludicrous*, so stupid I can't believe it.

Marna: My father designed an informal logic course which was widely subscribed in first year, but Trent had no mandatory across-the-board courses. I think that the one at U of O is a hangover from the days of the Oblates, in a much changed form.

I have some sympathy with people who want to skip relatively minor modern (or, for that matter, non-modern) works (which The Ice Storm would qualify as -- certainly more minor thean the Confessio Amantis (if you dispute this, check back in five hundred years to see if anyone's heard of it)) no matter what their moral or squick factor is, on the simple basis that undergraduate course hours are too short to waste on minor works when there are so many major ones to read and discuss. After all, in the time you were reading The Ice Storm, you might have been reading part of The Ambassadors or Tristram Shandy or The Cantos or Dance to the Music of Time or ...

*spits nails* I'm so angry I can't think of anything interesting to say. Honestly, this is the kind of thing I'd expect of our Lege. (Then again, we have the Gablers, about whom grrr.)

I think there's a place for dissection, but I question its educational value at that context and at that level of study, and I think it's wasteful of animal life

Having dissected several critters that were thoroughly pickled in formaldehyde (or whatever preservative), I can say that they're much closer to plastic than to anything alive. It was, however, interesting to learn that earthworms have bristles, and that gills are, even well-pickled, remarkably intricate structures (that was a crayfish). (This was eighth grade. I would have been much happier if there hadn't been an option which included a pithed live frog, which someone else took and did badly.)

Okay, so Christina Trefzger believes that some of the material may be offensive to some, which is to say, her.

I am offended by trigonometry. Not only does it make no sense to me, but having to study trigonometry caused me significant stress and embarassment. (I'm also offended by physics and chemistry, but that may have been because my teachers were rotten.) But as far as math goes--I think I should have been permitted to opt out of trig.

Vassilissa, it's not that they think their kids will subscribe to the book's values, but that their kids should never see some words or know about some actions.

Since I'm mostly self-taught, I was able to avoid all those standard boring books, which left plenty of time to read science fiction.

Marilee: aha! Anyone who is offended by Mademoiselle de Maupin must instead read Monstrous Regiment. Don't like Manon Lescaut? Here, try Lords and Ladies. Does Notre-Dame de Paris get on your nerves? Great! Write me ten pages on Hogfather.

I feel so much better now.

I wrote about this the other day. I'm here at the University of Arizona, and have been wondering what it would be like to teach in an environment where this law was in effect. I mean, it's prime facie insane, so it will be interesting to see if it passes.

James: it is the position of the University of Ottawa that they can't EXACTLY stop us graduating as moral midgets who don't know egregious bullshit when we hear it, but nobody's going to say they didn't TRY.

They phrase it more suitably in the official documents, but that's basically it. Ergo, one semster Logic, one semester Ethics, and none of it is wifty stuff. Basic, yes, wifty, no.

We must also take Essay Writing plus two other English (or French) Lit courses.

(Which is why I can tell you: that DH Lawrence you haven't read yet, don't. Thank goodness I read fast.

Also, thank goodness the prof considered "Sons and Lovers Sucks Through A Hose and This is Why" a perfectly suitable essay topic :)

I went to a college where they figured everyone needed a basic education in liberal arts, including the science and engineering students, to the tune of about 98 hours (quarter system) of classes from a cafeteria-type list. (There was no matching requirement in science and engineering classes for the liberal arts students.) I ended up with classes in lots of areas that weren't immediately relevant to computer science, but they helped keep me from going *sproing* some quarters. (Latin does have its uses.) Along the way I ended up hitting all of the named subjects in the trivium and quadrivium ....

I also never skipped the required reading, even when I thought it was boring.

These people want the ability to self-edit their curriculum without risk of negative consequences. Wimps. In my day (she says, invoking the O tempora, O mores clause), when we had objections to a text, we simply didn't read it, and we took our chances with the Cliff Notes afterward.

(I still haven't read Middlemarch . . . I got to page 50 one day in my senior year of college, looked at the remaining 450 pages of closely-set and very small type, and said to myself, "Life is too short to spend any more of it on this.")

Deborah, I'm with you. Middlemarch is really tedious, I started it and never got very far.... (but then I never made it all the way through Dune and I consider myself a well-read sf fan. Same reason, I can only go so far before I start getting the story or I just give the heck up).

John from Tucson writes: "I was going to suggest that if you knew more about the denizens of our beloved state Legislature, this would come as no surprise."

John, in another life, long ago, Teresa was a page in the Arizona House of Representatives. There is nothing you can tell her about that body that will surprise her.

I regret that my own literature teachers at University were not so accommodating as yours, Marna. On different occasions I explained to two of them that the texts being taught were, to my mind, not adequate accounts of humanity, for specific given reason. I was confronted, not with rebuttal, but with inchoate and ill-concealed rage. This seemed to be not so much an expression of artistic or scholarly difference as a reaction to the thought that a person of my standing should challenge the authority of the text, and, it seems to me, the teachers' own authority.

I will not say that was made clear to me that an attack on those texts would be treated as mere ignorance and would receive a comprehensively failing grade, no matter how the attack were constituted. I am extrapolating that from the initial, verbal, informal reaction, and quite possibly wrongly, but I was so pusillanimous as to leave the experiment untried.

I did try the experiment recently with a secondary-school literature teacher. I said that to my mind Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" fitted neatly into the paradigm of the Western art novel (picayune anti-hero, overwhelmed by human evil, driven willy-nilly by ineluctable forces to mere failure rather than actual catastrophe) and was therefore a genre text. (I admit to using the term "genre" mischievously.) I was confronted with exactly the same sort of simple rage. How dare I say such things?

Teresa's idea that students should only be allowed to opt out of studying a given text upon stating, in public, their specific objections to it, and would then be assigned a text acceptable to them, this text being of equal standing, seems to me to be a good course. It involves administrative difficulties, of course. But I cannot for the life of me see how it benefits students to force them to read texts whose very basis they actively resist and find fundamentally repugnant.

I found Hardy and Joyce and Salinger (to choose three) violently opposed to everything I believe about human beings. I despise them and all their works for their small-souled mealy-minded pettily vindictive provincial maunderings, their refusal to stop picking at wounds that should have healed long since, and in any reasonable human being, would have. I hate their smallness, their niddling, their twittering, their coddling of injuries to themselves.

All right, all right, this reaction is or may be unreasonable. But see what has been wrought by an education that enforced reading of texts I abhorred. Does anyone really think that was what was intended?

a book which PW and Amazon characterize as “Exhaustive detailing of early 1970s popular/consumer culture in suburban New England provides the context for this archetypal tale of the American nuclear family in decline,” and describe in terms like “ponderous sense of alienation,” “the text,” “more encyclopedic than evocative,” and “a bit stale,”

...not to mention "Rick Moody is the worst writer of his generation." (--snarkmeister Dale Peck)

Does this law apply to graduate schools, too? If so, I'm going out there and getting a quick M.D. Man, all that uptight Western medical stuff offends my New Age beliefs. Maybe I can get a law degree too--I shouldn't have to read all that tiresome stuff that just reinforces the power of the wealthy over the working class.

We also did Lord of the Flies, and it was confronting, but good to discuss & think about.

Which is funny, because I also did that at school, loathed it, and learned the following things:

1. If you want to write an allegorical novel, for heaven's sake don't set it on Earth in the 20th Century and employ a really contrived plot device to get a party of little boys away from adult civilisation into a behavioural crucible. Just put it on an actual other planet.

2. When you're fourteen, amusing but unintentional homoerotic double meanings just jump out and whap you in the face.

After all, in the time you were reading The Ice Storm, you might have been reading part of The Ambassadors or Tristram Shandy or The Cantos or Dance to the Music of Time

(Anyone want this pig bladder?)

A Senate committee voted Wednesday to let university and community-college students opt out of required reading assignments they consider personally offensive...

How does this decision prevent the possibility that a student can opt out of learning about every religion not their own if they take a survey of religions course?

“A lot of students are being forced to choose between their personal or religious beliefs and the demands of education...”

When they extend this brand of 'academic immunity' from religious beliefs to personal beliefs, there's nothing left that someone won't find conveniently offensive.

Having done my M.A. in religion at Arizona State University and having TA'd survey courses in religion, I guess I should be thankful I got my education and got out before Ms. Trefzger arrived with her Newspeak Crusade.

So, THAT's what was really going on in Ottawa, Marna? And I had always heard that Ottawa people went across the River for a good time in the Incredible Hull... I was fooled. (What did Charles de Lint say about that in Moonheart? It's been a long time since I read it.)

Dave Luckett: All right, all right, this reaction is or may be unreasonable. But see what has been wrought by an education that enforced reading of texts I abhorred.

Not that it's any of my business, of course, but maybe you are picking at wounds that should have healed long since, and in any reasonable human being, would have? Also: coddling of injuries to yourself?

Very perceptive, Michael. I suppose you're right, though I doubt, in all good conscience, that I regard the events I described as "injuries" or "wounds". I regarded, and still regard, the texts concerned as being unworthy of the attention or adulation that they have received, and I would defend the right of any person to reject them with contumely and still - and this is the point - regard themselves as being educated and cultured; and equally, I would reject the idea that any particular text or class of texts should be forced on anyone as being good for the latter in any sense.

When my mother was just starting out as a teacher of first graders in Camden, at one point one of them told her: "You're mean." (pause and scowl as best a six year old can) "You make us do hard things."

To which my mom thought: "Well, yeah. That's the point."

In a rational universe, there would be a visible difference in maturity between first graders and college frosh.

When correctly viewed
Everything is rude
I could tell you things about Peter Pan
Or the Wizard of Oz --
There's a dirty old man.

So, how will they know it's offensive to them if they haven't read it? Taking someone else's word is letting yourself be led around like a sheep.

Dave Luckett: Very perceptive, Michael.

Oh, well, you know. I have a degree in Literature. :)

Dave Luckett:

I have observed that attacks on works of fiction are better-accepted (and in my mind, classier) when they keep the author's intent and carry-through in their crosshairs.

A few years ago, I attended a seminar-style class on Spenser and Milton. Very small class, very intimate with the text, several hours a day in discussion and reading-aloud and following stray archaisms into the depths of the OED -- taught by Charles McCann, who founded the school (TESC) thirty-some years previous. Possibly the best academic experience of my life; at least one of the best.

One student turned in his first paper, whose thesis came to "Spenser was a misogynistic, backward bawsterd." Great, except Spenser wasn't, for his time. Particularly as compared to Milton, whom we hadn't even gotten to yet. The student dropped the class. What was weird to me wasn't his harsh-eyed modern stance -- it was that he had chosen this class, which was not required particularly for anything, without knowing about the basic prejudices and assumptions of the Elizabethan era or being willing to deal with the text within its context.

You may or may not have ever made a similar error; but I'm pretty sure from that incident that professors deal with a lot of "this is all bunk"-style glibness that hasn't been sufficiently considered or contextualized, and probably get real angry with it. Perhaps you fell victim to stylistic profiling.

I'm in the odd position of deliberately assigning texts I know will be offensive (Thomas Carlyle's 'Occasional Discourse on the N[egro] Question', a chapter of Mein Kampf) because I think it's impportant that students at an HBCU understand racist ideology from the side of the racist (i.e., that it isn't enough to dismiss racist thought, however shallow it actually is).

One of my colleagues disagrees, precisely because the material is offensive. However, he also believes I have the right to teach the material I find suitable because, even though he doesn't agree with my approach, he understands why I think it important (and he knows that I've been broadening the canon of political thought for the students rather than insisting that political theory began with the Greeks and exists only in the West). That, I think, is a more sensible attitude than 'It's offensive, keep it away!' The goal is to have students finish knowing more about the world than they did when they began. How they interpret this knowledge is beyond my (or any instructor's) ability to control.

Okay, first of all, this isn't like K-12, where students are captives legally required to attend school with no options. Higher-education is voluntary, not mandatory. So as James said, if they can't take the heat, get out of the kitchen. Find a different school, choose a different course. Sheesh.

Second, yeah, intentionally or otherwise this thing is so broad it will be used as a blanket to outlaw anything (abortion, history, philosophy, evolution, etc.) and to get lazy kids out of assignments.

Oh, what a great day for our educational system.

Epacris:
regarding the multiple texts thing, it's not always the English Department, per se, and it can happen at least three different ways:

Some schools allow teachers to self-select from several texts (choose two from column A and one from column B), so there is sometimes overlap because three freshman teachers taught _Huck Finn_, but one did _Lord of the Flies_ instead, and then in sophomore year three do _Separate Peace_ while one opts for _Lord of the Flies_, and there are five or ten kids (usually not the whole class) who unluckily get the two teachers who picked the same text.

If a school is tracking (splitting by ability levels)they sometimes assign a book to different levels in different years. So someone who is dropped a level, or fights to get re-classed at a higher ability may end up re-reading a book because of that.

When eigth grade is a middle-school with a separate building from the high school, there sometimes isn't effective communication of what's taught, or sometimes, they just fight over books. ("We don't like _Lord of the Flies_ it's too advanced for middle school. We're going to start doing _Animal Farm_ instead, so you need to do _Lord of the Flies_.") In either case, the high school and middle school may duplicate texts, at least over the short term (for two or three years middle schoolers that got _LOTF_ get it again in high school, and never see _Animal Farm_).

Of course, sometimes, yes, it's sheer organizational idiocy. As when my wife was in school, and they tried teaching a new spelling system for the first graders. It didn't work, but "Hey, not their fault, ours. None of 'em can spell, but pass 'em forward anyway." Then, the next year they had another new spelling system to try, but "since the last system didn't work for first graders -- too young -- we'll try it on second graders this time". They did this every year, from first through eighth grade. My wife never got taught a consistent spelling system and to this day can't spell worth beans.

Not only have I never heard of a God-given right to never be offended by anything, I'm pretty sure there's nothing like that in our Constitution.

The line between Christina Trefzeger and someone who throws a bomb or kills someone in a riot over an editorial cartoon is very fine indeed.

Oh yeah, one other thing,

Fragano has it right. One of the jobs of education is to open discussion and broaden perspective. One of the ways teachers (and authors)do this is by posing alternate (and sometimes offensive or seemingly-offensive)points of view.

I like the idea from Teresa and others of requiring the students to justify their opt-out, and I think one of the steps should be for the teacher to state the (or _a_) purpose of the text (i.e. drugs are bad, not glamorous, and ruin every aspect of your life) and them force the student to come up with at least an outline of how to present this idea in a story or novel _without_ being offensive.

Don't colleges have long, boring committee meetings precisely to discuss what books are chosen to teach in classes, months before the actual classes? And aren't some of those discussions over how "objectionable" some of the possible choices might be? So there's already a mechanism in place for considering objections to a text.

What the Senate action does is take out the middleman between the government and the students. Effectively, it removes any authority the college/university might have in deciding, oh, how to run a college or university.

So the inmates/students end up running the institution. Anyone remember the university takeovers of the Vietnam era?

I've read a lot of books I hated. Some were required, some weren't. None of them did me any harm (I don't regard not having fun, or being enraged, or even feeling queasy for an afternoon, as harm). Some of them gave me valuable ammunition for later use.

A person who objects to a book she hasn't read and fears spending time in the company of ideas she disagrees with is not an educated person. She may or may not be edcuable, but this proposal does not tilt the odds in her favor.

I'm speaking of adults here. There are books that could terrify or wound children, to no good end. But college students should be able to cope with boredom, controversy and even an occasional mention of where babies come from.

Besides, think what a useful skill they gain. Life affords many more opportunities for the use of "This idea sucks, and here's why" than for the date of the invention of the cotton gin.

Perhaps one useful approach might be to expose students earlier and more often to the concept that some "great writers" loathe the work of other "great writers" and aren't afraid to say so. Twain's "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses" comes to mind. Sample comment:

"[The rules governing literary art] require that when a personage talks like an illustrated, gilt-edged, tree-calf, hand-tooled, seven-dollar Friendship's Offering in the beginning of a paragraph, he shall not talk like a negro minstrel in the end of it. But this rule is flung down and danced upon in the Deerslayer tale."

Bruce: The answer to your question is 'Yes and No'. For some courses, because they are sectioned, there has to be agreement on common textbooks. For other courses, it is up to the instructor (within the limits of the course description) to select the texts.

For the lower-div American government course I teach, I work with a committee-chosen text (actually, I have a choice of three texts). For the upper division and graduate courses, I pick the texts and any supplemental readings. I get entire forests' worth of catalogues from academic publishers urging me to pick their books.

Marna:
My memories of the U of O background come from a friend of the family (now retired) who taught Sociology there from the sixties through to a few years ago. The ethos of "they can't EXACTLY stop us graduating as moral midgets who don't know egregious bullshit when we hear it" seems to be a direct descendent of the overall view of the role of the institution which had hung on from the days when the school was run by the Oblates (until 1965) -- there were ongoing direct influences for decades after the changeover, and I used to hear them described feelingly (and not approvingly).

I think that there's a tie-in in the Arizona legislation to the changes in attitudes which I've seen covered elsewhere from other points of view -- it seems that more and more parents are refusing to let go when their children go off to university (and frequently the students go along with it). It's a progressive infantilization of the student population in which they're less and less treated as independent adults. The parents become a royal pain in the arse for the university administrations, and the children refuse to grow up. After all, adults are supposed to be able to look after themselves; it's children who need protection from inappropriate influences.

Plus there's the attitude which also seems to be on the increase that it costs a lot to attend and if you're paying that much, you should be able to demand good treatment -- good grades and course content that you like, regardless of your own abilities and tastes.

Kat--

"John Donne"

Mock him if you like. He's tough enough to take it.

But for heaven's sake, spell his name correctly!!

(If you do that, it's still good publicity.)

Good God. Are students also standing up in history classes to object? "Please, sir, don't teach us about Henry the VIII. He divorced some wives and executed others, and I personally find that highly objectionable."

(Err -- Henry VIII, that is. I had the old Herman and the Hermits song running through my head when I wrote that. Blasted song.)

One specific complaint was aimed at “The Ice Storm,” a novel dealing with adults and children experimenting with sex, drugs and suicide.

Experimenting with suicide. That makes the book sound much more interesting than it probably is.

Indeed, Aconite, and I'm sorry I missed it before you pointed it out. "I tried suicide. It was rubbish." Sounds like something Marvin would say.

Shrug. In 1965 I "opted out" of a reading assignment in my junior English class. I told the teacher (who was also a friend) that I was not going to read "Cyrano de Bergerac", and that he could give me an F if he wanted to. He asked me why.

I said "It will make me cry and I just don't feel like crying right now." And so I was excused from Cyrano. Of course, I read 90 or 100 books on my own outside of class that year, so it's not as if the lack of Cyrano was going to make me an illiterate slut or anything.

Skipping any given work of literature is just *not* the end of the world. Really.

Huh. And I just read Transmetropolitan for a college class.

At the point at which you are dumbing down and pasteurizing your curriculum based on the notion (heavily marketed by the neocons) that people are intellectually or morally fragile, you've gotten out of the education business entirely.

If you go to Diane Duane's site, you'll find her post about a recent appearance on Irish TV. I especially like the photo, with the caption identifying her as 'Diane Dwayne'...

Off topic, I know, I know... I could have come up with some lame way of justifying this comment being in this thread, like how offended I am by people who can't be bothered to spell things right and can we have a law that'll ensure I won't have to suffer thru such offenses again? But that WOULD be a lame justification and so I won't inflict it upon my fellow MakingLighters.

Epacris, the way the kids had to read that book so many times was this: the district had made it required reading for all ninthh graders. Emma's eighth grade teacher was insane and had the kids read any old book she wanted them to. I forget how it ended up in the hands of the tenth graders.

It was worse for the kid who transferred in from a private school where he was required to read the book at yet a different grade.

This thread has dredged up a memory from my own undergraduate days: I was taking Theory and Literature of 20th Century Music (required for music majors), and the professor (Malcolm Brown, IIRC) was discussing the transition from late German Romanticism to Serialism. He played a short movement from something fairly innocuous -- Erwartung or something -- and continued his lecture. A girl in the class suddenly and rudely interrupted him: "Excuse me . . . excuse me!"

"Yes?"

"That music you played. It wasn't very pretty." And she folded her arms and looked around the class, quite pleased with herself.

Dr. Brown stared at her for what seemed like minutes. "Pretty? Pretty? He bounded across the room, and in two giant steps launched himself up the piano bench and on to the top of the piano. He perched on the piano like an eagle and screeched, "Music is not supposed to be pretty!"

About half the class sat there in shock, and the rest of us burst out in spontaneous applause while Dr. Brown awkwardly climbed down off the piano to continue his lecture as though nothing extraordinary had just occurred.

And that is how you instill passion in students. Except in Arizona.

TexAnne - Lord yes, a course based on Pratchett would be wonderful. But then all of that emphasis on magic and wizards would be objectionable; not to mention DEATH. But I would love to hear the reaction to Small Gods.

I used to think that reading anything was good; that reading could not harm me, that it could only disturb me or make me think in ways I didn't like.

Until I picked up that cursed tomb by Abdul Alhazred.. now I feel my skin changing texture.. my eyes can't stand the light.. the angles! The angles are all wrong! Yeargh!

Gaaah. How old do people have to be before they're allowed to think for themselves?

It's bad enough in cases like this: a school board in Southern California withdrew 23 books from the school library (via LISNews.orgbecause the trustees didn't think the books promoted their "Character Counts" agenda. In addition to usual suspects like Harry Potter were "Disney's Christmas Storybook," "Welcome to the USA California" (a non-fiction book, part of a series about the states), and the Clifford the Big Red Dog series. One of the trustees said she wasn't familiar with the books she pulled, including the Clifford books. "I approved books that I'm familiar with the content."

"Trustee Marlene Olivarez, a teacher who retired from the district two years ago, said the latest 'Harry Potter' installment was rejected because it is fantasy.

"'We want books to be things that children would be able to relate to in real life,' she said."

The trustees "said children can read the books on their own," but if they're not in the school library it will be harder for them to do so. Personally, I'm hoping some of them will read some of the books they've pulled and, once they are familiar with their content, put them back. Starting with Clifford.

Ok -- can someone please explain to me why High School English classes bless their students with:

_Great Expectations_ or damn near anything by Dickens? I have never found a novel by him that didn't conjure the Eight Deadly Words before I could reach the end of the first chapter.

(I -did- manage to slog through _A Tale of Two Cities_, but I didn't enjoy the exercise. If it hadn't been required I'd never have finished it.)

_A Separate Peace_ -- I have managed to blot this one from memory, the most I can recall is that I hated it.

The only novel I enjoyed in English class was _Silas Marner_. Thank heavens my English teachers allowed me to earn extra credit for books read outside of school. I remember my freshman English teacher's reaction when I brought in _Hawai'i_ and _The Source_:

"You read both of these this month?!"

"Actually, I read both of them this week..."

(All right, I was a Michener junkie in High School, I didn't find SF until my senior year.)

Frankly, high-school and college ae NOT the place to go to acquire a love of Literature or of any other art. It's more likely to have the opposite effect. About the only Grand Author that I managed to get into was playwright Moliere, and it's really hard to go wrong with him.

As for art, I bet you that showing kids the dream sequence at the end of An American in Paris would make them reconsider their opinion that Art is boriiiiing...

Are there situations in which a student can justifiably refuse to read a required text?

I'm trying to think of one that I'd allow. The only ones I can think of are the graphic violence exceptions—I can see exempting students who are sensitive to or offended by depictions of very graphic violence from having to watch or read them, especially if those students are refugees or otherwise post-traumatic.

My feeling is that if your religious convictions cannot withstand your exposure to depictions of sex, drugs, unsanctioned music, or dancing, then those convictions couldn't have been very strong in the first place. And if your diety doesn't want you to be exposed to whatever's verboten at all, then your diety will arrange things so that you needn't be exposed to them, perhaps by encasing you in a magical protective bubble or inspiring you to devote yourself to a cloistered order rather than attending college.

If your diety hasn't arranged for the bubble or the order, maybe you're meant to face and withstand temptation and things you believe are wrong, as Jesus is said to have done.

M.E. Henaghen: Of course, sometimes, yes, it's sheer organizational idiocy. As when my wife was in school, and they tried teaching a new spelling system for the first graders. It didn't work, but "Hey, not their fault, ours. None of 'em can spell, but pass 'em forward anyway." Then, the next year they had another new spelling system to try, but "since the last system didn't work for first graders -- too young -- we'll try it on second graders this time". They did this every year, from first through eighth grade. My wife never got taught a consistent spelling system and to this day can't spell worth beans.

My husband managed to hit the vanguard of the New Math movement--several times. His family was rather peripatetic, and he kept bouncing between school systems that did New Math and those that didn't. Result: he never really got either the new or the old system.

M.E. Henaghen - What on Earth is a spelling system? To the best of my knowledge, the only way to learn to spell English is by practice, pattern matching and luck. Any attempt to systemize English spelling would have more exceptions than rules by an order of magnitude.

German, on the other hand, has a fairly regular orthography - it's the danged nouns that do funny things, like having not two, but three genders and failing to agree on how to be plural or made into compound words. And the pronouns are no picnic, either.

In a previous existence as a graduate art history instructor teaching an intro course for non-majors, I found it prudent to make the following sort of announcement on the first class day (not verbatim, alas): "This is an art history class. It's all about images and their context. There will be pictures of naked people. You will be required to write about them. There will be sculptures of naked people. You will be required to stand right next to these sculptures. There will be religious art. At least some of this religious art is guaranteed to have been made in the service of a religion to which you do not subscribe. If any of this is a serious problem for you, then please find some other elective to take."

After that, no problems.

I'm actually going to take a widely divergent approach to this than everyone else posting here. Personally, I am amazed that something like this could happen. I am currently attending a very small, sectarian college in New York because of my personal religious beliefs. I have very little choice of subjects, and am forced to take most classes that I want as independent studies, with professors that have not mastered the material, simply because otherwise I am exposed to material that is verboten on religious grounds.

This is a personal choice, and one that I was particularly loathe to make, but given the lack of options in terms of core curriculum in the vast majority of universities in this country, the only way for me to pursue advanced courses in economics or mathematics is to teach myself. Of course, I could take classes at a secular university, but the costs of doing so are prohibitive. I do not believe that I do less work then the majority of college students in the country - in fact, including my religious studies in college, I am doing school work for more than 12 hours a day.

While some posters have claimed that the laws will be abused to allow people to avoid work, I do not know of any moral imperative to force others to be educated - in fact, the doctrine I understood as having the most merit is frequently called "live and let live." If I find content that I will be exposed to objectionable on religious grounds, I am forced to choose significantly more expensive, out of state options like the one I am currently employing.

Does it seem fair that people who honestly want a rigorous education devoid of any sexual or otherwise offensive content should be told to look elsewhere? I may not be "a lot of students." My beliefs may not fulfill the criteria of "unacceptable" that you feel is justified. But in the end, what it means is that a set of principles I hold force me to get what is, frankly, a less comprehensive education compared to what the majority of Americans enjoy. If that’s not a good enough reason, I guess my petty narrow-mindedness has trumped the country’s ability to provide me with an education. Congratulations, you seem to have won.

As I sit in a public library next to a community college in the state of Arizona...

...this is not surprising, not at all.

There seems to be a small, but vocal group in this state who subscribe to a particularly rigid and unconvincing form of Christianity. (I say unconvincing because it seems that anything will damage the belief system).

I had a parent fill out a "Request for Reconsideration" form for the animated Animal Farm video because it was "misleading".

The same parent came in and asked for a book "Like Lord of the Rings without all the magic and evil."

I have fielded many a complaint about Harry Potter.

For a while, I recieved a bevy of complaints about Eisner's A Contract with God because people were expecting a book of "religious instruction", and not graphic format stories about the Jewish ghetto in Brooklyn. The graphic novel collection is a frequent target of complaints.

One man let his 10 year old watch End of Escaflowne and wanted us to remove all anime and manga from the library shelves as a result. Even better was the 10 year old who checked out Election and who's mother complained to the city council.

So, not surprising at all.

It's a perfectly fine idea, as long as the student's transcript gets an (alt) notation next to each alternative class. Then employers can offer them an (alt) salary commeasurate with their skills...

David Manheim: I'm not sure I understand your point. You have chosen to get a substandard education because of your principles? OK, that's your call. The problem arises when you say, "I do not know of any moral imperative to force others to be educated." That's pretty much what the rest of us are saying. If you don't want to learn new things, don't go to college. You've accepted a substandard education, but that doesn't mean that I should be forced to teach you in a substandard way. Your freedom of religion should not trump my freedom of expression. You've chosen your path; don't interfere with mine.

If I've misinterpreted your views, please acccept my apologies.

Yes, you misunderstood my position; because of the fact that others feel it is morally wrond to censor college education, I cannot attend colleges that my tax dollars support. I think this is a bit ridiculous, as it should be my choice which classes to attend, but if this is not the case, I should at least be able to choose not to cover things I find offensive, without penalty to my grade, and loss of my scholarship, which is a typical scenario resulting from refusal to take core courses.

Why even go to college? Or open the newspaper?

By this reasoning, under no circumstances should a kid ever have to open the Bible. Ever.

the only way for me to pursue advanced courses in economics or mathematics is to teach myself

Now, I know that economics contains a lot of offensive ideas. But what is there about the study of mathematics that could possibly offend anyone's religious principles?

David--

You can attend them. No one at the colleges is saying that you cannot. You, however, choose not to attend them unless you can attend and break their rules. And that's a little different.