Please be disturbed

There I sat in a room crowded with science profs, Christians, all of them talking about evolution. Like Republican politicians these days, I don't know much all about the subject. I can read and I can think (I think), but my inclinations don't take me deeply into the nature of nature. Just don't. "We can choose what we write," Flannery O'Connor once said, "but we can't choose what we write well" (don't ask me for chapter and verse).

For the most part, the discussion had to do with teaching approaches in a Christian college where lab tables full of students probably believe the world would be better off if Darwin had chosen to be a butcher or baker or candlestick maker. To many evangelicals, "evolution" is just another word for "revolution" against the Almighty.

I won't try to quote anyone, but it was clear--and no one should be shocked about this--that the profs (from two different Christian colleges by the way) considered themselves more open-minded about such things than at least some their students and a goodly number of parents.

A kind of consensus formed mid-stream that nothing could be finer than a student's willingness to listen, maybe even carry a dollop of doubt. "What we want to see in students is a questioning mind, a little confusion," someone said, which might translate this way: in some situations we want kids with doubt.

I understand that.

I was not a participant in all of this, just a facilitator. I didn't have to talk, and I didn't say much at all; but as I was sitting there, I couldn't helping thinking that neither college would be using a line like that on its web page any time soon. "We want only open minds"--put that on a banner up above the student union on a Friday visit day.

In an article in Tablet, Todd Gitlin says some documentary-maker came to his campus recently to show a film that featured the unspeakable violence going on in Syria. Before the presentation started, the director said, "We want to haunt your imagination. Please be disturbed."

Please be disturbed. That's not going on a poster or a t-shirt anytime soon either.

Todd Gitlin says, "Universities are not fallout shelters."

Neither are Christian colleges, nor should they be.

Which doesn't mean there are no rules. The only time I exercised censorship in my classroom was decades ago when, from a retiring colleague, I inherited a course in contemporary novels. My predecessor's curriculum looked like a good place for me to start, so I followed his leads, including the novel Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess, a novel that featured frighteningly violent scenes in order to question behavioral sciences then in their heyday (think B. F. Skinner), a kind of uber-disturbing 1984 or Brave New World.

I assigned Clockwork Orange until a couple of female students told me, politely I might add, that they simply weren't going to read it. These students were not excessively prudish; their spokesperson is, today, a celebrated university prof herself. They were deeply offended by the rape scenes especially, by what the novel itself called the "ultra-violence" of the street toughs.

I quit the novel right there. It's probably important to point out that I never was taken with Clockwork Orange; as far as I was concerned, it took two steps back into barbarism in order to take one step forward into enlightenment. It's a novel with a point, with an argument, a thesis--not my cup of tea. As it turns out, it's an asterisk today, a novel (and a movie) known more for its innovation than its moral character, a story with really flashy accessories but a sermon whose time has basically come and gone.

No matter. I quit.

Did I do the right thing? I think so. I think I felt a gender block here, the sense that the novel was much easier for me to read than it was for the young women in my class. In this case, the strength and wisdom of Clockwork Orange didn't earn the difficulty the students had negotiating its brutality.

But that doesn't mean I don't think Todd Gitlin is right. "Universities are not fallout shelters."

I think "Please, be disturbed," should be a recruiting tool. But mostly I'm sure what you'll hear is, "You'll love it here."

But if education doesn't bruise something sometime, I don't know if anything is really learned.