A group of students at the University of New Hampshire is circulating a petition calling for the removal of a psychology professor who told his students that he is a member of the group Scholars for 9/11 Truth, a group that believes the federal government had prior knowledge of the Sept. 11 attacks. Once the UNH students get a set number of signatures, they will submit the petition to the UNH board of trustees, president, student senate and alumni association. Right now the university is standing by its decision that the professor acted within the bounds of academic freedom.
Simply put, the students circulating the petition may be overreacting. The UNH students' protests would be justified if the professor prevented students from expressing their views, graded students' work based on his political beliefs or made students so uncomfortable that they didn't want to come to class. However, none of this actually happened. According to the Portsmouth Herald, the professor only mentioned his membership "in the spirit of full disclosure."
College students are old enough and intelligent enough to hear information, process it and subsequently make their own decisions about it. University students are past the age when everything the teacher says is true simply because he's the teacher.
Also, if they haven't already, these students are bound to come in contact with someone who disagrees with them. If they haven't learned how to get along with and answer to people who disagree with them politically by now, it's about time they learned.
According to an article in the Portsmouth Herald, members of Students for Academic Integrity, the UNH group, "watch professors to just ensure they're doing their job ... they're not biased in the classroom and are not teaching what they are not supposed to teach."
Imagine a class where the professor sticks to the syllabus word for word, never brings up anything outside the strict boundaries of the class topic and presents information in an entirely politically correct manner. It would put you to sleep every class.
No one wants to sit through a Cross-cultural Communication class where the professor fears talking about communication and religion because it's a sensitive subject, or a Politics in the U.S. class where the professor keeps students from debating controversial issues like abortion, gay marriage or the death penalty simply because it would incite a heated debate.
Most students would rather sit through a class with an interesting professor whose views are different than their own than one with a plain vanilla, always politically correct professor who's afraid of offending everyone. That said, professors should keep their views in check when they're not pertinent to the subject matter at hand, and should respect the ideological diversity of the students who, ultimately, are paying to be taught by them.
