Wednesday, August 27, 2003

Teaching Intollerance

Prelaw courses were handled through the undergrad division of the business school, which was more renowned and respected than the university as a whole.  I don’t know why pre-law wound up there, shnuggling up with the marketing and finance and globalization divisions, but that’s how they organized things.  I was interested in a legal career so I signed up, setting my self one condition - if I didn’t get Dolfman’s section I’d take somethign else altogether.  Scuttlebutt was, Dolfman was the man.  He was tough, aggressive, confrontational.  People learned a lot from him - his syllabus was thick and daunting.  If you could handle him, you could handle law school.  With slim hopes, I signed up for his section.

I got into Dolfman’s class, which was held in the business school’s shiny new undergrad palace, Stressful-Depressive Hall, with the classy swivel chairs and the clean acoustically-friendly walls and the killer snack bar.  No bad seats in the lecture hall.  Reasonably close to my dorm.  No downside to any of it.

Except: Dolfman was a bit of a curmudgeon.  He liked to put people on the spot, make them think fast… sometimes he’d try to get under your skin, making you defend your ideas or your work product or your personal philosophy from a barrage of cross examination-style questioning, and you’d have to come up with good solid answers under the pressure of his intensity and the cynical green eyes of your classmates.  He’d push you to see if you pushed back, and to see if you could think on your feet even when the ground beneath them started shifting. 

He was famous for being incendiary.  Boys would bluster and bellow; girls had been known not infrequently to burst into tears under his tutelage.  I came to class with my thick skin and quick wit at the ready, and just waited for the show to start - fully expecting to be one of the chief participants.  But I was not expecting the show that we all got.

It started a few weeks into the semester when Professor D asked the class to discuss involuntary servitude and the 13th amendment.  There were no volunteers so he picked someone.  An african-american boy, one of very few in the class and the school.  “You should know about this law,” he harrangued.  “You are an ex-slave.  As a jew I celebrate my release from freedom every year at Passover.  This constitutional amendment released you from slavery.  You should get down on your knees and thank god for this law every day.” I could feel the student stiffen; the cordiality quotient of the class, never very high, plummeted.

Within a week there was a response.  Ten minutes or so after a subsequent lecture had started, both doors at the back of the room opened with a sharp crack and the Black Students’ League started filing in.  About 70 of them, all of them black, all of them dressed in black from head to toe, with berets and sunglasses.  They stood in the aisles with their arms crossed, and one big burly angry demonstrator stepped to the lectern as their spokesman.  He announced that the BSL had had enough of racist insensitivity from the faculty and from Professor D in particular.  They would take steps to have him removed and intended to keep him from teaching any more hatred or bigotry.

Professor D let him make his announcement, looking as if he was being told that the burger he’d just eaten had been made out of kittens and babies.  Once the spokesman’s announcement concluded, he asked the speaker and the other demonstrators to leave the room - “I’ve let you make your little statement, now please leave us, there are students here who want to learn something...”

Well, we all learned quite a bit from that class - Professor D, included.  Dolfman wound up cancelling the remainder of the lecture after another ten minutes because it was too disruptive to teach in a classroom full of bitter angry protesters, even though they just stood silently, arms crossed, scowling.  And then, over the next few months, the faculty convened and summarily ruled that Dolfman’s statement had violated academic codes of conduct.  Dolfman’s lectures did continue without further protests for the remainder of the semester… but after that, based on the indictment of his peers, he was suspended for a full year.  I understand that his teaching contract was not thereafter renewed.  They’d closed him down. 

Murray Dolfman was a very effective and entertaining teacher; I am convinced he did what he did, the way he did it, with the sole goal in mind of making education compelling and making dull legal lessons stick in the slippery minds of the undergraduate community.  But those values did not impress those whom he offended, nor did they suffice to preserve his professorship.  I think I was in his very last undergraduate class.  I don’t know what he’s doing today. 

MORAL: It doesn’t matter if your heart is in the right place if you piss people off all the time.

cool story! don’t remember ever hearing it before.

nicely told and your moral is fabulous :-)

Honestly I’m not sure how I feel about this issue.  This is a trend in almost all schools these days.  I’m not sure if it’s a good thing or a bad thing.  I know that the world is not “fair” and that often there are no rules that are adhered to...and I wonder when you get prepared for that if not, at least, in college.  At the same time there are a multitude of ways to teach that don’t have to involve that sort of confrontational process.  But when do you learn to deal with confrontation?  When do you learn to not blow your “case” as result of someone pushing your personal buttons?

wait, is this a cliffhanger?  i hate cliffhangers ...i have hated cliffhangers ever since “who shot j.r”... where si the rest of this story, and why were you taking a pre law class at a business school...us blue collar types are dense.

His heart may have been in the right place, but did that give him the right to reduce one of his students to nothing but a racial construction, complete with a moral imperative ("this how you should behave, given your melanin content")?  My sympathy is highly limited.

My 11th grade American History teacher tried to “spice up” the curriculum by feeding us tidbits of the President’s sex lives. Now, I can only identify them by their fettishes and fornicating-style. Two years (and 10 or 20 pissed off parents) later that teacher disappeared.

Side note: Apparently, my husband has not learned how to use the “Expand” fuction on your page. I’ll school him on it tonight.

Here’s my feeling: Dolfman crossed a line and should have known a lot better - that was a sin of commission.  But his classroom was a place of debate and argument, and he encouraged people to call him on his misstatements and hyperbole - when he told one student “you don’t understand ‘cuz you’re a girl” she lit into him big time and we had a great discussion of equal rights, the 14th amendment, and gender equality.  He had only called on the black student to elicit a response - which never really materialized during the lecture in question.  In response, he should have initiated this discussion himself and made sure no one misunderstood where he was coming from.  Rather than using his crude words as a starting point for constructive discussion, we just left them to fester and spread infection through the campus community.  He was wrong, but he had a lot of company.