‘Guidelines for Classroom Discussion’ Still Stifle Free Speech at the University of South Carolina

‘Guidelines for Classroom Discussion’ Still Stifle Free Speech at the University of South Carolina

by Luke Sheahan

November 15, 2007

Five years ago FIRE criticized the University of South Carolina for the presence of a document titled “Guidelines for Classroom Discussion” in the syllabus of “Women’s Studies 797: Seminar in Women’s Studies,” a required class for a certificate of graduate study in Women’s Studies. The “Guidelines” require that students:
1. Acknowledge that racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, and other institutionalized forms of oppression exist.
2. Acknowledge that one mechanism of institutionalized racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, etc., is that we are all systematically taught misinformation about our own group and about members of other groups. This is true for members of privileged and oppressed groups.
3 Agree not to blame ourselves or others for the misinformation we have learned, but to accept responsibility for not repeating misinformation after we have learned otherwise.
4. Assume that people-both the people we study and the members of the class-always do the best they can.
[…]
7 Agree to combat actively the myths and stereotypes about our own groups and other groups so that we can break down the walls which prohibit group cooperation and group gain.
[…]
We wrote in our letter:
These “Guidelines” compel students to express viewpoints they might not believe and to make fundamental assumptions with which they might not agree, under the stated, explicit, and coercive threat of being graded poorly for honest intellectual dissent. Such an ideological “loyalty oath” should be anathema to any institution devoted to learning, because it replaces the process of intellectual discovery with the imposition of dogmatic political orthodoxy. Because this class is explicitly a “required seminar,” its ideological requirements violate not only the guidelines on academic freedom of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and USC’s own regulations, but also, indeed, the Constitution of the United States.
It is fine for a professor to hold the above views and even to argue for them in the classroom through teaching and assigned reading. But, as we wrote in our letter, “[I]t is categorically different to require students to hold certain arguments as unquestionable truths in order to participate in a class without penalty (let alone in a required class).” The University of South Carolina understands and expresses this idea in its statement of “Students Rights and Freedoms Within the Academic Community” which states:
As members of the academic community, students should be encouraged to develop the capacity for critical judgment and to engage in a sustained and independent search for truth.
[...]
The freedom to learn depends upon appropriate opportunities and conditions in the classroom, on the campus and in the larger community.
It’s safe to say that the “Guidelines for Classroom Discussion” in Women’s Studies 797 do not cultivate “appropriate opportunities and conditions in the classroom” for the “freedom to learn” and certainly do not aid in any way the development of “the capacity for critical judgment” or encourage “a sustained and independent search for truth.”
 
Five years later, the Guidelines are still in place. This highlights the old adage that “the price of liberty is eternal vigilance.” FIRE continues to encourage the University of South Carolina to change its classroom policy for Women’s Studies 797. Please, give your students the freedoms required by the Constitution and enshrined in your own policies.