Daring Dissent
Many students complain to me that their other teachers
indeed are such bigots that they reward students who reflect their views and banish those who are
different to some academic gulag. To get ahead, say these ass-kissing upstarts, you need to learn
to get along. On my campus, fraternity brothers openly snicker over the well-known and successful
scenario for acing any course taught by a feminist. All they have to do, they tell me, is to start
off pretending to be macho and sexist and then, over the semester, gradually come around to her
point of view. The teacher thus rewards them not for their writing but for their "intellectual
development" and "heightened maturity." Other students say that to argue a conservative
point in a liberal's class, or a liberal point in a conservative's class, is sure death. Although I
admit that both sides of the political battlefield have some idiotic ideologues who do not know or
care about the difference between propaganda and pedagogy, I suspect that in many of these reported
cases, the problem is one not of conforming to the hidden or not-so-hidden agenda of the teacher but
of failing to acknowledge it. All teachers have agendas; make no mistake about that. But most teachers
are happy simply to have their viewpoints acknowledged, not digested and regurgitated.
Dissent from the class agenda is probably a healthy response
and deserves respect, since it is always harder to fight the current than to go with the flow. But
such dissent carries with it the additional responsibility of bowing toward your opponent before the
battle starts. The tactic, which is simple but effective, involves giving the party line a nod in a
brief paragraph near the opening of the paper.
It is certainly true that Marx predicted the inevitable
downfall of capitalism, and the United States as a capitalist country does ex-hibit many of the
contradictions Marx discerned in capitalism. Indeed, some of these contradictions can be found in
a close reading of our current text, The Essential Calvin and Hobbes . Nevertheless,
other forces more than compensate for the failings of capitalism and have promoted development
of the many beneficial aspects of American culture.
Then you can press on with whatever points you originally
wanted to make. The real danger with the dissenting paper, and it is one I have run into numerous
times, is the failure to provide any evidence that you have paid any attention to any of the
class lectures or read any of the texts. That, after all, is a major reason for writing
these papers. The grader needs to have some evidence not only that you have opinions of your own but
also that you have read and thought about the assigned work. A dissenting argument that never even
mentions the class agenda risks being read as an evasion rather than a response. The connection
between your argument and the assignment may be obvious to you, but you have the responsibility to
make it obvious to the grader. Spell out clearly but respectfully the points of contact and conflict.
