>
> I hear frequent complaints from Christians attending state universities
> that some professors use their classrooms to indoctrinate students with
> their particular slant on women's issues, lesbianism, pro-abortion and a
> variety of other highly political issues. They resent spending their
> tuition dollars for irrelevant political detours also. My reaction is
> that all of us ought to put more pressure on our public universities to
> teach what they were chartered to teach.
These days, unless you teach exactly what the parents and state
governments want, you're going to get complaints (and it's not improving
the system. Indeed, unless you're Bill Nye the Science Guy, they call you
a bad teacher because you don't entertain the kiddies enough.
Indeed, I think the claim that students are being indoctrinated at this
level on political issues is an overstatement. Jim Bell claims that it
is, but how can it be when attendence is a choice of the student and the
record shows that most students aren't changing their presonal views
much (in reference to Provine)? In my personal experience, conservative
views were rarely belittled by the teacher, but often by the students
themselves. The is a range of experience at the university level, and if
you kids are taking classes that don't support your views, you should
have a long chat with you own kid for making the choice of taking those
classes.
Now, if you're arguing that an individual class should teach what the
class is intended, fine. But, if you say certain classes the include
material that you don't agree with should not be taught, then you're wrong.
In regards to Kenyon, if he was teaching YEC, or ID, that was
inappropriate for an intro class. On the other hand, I think it can be
appropriate either in an upper level class or in a non-science class.
Intro students are confused enough as it is - they need the basics of the
science. Once they've been given those basics, I think that can approach
non-mainstream issues such as YEC and ID, etc. Of course, abortion had
no place in that class (although it's a legit topic elsewhere)..
For comparison, I've attended paleo classes in two universities and both
contained sections on creationism. Both profs attempted to be as neutral
as possible and gave reading assignments. In this context, the students
had the backgrounnd to evaluate the arguments from a scientific viewpoint.
In the right context, what Kenyon taught could be legit topics. However,
he wasn't teaching them in the proper context.
Tom