31, no. 1 (Fall 1999): 36-37
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Teaching Tolerance: Introduction
GEORGE E. HAGGERTY
THE PAPERS gathered here are based on those presented at the session "Teaching Tolerance: Combating Bigotry in the College Classroom" at the 1998 MLA convention in San Francisco. This session was organized by the MLA Task Force on Campus Bigotry. As reported to the Delegate Assembly at the convention, the task force was established to "assist the MLA, MLA members, and the academic community to oppose bigotry on campus and promote a campus environment of mutual respect and toleration." At its meeting in January 1998, the task force considered the terms of this charge and produced a working definition of bigotry that both focused its deliberations and made it clear where the most work was needed. In part, that definition said that "[t]he consequence of bigotry is: to impede the free exchange of ideas and the application of scholarly standards to the discussion of controverted issues; to erode the mutual respect for differences that should undergird academic discourse; and to exclude members of the academic community from full participation in campus life."
Because of the particular interest and expertise of the Modern Language Association, the task force decided that an MLA session would be one of the chief means by which the association could address this issue with the full involvement of its membership. It is in the classroom, after all, where the effects of bigotry are often most virulently felt, and it is in the classroom where the assumptions that give rise to bigotry can be most usefully combated.
The panel was a great success, as those who attended it will attest, and the speakers raised a wide range of topics that were in urgent need of discussion. With the idea of continuing the very lively conversation that followed the presentation of these talks, the task force hopes that in presenting revised and (slightly) expanded versions of them here, it will be able to continue to keep these issues alive and bring them to the attention of the broadest MLA membership possible.
Together these essays challenge all of us working in the college classroom to rethink the politics of the encounters that take place there and to reimagine the kinds of difference that teaching can make. Jacqueline Jones Royster says that, beyond the intellectual and philosophical challenges of the classroom, all teachers, scholars, and administrators are called to mediate deeply embedded personal behaviors, learned codes of public interaction, and an entire range of personal respect and disrespect that reflects the social and political realities of our time. We must meet this challenge, she claims, if we are to have an intellectually and socially productive academic future. Her comments and those of the other writers ring with a challenge that is meant to shake the complacencies with which English and foreign language faculty members congratulate themselves on their open-mindedness. Open-mindedness is not enough; even awareness of the problem is not enough, Royster insists. Faculty members have to become active--proactive, as the phrasemakers say--in working to combat bigotry in all its many guises.
For Royster, combating bigotry means looking directly at the volatility of issues of tolerance in writing classrooms; it means developing "ways for doing more successfully and more systematically what we need to do." I note the active form of the verbs in this sentence: combating bigotry takes imagination, energy, and will, but it also takes endless intellectual and physical activity on the part of the faculty. For Guadalupe Valdés, it means that English teachers at every level need to find new ways to work effectively with nonnative English-speaking students; they need to face directly and constructively the new minority population and the personal, social, and political issues of bilingualism that attend that population. Valdés asks us all to confront some of our most deeply held assumptions about the English language itself and about the varieties of abilities we must now deal with. For Rosemarie Garland Thomson, the challenge involves further critical self-examination, in this case about the models with which we theorize relative physical and mental abilities, and a call to reimagine disability with a model that exposes it as a cultural product rather than as an inherently physical inferiority. To resist the "benign" bigotry that she sees everywhere around her in the classroom and the university at large--especially the exclusion of disability studies as a critical category in analysis and in institutional structures--Thomson proposes "new disability studies" on the model of minority studies. Finally, Douglas Eisner looks at teaching strategies for incorporating texts by sexual minorities into the classroom, and he considers ways to deal with the blatantly homophobic comments that can undermine the writing classroom. In fighting bigotry, he develops some surprising strategies for both the gay and the nongay instructor.
Taken together, these essays offer an astonishing range of deeply felt concerns and begin to suggest an agenda for change. Those of us on the task force, as well as these writers, hope that the publication of these essays will lead to further discussion, further consideration, and, we dare imagine, further change. For in talking about combating bigotry we are talking about perhaps the most ominous challenge to the classroom of the twenty-first century. If we do not take action to shape the college and university climate so that mutual respect and the free exchange of ideas are the norm, we may find ourselves losing more than we can ever gain with open admissions policies or special fellowship programs. Our students, of course, will lose even more.
The author is Professor of English at the University of California, Riverside. He presided at a session at the 1998 MLA convention at which the four essays that follow were presented.
© 1999 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
