For the life of me, I am puzzled by the posting re: Mary Daly. Yes,
she is a pioneer feminist scholar who has taken up a courageous set
of stands over the years. Yet, her behavior in this case as a teacher
seems on the face of it at least odd, if not plainly unacceptable.
(For the sake of honesty, let me disclose that I am a Jesuit priest
[though I have never met the current president at Boston College] and
I do have a grand total of 3 undergraduate credits from BC from a
1976 summer session in which I was introduced to statistics over four
weeks of night class.)
Why should Mary Daly's policy be applauded? Change the example from
one in which the faculty member "in order to promote a safe space to
discuss such issues as violence against women" decides only to teach
males in a separate locale. Suppose she were teaching a course in
African American Studies and decided to teach White students
separately in order to create "a safe space for persons of color to
deal with issues such as racism and colonialism"? Or, suppose she
were teaching an Islamic Studies course and asked Jewish students to
meet with her in her office separately so as to allow Muslim students
"a safe space to deal with issues such as Zionist oppression and
Palestinian rights"? It just doesn't wash in my understanding--at
least not in a post-secondary coeducational institution in the US. If
she were conducting a group therapy session in a private setting, I
would understand a therapeutic rationale for grouping according to
some personal characteristic. But, in a public educational
institution of Boston College's type, I can't see the justification.
Perhaps I am completely off base and others might be able to offer
parallel examples of legally acceptable separate instructional
practices in public US universities and colleges. I, for one, have
never heard of such separatism except historically as an expression
of racism or anti-feminist bias. Indeed, I am even frightened by the
implications of Daly's position (or, at least, those advanced by some
of her defenders) for the possibility of the academy's future
existence as a locale for fearless intellectual exploration.
Regarding the question of tenure, who would want to weaken this
protection of our academic freedom? Yet, I suspect that there are
forms of teaching which are so contrary to the underlying contractual
obligations of faculty that tenure cannot be heralded as the sole
value at issue. For example, consider a situation in which I were
teaching an undergraduate course in psychological testing and held
the "unconventional" viewpoint (a la Murray and Herrnstein or, even,
a la Carl Brigham in an earlier era) that there are profound genetic
differences across the races which translated into unequal
intellectual capacities and functioning. And, suppose that I made
sure in my classes that my viewpoint was repeatedly voiced (though
some classes might cover more mainstream and less "unconventional"
positions which do consider my viewpoint as sheer nonsense). I guess
that, with gritted teeth, those of us valuing tenure as a major
defense of the right to hold unconventional viewpoints might oppose
efforts to remove me from the classroom simply for the viewpoint
expressed in class. (Of course, thought police anywhere might
challenge that defense.) But, press the example a step further. How
would defenders of tenure as an unquestioned value deal with a
further decision by me to separate my class into racial groupings in
order to "maximize the learning advantages" for members of each
group who could then "learn at their own pace"? I think this
hypothetical pedagogy and its underlying assumptions are simply
loopy. But, I am having trouble understanding how one can defend
tenure as an unquestionable value without also accepting the freedom
to carry out such an excessive pedagogical practice.
Vincent Hevern
Le Moyne College
Syracuse, NY