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The Profession of Education: Responsibilities, Ethics and Pedagogic Experimentation Shannon Kincaid, Ph.D. Philip Pecorino, Ph.D. The art of teaching is to teach, to teach well and to teach even better. Chapter: IX: Cases Getting Out the Vote: One Professor Insists Upon It September 22, 2004 By MAREK FUCHS The New York Times Company MADISON, N.J. - Merrill Skaggs has taught American
literature at Drew University for four decades, but it
Professor Skaggs, a gentle-spoken 66-year-old, sent out a faculty wide e-mail message announcing that she planned to make voting a class requirement. She urged other faculty members to do the same. "I will explain this move by reminding my students that we not only study the forces that shape our American culture," Professor Skaggs wrote, "but also participate in shaping the culture as well." Responses shot back from philosophers, Far East specialists, Freud scholars and economic determinists - overwhelmingly against the plan. "The idea was called totalitarian," said Professor Skaggs, who came by it after attending a conference over the summer and learning that only about one-third of college-age students vote. She was not swayed by the totalitarian argument. "That's just what I spot as a big word to shut off argument," she said. "There's a difference between a totalitarian country and classroom. All classrooms have requirements, but you can get out of a classroom if you want; it's an intellectual choice. That all written work come in on time is mandated, and that could be considered a harsher requirement than voting for the population concerned." When students arrived for Drew's fall semester, the
requirement became a hot topic and the subject of a
Many critics, including Drew's president, Thomas H. Kean, suggested that though Professor Skaggs's ends were admirable, the method was not. Mr. Kean, the former governor of New Jersey and more recently the chairman of the 9/11 commission, remarked: "I've been trying to encourage people to vote, particularly young people. I've tried to do about every single thing, but this is a touch over the top." Among the suggestions for tweaks to Professor Skaggs's plan were that she not make voting a requirement but create occasions to talk about the election in class. Professor Skaggs, who is coy about which candidate she favors in the presidential election but says she is a Quaker who opposed the Iraq war, did not see this as a workable replacement to a straightforward requirement. "A professor has no business expressing loves and hates
in the classroom. That's propaganda, not education -
and I'm not sure I can trust myself to be totally neutral anyway."
A self-described creature of the 1960's, Professor Skaggs said that she went to Selma, Ala., with students during the civil rights demonstrations and helped picket to integrate a barbershop in New Jersey that refused to serve black customers. But then came two children, a term as a dean at Drew's graduate seminary and a stint as head of the faculty senate. "Being a dean pretty much scotched my activism," she said. "Something about being in administration makes you not want to argue. And when I was chair of the faculty senate, that was as much politics as I wanted. Being political is not foreign, but it's certainly not habitual." Tom Harris, a university spokesman, said this was the first large-scale intellectual brawl that Ms. Skaggs has started in his 12 years at Drew. Bahram M. Rajaee, a spokesman for the American Political Science Association in Washington, said this particular debate about making voting a class requirement has never come up in his organization. Many at Drew are uneasy about Professor Skaggs's proposal. "Whether or not they vote is confidential information," said Fred Curtis, an economics professor. "Considering my specialty," said Catherine Keyser, a
political science professor with a focus on China, "we
Paulo Cucci, vice president and dean of the college, is also against the requirement. Swayed by the mounting disagreement and the prospect of legal challenges, Professor Skaggs scaled back the requirement before school began. Framing the requirement in the vocabulary of the experiential learning that the school champions, Professor Skaggs said students would be required only to enter the voting booth; if they wished, they did not have to pull the lever. Students who are not American citizens would get a pass on the requirement. Professor Skaggs said the penalty for failing to enter the voting booth, which would be done on the honor system, would probably be "a failure to be generous" on her part when it comes time to issue grades and "an inclination to round fractions down." Since school started, no students have dropped out of her classes, according to school officials. "When she told us we were required to go into voting
booths," said Nathaniel Purcell, an English major, "it
Benjamin Weingrod, a sophomore and head of the campus Democrats, said he supports the idea, but along the paths and benches on campus, most others were against it. Even inside the University Center building, Katija Hakim, a senior political science major working a voter registration table, said the requirement runs counter to democratic freedoms. And while it might encourage students to vote, said Dawn DelliSanti, a junior psychology major, the new voters are likely to lack passion. Whether or not everyone is honest about entering the voting booth, Professor Skaggs already considers her policy a winner. "I want to provoke discussion among the students," she said, "and the provocation that works best with my students is requirements." Besides, she added: "Everyone loves to fight. We may have more." Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company ******************************************************
http://www.nas.org/forum.html Should Professors Compel Their Students to Vote?
In an article published recently in the TC Record (which bills itself modestly as "The Voice of Scholarship in Education") Drew University English professor Merrill Maguire Skaggs explained why she felt justified in making it a requirement in one of her classes that students register and vote. She wrote that while attending a meeting of the Society for Values in Higher Education earlier this year, she was dismayed to learn that only 37 percent of college students had voted in the 2000 presidential election. From that, Professor Skaggs concluded that if students participated in elections in greater numbers, they had "the capacity to swing an election." But because relatively few students vote, candidates do not "bother to address student issues thoroughly." Feeling the need to do something, Professor Skaggs hit upon the idea of requiring all of her English students to vote. Although she tosses in such bromides as "citizenship comes first" (quoting a martial arts instructor who required all of his students to register and vote), she makes no effort to conceal the fact that her motivation was personal: "For me, making what I myself could consider a meaningful gesture was the important thing -- the personal satisfaction of finding something I could do." So is this a good thing to do? Should professors across the country (not to mention martial arts instructors) adopt Skaggs' idea and make voting mandatory? Is this a laudable attempt to promote good citizenship -- or an indefensible abuse of power for personal satisfaction? Sorry, Professor, but I take the latter view. The job of an English professor is to teach English. That's it. Adding non-academic requirements to a course is objectionable, no matter how important the professor may believe them to be. Suppose that another English professor who feels passionately that students need to get in better physical shape (for their own benefit, and also to reduce the strain that overweight, sickly people put on our semi-socialist health care system) mandates that in order to pass the course, all students must be able to run a mile in less than 8 minutes -- undoubtedly, a "meaningful gesture" in the critical war against obesity. True, getting in shape for the run would take a lot more time from the students than registering and voting, but it's a difference only in degree, not in kind. Such a fitness requirement would be roundly condemned as none of the professor's business. I can see no reason to regard a voting requirement differently. Professor Skaggs tells us that she agonized over the decision and consulted many of her colleagues. A number of them thought the idea of mandatory voting was "totalitarian." But then she learned that Australia has a law that requires voting and punishes citizens who don't. Since, she writes, "Australia is not normally considered totalitarian," that clinched it. Logicians will quickly see a problem here -- the fallacy of division. That is the logical error in concluding that because X is true of the whole, X must also be true for all its constituent parts. Let us agree with the premise, "Australia is not a totalitarian nation." Does it follow that "No law enacted by Australia is totalitarian?" ("Authoritarian" would be a better word here, but never mind.) No, it doesn't. The morality of each law must be evaluated independently. To my way of thinking, punishing people for choosing not to participate in an election is about as bad a victimless crime law as you'll find. The fact that Australia has mandatory voting does not serve as a justification for American professors to impose a voting requirement on their students. There are a number of good reasons why an individual might choose to remain uninvolved in the political process. For one, there is the well-known "lesser of two evils" problem. Many people realize that there are grounds for objecting to both (or all) of the candidates for an office. Since you can't register your approval of individual positions candidates take, but instead have to vote for one entire candidate bundle or another, some citizens prefer not to lend their sanction to the system by voting for someone whom they do not trust to represent their interests or protect their rights. Maybe Professor Skaggs didn't have any "conscientious objectors" in her class, but if she had, would they have been excused from the voting requirement? More commonly, people don't vote because they just don't think it matters and therefore isn't worth the time. They might conclude that because a single vote almost never "swings" an election, it isn't worth the trouble. (That would still be true even if all professors had a mandatory voting policy.) Or they might conclude that the time it would take in order to become truly well informed is too much for them and they'd just as soon not vote if they aren't well informed. (Skaggs admits that she considered having in-class discussions of election issues, but decided against doing so because she didn't think she could keep her own views to herself; the fact that an English class is not the place for political discussion apparently was not a factor in that decision.) Probably the most common reason why people choose not to vote is that they don't think it will make any difference in their lives. "Who cares whether Tweedle-dee or Tweedle-dum wins?" they ask. To people like Professor Skaggs who are in the thrall of politics, this position seems absurd. "Don't you realize that Candidate A's position on Issue X will promote the public interest, while Candidate B's position is nothing but a sop to special interests?!" But a lot of people, including some students, realize that life is more complicated than that. I'm not saying that all political positions are equally good, but merely pointing out that just because the candidate with the position you like on Issue X wins doesn't mean that he will actually try to do anything to bring it about, or succeed even if he does try. If a student sees it that way, forcing him to vote in order to pass a class is nothing more than mandating that he waste some of his time. Therefore, political non-involvement is entirely rational and certainly does not rise to the level of "turpitude" as Skaggs says. Skaggs opines that "it's time for students to seize their power." Alas, the chief problem with the United States is rooted in groups "seizing their power" and using the political system to help them get what they want, inevitably at the expense of others. With her "you must vote because I say so" attitude, she has set a bad example and given a small boost to the authoritarianism she thinks she is combating.
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