Dani Wexler | Freedom to disagree

Hackneyed as it may sound, with great power comes great responsibility. And teachers have great power.

There's a video circulating the web, which shows an elementary-school teacher exerting blatant pressure on her students to support Barack Obama. Teacher Diatha Harris insinuated to the daughter of an American solider that the child's advocacy of McCain would extend her own father's time in Iraq.

And while elementary-school teachers impact the malleable minds of their fledgling students, college professors can also seriously impede our intellectual freedom. They can intimidate us out of expressing our own carefully formulated opinions (even in a purportedly liberal and open campus environment like Penn).

Many Penn students I spoke to were rattled by their professors' aggressive support of Obama, and McCain voters experienced a particular feeling of discomfort and alienation. We love our professors, and we're lucky to have them. But they're in control, and so we hesitate to contradict them. Maybe they'd welcome a challenge to their authoritative proclamations, but most of us shy away from the risk.

It's in that same vein that the majority of my sources either opted out of the column or requested anonymity. One such College senior majoring in English told me that three of her professors openly advocated supporting Obama. She found the first professor's candidness particularly jarring because the class is a small seminar.

The day after the election, he "assumed that everyone was for Obama, like it [wasn't] even a question." According to her, the professor qualified his statement by saying: "I can't assume that all of you are Obama supporters . I can't imagine why not, but ." and then proceeded to gloat about Obama's triumph.

She saw the same pattern in a Legal Studies course. "The day after the campaign a kid was wearing a McCain sticker," she told me. "The professor singled him out, and it seemed as if he was mocking it."

Though he's too radical for my taste, I identify with conservative activist David Horowitz's petition for intellectual freedom: "I think it's unprofessional for professors to be overtly political in the classroom," he said. "It's an abuse of students' academic freedom."

Apparently the tendency crosses disciplines at Penn as well. About a professor in the Biology department, Wharton sophomore Ayesha Chacko said: "It was pretty clear he was supporting Obama." Chacko and another anonymous Wharton sophomore separately described to me their professor's public delight at Obama's victory.

When I spoke with College Republicans chairman Zac Byer, he agreed that professors' political convictions "certainly bleed through."

"It seemed like most professors supported Barack Obama, but as Republicans, we expected it." Byer mentioned a questionable e-mail sent out by a school department offering internship opportunities for only the Obama campaign.

"For that to happen, especially amidst this discussion about not funding student political groups because our events aren't bipartisan, seems to be antithetical to those tenets," Byer told me.

Whether or not these aggressively political professors represent a minority, the issue still stands. University policy doesn't ban professors from political expression in the classroom, presumably based on their first-amendment rights. Truthfully, most of our classes are biased to some extent anyway, so bureaucratically restricting professors' political opinions would be illogical.

A class in the Graduate School of Education recently confronted this issue. First-year graduate student Ayal Robkin said his class, taught by professor Michael Nakkula, decided that a teacher stating his or her political opinion consciously or unconsciously alienates a student and infringes on "a student's development of identity."

That's why I maintain that with great power comes great responsibility, and the responsibility falls on our professors. One student summed it up with the following: "I think it's just plain inappropriate to turn the class into a political forum. Professors take advantage of their position because they know how much influence they have."

That may or may not be true. But the fact is that a contingent of students felt particularly uncomfortable during a time that should have been rife with uninhibited, independent thought. Those students are reason enough to seek the anticipated "change" that so clearly enraptured our faculty in the recent election.

Dani Wexler is a College sophomore from Los Angeles. Her e-mail is wexler@dailypennsylvanian.com. Wex Appeal appears every Friday.

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