You are currently browsing the category archive for the ‘Curriculum’ category.
Just when you thought the Arizona legislature was out of bad ideas.
SB 1467, newly introduced in the Arizona State Senate, would force schools and universities to suspend, fine, and ultimately fire any teacher or professor who “engage[d] in speech or conduct that would violate the standards adopted by the federal communications commission concerning obscenity, indecency and profanity if that speech or conduct were broadcast on television or radio.”
For the first offense, you’d get a one-week suspension without pay. For the second offense, two weeks. For the third, a pink slip.
As Greg Lukianoff of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education notes, this law would not only block the teaching of such classics as Ulysses, The Canterbury Tales, and Catcher in the Rye, it’d prohibit historians and law professors from competently discussing campus free speech regulations, since the most important Supreme Court case in that field hinged on a jacket with the slogan “Fuck The Draft” written on it.
It’s also worth noting, as Lukianoff does, that the bill would regulate professors’ actions outside the classroom, which means that merely writing the paragraph above — in a blogpost, a scholarly article, even a private email — would get you suspended.
But it’s even worse than that.
Note the language of the bill: You’re violating the law if you engage “in speech or conduct” that would violate FCC standards if “broadcast on television or radio.” Not public speech or conduct. Speech or conduct, full stop.
If this law passes, it will be illegal for any “person who provides classroom instruction” in the state of Arizona to have sex.
Or pee.
Ever.
A federal appeals court gave a conservative Christian counseling student’s lawsuit new life last week, ruling that Julea Ward’s case against Eastern Michigan University could go forward.
Ward was expelled from EMU’s graduate counseling program in early 2009. As I wrote at the time, Ward asked to be reassigned off the case of a gay counseling client. In a letter she read during her disciplinary hearing, Ward said she believes that “God ordained relationships between men and women,” and that people should “strive to cultivate sexual desires for persons of the opposite sex.” She is, she said, “morally obligated … to express the biblical viewpoint regarding proper sexual relationships” in the course of her counseling work.
When asked by the school why she would feel comfortable counseling someone who was contemplating abortion, but not someone who was in a gay relationship. “With abortion,” she said, “you have options which you can offer. With a client that’s struggling with homosexuality … it’s just, ‘OK, this is who you are, so we’re only going to deal with helping you feel comfortable with who you are.’ You cannot discuss any other treatment plans that would bring them out of that particular lifestyle.”
The Ward case has become a cause celebre for the Christian Right, who see her expulsion as a violation of religious freedom and as evidence of the politicization of the counseling profession’s ethics codes. Although the American Counseling Association does not explicitly bar so-called conversion therapy intended to “cure” homosexuality, it notes that such therapies have no proven record of effectiveness. More importantly, as I wrote in 2009, it bars therapists from suggesting such approaches in the absence of a client-initiated request.
Last week’s decision is not a ruling against EMU on the merits of the case, but a reversal of a lower court’s granting of what’s known as “summary judgment” in the university’s favor. The court declared that because, under the most generous reading of the evidence available, “a reasonable jury could conclude that Ward’s professors ejected her from the counseling program because of hostility toward her speech and faith,” the previous decision to throw out the case before it reached a jury was mistaken.
The issues in play here are important ones. A fundamental question is that of the EMU (and ACA) policy on referral in situations in which a counselor is unable to meet a client’s therapeutic needs — Ward claims that such referrals are explicitly authorized by the ACA ethics code, and the appellate court ruling is sympathetic to that position.
As I’ve written in the past, however, the ACA code only anticipates client referral on a case-by-case basis, not a counselor’s rejection of an entire class of clients. And while Ward’s stance may seem reasonable on the surface, the fact is that a client’s homosexuality will not always be made known to a counselor in advance of the establishment of a therapeutic relationship. For a counselor to establish such a relationship and then break it off upon learning that her client is gay would, EMU rightly perceived, represent a profound betrayal and a violation of the counselor’s ethical obligations.
More on this as the case goes forward.
If you thought the end of the school year meant no more grass-roots student agitation until fall, you thought wrong. Not gonna happen. Not this year. Yesterday students in California and Wisconsin, two of the country’s most active states, held targeted protests, and there’s more on the horizon.
In California, students at UCLA staged a campus march and sit-in to protest plans to suspend free tutoring services at the university’s Covel Commons. The group, who had timed their action to get noisy only during scheduled breaks between final exams, met with a vice chancellor and took steps to keep the pressure on in the weeks to come.
More on what’s happening in Wisconsin later today…
Students at the University of California at Berkeley are hunger striking to protest the university’s lack of commitment to ethnic studies.
Five representatives of the group met with a university official yesterday. Vice Chancellor Harry Le Grande agreed to two of their demands — that he support an ethnic studies bill currently pending in the state legislature and “publicly acknowledge the unfulfilled promise of the creation of a Third World College at UC Berkeley.”
There was no movement, however, on the demand that the university reinstate Ethnic Studies staffers whose positions were recently eliminated, or the demand that the university’s “Operational Excellence” restructuring initiative be halted.
The hunger strikers have been holding vigil in front of California Hall since their action began, though they left their position for a time overnight when threatened with arrest.
Nine high school students burst into a room in which the Tucson, Arizona school board was scheduled to meet last night, chaining themselves into the very seats that the board members were scheduled to occupy. Their action forced the cancellation of the meeting, which has yet to be rescheduled.
The students were protesting a planned resolution that would remove ethnic studies from the core curriculum in Tucson schools. That resolution was drafted in response to HB 2281, a new state law intended to remove ethnic studies from the Tucson school district entirely. The board is divided on the resolution, which opponents call a capitulation to HB 2281.
Recent Comments