After more than 15 years of teaching college and graduate courses, I am no longer apprehensive about receiving teaching evaluations. Over the years, I have honed my pedagogical skills, taken stock of my performance, and eaten my share of humble pies after perusing stacks of multiple-choice and discursive evaluations of my teaching style. I’ve even peeked at my RateMyProfessor responses and found them to be generally complimentary. If anything, my overall scores in the various metrics of student evaluations have been gradually inching upward.
So, imagine my reaction when I glanced at the latest summary of my student evaluations and realized it was a bloodbath. Had there been a mistake? Did I receive somebody else’s teaching evals? This can’t be me, I thought. But it was me, and I had just been crushed.
The inevitable soul searching thus began. I knew I was not guilty of any major dereliction of duty — there had been no snafu, no student rebellion, no complaints filed. I had not been a harsh grader, nor had my students failed to perform well. The course had a “fun” theme (laughter and religion), and it provided a large conceptual, philosophical, historical, and literary payoff. Despite some of the usual challenges along the way, I had thought that great evaluations were in store for me.
But something must have been amiss. After some reflection, it dawned on me that I was a proxy absorbing the wrath that my students might have wanted to direct against the likes of Mark Twain, James Morrow, Ron Currie Jr., and Christopher Moore. You see, I had assigned these writers’ most blasphemous, irreverent, and antireligious works. The course was designed to study religious comedy, and I had anticipated an open, dispassionate, analytical, and contextualized series of inquiries into the role of laughter, including mockery and derision, in a religious context. The only problem with this project was that with one exception (an agnostic), all of my 18 students at this urban New York campus were either practicing Christians (Catholics, Seventh-day Adventists, Evangelicals), Muslims, or Buddhists. An atheist teaching religionists about irreverent comedy — what could go wrong?
Are we beginning to lose the ability to tolerate and engage with disagreement and dissent?
In my defense, nobody was “forced” to take the course — it was an Honors elective. And I had printed my first-ever “trigger warning” at the top of the course description, spelling out clearly that we would be reading literary texts that could be legitimately considered offensive and blasphemous, depending on one’s religious outlook. Since nobody opted out of the class after a cascade of cautionary comments, I assumed that they would be able to handle the likes of Twain (“If Christ were here now there is one thing he would not be — a Christian”) and Morrow (“Satan and Santa are one and the same, beginning with the anagrammatic connection between our names”).
Well, it turns out, the trigger warning may have been ineffectual since students apparently had little prior exposure to radical irreverence à la Mark Twain. So, when they read (in “The Mysterious Stranger”) about “a God … who gave his angels painless lives, yet cursed his other children with biting miseries and maladies of mind and body; […] who mouths morals to other people yet has none himself,” the devout students were startled and found it hard to respond within a framework of academic inquiry. They were sorely tested when asked to critically process offensive comments that targeted Yahweh, the Virgin Mary, atonement, or original sin. When such religious matters became the focus of literary satire or parody — i.e., when abrasive, blasphemous ideas were aimed at what was considered holy and worshipful — the tolerance was stretched to the breaking point, the good will ran out, and the teaching evaluations tanked.
To me, this is a pity and a problem. I had hoped precisely to demonstrate that any ideological construction of meaning (whether it touches on race, class, gender, age, disability, geography, or religion) is open to critical inquiry — that the rules of academic inquiry do not need to be changed simply because religious (rather than other) sensibilities are at stake. The assigned texts were not treated as “the truth” and were not celebrated as “payback” or “gotcha” victories scored against religion. Rather, they were presented, approached, and analyzed as artworks with an agenda, as artifacts promoting heretical viewpoints, or as satires representing theologically revisionist positions. Often, my teaching was dominated by historical framing and theological sophistry (my students learned to parse the distinctions between the ontological and the freewill theodicies, for example). The course was further built on a solid technical understanding of the four major theories of laughter (incongruity theory, superiority theory, relief theory, and play theory), so that my students came away with a thorough understanding of the workings of comedy in general.
But their resistance to the subversive and irreverent tone of several core texts could not be successfully compensated for by the cognitive benefits that they were reaping from the course. The fact that they had to absorb irreverence in a context of laughter added to the challenge. I suspect that laughter and comedy had been so positively connotated for them that they could not adjust their expectations to see comedy as a means of critique and laughter as a subversive weapon rather than simply a feel-good mechanism.
I began to have a hunch what I was up against (or at least what my pious students were up against) when they repeatedly reported feeling “guilty” for reading the assigned texts. Now, I did not assign the likes of the Marquis de Sade. The farthest I went was giving them Ron Currie Jr.’s grotesque satire God Is Dead (2007), in which God incarnates as a Dinka woman in South Sudan, is killed in a raid by paramilitary thugs, and then becomes food for feral dogs. At this point, I let students excuse themselves from submitting response papers if they didn’t want to deal with this material. My students had reactions that ranged from bewilderment, to guilt, to anger. Turning this feedback into teachable moments whenever I saw a chance made me think — falsely, as it turned out — that my students would ultimately warm to the course theme and appreciate its challenges.
But there were other signs of trouble. One of my students wrote in the draft of her final project that Catholics are not Christians. After repeated failed attempts to have her revise this claim (office-hours invitations declined; a diagram of the genealogical tree of Christianity’s development, with Catholicism as its trunk, rejected), I was nonplussed. Here was a blockage, a doctrinal point of faith that was completely impervious to reasoned argument. If I could not communicate on a rational level with this student about a fairly clear matter of fact, perhaps I faced a similar problem with other religious believers in my class over more insidious aspects of religious belief and dissent.
Although issues involving the religious sensibilities of students are a particularly delicate matter, I can’t help thinking that my experience may be indicative of a larger trend in handling ideological differences. Is my students’ displeasure in some way related to the much publicized disinvitations in 2014 of Christine Lagarde and Ayaan Hirsi Ali as commencement participants from Smith College and Brandeis University, respectively, because student activists objected to them ideologically? Have we reached a point where exposing students to opinions that make them uncomfortable triggers rejection on a scale that undermines the project of a truly liberal education? Are we beginning to lose the ability to tolerate and engage with disagreement and dissent? We may not have reached that point yet as far as issues like globalization, foreign aid, feminism, racism, and militarism are concerned. But what of religion and heresy?
Sadly, instead of using the provocative texts that I assigned as objects of legitimate academic inquiry, my students sought to avoid the confrontation, then vented their disapproval indirectly, via course evaluations. True, my students did not administer a gag-order against me. But I suspect they were yearning for the moment when this class was over and they no longer needed to face its unruly contents. But here’s the rub: If we value mental habits like grit and disruptive thinking, we cannot shield students from ideas that they don’t like, including blasphemous ones. The 20th-century British humanist Rebecca West once said that “all men should have a drop of treason in their veins, if nations are not to go soft like so many sleepy pears.” I think we can substitute “men” with “students” and “treason” with “irreverence” or “satire,” and we’d have a statement that similarly reflects the need to consider ideas that smack of heterodoxy and nonconformism in order to avoid intellectual complacency and eschew facile pieties.
What’s at stake here is not only the ability to live up to the ideal of academic freedom, but to tolerate it when one’s own group becomes the target of humor without lashing out, in one form or another. As the recent brouhaha surrounding the mocking of Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, by a German satirist demonstrates, authoritarianism goes hand-in-hand with humorlessness, and thin-skinned intolerance is a prelude to censorship. And so, stretching the boundaries of my students’ grasp of comedy, whether they liked it or not, may well have fulfilled a valuable civic function. Humor is the grease that lubricates the mental apparatus and loosens the grip of power, including the power of fixed ideas and blind faith. This my students should have realized on some level, even if the grease that was administered smelled quite repellent to them.