The Des Moines Register ran an editorial today about Steve Bitterman’s firing (see also here) from Southwestern Community College in Red Oak. Bitterman says he was fired because he told students that the biblical “garden of Eden” story shouldn’t be interpreted literally (read: as accurate historical reporting); students say it was because he was hostile and derogatory toward them. The unsigned editorial takes Southwestern to task for their secrecy in this matter. Bitterman is talking, students are talking, but the administration is keeping quiet except for some bureaucratic doublespeak. The silence is deafening. The editorial reaches this conclusion:

For faculty and students, institutions of higher education should be havens for free inquiry into the most controversial topics. It’s outrageous if Bitterman’s expression of his interpretation of a biblical passage figured in his dismissal.

Yet, neither should anyone in America - in a classroom or elsewhere - be belittled for their religious beliefs. Giving free rein to discussion doesn’t mean condoning a lack of civility, or worse, harassment.

One thing, though, is crystal clear: This story sends a message to all college students in Iowa that if your instructor says something offensive, you can complain and maybe get the instructor fired.

That is a very dangerous message to send when it comes to higher education - a place where students should be exposed to new ideas and have their thoughts challenged.

In my estimation, those last two paragraphs are key. With all due respect to my students, whom I love, it’s galling to think that 18-year-olds would have that much power over a 60-year-old professor’s (even an adjunct professor’s) livelihood (if $1,700 per course—Bitterman’s wages—is a “livelihood”). (A related DMR editorial, signed by Andie Dominick, takes aim at the “helicopter parents” who took their complaints to the administration.) And it’s even more galling to think that a college would shield students from exposure to ideas contrary to those they already hold. That’s sort of the whole point. Education doesn’t happen when all that happens in reinforcement of your current ideas.

The Des Moines Register has a new story today following up on the firing of Steve Bitterman from Southwestern Community College in Red Oak, Iowa. Bitterman claims that he was fired for teaching a non-literal interpretation of Genesis 1–2 in his Western civlization course, but students say they complained about his brash teaching style. According to the Register:

But students in the class, which was transmitted to a classroom in Osceola over the state fiber-optic network, say Bitterman also told them to question their religious beliefs and at one point in the heated debate told one of the Osceola students, Kristen Fry, to “pop a Prozac.”

Now there are two completely separate issues here. Being outright rude to students isn’t a wise choice for a college professor to make, though I have to admit I’ve given in to the temptation on a few occasions when I was extremely frustated. A professor really shouldn’t be insulting students—or persons suffering from clinical depression—with remarks like the “Prozac” one. According to the Register, “Bitterman said the Prozac comment was a joke meant to disarm a student who ‘was screeching at me,’” but clearly it misfired (and how could it not?). Just the other day I read a post or article on this very topic—using “Prozac” (mutatis mutandis) jokes as insults—but I cannot now remember where. Whether Bitterman’s abrasiveness should be a firing offense, I don’t know, and really can’t assess at such great remove from the situation.

On the other matter, though—the complaint that Bitterman challenged students to question their prior beliefs—perhaps the best response comes from Stephen Colbert, responding to the complaints of Roger Williams University student Barry Lucier, who objected to watching An Inconvenient Truth as a class assignment:

Stephen: This savage attack on young minds brings us to tonight’s Word: Heated Debate. Folks, you know it, I know it, the left has a stranglehold on our universities. Professors are forcing our kids to submit to their pro-glacier agenda. But heroes like Barry aren’t taking it lying down.

[Video: Barry Lucier: This was forced upon me to watch something that I didn’t believe it.]

Stephen: Folks, at a “college” Barry was forced to think about something he didn’t already think. When you confront young people with information that doesn’t jibe with what they already believe they can get confused, or even worse, bitter.

{Video: Neil Cavuto: Are you bitter?
Barry Lucier: Uh, a little.]

Stephen: Of course he’s bitter! He’s enrolled in a class where the professor thinks he knows more about the subject than the students! (Boss Tweed) Last time I checked that is the definition of elitism. (Stephen has never checked) Hey, I’m no scientist but I thought there were supposed to be two sides to every story. (Mine & wrong) Sure there’s a vast consensus on global warming science, but doesn’t the opposing five percent deserve 50% of the time. (Fair & balanced) In this core science class he probably got a syllabus full of “convention wisdom.” For instance they probably also told him the Earth revolves around the sun. (Actually revolves around Stephen) This is a relatively new and untested theory that’s only been around for 500 years. (Barely longer than Law & Order) But of course the Copernicus crowd doesn’t even mention Ptolemy’s view that the Earth is the center of the universe even though that theory has been around for 1900 years. (Ptake that!) It is 1400 years truer! But these days college is all about silencing the dissenters, it’s no longer a place to raise your hand, offer your minority viewpoint and have healthy and informed debate. (That’s Hannity and Colmes) The Barry Luciers of the world are entering a minefield of knowledge. Who knows what destructive information they’ll be confronted with next. (Student loan bill) That’s why all colleges should be forced to advertise every element of their curriculum so students are guaranteed that when the leave college they’ll be exactly the same as when they went in. (Give or take $160,000) That folks, is what I believe college is for. You take these unformed lumps of clay, leave them unformed lumps, then fire them in the kiln of unchallenged thought so they become rigid and never move again. That’s how you get well educated like Barry.

[Video: Neil Cavuto: What was your grade?
Barry Lucier: My grade was well.]

Stephen: See? His grade was well. Now he make double plus think despite unwell school. Let’s just hope our future generations can do the same.

And that’s the Word. (reposted from College Freedom, warts and all)

The next part is kind of surreal. The “Prozac-targeted” student, Kristen Fry, told the Register:

“I talked to a lawyer and was told that what he was doing was illegal,” she said. “He was not allowed to be derogatory toward me for being a Christian. I told my adviser I would sue if I had to.”

Wait … did I read that right? A lawyer told her it was illegal for someone to insult her because of her religious beliefs, and moreover that it was actionable? When did that happen? It’s almost as if this were scripted to prove Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris right about the silliness of religious people thinking that religious views somehow get a “pass,” that one’s religious views are exempt from critical scrutiny or from the ridicule of others. No such legal protection exists. U.S. law protects its citizens from the imposition of a governmentally-chosen, governmentally-sponsored religion, and it protects its citizens from governmental restraint on the free exercise of religion. It does not grant religious citizens some sort of shield against criticism, even harshly insulting criticism. There are many things wrong with a professor insulting a student, but as far as I know, it isn’t a criminal offense.

Bitterman himself has tried to defend his style:

“Sometimes you say something outrageous just to see if you can provoke some discussion. … I can be a little acerbic at times, I don’t deny that,” he said. “I certainly take students’ viewpoints seriously in the sense that I encourage them to express it, and then I will challenge that viewpoint, regardless of what it is, to see how well they can back it up with reason and critical thought.

“Often, these students are essentially right out of high school and they take things so personally,” Bitterman said. “They really can’t distinguish between a critical assessment of their argument and an attack upon them personally.”

When I say outrageous things to provoke discussion, I usually preface it by saying, “I’m about to say something outrageous to provoke discussion.” When I’m trying to find out how well a student can back up a position with reason and critical thought, I will say something like “I’m really not trying to pick on you, Andrew, but I really want you to connect the dots for me” (loosely paraphrased from today’s “Faith & Reason” seminar). Maybe Bitterman would feel that this kind of self-referential voiceover would defeat the pedagogical purpose (if that’s the right phrase to use) of his abrasiveness, but then, maybe he would still have a job had he found less combative teaching techniques.

(P.S. Anybody else notice the synchronicitous linguistic irony in the students’ complaints against Steve Bitterman?)

I’ve previously blogged about the outrageous treatment of Richard Colling by the Olivet Nazarene administration, and of Steve Bitterman by the administration of Southwestern Community College in Red Oak, Iowa. Today’s Inside Higher Education reports a story that may be the mirror image of these.

Phil Mitchell, a longtime instructor at the University of Colorado at Boulder, claims that hostility toward his conservative religious and political views led to his contract not being renewed this year. Actually, Mitchell’s contract was terminated in 2005, but a storm of protests seems to have embarrassed CU into reversing that decision; Mitchell claims the 2007 non-renewal of his contract comes in retaliation for his protest against the 2005 non-renewal, and he attributes that non-renewal to religious and political bias against him. According to a report attributed to the American Association of University Professors (a group that is by no means composed of reactionary conservatives, but is dedicated to academic freedom), Mitchell had a significant history of receiving glowing teaching evaluations both from his students and from his peers. Here’s a clip from that report that illustrates just how odd this situation may be:

9. February 1, 2005. William Wei, the director of Sewall RAP, recommends Mitchell for a three-year reappointment. (There is no personnel committee in the Sewall RAP. All hiring and reappointment decisions are made by the director, pending the approval of the appropriate disciplinary unit and the Dean of Arts and Sciences.) Wei concludes his recommendation to Associate Dean Joyce Nielson by stating, “If an academic unit is lucky, it will have at least one Phil Mitchell on its faculty” (Attachment 4).

10. February 2005. Sewall Director William Wei calls Mitchell to express his regret that Mitchell has been terminated from the Sewall RAP because the History Department would no long longer “sign off” on his classes.

Wei tells Mitchell that he would be allowed to teach classes for one more year “and then no more.” According to the Colorado Daily, Dean Todd Gleeson told Wei that Mitchell was terminated for not teaching up to History Department standards and for preaching to students.

According to Mitchell, when he asks Wei what the History Department standards are that he has failed to meet, Wei tells Mitchell, “We don’t have any.”

The full report continues in this vein for quite a long stretch. If the AAUP’s report gives a fairly accurate view of the sequence of events, then the CU case seems to be one of targeting a colleague for firing because of ideological disagreements. CU faculty and officials seem to have gone to a lot of trouble to get rid of Phil Mitchell. It seems to be the opposite trajectory of what happened to Steve Bitterman, but (if the report is accurate) it’s just as outrageous.

In my “Faith and Reason” seminar this past week, our reading was Genesis 1–11. We did not engage “creation-vs.-evolution” issues in my section this week; rather, we tabled that discussion until later in the semester, when we will be reading excerpts from Darwin’s Origin of Species and selected chapters from Ken Miller’s Finding Darwin’s God. My students (most, but not all, conservative Christians) were, well, pretty freaked out by the notion of the “divine council,” which is explicit in other biblical texts but implicit in Genesis 1, 6, and 10. They also had never really considered the differences between Genesis 1 and Genesis 2. I tried to focus the discussion primarily on literary themes, so the students could see that the differences between Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 are not just matters of superficial detail, but run deep into the conceptual frameworks the different stories instantiate (different controlling metaphors for God, different views about the “godlikeness” of humanity, and so on).

Yesterday, the table of contents for the October 2007 issue of Teaching Theology and Religion (published by Blackwell) landed in my inbox. This issue includes an article by David Bosworth entitled “Teaching Creation: A Modular Approach.” (The abstract is available here; you need a subscription to the journal—your own or a library’s—to read the full article, or you can pay a one-time access fee.) In the short (four pages) note, Bosworth describes how he teaches the Genesis creation stories. It’s an interesting approach, though it requires about three days of class, and I’m not sure how large Bosworth’s courses are. Some of his strategies sound a lot like my own, although I can really only spend one day of my “History and Religion of Israel” class on the creation stories, and I teach Genesis 1–2 alongside Psalms 74; 89 and Proverbs 8, so the students can see just how varied “biblical creation faith” really was.

But Bosworth’s non-literal approach apparently wouldn’t go over too well at Southwestern Community College in Red Oak, Iowa, where Steve Bitterman alleges that he was fired from his part-time appointment teaching Western civilization courses because he taught the Genesis story from a non-literalistic perspective. This story was brought to my attention by Hector Avalos, who was interviewed by the Des Moines Register for the story. Here’s a long excerpt from the story, though I encourage you to read the whole thing for yourself:

A community college instructor in Red Oak claims he was fired after he told his students that the biblical story of Adam and Eve should not be literally interpreted.

Steve Bitterman, 60, said officials at Southwestern Community College sided with a handful of students who threatened legal action over his remarks in a western civilization class Tuesday. He said he was fired Thursday.

“I’m just a little bit shocked myself that a college in good standing would back up students who insist that people who have been through college and have a master’s degree, a couple actually, have to teach that there were such things as talking snakes or lose their job,” Bitterman said.

Sarah Smith, director of the school’s Red Oak campus, declined to comment Friday on Bitterman’s employment status. The school’s president, Barbara Crittenden, said Bitterman taught one course at Southwest. She would not comment, however, on his claim that he was fired over the Bible reference, saying it was a personnel issue.
“I can assure you that college understands our employees’ free speech rights,” she said. “There was no action taken that violated the First Amendment.”

Bitterman, who taught part time at Southwestern and Omaha’s Metropolitan Community College, said he uses the Old Testament in his western civilization course and always teaches it from an academic standpoint.

Bitterman’s Tuesday course was telecast to students in Osceola over the Iowa Communications Network. A few students in the Osceola classroom, he said, thought the lesson was “denigrating their religion.”

“I put the Hebrew religion on the same plane as any other religion. Their god wasn’t given any more credibility than any other god,” Bitterman said. “I told them it was an extremely meaningful story, but you had to see it in a poetic, metaphoric or symbolic sense, that if you took it literally, that you were going to miss a whole lot of meaning there.”

Bitterman said called the story of Adam and Eve a “fairy tale” in a conversation with a student after the class and was told the students had threatened to see an attorney. He declined to identify any of the students in the class.

“I just thought there was such a thing as academic freedom here,” he said. “From my point of view, what they’re doing is essentially teaching their students very well to function in the 8th century.”

I think it’s shocking, too. I might have expected such behavior at a private, Christian college where professors are required to affirm “statements of faith” and that sort of thing; even at Pepperdine, I know that my colleagues sometimes choose their words very carefully to avoid certain vocabulary (”myth”) while communicating the same concepts. But for a community college to fire a Western civilization professor for not teaching the “garden of Eden” story as historical fact is just mind-boggling. Besides that, Bitterman is quite right to say “it was an extremely meaningful story, but you had to see it in a poetic, metaphoric or symbolic sense, that if you took it literally, that you were going to miss a whole lot of meaning there”—which loops us right back around to the first paragraph in this post. The Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 stories dramatize some very deep-seated (for the authors and their ancient audiences, anyway) questions about humanity and its place in the cosmos, and they offer diferent answers to these questions. That the editors of the book of Genesis left both stories in testifies to their ambivalence about the issues, and their sense that the two stories, which are incompatible if taken literally, represent two “poles” in a debate over these humanistic questions.

If Bitterman’s firing really was about the way he treated Genesis in his Western civilization course—and as far as I know, there has been no further comment from the school adminstration to the contrary, beyond the vague denial reprinted above—the school’s actions are reprehensible (and probably legally actionable as well, though I’m not really competent to speak on legal matters). One would think that if there were other serious reasons to fire Bitterman, the school wouldn’t have put him on the teaching rotation for the current term. The fact that the course is close-circuited over to another campus certainly suggests that they don’t have much depth in the bullpen. The timing is also suspicious. I’ll be surprised if Southwest comes out with a really convincing defense of Bitterman’s firing, but time will tell.

Several bloggers and Pepperdine colleagues have drawn my attention to Sharon Begley’s online column, “Can God Love Darwin, Too?,” “preprinted” from next week’s Newsweek. It seems that the school administration has banned one its faculty members, biologist Richard Colling, from teaching an introductory biology class (which he’s taught since 1991) and has banned other faculty members from assigning Colling’s book Random Designer (Browning Press, 2004)—because Colling is a theistic evolutionist (emphasis on evolutionist). I feel for Colling and find the administration’s actions reprehensible. At the same time, I am glad that, at present at least, my Pepperdine colleagues need not fear similar treatment.

I have the best job in the world. Sometimes I get busy, and say “yes” to too many things, and feel the resulting stress, and then I gripe about being “overworked.” But every day, I get paid to talk with enthusiastic, intelligent, charismatic people (my students and colleagues) about big, important ideas (our subject matter).

As you can tell, the semester is off to a great start.

The new fall semester, that is. Pepperdine’s academic year begins today. I have meetings but no classes. My class schedule begins tomorrow with Hebrew at 8:00 AM on Tuesdays and Fridays, Religion 101 at 10:00 AM on Tuesdays and Fridays, and a First-Year Seminar on Faith and Reason from 12:00–2:50 PM on Wednesdays.

My desk copy of Basics of Biblical Hebrew, 2nd edition by Gary Pratico and Miles van Pelt (published by Zondervan) arrived at my office sometime late last week. Upon opening this long-awaited package, the first thing I noticed was that the book is bigger—not thicker, but bigger. The hardbound grammar is now the same size as the associated workbook, which I find aesthetically pleasing.

The next new feature I noticed was the red ink. The second edition uses red ink to highlight certain letters or morphological features. The first edition used black ink throughout. Now, for example, the final form table on page 2 begins more like this:

And so on down through the other relevant letters. It’s a small and simple change, but one that could prove exceedingly useful as students try to see the difference between, say, the absolute and construct forms of מחנה.

According to the Zondervan web site, the substantive changes to the grammar come in chapters 2 (vowels), 9 (pronominal suffixes), 17 (”waw consecutive”), 18 (imperative, cohortative, and jussive), and 23 (sentence syntax).

The material in chapter 2, “Hebrew Vowels,” looks like it’s mainly been rearranged a bit. In the first edition, Pratico and Van Pelt presented a chart of vowels written with ה, with ו, and with י before actually explaining how these letters function as “vowel letters” (the authors’ term for matres lectiones). The content is essentially the same, but is presented in a more logical fashion.

As far as I can tell, the only change to chapter 9, “Hebrew Pronominal Suffixes,” is the addition of a paragraph explaining the use of resumptive pronouns.

Chapter 17, “Waw Consecutive,” receives some fairly significant retreading. In the 1st edition, the chapter was entitled “Waw Conversive,” even though the authors claimed, in a footnote, to agree that this terminology was “archaic and a simplification of historical and linguistic realities.” Now they use the label “waw consecutive” to indicate that the form is most commonly found in narrations of a sequence of consecutive actions. In the 2nd edition, Pratico and Van Pelt have added a section of “advanced information” to the end of the chapter 17; this new section discusses very briefly some of the different ways in which the function of wayyiqtol and weqatal forms are understood. In so doing, the 2nd edition collects into one place information that was scattered throughout the chapter in the 1st edition. The new edition seems to me cleaner and, hopefully, clearer than the first.

In chapter 18, “Qal Imperative, Cohortative, and Jussive,” the big change seems to come in the discussion of the cohortative. The 1st edition gave students the impression that a cohortative form was the imperfect plus ה, period. The 2nd edition acknowledges that there is also a simpler form of the cohortative that is indistinguishable morphologically from the imperfect. The discussion of the jussive has also been edited a bit. Both forms receive additional examples which should help to clarify their use. The section “Important Sequences with Volitional Conjugations” has been moved to …

… chapter 23, “Issues of Sentence Syntax.” Also, some of the example sentences or phrases found in the 1st edition have been removed from the 2nd edition. This is fine, because the first edition was overkill. New sections on syntactical issues when using the perfect and imperfect have been added. The section previously entitled “Conditional Sentences” has sagely been renamed “Conditional Clauses.” There’s also a new section entitled “Additional Clause Types”; this features conditional, purpose, result, and concessive (”even though”) clauses. The section on the disjunctive waw seems to have remained pretty much the same, but the section on the syntax of adverbs has been moved to the end of the chapter as “advanced information.”

Overall, it seems to me at first glance that the changes in the 2nd edition will make the book a little bit clearer for introductory students. The changes aren’t huge, and I’m not 100% sure they justify a 2nd edition, but I’m glad to see most of these changes.

One change I would have liked to have seen—though of course I can’t expect this from a Zondervan book—is the elimination of the “devotional thoughts” that come at the end of each chapter. In some cases these are not horrible (how’s that for damning by faint praise?), as for example Roger Valci’s two paragraphs on the aesthetics of acrostic poems; this is a fairly unobjectionable sidebar for the chapter on the alphabet. Others are downright irrelevant or even inappropriate in their context. For example, why on earth do we need a page and a half on “the imperative summons to praise” in chapter 3, which treats syllabification? The topic has nothing to do with syllabification, and imperatives aren’t introduced until chapter 18! And then there’s the new one by John Piper, in which he sounds like he’s been channeling John Hobbins (”But where can you do a D.Min. in Hebrew language and exegesis? Yet what is more important and more deeply practical for the pastoral office than advancing in Greek and Hebrew exegesis by which we mine God’s treasures?”) …

Again, I’m pleased with the changes that I can see between the 1st and 2nd editions, and I’ve just about got the syllabus done for this course. In fact, the sequence (which chapters on which days, when will tests be, etc.) is done, but I need to work diligently through the workbook to determine what homework to assign.

John Hobbins recently lamented a dearth of language instruction in today’s seminaries. John opens his post as follows:

The situation is the following: seminaries and theological schools in North America, more often than not, do not require students to learn the languages of the Bible and of the core literature of the tradition they are charged to uphold. In those that do – e.g., evangelical seminaries that require Greek and Hebrew, conservative Lutheran seminaries that require Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and German, Catholic seminaries that require Latin - students nowadays come to the seminaries with little or no background in said languages. The result is inevitable. Overwhelmed by many other claims on time and mind, students end up with a merely cursory and superficial preparation in the literature that is supposed to be compass, mirror, and anchor of the ministry they will carry out.

I encourage you to read the whole post. I’m coming late to this conversation, so trace the linkbacks as well.

I don’t know whether I can really comment adequately on the “facts of the case.” I don’t feel that I have a good overall sense of “what’s happening” in seminaries across North America. I do know that when I was in seminary, I was required to take one year of each of Greek and Hebrew; I actually took 1.5 years of Greek and three years of Hebrew. At present, I teach in a program that has both undergraduate and master’s degree students. In the undergraduate program, almost all degrees (of any sort, anywhere in the college) require three semesters of language study, and of course in the Religion Division we encourage our majors to meet that requirement with Greek or Hebrew. Greek is a lot more popular, despite the intrinsic superiority of Hebrew in both aesthetics and coolness.

Well, this was kind of a wimpy post. I just didn’t want John to think I was ignoring him.

I don’t usually do “quotation of the day” posts (and I never do “quote of the day” posts, because I’m not an insurance salesman), but I was reading a story in the Los Angeles Times about computers in K-12 education, and this statement by a 12-year-old boy caught my attention:

Zana steered me to an entry by Juan Marrouquin, 12, arguing that technology, though helpful, is not without limits. “If a professor is explaining something like quantum physics,” the boy wrote, “it’s better to just sit and listen.”

Out of the mouths of babes teenagers …