A disruptive student.

I believe I was set up for right-wing entrapment a few years ago in a mass media class during the Bush-Kerry election of 2004. The Iraq War was already going badly then amid Michael Moore's hugely successful Fahrenheit 9/11. For this upper-level course in media literacy, I asked students to compare

the differing coverage of the Bush and Kerry campaigns in local newspapers. Two right-wing dailies, Rupert Murdoch's New York Post and Morton Zuckerman's Daily News, tilted coverage blatantly towards Bush and against Kerry, in contrast to the studied balance attempted by the moderate Republican New York Times. (My students read the Post and the News mostly, but certainly do not describe these papers as right wing.) I and other teachers may think it is easy enough to read the political allegiance of these dailies, but what teachers think is easy enough to see is not necessarily how students see or name their world. In fact, the students in my classes are generally unable to or unwilling to describe the politics of their daily papers, something I routinely ask on a first-day sign-in sheet for the class.

To pose the problem of ideology in campaign coverage, I xeroxed articles and photos from the three local papers for comparative close analysis in class. In doing so, I did not deliver lectures to the class with my conclusions about what the news reports and graphics showed but rather asked students to read these materials slowly in class. The politics or ideology embedded in any aspect of society or experience does not come with a user-friendly guide attached to the items, but these phenomena do reveal themselves in a close reading process of abstraction/ extraction, lifting familiar items from daily life for unfamiliar scrutiny, theorizing, and public discussion. I asked students to examine the size, page location, headlines, lead paragraphs, and quoted statements in all articles along with the iconography of all graphics. The Times endorsed Kerry but balanced its representations of the candidates, printing photos of the two that were the exact same size, on the exact same page, and with the exact same demeanor (smile for smile, thoughtful gaze for thoughtful gaze, baby-kissing for baby-kissing, etc.), and offered each major party candidate the same column inches of coverage, all of which I asked students to evaluate as an analytic protocol, individually and in groups. In contrast to the Times, the two right-wing tabloids ran stories, photos, and headlines that buffooned Kerry and ennobled Bush. It is important to reiterate that I did not offer these conclusions as lectures to students but rather provided a hands-on lesson in critical analysis of representation, which they exercised. Weekly exercises of this kind exposed the two conservative dailies as pro-Bush, pro-War attack machines with no journalistic balance, though I never used such polemical language in class (one student said she was amazed to discover that the newspaper she always read, the Post, was, in her words, such a "right-wing rag"). This comparative study is a good start to critical literacy, but it is still limited by the hegemonic choices favored by major dailies, with Bush or Kerry as the only options, an exclusionary, ideological view of the world also supported by the balanced New York Times. I had to bring in other materials that questioned this two-party view of what exists and what is possible.

In this course, a twenty-one-year-old woman from out of the New York area enrolled. She drove about ninety miles each way for the Saturday class, which met once a week for four hours in the afternoon. Her long trip for this single class struck me as truly odd. My low-rent, third-rate college is not a famous campus that people drive ninety miles for. Neither am I a famous professor whose name drives enrollment up. My classes are packed because this college fails to offer enough sections of courses students want. So, why would she or anyone drive so far for an ordinary Saturday media course that she could find in colleges closer to home? I let this mystery hang without asking her because in some ways it was none of my business.

On the first day of class, she did something else odd: She chose a seat in the front row, virtually in front of me, which is the least desirable, last-chosen spot in the classroom for students (something I named "the Siberian Syndrome" in my book When Students Have Power, vis-a-vis student preference for the far corners away from the teacher). Then, each week as I presented problems for media analysis, her hand would be raised nonstop in front of my face, waving urgently to speak. When she did speak, she was uniformly hostile to the materials and exercises I presented. This too was odd, because unhappy students rarely complain so often and so loudly in class; they just drop the class, or figure out how to get their A or B, and just sit through it. In some ways, her participation and criticism were enlivening. But, I was bothered because she hogged discussion, always wanted to speak, and forced me to look past her urgently waving hand to call on other students. I approached her privately to ask her to stop waving her hand in my face, and she did less of it, so I lived with her negative comments and even invited her to bring in a conservatively-financed "answer" to Moore's documentary, which I showed in class along with Moore's film.

However, the detente was shattered one Saturday when without warning she suddenly denounced me as a "liberal who pushed his views on the students." A hush fell over the classroom. Students at my college can be disruptive and disrespectful in all kinds of ways small and large, but in thirty-five years of teaching there I have had to stop class only three or four times to get control of the situation and none of these outbursts shaped up as an explicit political attack until that Saturday. The novelty of her political denunciation thus intrigued me and probably influenced my counter-response to her. Even though she was making a provocative scene in class, I did not escalate the situation by yelling back at her. I planned to confront her after class about her rudeness, while at that moment in class I addressed her in a level tone. I said that she should feel free to push back and disagree with me whenever she wants, like she does every week. She answered that she always loses our arguments and looks stupid. I then replied that she never looks stupid in class, that she's a smart person. Before either of us could say any more, another woman student in class suddenly jumped in to defend me, saying that I didn't push anything on the students but only posed problems and asked students to make up their own minds. I was astonished at being rescued like that. This second student was not a "teacher's pet" or even an "A" student. For some reason, she was moved to speak on my behalf. This chastened the aggressive student, who grew quiet, and I moved on with the class. Had she persisted in disrupting class with rude denunciations, I would not have tolerated it and would have advised her to drop the class or stop the attacks.

All in all, the out-of-town student seemed on a mission to provoke me into a confrontation that could become a juicy anecdote about a leftwing professor silencing a conservative student, though I have no conclusive proof of this. She finished the class and I never saw or heard from her again. I did feel under her hostile surveillance in that class but did not alter my teaching. If I were young, female, or minority, I most likely would have been more threatened by her. Being a senior, male, white, tenured, full professor gave me more authority than is available to many other teachers in the classroom. I don't tolerate rude students and use my authority to stop disruption and to discipline such students, sometimes advising them to drop the course. I also use the authority of my age, maleness, whiteness, and tenured status to pursue experiments with critical pedagogy. In the case of the hostile student in the media class, she displayed a political aggression rare for students at my college but more common now at other places thanks to the right-wing war chest funding campaigns against progressives in higher education.

Over all, I think teachers should not be permissive in the classroom, not tolerating disrespect or disruption, not allowing any student to take over the process and interfere with the teacher's right to teach and the students' rights to learn. As I said above, being male and white, I've felt able to stop student sabotage, which I consider very different from student rights to protest the learning process and to democratically negotiate the syllabus with me, which I've written about at length. But if no teacher has a right to abuse any student or to unilaterally impose a curriculum without student consent, neither does any student have the right to abuse any teacher or to unilaterally take control of the learning process.

Ira Shor

College of Staten Island