In attempting to resolve an internal struggle the other day, a discussion with a friend boiled down my conflict to the following question: when do you stop asking questions and make a statement? As I considered this question, I came up with the answers (plural, not singular), never and when you have an opinion.

Why do we force students to make a stand, regardless of whether or not they have an opinion on a subject? Does a few weeks of lecture and the reading of a few texts provide the student with enough information to understand an issue sufficiently to decide for themselves what they think about it? Too often I have found myself doing a paper or a class presentation in which I am expected to act like I know what I am talking about on a subject that has been debated for decades if not centuries, feeling like I’ve just skimmed the surface of the issue, and am completed unprepared to take a stand. But, taking a stand is a requirement of the assignment. Is forcing students to take a stand before they know an issue well enough to really have an opinion perpetuating the idea that academic problems are fabricated opinions whose purpose is to make someone sound like they know what they are talking about for the purposes of getting a good grade/advancing their career and/or gaining tenure? Isn’t requiring students to use the third person and to omit statements like “I think,” “I believe” and “in my opinion” creating a falsehood? Do the students mean to state something as if they believe it is a fact that should be globally accepted as a truth, or are they only at the stage in which they “think” this is how it works or what it means? Is it wrong to be in a state of inquiry?

Not to become too philosophical ,but do we really “know” anything? At one time, scientists considered the Earth to be flat and had valid reasons for thinking that. If people always considered information in flux and open to new perspectives, would someone have discovered sooner that the Earth was round? If more people took stands like, I think the Earth is flat but let’s keep talking about it and as we learn more, let’s re-evaluate, would we progress faster and further in resolving conflicts and learning new things?

Is it productive to take a stand? I think it is, but let’s talk about it. I think the academic community needs to be free to put forth their ideas as their ideas and for those thoughts to be respected. I think that stunts like Sokol pulled by embarrassing a colleague by making him look stupid for not saying that he didn’t understand the ideas of his article only perpetuates an environment in which individuals are afraid to appear stupid and therefore don’t ask questions. The fear of being questioned and proven wrong contributes to the sentiment that academics think they have to write in an incomprehensible discourse in order to be respected. Does being respected mean that your ideas are not questioned?

What if, instead of teaching students about theories by presenting them with articles by experts that are written as if they are statements of fact, publishers print a textbook in which the chapters are like chat room discussions where theorists work in collaboration to debate the issues, having a limited amount of time to respond and limited ability for editing? What if, at the end, individuals who are not part of the academic community (are undergraduate or high school students perhaps) had the opportunity to ask questions to clarify the meaning or the issue or to raise new concerns based on the debate in the chat room? What if the experts were open minded enough to admit during the discussion when someone challenged a point and made them rethink their point of view? My thought is that this would allow students to see first-hand how academic discourse works and to see many sides of an issue. Hopefully it would demonstrate how academics with conflicting ideas can work together to resolve an issue, or at least come to a deeper understanding of it. It would show students that what is often presented to them as facts, as Graff’s examples of conflicting class lectures demonstrates, are not really facts but someone’s opinion. I would like to think this would allow students the freedom to voice their own ideas because they would see that academia is about having creative, well thought out ideas that can be proven wrong but still respected and that are productive in advancing an issue.