Don't Feel Like Doing Your Homework? Take Action, Take Offense!

It seems that taking offense has become something of a phenomenon lately.

Here's the latest example of an absurd attack on academic freedom: a bill in Arizona would require public colleges to provide "alternative coursework" if a student finds material on the course curriculum to be "personally offensive" or if it "conflicts with the student's beliefs or practices in sex, morality or religion."

I wonder if lazy students could claim that reading a long novel, say, Moby Dick, violated their personal practice of getting piss drunk on a weeknight instead of reading and blowing off class the next day?

The Arizona debate was ostensibly sparked by a student who found the wife-swapping in Rick Moody's The Ice Storm to be offensive. This student must be quite sensitive. I wonder if said she or he ever gets 'offended' by things like the torture by U.S. troops at Abu Ghraib prison? In any case, someone ought to tell the brat that he or she isn't community college material and to grow up before enrolling at an institution of higher education.

The chilling thing is that no academic would dare speak such words in an official, institutional setting.

The message sent to the students: Avoid Whatever Offends You.

So if such legislation does pass, and these days you never know what sort of unfreedoms might become law, the prof ought to assign the whinging student William Gaddis' J.R. (a great novel about the 1970s, and of more literary merit than the Moody, but quite long) as the "alternative coursework." One of the themes in the book concerns the dumbing-down and technocratization of education in the United States.