Free your mind

Last week, the Arizona state Senate's Higher Education Committee approved a bill that would allow college students to opt out of required reading assignments they consider personally offensive. The legislation would permit students to forgo assignments that "conflict with the student's beliefs or practices in sex, morality or religion."\nWe applaud this bill. It's extremely important to make sure that students never encounter any material in the classroom that is contrary to their own personal beliefs, and extremely important that -- wait a minute. No, this is a terrible idea for a bill. \nThere are three huge reasons to oppose this ill-advised idea.\nFirst, it presents a practical problem. If this bill passes, students could opt out of doing required reading or writing papers for a course and demand a substitution of alternative materials to replace whatever they find offensive. It would be impossible to maintain the integrity of a course, particularly in the arts and humanities, if students within the same class were studying different materials that address different subjects.\nSecond, this bill is problematic because of its arbitrary nature. A supporter of the bill, Arizona state Sen. Jake Flake, R-Snowflake (that's a true but unfortunate name/district combo), agrees that students should be exposed to ideas they might find offensive. However, he adds that no one should have to be exposed to "pornography and smut." But who should define these terms? The government? We think not. Clearly, what one person considers pornographic might not be considered offensive by another.\nArizona state Sen. Thayer Verschoor, R-Mesa, a sponsor of the bill, acknowledged that the bill might have to be revised prior to coming before the full Senate. He was not hopeful that professors and instructors would be willing to let students opt out of anything "because of the whole academic freedom thing."\nOh, right, THAT thing. \nThird, we come to college to learn. One crucial way for students to learn is to be exposed to ideas that are contrary to their personally held views. Students don't have to celebrate and embrace ideas they find wrong or even vile; but learning from several sides of the same issue is an important way to enrich one's education.\nAnd let's be clear: College students are not grade-schoolers who are easily threatened or swayed by the introduction of alternative ideas. By the time students are in college, they should possess the rationality to defend their own deeply held beliefs and withstand exposure to different ideas. \nMoreover, college students are not clueless about the contents of a particular course. We are free to talk to professors, departmental advisers or fellow classmates about a course before we sign up, so we should know what we are getting into. If a course contains ideas that are anathema to a student, he or she should probably not enroll. Better yet, if you are so fragile that you can't handle being asked to consider ideas that aren't your own, higher education might not be for you.