FOR ME, this has been the Summer of Contention. I'm living in Washington, D.C. this summer, and the experience so far has been fun and frustrating at the same time. On the one hand, it is nice to be in a place where people have convictions on more than what brand of light beer tastes the best. On the other hand, people with really strong opinions can be pretty damn annoying. So far, I've identified a few different species.
First, there's the Inappropriately Partisan Professor. I am unlucky enough to be saddled with this particular species through the economics course I'm taking this summer. This kind of professor infuses his class material with his political beliefs and lectures about it to a captive audience; the key word being captive. This particular professor prefaced a 20-minute tangent that could have been entitled "Why Ronald Reagan Should be Canonized."
Not only did said tangent not have any bearing on what we were supposed to be covering that day, but it was not an objective presentation of facts. He barely addressed Reagan's main failing, namely, the huge deficit he racked up. But his spiel on why Reagan was great was comprehensive.
Of course, it is his classroom, and as a tenured professor he has a right to say whatever he wants.
That doesn't, however, mean that he should. If partisan views are going to be discussed in the classroom, at the very least both sides should be presented. Anything short of that is lopsided, sloppy teaching.
In the spirit of fairness and respect for the fact that not everyone necessarily wants to spend half a class period listening to partisan rhetoric, teachers should not transform the lecture hall podium into a pulpit.
Such behavior can corrode the teacher/student relationship, because it is hard for students to have respect for teachers who do not have respect for them.
Fortunately, University professors are more tactful and usually refrain from speaking about their own opinions until the last day.
Another type of annoyingly opinionated person is the Overly Self-Righteous Person. These people prefer to spend as much time as possible in a state of self-righteous indignation. They are deeply offended by pretty much everything. As much as it pains me to say it, it seems like my fellow liberals are more likely to fall into the overly-indignant trap than others. For these people, anyone who eats red meat or doesn't agree with affirmative action or likes Starbucks frappuccinos is automatically a murderer or bigot or capitalist whore and, therefore, cannot be saved or forgiven. Everything is to be taken seriously, because the world is rapidly coming to an end and, if not, it's at least devoid of justice and democracy and all that other stuff.
It's very hard to take these people seriously, much less want anything to do with them when they are constantly in an uproar about something, tossing silly words around. They are acting like the boy who cried wolf. They get their politically correct hackles up so quickly and so often and, in most cases, with so little cause, that people eventually stop listening to what they have to say. Then, when confronted with true bigotry, no one will listen to them.
This undermines not only their credibility but the positions they stand by, which is an unfortunate consequence of their attitudes. Their positions shouldn't suffer because of their insufferable tactics. It is counterproductive, to say the least.
Then there are the people who think that they are right and everyone else is evil or simply severely misguided. I know the type well, because I used to be one. In my case, Republicans were the Evil Empire. I thought of them the way people who lived during the Cold War probably thought of Russians. I could picture them, giggling maniacally and plotting the best ways to screw up the country - when they weren't tying damsels to railroad tracks, of course.
"Let's start drilling in wild refuges," I could picture them saying. "That way, we'll mess up the environment and maybe, as a bonus, we'll kill some cute fuzzy animals along the way." Actually, they were probably thinking that opening up Alaskan oil fields would create jobs and help the United States become less dependent on foreign oil reserves.
I still think it's a bad idea, but the point is that they're just doing what they think is best. We all are just trying to do what's best; the problem is that we have different conceptions of what that is. One side isn't evil and the other isn't good. We're all just trying to muddle through the best we can.
(Laura Sahramaa is a Cavalier Daily associate editor. She can be reached at lsahramaa@cavalierdaily.com.)
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