It could be argued that the entire Bowdoin experience is meant to push students to grapple with complexity, to learn how to construct arguments and build one’s views through uncertainty and debate, “To gain a standard for the appreciation of others’ work / And the criticism of your own….” That’s why Bowdoin faculty painstakingly construct and teach courses that examine the intricacies of affirmative action, the value of charter schools, the fall of Rome, the origins of capitalism—topics that are complex and require meaningful context to even begin understanding their complexity. Other courses ask students to debate physician-assisted suicide or the ethics of AI. Topics without an obvious answer. Topics with layers upon layers of nuance to be mined and sifted.

The professors who reach the heights of the College’s vision for itself have a lasting impact on students by giving their students the tools to encounter the complexity of the world: “A liberal arts education … hones the capacity for critical and open intellectual inquiry….” For those professors who grasp and have a reverence for that awesome responsibility, we should be grateful.

For those professors who seek to simplify, to narrow, to preach, to reduce, to flatten, to essentialize—of those professors we should be distrustful. It is these professors who are less motivated by the College’s vision of the liberal arts and are more passionate about their own personal agendas. It is these professors who too often succeed in abusing their authority while setting up their students to fail in the years following their graduation.

It is often hard to identify which professors fall into which camp. Yet, there are certain signs.

• When entire departments and courses narrow, reduce and silence, that could be a sign.
• When entire departments and courses avoid teaching about topics that might complicate a narrative or introduce an alternate narrative, that could be a sign.
• When professors write with the fire and brimstone typically reserved for a missionizing evangelizer rather than a dispassionate remove, that could be a sign.
• When professors foist a reductionist or temptingly conspiratorial worldview onto their students, that could be a sign.
• When professors’ scholarship and public statements ignore vast swaths of their fields and centuries of human history, that could be a sign.
• When professors leave out seminal texts from a course syllabus, that could be a sign.
• When professors respond to reasonable critiques of their agendas by accusing others of trying to silence them, instinctively making mention of oppression, inequity, entrenched power dynamics, victimhood or dominant subgroups or cultures; or declaring the justness of overthrowing hierarchies, which is foundational to their professional aspirations and senses of self and so is used as a bizarre justification for absolving them of the responsibility to provide a holistic education for their students that could be a sign.
• When professors fan the flames of conflict, obliquely threaten others around campus and encourage students to flirt with the Code of Community Standards, that could be a sign.
• When professors are so strident in their views that they can’t even see the self censoring by students within their classroom—or if that self censoring is the goal—that could be a sign.

When we see these signs, we should ask ourselves if these professors are up to the task bestowed on them. We should ask ourselves about their expertise and qualifications. We should ask ourselves if these professors are worthy of their employer’s trust. And when they eventually come up for tenure or are tenured already, we should ask ourselves whether a generation of Bowdoin students is well served by the narrowness of their thinking, the clumsiness of their scholarship, the irresponsibility of their teaching, the intolerance of their mindset, the overconfidence in their voice or the moral clarity they assert. If Bowdoin is to be a school worthy of its  reputation, the leadership of the College would be wise to take note of those in its faculty who live the Offer of the College and those who merely use their perch to trample over it. And students would be wise to speak up, demanding that the College employ professors who actually encourage debate and promote a diversity of thought. Only then will Bowdoin students be prepared for the complexities of the world beyond Brunswick and to add their well-reasoned perspectives to debates beyond the dorm room rather than transmitting the sectarian worldviews of their dogmatic professors.

Saul P. Greenfield ’73, MD

Dr. Saul Greenfield ’73 is a former Editor-in-Chief of the Bowdoin Orient.