I’ve previously written about Gerald Graff’s presidential address to the Modern Language Association, which he delivered back in December at the annual convention. The address is now published in PMLA, and it’s worth a careful reading. Some quotes:

Critics of higher education, many though not all on the political right, have loudly denounced academic humanists today as politically correct thought police (or as their enablers), and these insulting characterizations have gained traction in the popular media. Many of us have reacted to these denunciations as an outrageous interference with our academic freedom, one that at worst is aimed at cutting off our public support. I would argue, however, that to respond effectively to these charges we need to become less dismissive and defensive and more willing to ask whether some of them may be true. . . .By characterizing our critics as “anti-intellectual” advocates of “academic unfreedom” who would impose an “ideological agenda” by force, we conveniently avoid asking whether some of their concerns are legitimate. . . .
Since the 1960s “transforming” the political consciousness of students has been widely defended in print as a legitimate goal of teaching, as is seen in such self-described trneds as “the pedagogy of the oppressed,” “critical pedagogy,” “teaching for social justice,” “radical pedagogy,” and “anti-oppressive education.” Having complained earlier in this address that we know shockingly little about what our colleagues do in their classrooms, I won’t now claim to know that unethical classroom behavior is taking place on a significant scale. I do know, however, that what the advocates of these pedagogies say in print is often disturbing. . . .
Radical-pedagogy advocates have indignantly retorted that they regularly assign views strongly opposed to their own and do not bully their students but invite them to make up their own minds. I don’t doubt the sincerity of these disclaimers, but I can sympathize with conservative critics who aren’t satisfied to simply take the radical teacher’s word for it. Then, too, if it’s true that radical teaching in practice consists of little more than asking students to choose from a spectrum of political positions, I have to wonder why its advocates don’t call it “teaching political debate” instead of “the pedagogy of the oppressed,” “teaching for social justice,” “radical pedagogy,” and other labels that inevitably suggest an effort to convert, if not to brainwash. If you want to issue manifestoes to teachers that urge “helping students become radicals” and “stimulating them to work for egalitarian change,” so be it, but then don’t get angry and defensive if someone says that sounds like coercion.