Utah Bubble/Utah Culture: Politics is Religion is Personal is Politics

The question at the heart of this is simple enough: are there concerns about teaching composition that are region-specific? Culture? Student demographics? Local and state-level politics? Curricular issues? If so, can we make a place here to discuss them?

Shortly before I left Oklahoma for Utah, I decided to use Signs of Life in the U. S. A. as my reader for composition II. It’s a popular culture reader—and a very good one, at that—and I imagined that the students would find it accessible.

What I found, however, was that many of the students had no frame of reference whatsoever for many of the essays in the book. They didn’t watch The Simpsons. They didn’t watch Sex and the City. They didn’t watch Friends. They didn’t watch television much at all, frankly. The majority had never seen an R-rated movie, which meant that many of the films referenced in the text might as well have been Bulgarian cinema for them.

This is not to say that the book was a flop. It wasn’t. In fact, I think the students liked it quite a lot. But the added pressure upon me to contextualize what I had previously assumed would be bits of universal knowledge (Ross and Rachel; Bart and Lisa) left me sometimes wondering where on earth I had landed.

My students referred to this as the “Utah Bubble.” As I taught the readings in the textbook, I found myself sometimes wondering whether these things that I believed would be interesting were, in fact, an assault upon some of the students’ beliefs, politics and sensibilities. I mean, considering I could teach this course in any number of ways, was it imperative that I use these texts? Could I find something more accessible for them? Less potentially offensive?

I am, of course, accustomed to being warned about teaching in a conservative community. I am originally from Mississippi and I lived for 8 years in Oklahoma. I know my red state values. But there is a difference, I think, in teaching a film like Pulp Fiction to a group of students of whom one or two might object and teaching that same film to a student demographic such as ours, where 40-60% of the class might object. Can we force them to watch such things? Ought we?

One of the essays in Signs of Life, Tad Friend’s “You Can’t Say That,” is concerned with television networks’ standards and practices in the wake of cable television creating award-winning original programming. One of the key questions, Friend explains, is that when a show on HBO can do whatever it wants with regard to sex and language, how is a show such as The West Wing to compete?

It’s a wonderful essay, even if the students had never seen any of the shows it discusses.

The problem, I found, was with the language. I had warned the students for a week or so prior to the reading being due that the essay used what they would consider “foul language,” but that it was always in context and was never, ever used gratuitously. I asked students to come to me if they had significant problems with this, but encouraged them to trust me in the matter. Could I have put my foot down? It wasn’t as if I were forcing them to read Fanny Hill, after all. The recent lawsuit at the U of U, however, changes this. Forcing a student to read a text to which they are opposed, or punishing them for not taking part in something to which they are opposed, could result in a lawsuit which the university would most likely lose.

And so I’m back to that question: do I have to teach this particular text? Couldn’t I use another text and accomplish the same goal? In a place where politics and religion and personal conviction are so closely intertwined, should I be more concerned than usual about what I choose to teach? Is the conviction that “this is an idea you ought to be exposed to” enough to justify potential offense? Is the conviction that “the Utah bubble needs to be burst” justifiable? Is that enough?