What I learned from my craziest and best professor

I was reading something about the evils of communism and the person was ranting about how colleges are filled with communist professors.  First - anyone whose actually gone to college will tell you - they probably NEVER had a communist professor. Universities are not actually the bastions of extreme liberalism they are sometimes portrayed to be.

Second: I thought worrying about communism on college campus was - a cold war thing. I guess people just don't like giving up a good boogeyman. 

As for - communist professors - I only ever had one in my entire college career  - and he was awesome!  Crazy. But awesome.   

My one and only communist professor was a sociologist at my local community college. I thoroughly enjoyed the class and learned quite a lot from him about what sociology is and why it's an important field of study - and how things are studied and why it's important to study them sociologically. 

I don't think he managed to turn any of us into communists. Mostly because - he never tried. This was a sociology class - not an economics class. We were learning - sociology. 

As awesome as he was - I was NOT surprised that he was fired immediately after our semester ended. He was not fired because he was a communist, that only came up once. or twice or a few times. No - he was fired - either because one time he asked us if any of us had seen his heroin dealer or because one time - he told us there was no god. And both of those statements freaked some of my classmates out. A LOT!

Given the - rather crazy nature of this teacher - why did I think his class was so awesome? Because we learned so much. Every class - he would do a poll on some topic that sociologists have the tools to weigh in on. And then he would play devil's advocate against the majority viewpoint and introduce sociological studies to argue his case. It was very challenging - but in a good way.  And - as I said - he taught us about sociology. How it works. What they find. What the limitations are - how the information is used to create public policy. Basically - everything you would want to know in an introductory class about sociology. 

Yes - he was kind of crazy.  But there was also a method to his madness. He took a poll - figured out what the majority thought - and then challenged the majority thinking. He could clearly argue both sides well and effectively. The result was his classes were totally engaging and thought provoking and we learned about sociology.  And yes - he most likely knew in advance what the majority was going to vote for in any given poll - he was a sociologist after all. 

I can see though - how if your opinions were ALWAYS on the side he argued against - it would be upsetting. But I'm also sure that had the majority of us - been atheist (which is unlikely - but totally possible - again - thanks sociologists for your work on that)  he would have been able to argue that there was in fact a god and we were wrong and then he would have discussed all the sociology research on religion.  He clearly felt his goal - was to challenge us to think and to not shy away from studying and looking at the evidence for and against - any position. 

The other thing about the crazy things he said - like - have you seen my heroin dealer and - there is no god - is that ... I'm not sure anything he told us about himself was true. Mostly, I think he just really enjoyed challenging people's perceptions & would say things about himself that were controversial to - bring up the subject, whatever it was, not as an abstract topic - but as one that effects real people.  If they didn't know an atheist - now they did. If they didn't know a heroin addict - now they did. You get the point.

So - what did I learn from this crazy communist professor?  I learned that learning and thinking and being challenged in your thinking - can be REALLY fun. 

I learned that most people don't like having their ideas challenged and get really cranky when they have to defend their ideas. 

I learned what sociology is and what sociologists do and how pragmatic and useful their work is to solving real life problems. (which was the point of the class).

And - I learned not to be so judgmental of people who are different than me. 

What I didn't learn from my communist professor - was - to be a communist.  I'm still the same philosophically - pro market person I was when I took the class.  

My nutty communist professor was hands down - one of the smartest educators I ever studied under. The man was crazy brilliant. 

So - if you are for some reason concerned about communists teaching your kids in college - don't be.