Students, Slaves, or Something in Between: A College Professor Brings Liberalism into the Classroom
Deja Dennis talks to Dr. Michael Fischbach, a professor seeking to change how students learn in the classroom.
Dr. Michael R. Fischbach is no average professor. He works in the tiny town of Ashland, Virginia, sarcastically nicknamed the Center of the Universe, at Randolph-Macon College. His office is housed on the second floor of Washington-Franklin Hall, the campus’ oldest building and the headquarters of the school’s history department.
Fischbach’s door holds an array of historical photos: a grayscale John Lennon and Yoko Ono holding a ‘WAR IS OVER!’ sign, a miniature portrait of Malcolm X, and the legendary Abbey Road album cover art, among countless others. Visitors are greeted by a poster in the middle of the door that reads, “Attention! Border Crossing!” in bold letters. The carpet threshold separates the rest of the college from Fischbach’s ‘Temporary Autonomous Zone.’
“This is a liberated territory,” the sign declares. “Enter herein all who wish to be free!”
Sixteen hundred people regularly occupy Randolph-Macon’s campus, and Fischbach’s reputation precedes him among students and faculty alike. He is a tenured professor, currently in his 26th year with the history department; an author, with four books under his belt and a lengthy list of articles and reviews padding his résumé; and an expert on the modern Middle East, with a master’s degree in Arab Studies and a room full of cultural relics to show for it.
He is also an active liberalist, best known among students for his lax course philosophy. The following motto from 1800s Italian socialist thinker, Carlo Pisacane, is the focal point of his syllabi:
“People will not be free when they are educated, but will be educated when they are free.”
Fischbach ascribes to this habitually, creating detailed unit plans but leaving the meat of his courses entirely up to the students to decide. He never takes attendance or gives concrete deadlines, and if the college did not mandate final exams, he wouldn’t even consider them. No grade points are taken off for missing class, and students are free to negotiate the terms of their homework and grades.
“I believe that you are adults,” reads his syllabus, “and should be treated as such.”
This past January, I met with Fischbach to probe the reasoning behind his avant-garde teaching. Like countless students across the nation, I came to college straight from the American public school system, and like countless students in Fischbach’s Modern Iraq course, I was jarred by the transition from the standard, dictatorial classroom style to his more flexible, democratic approach. After 12 years of crack-of-dawn classes enforced by tardy slips and hall monitors, where does one find the drive to attend class purely for the love of learning? And after 12 years of mandated participation, pop quizzes, and standardized testing, how does one shift to view school as a privilege and not as a punishment?
Seated across from me in a padded rocking chair, Fischbach attributed the origin of his philosophy to Jerry Farber’s controversial publication, The Student as Nigger. The book argues that America’s dominant methods of schooling — particularly the heavy micromanagement of teaching and learning styles — are slave-like and drain students of autonomy. Upon reading, it caused Fischbach to question the nature of the system he’d inherited as an educator.
“When I was in college, nobody took attendance. Why do I take attendance? It’s their choice; it’s their education.” He paused, his eyes facing a corner adorned with military memorabilia. “So I stopped taking attendance. That was about six or seven years ago.”
But the “dramatic change,” as Fischbach refers to it, that inspired him to further loosen the reins on grades and deadlines is barely two years underway. The idea that humans should engage in radical democracy and dictate the rules that control their lives is the spark behind this second academic evolution. He strongly believes that, once rid of distracting rules and due dates, students will be able to focus purely on learning. One of his favorite quotes is a Sufi mystic phrase about religion that he recontextualizes for education: “‘Let me love the water more and the cup less.’ The cup is the structure that can lead them to God [the water], but the water is what actually counts, not the cup that holds it.”
Following up on his attendance policy, Fischbach continued, “Why do I insist [my students] turn in something on a certain date? If they need longer to learn or to write a paper, I should give them more time. If students don’t even want to do an assignment, why should I force them to?” Fischbach is also open to discussing substitute work with students. “Maybe I’ll try to convince them to [do the assignment],” he conceded, “but if they don’t want to do the research paper, [and they] want to do an oral report instead, or a PowerPoint — the point of education is to learn.”
The presumption behind these changes is that once Fischbach steps back, the students will step up. “I basically started making courses where I try to disappear into the background as much as possible and let students take charge of their own education,” he explained. “So by offering as much freedom as I can, like the motto [says], I feel like people will learn because they want to.”
But what happens when people don’t want to?
As a liberal arts college, Randolph-Macon requires a pair of entry-level history courses for graduation eligibility. Thus, while Fischbach’s seats fill notoriously quickly, the students aren’t necessarily registering out of interest in the content. And to many students — particularly seniors — who feel burdened by the workload from other professors or who simply lack intrinsic motivation, Fischbach’s policies seem like a dream come true. Students falsely assume that they can miss an obscene amount of classes, slack on the homework, and still emerge unscathed. In spite of these rumors, Fischbach maintains that, like any other class, his students’ grades will reflect the effort that they put in. Accumulating absences and pushing deadlines inevitably comes full circle when a student cannot analyze material or only has a handful of grades by the semester’s close.
Students must be somewhat well-adjusted, nevertheless, for the class to have maintained its favorable reputation through the years. Fischbach uses his final exams, which are take-home assignments, as a way to gauge feedback on how well or how poorly his class has been executed. The exams are open-ended with no right or wrong answers, and they provide a space for students to share the knowledge they’ve acquired as well as to voice their opinions about the class structure.
Fischbach first asks to be told “honestly and in detail” what the student has learned throughout the course. If the student is adamant she has learned nothing or very little, Fischbach urges her to explain why she thinks that is. He next asks what she has learned outside the class material. Critical thinking, the nature of higher education, and the discipline of history are among the examples he lists as a springboard for discussion. Finally, at the end of every school year, Fischbach submits a faculty report that includes lengthy fragments from these responses, allowing his work to speak for itself in justification of his methods. After years of poring through praise and criticism alike, he feels confident that the philosophy works, in spite of its riskiness.
Still, some of the other faculty view Fischbach warily. While they don’t critique his nonconformity outright, some become defensive of their own coddling. “They say things like, ‘Look, I allow a certain number of absences but […] students have to be present to go on to the next level in our major.’” Fischbach waves his hands in mock adamancy. “Now, I might have my own way of responding, which is, ‘Yes, but just because the students are present doesn’t mean they are actually learning.’”
Even Randolph-Macon’s provost has acknowledged that not every professor could teach with such atypical principles and garner the same outcome. But Fischbach’s response is simple: “Coercion is not an effective learning tool,” he says, “or teaching tool. I don’t think Jesus coerced people to sit down and listen to him. I don’t think the Buddha did. When Lincoln gave the Gettysburg address, I don’t think he took attendance.” By trusting students to take responsibility for their learning, Fischbach is comfortable giving them the freedom to dictate the terms of their experience.
But even as its results silence skeptics, Fischbach’s system can be — and often is — abused. He maintained that it would be naïve not to expect what he called “freebie” students after the rigidity of public school learning. “Twelve grades of a style of teaching, that sudden granting of freedom might just freak them out,” he laughed. “But I’m willing to take that chance because I think that the overall experience […] will still be a positive one.” To him, the risk of some taking advantage is worth the chance of others gaining a transformative experience in responsibility and self-government, possibly for the first time in their lives.
Fischbach’s students give a glimpse of this transformation with their commentary on the forums held to discuss each unit’s readings. “In past years, people seem to have been pretty blown away,” he mused. And to a student accustomed to censorship and heavy teacher involvement, an environment where people are encouraged to speak up while the professor sits quietly would seem incredibly liberating — although this revelation is, in itself, incredibly disheartening. Is schooling really so suppressive that taking ownership of academic conversation is a novelty?
In a way, Fischbach thinks the answer is yes. He is harshly critical of schools’ roles in behavioral socialization — habits that, once formed, can make it difficult for students to overpower their conditioning and speak their minds freely. He notes the hypocrisy of curricula seemingly centered around young adulthood, but distributed within an oppressive and condescending system: “If you treat someone like an adult, maybe they’ll act like an adult. But if you treat them like a child, they’ll act like a child.”
He also sees standardized testing as ineffective, claiming that it causes the classroom priority to shift from learning to test preparation. Teachers adjust their lesson plans to mirror the exam, and students become preoccupied with memorization — a far cry from genuine learning. A collaborative study between MIT neuroscientists and education researchers from Harvard and Brown University revealed that higher standardized test scores barely influenced “fluid intelligence” test scores — that is, assessments of memory capacity, information processing, and problem-solving skills. To Fischbach, SATs, SOLs (Virginia’s Standards of Learning tests), and similar tests are merely one strand in the messy web of college applications, internships, and job hunts.
“This is a game,” he sighed. “And I understand sometimes you have to play a game, but recognizing what’s the game versus what is actual learning is something else.” He contends that if the schools were in better shape, his own approach to teaching would not be so extreme.
Yet even now, Fischbach struggles to stretch his liberal policies further without compromising his responsibility to the college. How does one reconstruct a building from the inside out? If allowing students more freedom is a threat to the education system, why is the system reliant on keeping students in intellectual bondage? He admits that at times his task seems impossible, likening his position to “dancing between raindrops” and trying to stay dry. Nonetheless, he is fully invested in his vision and determined to make change from the top of the tower every year: class by class, brick by brick.
DEJA DENNIS is a third-year student at Randolph-Macon College, where she majors in English and double-minors in Spanish and Journalism.
