In the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, they call it “Godwin’s Law.” Around here, we could rename it “Bennish’s Blunder.”
The rule is this: Whoever mentions Hitler or the Nazis first loses the argument.
This may not comport well with the First Amendment, but it applies in public school classrooms, especially in Colorado. So Overland High School geography teacher Jay Bennish can blame himself for the avalanche of publicity that threatens to bury his career.
Bennish told a class that there were some “eerie similarities” between what President Bush says and “things that Adolf Hitler used to say.”
Speaking of eerie similarities, what Bennish said to students sounds inexplicably like the written comments that got University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill in so much trouble. Churchill violated Godwin’s Law, too. He likened some victims of the World Trade Center terrorist attacks to “little Eichmanns.”
Now, not only is Churchill’s tenured professorship at risk, but a bill in the state legislature threatens to hurt tenure for every professor at a state university.
You wonder if Bennish has been living under a rock. He didn’t call Bush Hitler during a geography class in Aurora. But Bennish did make an in-class link between the two.
So even though two veteran teachers found it creepy that a student taped Bennish’s class and turned the tape over to right-wing talk shows, and even though both worried about the chilling effects on all teachers of the resulting furor, neither gave Bennish a free-speech pass.
You don’t shy from controversy, said Lee Patton, who taught 20 years in Douglas County, then mentored teachers for eight.
“You stay away from advocacy. Let’s take religion. If I’m an agnostic, I’m not interested in fostering the agnostic viewpoint in the classroom. But children should know it exists.”
While teaching early American literature, Patton explained to students that 18th-century writing was very religious because of a young country’s grounding in Judeo-Christian principles. But it was a balancing act.
“I had evangelical Christian students,” Patton said. “Sometimes they would go from ‘Let me tell you how I feel about Jesus’ to ‘You need to accept Christ as your savior.”‘
The first might have a place in certain academic discussions, said Patton. The second never does.
Ray Schoch taught social studies in Missouri for 30 years before retiring to Colorado. What Bennish did “sounds exactly like the kind of thing I might have done after three or four years as a teacher.” Through “painful lessons,” Schoch learned that free speech for teachers differs in class and out.
“You really play the role of referee,” he said of classrooms. “If all the opinions come from one side, you might play devil’s advocate. You have to make those rules at the beginning.”
Added Patton: “You just have to lay the groundwork that something is controversial and there are many claims to truth. You make the students comfortable that nothing is going to be shoved down anyone’s throat.”
Doubtless, Bennish doesn’t think he did that. Doubtless, Sean Allen, the student who taped Bennish, thought he did. The result, Patton and Schoch predicted, is liable to hurt both.
“If (Bennish) survives,” said Schoch, “he’ll be so chastised that he’ll be afraid to bring any controversial issues to class.”
That condemns Allen and other students to boredom.
“Too often,” Patton explained, “controversial issues are treated in milquetoast fashion in textbooks when they are anything but milquetoast.”
Milquetoast isn’t the issue here. A reference to fascism is. In the recording of Bennish’s class released to the media, Bennish tries to carve out middle ground.
“You have to figure this stuff out for yourselves …,” he tells his students. “I’m not in any way implying that you should agree with me. … What I’m trying to get you to do is think about these issues more in depth and not just to take things from the surface.”
This is exactly how it should be. But it is exactly how it won’t be once a teacher compares anyone to Hitler.
Jim Spencer’s column appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday. He can be reached at 303-820-1771 or jspencer@denverpost.com.
