TITLE: Politics in a CS Textbook
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: February 13, 2014  4:25 PM
DESC: 
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Earlier this week, I looking for inspiration for an exam
problem in
<A HREF="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2013-11.html#e2013-11-24T10_54_19.htm">
   my algorithms course</A>.
I started thumbing through a text I briefly considered
considering for adoption this semester.  (I ended up opting
for no text without considering any of them very deeply.)

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The first problem I read was written with a political spin,
at the expense of one of the US political parties.  I was
aghast.  I tweeted:

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
 This textbook uses an end-of-chapter exercise to express
 an opinion about a political party.  I will no longer
 consider it for adoption.
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

I don't care which party is made light of or demeaned.
I'm no longer interested.  I don't want a political point
unrelated to my course to interfere with my students'
learning -- or with the relationship we are building.

In general, I don't want students to think of me in a
partisan way, whether the topic is politics, religion, or
anything else outside scope of computer science.  It's not
my job as a CS instructor to make my students uncomfortable.

That isn't to say that I want students to think of me as
bland or one-dimensional.  They know me to be a sports
fan and a chess player.  They know I like to read books
and to ride my bike.  I even let them know that I'm a Billy
Joel fan.  All of these give me color and, while they may
disagree with my tastes, none of these are likely to create
distance between us.

Nor do I want them to think I have no views on important
public issues of the day.  I have political opinions and
actually like to discuss the state of the country and
world.  Those discussions simply don't belong in a course
on algorithms or compiler construction.  In the context
of a course, politics and religion are two of many
unnecessary distractions.

In the end, I did use the offensive problem, but only as
inspiration.  I wrote a more generic problem, the sort you
expect to see in an algorithms course.  It included all
the relevant features of the original.  My problem gave the
students a chance to apply what they have have learned in
class without any noise.  The only way this problem could
offend students was by forcing them to demonstrate that
they are not yet ready to solve such a problem.  Alas, that
is an offense that every exam risks giving.

... and yes, I still owe you a write-up on possible changes
to the undergraduate algorithms canon, promised in the entry
linked above.  I have not forgotten!  Designing a new course
for spring semester is a time-constrained operation.
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