Academic Controversy:
Enriching College Instruction through Intellectual Conflict

By David W. Johnson, Roger T. Johnson, and Karl Smith. .
ASHE-ERIC Higher Education Report Volume 25, No. 3. Washington D.C.: The George Washington University Graduate School of Education and Human Development.

The authors of Academic Controversy: Enriching College Instruction through Intellectual Conflict make a convincing case for the value of introducing organized conflict into higher education. They provide strong evidence of its value, citing numerous studies; a detailed explanation of a workable procedure to apply in one's classes; and a number of useful sample cases to illustrate the flexibility of the procedure they advocate.

The monograph begins with a discussion of how and why college teachers often strive to avoid controversy in their classrooms. The authors then proceed to demonstrate that controversy and conflict are inevitable, indeed endemic, in exploring the issues that arise in college classrooms. After that, they explain how faculty can harness these inevitable disagreements as teaching tools by following the simple, yet effective, procedure the authors have developed and tested.

Part of the purpose of the book is to compare controversy to three other methods of teaching and learning: debate, concurrence seeking, and individualistic learning. Not surprisingly, controversy turns out to be the most valuable of the four. According to their argument, individualistic learning offers the least gain for students in a number of areas. This is because by its very nature it presupposes a number of conditions which, they argue, limit learning: "No oral statement of position," "Presence of only one view," "High certainty about the correctness of own views," "No epistemic curiosity," and even, "Low achievement, relationships, psychological health" (See p. 8, Table 2).

Besides wondering if all solitary thinkers, say Descartes, for example, suffered from "no epistemic curiosity,"--or poor psychological health--I have another quibble with this breakdown. Though I accept fully the value of using controversy and find the procedure the authors have developed useful, the final step in that procedure makes me wonder if controversy, as they define it, is as different from concurrence seeking as they would have us believe. In brief, students are asked to 1) "Research and prepare a position" on the issue at hand; 2) "Present and advocate [their] positions"; 3) engage in an "Open discussion (advocate, refute, rebut)"; 4) "Reverse perspectives" and argue for the opposite view; and, finally, 5) "Synthesize." The instructions for this final step state:

Drop all advocacy. Synthesize and integrate the best advice and reasoning from both sides into a joint position that all members can agree to [emphasis mine].

To be fair, the authors do define concurrence seeking as follows: "when members of a group inhibit discussion to avoid any disagreement or arguments, emphasize agreement, and avoid realistic appraisal of alternative ideas . . ." (6). Still I wonder why they insist, in their own admittedly more confrontational method, on all members agreeing at the end. I question the assumption that such things as "best advice and reasoning" (my emphasis) always exist, especially when discussing our thorniest ethical questions. What is the best reasoning on abortion? Assisted suicide? I cling to the notion that students should be able, and allowed, to continue to disagree, albeit respectfully, even after hearing and carefully weighing all sides of an issue.

A more fundamental problem I have with this monograph, though, concerns not content, but style. I found the writing tedious and needlessly repetitious. Given that it has three authors, perhaps it should not be surprising that it reads as if it were written by a committee. The authors, for example, reiterate the steps of the procedure, with little variation, many times throughout the text (in a quick skim, I found them repeated at least five times, in their entirety, before page 60). Much of the other information seems similarly redundant. At one point, the authors give this revealing piece of advice for the students working on a controversy:

To ensure that the audience does not miss the important points, each major point included in the rationale should be clearly stated, stated again in different words, illustrated with an example, story, anecdote, or visual display, and stated once more. (79)

As I read through to the end, I could not help but feel they had followed their own advice all too well. Had they not, this one-hundred-plus page monograph might have been edited down to a really good twenty-five page article. Still, for those readers willing to push through to the conclusion, the work does contain much valuable advice for college educators looking for a workable and interesting way to use controversy in their classrooms.

Peter J. Caulfield.
UNC-Asheville