Diversity, Ideology, and Teaching Writing

Oh, professors. If I've picked up anything about this mysterious brand of human being over my four years of college, it seems to be that "professor" is more of a state of mind than anything else. A state of mind that, when harnessed properly, is seen by the special select few who could afford grad school (or thought they could) as almost a super power, a divine gift bestowed upon them that can be used for good or evil. This is a mindset that can be incredibly useful in teaching, but almost blinding in other aspects of daily life (many of which do not include academia). For example, when Hairston started out talking about the present growth of the composition studies field by citing tenure tracks and conferences, I just about laughed out loud. Shouldn't we measure writing courses by what students are learning and producing, rather than how much someone gets paid to teach it?
I think the true problem with freshman courses, rather than the political slant Hairston criticizes, is that writing professors just don't know what to do with freshmen. Often times, the class is a requirement, making it a mixed bag of gen-ed students writing professors would rather not deal with, and for good reason, I suppose. They signed up to teach writers, and the business and physical therapy majors who would rather be spending their time elsewhere only take up space in the intellectual vaccuum they had hoped to create. Hairston's argument, however that the freshman course should be moved away from the political mindset, in my mind, is incredibly short-sighted, as political issues are one of the few things college ids can get worked up about enough to write a paper. You take politics away from freshman writing classes, and you're going to be reading a lot more stories about high school boyfriends and sports heroes.
Honestly, the section titles "New Possibilities for Freshman Courses" made me laugh out loud. The whole previous section is dedicated to how we can make students more comfortable and productive in their freshman writing classes, and then the first two paragraphs of this section describing the exclusivity of "multicultural courses." For these reasons, I couldn't help but wonder what she imagined would happen when her idealistic little Benetton ad of a class tried to workshop, or even describe their work for one another.