Teach students to speak out without fear
In November 2016, I led a first-year political science tutorial at the University of Toronto. Since we were discussing the social construction of identities, I thought I’d get the students to consider whether all identities are socially constructed and, if not, where to draw the line. I told them about a video of a tall white man in his thirties who asked students at a different university how they’d react if he said to them that he identified, first, as a woman, then as black, then as short, then as Chinese, and finally as five years old. I could tell that my students were curious about why it seemed easier to accept the idea that gender is socially constructed, a matter of free choice, than it did to think the same thing about age and the other characteristics. No one was quite willing to see the man as a short, black, five-year-old Chinese girl.
But even though I knew that the topic was interesting and that the students were interested in it, and even though I had gone out of my way to set it up for them so that they’d be eager to discuss it, nobody was saying a word. I asked why, to help understand what I had done wrong in setting up the topic for discussion, so that at least I could do it differently in the next tutorial. One student raised her hand and said I had done fine. The issue wasn’t me. The student said she was silent because she was worried to share her opinion, for fear of being singled out or accidentally saying something offensive. I asked who else was not speaking for that reason.
For the first time in my years of experience as a teaching assistant, something happened that most teachers dream about: everyone raised their hands.
No one was talking because everyone was afraid. I encouraged them to speak despite their worries, and asked how I might make it easier for them to do that. Someone suggested that it would be easier if they were assigned an opinion so that they wouldn’t have to be responsible for holding it or feel bad for defending it.
The students were eager to talk. They wanted to talk. But they were afraid of even letting themselves think out loud about a position that might land them in trouble through social sanctions and accusations that they are racists, fascists, bigots, or sexists. Political science students at a top Canadian university had become accustomed to having their mouths kept shut. It’s only a matter of time until the mind shuts, too.
From time to time, moments of ideological persecution on campus make their way into the news. How many such moments are unnoticed, unreported, and unresolved? How many professors have been successful in sabotaging the careers and reputations of students who crossed an invisible red line into the domain of forbidden discourses, illicit beliefs, and dangerous ideas and were therefore called enemies of some kind? How many students learned early on to stay quiet and conformingly repressed their nascent intellectual curiosity?
But what good will it do anyone if the university becomes a place of intellectual repression, rather than intellectual inquiry? If minds are made to tremble and fear, rather than labour in the search for wisdom? How does a society fundamentally dedicated to the dignity of the mind banish certain inquiries to the realm of the inadmissible when those inquiries are themselves but expressions of the dignity of the mind?
Somewhere within itself, in departments of psychology, philosophy, and political science, for instance, the university must be a place where students are encouraged to think without the fear of reprisal, without ideological tests. Educators must not neglect to foster the spark of independent thought that animates and elevates the mind. Our next generation of students and leaders cannot fear to acknowledge, on a university campus, of all places, that a tall white man in his thirties is not a short, black, five-year-old Chinese girl. Those who subject their students to ideological tests, chastising them for following their natural intellectual curiosity, scaring them into submission, should consider the old saying about nature and the pitchfork. The respectful and dignified treatment of intellectual curiosity, the fair-minded willingness to withstand, perhaps even to provoke, disagreement, the prudent understanding of the moderate educator — all that is preferable to frightened silence and ideological conformity.
Moments of ideological persecution on campus make their way into the news. How many such moments are unnoticed, unreported, and unresolved?