Las Vegas Review-Journal (Sunday)
CAMPUSES SEEN AS INCREASINGLY PARTISAN
as DACA; the Charlottesville attacks; the Black Lives Matter protests — have brought both relevance and volatility to academic debate. Inside classrooms, professors feel newly exposed. They want strategies to manage testy exchanges and challenges they don’t see coming.
At Reed College this semester, instructors abandoned the stage during the first meeting of Humanities 110, a required freshman course on early Greek and Mediterranean civilization. “We cannot have our class if we have students interrupting the teaching,” Elizabeth Drumm announced as a student grabbed a microphone and talked over her. Others joined onstage. One protester held a sign: “Don’t teach us white supremacy.”
At George Mason University, “a fervent Trump supporter” last summer in Jeremy D. Mayer’s course on the presidency sparred at the start of each class. One session, he dismissed an article Mayer had cited as fake news, with: “The Washington Post hates Trump!” It was “very frustrating,” Mayer said. “How can you have a class that touches on current events when you don’t have an accepted, fairly standard source of information?”
Even content in fact-heavy courses like biology looks less neutral with hot-button issues like reproduction and genetic testing. It’s why Scott McLean, kinesiology professor at Southwestern, is careful when teaching a unit on health insurance. “I really try to present two different sides,” he said. The class movie night showing “McFarland, USA,” about children of migrant workers who excel at cross-country, no longer looks like “a free dinner and getaway from the books.” And so a professor who specializes in the mechanics of body movement must now prep for queries about immigration and DACA.
Today’s students bring a multiplicity of personal identities to campus — their sexual orientation, race and ethnicity, religion, political leanings — and they want to see that reflected in course content. The values in readings, lectures and even conversations are open to questioning. All good — that’s what college is supposed to be about — except that now the safety screen around the examination of ideas has been pulled away. Higher education is increasingly partisan, and professors must manage these disconnected ideologies, which are sometimes between themselves and their students.
With so many professors identifying as liberal or far left (60 percent, according to a UCLA poll last year), it’s not surprising that the right distrusts the profession. In a Pew Research Center survey released in September, respondents indicated on a thermometer scale how they felt about professors. Democrats rated them a warm 71 degrees, Republicans a chilly 46 degrees.
It’s a charged climate and professors know it. The culture wars playing out in the classroom have made them fearful of being targeted. That has been a particular issue at Northern Arizona University, a politically mixed campus in a red state. Six professors there have received death threats or harassing emails or calls, some after being the subject of posts on conservative media sites, amplified by Facebook and Twitter.
“The air is different now because what you do in a classroom can end up on Fox News,” said Luis Fernandez. His fall course at Northern Arizona, “Political Crime,” considers Russia’s use of media tools to meddle in U.S. affairs. This semester, he received threats on his office phone, naming his wife and siblings and citing addresses. The day after, Fernandez found himself scanning the classroom — messages had alluded to a student in class — trying to guess which of the 36 was responsible. “Then I started thinking, ‘This is really silly. My job is not to identify this person; my job is to educate and teach.’” The police are investigating.
An English professor at Northern Arizona, Anne Scott, did end up on Fox News. After she deducted 1 point from a first-year student’s paper last spring for using “mankind” instead of “humankind” — she said she had told the class that “inclusive” vocabulary is required — the student contacted the website Campus Reform. She received more than 400 emails, rude voicemail messages and dropped calls. This semester, when the student’s name appeared on the wait-list for a course she was teaching, Scott said, “I was terrified.”
These clashes are affecting curriculum. After meeting with a professor to plan a spring course on fascism and anti-fascism, “we decided it was probably not worth it,” said Lori Poloni-Staudinger, head of the department of politics and international affairs, who has also received threats. The class won’t be offered. “People are more guarded,” she said. “They are watching what they say.”
As campuses grow more racially and economically diverse, navigating strong emotions has become a coveted skill. Anita Davis is in a newly created post of director of diversity and inclusion at the Associated Colleges of the South, a consortium of 16 institutions that helps professors with “hot” conversations. “They are struggling to handle tense, confrontational, challenging moments,” she said.
Tools she shares are new to professors focused on conveying content. On the first day, she urges instructors to work with students to create ground rules for class discussions, including what to do when talk gets heated. She shares tricks like asking students, before peers pounce, to rephrase or repeat a provocative utterance (often it’s less harsh). If someone suggests that people who ride buses are poor, instead of calling him “classist,” she said, a teacher could reframe: “Let’s talk about the labels that come up when we talk about social class.”
It’s also important to openly discuss cultural identity with students, rather than make assumptions. “You can be from the same background and be very different,” she said. “Or you can be from very different backgrounds and think very similarly.” Digging below the surface is critical because students “are asking for more opportunity to be complicated individuals.”
Professors who once skipped pre-semester faculty workshops now want to know “how to model productive disagreement,” said Theresa Braunschneider, associate director of the University of Michigan’s Center for Research on Learning and Teaching. “We are responding to increased demand across the university for programming that helps instructors.” A recent workshop had a wait-list of 50; 10 colleges, including an engineering school, have requested custom sessions.
The center also has a theater program in which actors perform classroom scenarios; a facilitator debriefs faculty audiences. Popular sketches hit touchy subjects — a Muslim student accidentally leaves behind a backpack; a student jokes that it contains a bomb. What should the professor do?
Back at Southwestern, classmates in Mariotti’s seminar gathered in a library lecture room overlooking a sunny quad to share with a reporter what bothers them. At the top of the list: professors who expose their views on current affairs.
In the seminar, silent meditation over, Mariotti dove into the assignment, which was to speak with someone holding an opposing political view. She would use their reactions to help draft ground rules for class discussion. For example, notice your own bias so you can grapple more generously with others.
Rachel Arco said she is “a competitive person.” The exercise told her that every conversation “does not need to have a goal or something you can win.” It’s an opening. To which Oscar Barbour offered a useful idea: People should “let go of their personal stake” in a charged conversation.
Agreement may not be the point, or possible. But talking about how to talk proved helpful when a few weeks later the class was faced with “Strangers in Their Own Land,” a book about a Tea Party-leaning community in Louisiana. Some students saw themselves in portrayals they found condescending or thought the writer was too kind toward those with racist views.
In what may prove to be the hidden gift of these provocative times, grappling with dicey subjects may force students to reflect and not just to react. “They are struggling with how the book makes them feel,” Mariotti said. “We’ve had a lot of conversations about where the limits of our empathy are.”