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"Classroom Politics in a Partisan Era"
by Regina Lawrence
Religion and politics, as the old saying goes, are not polite topics of conversation. Yet, as the authors (Kelly-Woessner and Woessner, 2006) of a recent study of students’ beliefs about their political science professors observed, “our very livelihood depends on our ability to discuss these unmentionables with large groups of diverse individuals on a routine basis” (p. 495).
The job of the college instructor who teaches political topics is therefore never easy. But in recent years it has become distinctly more difficult. Mirroring the partisan polarization documented by political scientist Gary Jacobson in his book A Divider, Not a Uniter (2005a), the students on my campus have become more deeply politically divided and distrustful of one another over the past six years. And the divide is not marked simply by partisanship, but by an intense polarization focused on a single individual and his momentous decision to take the country into a protracted war based on flimsy evidence of an imminent threat to our national security. In the face of what Jacobson (2005b) describes as the administration’s “cavalier approach to truth—dishonesty not by lying, but by a deceptive selection of truthful but misleading statements,” (p. 13) basic factual claims have become politicized, contested and confused such that students’ political camps are easily identified by the particular facts they choose to believe or disbelieve. (I recently received a reminder of the extent of this obfuscation of facts when an editor asked me to document my claim that the administration’s case for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq had been faulty, to mollify readers disinclined to believe that claim). Even students who do not normally describe themselves as political nevertheless have strong opinions on our current president, and any discussion of George W. Bush threatens to bog down in vituperative argument.
One of the main side effects of the increasingly polarized atmosphere of the past six years—ever since what many of my students view as George W. Bush’s theft of the presidency—is the pressure it puts on instructors to win enough trust among students on both sides of the aisle to create a healthy classroom environment. (For me, an optimally healthy classroom is one in which all students contribute to respectful but vigorous debate; in reality, these days I sometimes settle for a classroom in which the students don’t jump down each others’ throats at the first mention of the president). At a campus where students tend to lean left and to distrust mainstream information sources, one challenge is to establish credibility with the majority of the students while not simply confirming their already-formed beliefs about Republicans, the corporate media, and other favorite villains. Meanwhile, a smaller group of conservative students seems to watch with mistrustful scrutiny for signs of that infamous liberal indoctrination many of them have been told to expect from their college professors. Broader cultural currents—the decline in public trust in the mainstream media, the growth of a variety of media outlets, from AlterNet to Fox News, that openly deride the trustworthiness of other media sources, the pervasive sense that public discourse is based on nothing more than what Stephen Colbert skewers as “truthiness”—all of these developments only intensify the difficulty of finding common ground in the classroom. Moreover, as conservative pundits make hay heaping scorn not just on the mainstream media but the academy as well for our supposed liberal bias, the pressure is high on professors who teach about politics to claim the high ground and prove we are more than the partisan hacks we’re sometimes suspected of being.
This polarized environment has intensified an inevitable tension in the classroom between the professor’s obligation to avoid crass advocacy and to present contending points of view as evenhandedly as possible, and her obligation to at least sometimes tell students what she personally believes about politics and current events. The first obligation is more widely recognized, but the second has arguably become more crucial in an era of increasing political controversy.
The first obligation of professional detachment reflects societal expectations of our profession and others. Noted professor of law Stanley Fish (2006) recently argued in the New York Times that college professors are held to the same standard of objectivity as are judges, referees, and reporters. “It is part of a teacher’s job,” Fish contends, “to set personal conviction aside for the hour or two when a class is in session and allow the techniques and protocols of academic research full sway.” Fish argues that “no matter how many (or few) views are presented to the students, they should be offered as objects of analysis rather than as candidates for allegiance” (p. 13).
In short, according to this first ideal, teaching should never be indoctrination, students should never feel singled out for their political views, and professors should avoid using their bully pulpit to hold forth on their personal views. All views should be accorded equal parts respect and critical scrutiny.
It is a widely shared ideal. Like most other college instructors I know, I make a point of trying to conceal my own personal political views as much as possible in the classroom. I’ve viewed it as an accomplishment if my students are still guessing which party I vote for by the last day of the term. (In fact, some students once revealed that trying to draw me out politically in the classroom had become a kind of parlor game among the political science majors). I try to resist the temptation to laugh along when students make the inevitable Bush jokes, and I try to challenge their assumptions about the basis of the president’s (now much decreased) popularity among voters. I see my job as to engage students in great unresolved questions about political behavior and public policy rather than on narrower questions of party politics, and I avoid devoting classroom time to specific political appeals—unless they are being offered by a student group as a public announcement (all are welcome to make announcements) or are being held up to critical scrutiny. For example, last year I accepted the offer of an activist organization to make a presentation to my Politics of the News class about news coverage of the Palestinian uprising. The group’s aim was clearly to influence student’s beliefs about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, but the presentation was illuminating not only for what it revealed about possible patterns of media bias, but for what it showed about how claims of media bias are often made without strong supporting evidence or any coherent theory to explain the patterns.
But in my view, professional even-handedness is not my only professorial obligation. Occasionally, students really want me to divulge my own views, and occasionally they are entitled (as another old saying goes) to my opinion. They are in college, after all, to learn how their professors see the world—not because they should see it the same way or because our views are always correct, but because we owe them whatever insights we’ve gained from our learning, and we can model for them how we think through issues and problems. This is particularly true as the partisan rancor in the nation increases—along with the seriousness of the Bush administration’s assaults on the separation of powers, checks and balances and international law, not to mention a free and independent press. And as distrustful as students can be of hidden agendas that they seem to believe motivate virtually everyone in public life, I have learned that it can disarm their mistrust and actually east tensions in the classroom for me to reveal my own political views. I don’t make a habit of it, nor do I make it a centerpiece of discussion, and I always preface such statements with a qualifier, such as, “My own personal view is that…”
In fact, a danger of the reticence about voicing personal views that Fish and others advocate is that it could morph into the kind of ritualized objectivity that characterizes so much mainstream news. Most journalists rely on the objectivity norm in part because it makes their jobs easier: Rather than risking flak from their sources, editors, or readers, they play it safe by simply writing their stories around the major viewpoints (often two—one Republican and one Democratic) being offered in official circles, being careful not to take sides. In short, if students believe that they are entitled to the same kind of “objectivity” often practiced by reporters, then the classroom might be bled of life and meaning, not to mention expertise.
The opposing obligations to offer my students professional detachment yet a clear, informed perspective on current affairs come into conflict most intensely when teaching about subjects such as public support for the war. For example, Jacobson’s (2005b, pp. 15-22) data clearly indicate that support for the war and for President Bush among self-identified Republicans remained intact for some time after the administration’s case for Iraqi WMD had publicly crumbled. Presenting that case can invite left-leaning students to make derisive comments about benighted conservatives and Fox News, while it puts conservative students on the defensive (or used to, anyway, before public doubts about the war widened). The challenge is to put those facts front and center while not allowing the classroom discussion to disintegrate nor allowing conservative students to feel singled out; one way I have dealt with that potential problem is (following Jacobson’s argument) to get students to ponder whether Democratic and Independent voters’ quicker disaffection with the war really reflected any superior knowledge among them, or simply reflected their own predispositions. If pressed to give my own view, I will tell students that there seems little doubt that the administration misled the public about WMD in Iraq, offer a few sources and examples to back up that claim, and turn the discussion back to them by asking a larger question such as, What does the Iraq war example teach us about the factors that drive public opinion? What does it mean for the relationship between the public and elected leaders?
Of course, it’s inevitable that even when I am trying to observe the first obligation, students may think I am violating it. I experienced that dilemma rather painfully one day when I pulled up the images on the website thememoryhole.org on the classroom’s big screen. My point was to show images of coffins returning from Iraq that were missing from mainstream news to illustrate how we often filter new information through our pre-existing beliefs (I asked them to try to notice their own first reactions to the photos). More than one student was brought to tears and distraught that I would, in their view, disrespect of families’ grief and further the agenda of those who posted the photos online. In this kind of situation, I have found the second obligation particularly pressing: To fess up to those students that although I did not intend the exercise to advance any political agenda, I also did not anticipate their reaction to the photos because of my own predispositions. I told them that I view it as a greater disrespect to our troops to conceal their sacrifice from the public, and apologized for not anticipating the variety of strong feelings the photos might arouse.
In short, the tension between these competing professional obligations can be difficult to navigate, particularly as the war grinds on. Walking that tightrope among the minefields of polarized politics is the challenge—and the thrill—of the job.
Regina Lawrence is an Associate Professor of Political Science, Portland State University.
REFERENCES
Fish, Stanley. (2006). “Conspiracy Theories 101,” New York Times, July 23, 2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/23/opinion/23fish.html?pagewanted=2&ei=5088&en=e967d7be6648ae71&ex=1311307200&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss
Jacobson, Gary C. (2005a). Uniter Not a Divider: George W. Bush and the American people. NY: Pearson-Longman.
Jacobson, Gary C. (2005b). “The Public, the President, and the War in Iraq.” Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Marriott Wardman Park, Omni Shoreham, Washington Hilton, Washington, DC, September 1, 2005.
Kelly-Woessner, April and Matthew C. Woessner. (2006). “My Professor is a Partisan hack: How Perceptions of a Professor’s Political Views Affect Student Course Evaluations.” PS, 39(3), pp. 495-502.
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