|
"Bridging Political Divides in the Classroom"
by Elizabeth Skewes
It’s been a few years since David Horowitz and his Academic Bill of Rights, a bill aimed at increasing the number and volume of conservative voices in the classroom, were at the top of Colorado’s legislative agenda. According to his view, impressionable college students are being indoctrinated in their thinking by largely liberal faculty who are hostile to Republicans and to conservative perspectives. Horowitz’s concern, which he still holds today, is that the nation’s college classrooms have become “a learning environment hostile to conservatives,” according to his opening column at Frontpagemag.com.
While I don’t share Horowitz’s belief, as he wrote in a Feb. 13, 2004, column for The Chronicle of Higher Education, that this is “one of the most pressing issues in the academy,” I do understand and share his concern that students who support George W. Bush and his administration may find it difficult to speak up in most college classrooms.
So despite the excitement I felt at being able to teach a freshman seminar on “Media and Political Engagement” at the University of Colorado at Boulder this past fall, I also felt some measure of trepidation. How could I teach a class that was focusing on politics and elections—and do so in an election year that was being defined by Bush’s policies in Iraq—without injecting my own views into the class and while creating a classroom where students from a broad range of political perspectives felt free to express their opinions?
First, and Horowitz would likely approve, I tried to keep my political opinions to myself. I agree with Horowitz that as the professor in the class, I can wield more influence than I should on students’ attitudes. My job is to educate, to inform, to help students make connections between how media coverage of political events might affect citizens’ political behavior, especially in an election year. And it stops there. My personal views about the Bush administration—or any other presidency—aren’t relevant. How I voted isn’t relevant. So when my students asked, after the mid-term elections on Nov. 7, how I voted, I didn’t tell them.
I don’t know if I was stunningly successful at keeping my political views out of the classroom. I know I tried. But if someone polled my students and asked them to guess how I voted, more would probably guess correctly. Still, I tried to keep my criticism focused on the media, not on the candidates, and I tried to keep it even-handed.
But more than that, the students in my class were able to bridge some of their political differences by sharing real-world experiences. As part of the class, each student was required to spend roughly one day a week volunteering for a political campaign. Each student got to choose the campaign—either for a candidate or on behalf of a ballot issue—that he or she wanted to work with. Politics didn’t matter.
Out of the class of 14, one spent time working on the campaign to support Amendment 41, an “ethics in government” proposal which limits gifts to legislators to $50 of value (the measure ended up passing). Others went to work for Bill Ritter, the Democratic gubernatorial candidate who defeated Bob Beauprez. And quite a few chose to volunteer for Referendum I, which failed, but which would have provided “basic legal rights” to same-sex couples.
The time they spent in the field—making calls from phone banks at campaign headquarters or staffing tables in the student center or canvassing door-to-door in the dorms—was something they had in common, no matter where they came down in terms of their own political beliefs. When we met as a class to talk about what they were observing, they all could talk about people—real potential voters—who had little understanding of the sometimes complex issues the were voting on in November. All of my students could tell war stories about having doors shut in their faces or phones hung up as they were in mid-sentence. They all saw how the media, despite the volumes of news coverage on the election in the fall, returned to the same two or three narratives.
In fact, it was on this last piece—the media coverage of politics—where the common threads were most apparent. Those in my class who supported Referendum I and those who opposed it both saw that the media coverage of the referendum was narrow. It relied on a handful of sources and it focused on the fact that Referendum I was not gay marriage (a separate measure on the ballot, Amendment 43, which passed, did deal with defining marriage as a heterosexual union).
By examining media texts around Referendum I, or around the governor’s race for that matter, the discussions in class were more productive and less partisan. Students who disagreed politically could agree on, and speak up about, the fact that media frames of the election didn’t give voters all of the information that they would need to make a decision. Instead, the coverage was much more impressionistic.
We did talk about George W. Bush—it was impossible not to since much of the media coverage talked about the 2006 elections as a referendum on his presidency. But we also watched Alexandra Pelosi’s documentary “Journeys with George,” which gave students a chance to see a “softer” Bush, as a candidate in 2000, chowing down on a bologna sandwich and joking with the press. The result was that students who like Bush got the chance to pull from the video to talk about what they saw in him that impressed them, and the students who don’t like Bush could see what drew the electorate to him in 2000 and 2004, but could also talk about how some of the things that made him a likable candidate conspired to weaken his presidency.
In the end, the students came away with a less polarized view of the president, and, hopefully, a less polarized view of politics.
I don’t share David Horowitz’s fear that today’s college students are overly influenced by a largely liberal faculty. My greatest fear is that in the debate about liberalism and conservatism—about blue and red—we’ll lose sight of the fact that the issues are typically more complex than that dichotomy. We’ll lose sight of the fact—and will fail to teach our students—that most issues and most candidates are simply varying shades of purple.
Elizabeth Skewes is an Assistant Professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of Colorado, Boulder.
|
