Academia: The Presentation of Political Selfhood In Everyday Student Life
Thursday's Child Has Far to Go
There is so much to object to in common invocations of “viewpoint diversity” as a supposed problem in academia that I am often at a loss to know where to begin.
One thought, however, might be that discerning the expressive, substantive, acted-upon political views and preferences of individual faculty, staff and students is often much harder than various complainants about viewpoint diversity might think. (Assuming they actually care what the reality is, which is sometimes not the case.)
I think this isn’t just the case with academia: in every profession, in every workplace, in every coffee shop that has its regulars, when ostensibly political conversations surface, people whose party affiliations, donations, and civic activism make them look the same on paper can sometimes find themselves fiercely at odds over the smallest divergences, while people who look from the outside like profound antagonists can align with surprising ease, even in our bitterly partisan moment. Various ways that we conventionally turn political views into quantifiable measurements frequenly pound square pegs of actual feeling into the round holes of polling and surveys.
However, this is especially true in academia precisely because there is such a surplus of opportunities to be in conversations where political views are likely to arise and because there are such strong expectations about the conventional or typical views that people should hold that are in tension with exhortations to think critically and to consider evidence.
I was struck by this recently listening in two separate conversations to colleagues talking about whether and how their students have political views or are inclined to discuss politics. In both discussions, it was really striking to hear people who teach within somewhat related or adjacent fields say that they either see students as being highly political—one colleague even thought ‘too political’—or as being rather apolitical, cautious, or apathetic. When I switch to a wider lens and look at at American academia as a whole, I see the same range of opinion among professors. Moreover, this feels like an evergreen discussion, as if we’ve been having it in some similar form ever since the 1980s. The exception here, unfortunately, is the aggressive attack on faculty political views at a subset of public universities in certain states, which has forced many faculty to be considerable more circumspect about what they themselves think with a concomitant shift in how (or whether) they discuss the presumptive politics of their students.
The problem with so many insistent readings of what-do-people-actually-think, or attempts to align the observable sociology of people with the concretely political actions they take (like voting or party registration) is that insistence that the fuzziness of what people say and don’t say in various settings should be collapsed down into a single concrete affiliation or position. So when I listen to professorial discussions about what students think (and not just about political matters), I instantly shift into a more Erving Goffmanesque perspective on the discussion. I consider the presentation of (political) self in the everyday life of students as faculty encounter it. This isn’t just useful for reading political views but for everything you think you see (or don’t see) in your students.
The first thing that I think most faculty recognize is that your students’ readings of you strongly condition what they are and are not willing to display in your presence as well as attract or repel students based on what they think you approve of or disdain. A faculty member who has a very public or discoverable set of political commitments has a different aura from one who is opaque or indirect on this score.
Which raises a second point: your pedagogical affect also strongly conditions what students say and perform in your presence. Some time ago, there was a faculty member here in another social science department whose affect was more or less of an Old Testament prophet relaying the displeasure of the Almighty with the unworthy learners gathered in the seats in front of him. A student who ventured to disagree had to be really sure of what they were doing, or to have a taste for argument. I can recall an impishly conservative historian I took classes with when I was an undergraduate who enjoyed poking and prodding me about his inferred understanding of my rather inchoate leftist politics, and while I didn’t try to give as good as I got (I lacked the confidence and eloquence) somehow he didn’t make me feel afraid to articulate some version of my politics. But many professors are hard for students to read in affective terms, so they aren’t certain whether an invitation to speak about a political issue is in fact genuinely inviting or whether it is in some sense a trap for the unwary.
A third point seems even more important. I think a fair number of students at a variety of institutions are uncertain whether what they are studying, whatever the discipline, actually has a politics, and are even more uncertain about whether the politics of what they study is actually useful to the real-life politics that they inhabit or want to inhabit. For many faculty, it is the most natural thing in the world that the work you do in your field—even in STEM fields—addresses, informs and enables your politics in the rest of your life. I think many of our students are dubious about that proposition. It is the easiest thing in the world inside of academic culture to think that the problem with the political systems out there beyond the university walls is that they lack knowledge, that the voters don’t have enough information (or are led astray by misinformation). But at least some politically active students may realize that this isn’t necessarily the case at all—that intellectual work might in some cases impede active political projects or might frustrate or inhibit effective political persuasion. (In the case of students strongly drawn to the current GOP, that might go still further, to the point of consciously thinking that what is needed is misinformation, or at least a cavalier disdain for aligning political conviction and evidence.)
You might ask why students don’t say as much to their professors—that they’re not sure that intellectual work leads to a clearer set of political convictions or a more effective kind of political action—and I would say that at least in some cases, it’s not out of nervousness that they would get a negative reaction but out of kindness to the faculty. They know that most of us do derive a politics from intellectual work and that is fine for us, but perhaps not many of them.
I think, for a school with as "liberal" a reputation as Swarthmore, the primary role of professors that I had was to ground my beliefs. If I found myself to be skeptical of an idea or proposition based on a gut feeling, my professors challenged me to support that gut feeling. The result was that I probably, if anything, moved to the right politically. Meanwhile, some of my classmates who came from more right-leaning assumptions inevitably shifted quite a bit to the left, in all likelihood for the same reasons-- doctrinaire right wing views don't stand up to scrutiny very well.
Interestingly, if anything, my professors in political science, where I majored, probably conveyed the least of their personal ideology of any of the non-STEM professors that I had-- I still don't have a clear sense of where many of them aligned politically, and even professors with well-known ideologies didn't tend to foist them upon students; aside from the occasional quip about "demon-crats," Jim Kurth was hardly pushing a dogma, and was quite popular despite being quite a bit out of alignment ideologically from his students.
I think the primary lesson that I got from my time in college was not that professors "indoctrinate" students-- rather it was that reality has a persistent liberal bias. It didn't turn anyone into a Marxist-- Marx was taught in the philosophy department, not the economics department-- in reality, it seemed to turn Marxists and Hayekians alike into... adherents of Paul Krugman.
A striking feature of arguments about "viewpoint diversity" is that the assumed range of viewpoints is that of the US population as a whole, at least as regards social and economic issues. )I don't see anyone, claiming, for example that universities should hire more anarchists.) This version of viewpoint diversity used to be advanced in relation to issues like evolution, where it has largely been abandoned and climate science, where it is certainly in retreat.
But even with respect to social and economic issues, the idea that there is a specifically American range of viewpoints that deserve respect doesn't stand up to even momentary scrutiny. It's entirely appropriate that people who have never been near a university should vote in a democracy, but why should their views on the appropriate content of curriculums and research programs be given any weight.