New York Times
By Laura Pappano
October 30, 2017
“Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life,” a guide to spreading kindness, is an odd choice for a political science syllabus. But Shannon Mariotti sees the need. Her seminar about race and class alienation invites contention; course readings swing between Tea Party and far-left perspectives.
The 13 students represent the stew of political views at Southwestern University, a liberal arts campus in mostly red Georgetown, Tex. Dr. Mariotti pushes buttons, but prudently. She wants reactions, she said, somewhere “between nice and angry.” She hopes the book — from step one (“Learn about compassion”) to 12 (“Love your enemies”) — will teach students “to develop compassion and empathy” for opposing, even distasteful stances.
It is not her only Zen move: As students settle at a long conference table, Dr. Mariotti taps the timer on her iPhone. Classes start with silent meditation. “All you are supposed to be doing right now is to breathe in and breathe out. Every time you think of something,” she said, “just let it go.”
Dr. Mariotti designed this upper-level course in response to political divisions at Southwestern, divisions that have fractured friendships. “The only way that kind of polarization in politics will get better is if we can find a way to talk to each other in a way that is sympathetic, but not wishy-washy.”
These are fitful times on college campuses. Tumultuous current events — the revocation of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, known 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,” Prof. 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 Dr. Mayer had cited as fake news, with: “The Washington Post hates Trump!” It was “very frustrating,” Dr. 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 U.C.L.A. 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, Dr. 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 one 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 voice mail messages and dropped calls. This semester, when the student’s name appeared on the wait-list for a course she was teaching, Dr. 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 help 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 busses 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?
In “Conflict in the Classroom,” a sketch recently staged at Skidmore College, a statistics “class” discusses correlation and causation. The “professor” posits an example: the link between infant mortality and maternal income. The “students” raise questions that have nothing to do with math. “It becomes a debate about the variables,” said Sara Armstrong, the artistic director: One student wonders why the example doesn’t consider household income, and defines a household as man and woman. Another objects. The first accuses the other of attacking. The instructor interjects, “I don’t think this is appropriate for this class. We really can’t talk about this.” The upset student insists, “This is a problem! We have to talk about this!” A student records on his phone.
In the post-performance discussion, the faculty members backtrack: What could the instructor have done ahead of time to prevent problems? What could the instructor do in the moment? And afterward? Approaches involve addressing not just what is taught, but how and why. The professor might explain why he chose the case study, pause the discussion, or email the class, acknowledging the disruption and, perhaps, apologizing.
Getting faculty prepared is why Kristie A. Ford, director of the Center for Leadership, Teaching and Learning at Skidmore, invited the Michigan troupe as part of a semester series she calls “Teaching in a Time of Turmoil.” “Regardless of discipline, we cannot shut out the world,” she said. “It is seeping into our classrooms, and we need to hone our skills for how to productively engage with it.”
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Classmates in Dr. 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.
Conner Joyce, a “moderate Republican” majoring in political science, scratched a double major in philosophy because a professor kept comparing Trump to Hitler. Instead of engaging, he said, “you shrink back: I will just write my paper, take my test and move on.”
Sydney Cardenas, a Trump voter, objects to liberal students’ special alliances with liberal professors. “They make those jokes,” she said, and instructors slyly signal approval “under the table” or with a giggle. You expect politics in political science, she said, but she was irritated that her education class “was extremely political for no reason whatsoever.”
Camille Martin and Mikaela Manion, left-identifying students who have strong religious backgrounds, face prickly moments, too. “People can be hostile when Christianity and the whole evangelical movement are brought up in class,” Ms. Martin said. “It triggers me.”
Ms. Manion felt her anger rise in class when a student dismissed religion as “the opiate of the masses.” “It was very derogatory toward Christianity and that was very hard to deal with,” she said. Later, she wrote “liberation theology,” a term that marries religion and social justice, in large pink uppercase letters in her notebook.
In the seminar, silent meditation over, Dr. 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 and the Armstrong reading 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.
A kind thought, but Ms. Manion wasn’t buying: “I want to challenge Oscar. We are part of the conversation. We can’t distance ourselves from what we care about.”
Mr. Joyce jumped in to defend Mr. Barbour: “It can be honoring your own values to open them up to challenge.” But then you risk being “nice” rather than “authentic.”
Assuming the best of classmates, Ms. Arco confessed, “is something I’m not very good at.”
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,” Dr. Mariotti said. “We’ve had a lot of conversations about where the limits of our empathy are.”
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