Pedagogy + Politics

The professoriate is losing its radicals, the New York Times reported recently, and new professors are more moderate than their predecessors.  The article suggests that the professors who flooded universities in the 60s and 70s were cut from a different cloth.  Today’s academics are less politically motivated, more moderate, and research-minded rather than ideological.  Teaching, however, has never been apolitical.  Just ask Socrates.

Before the great Greek philosopher gulped down his fatal dosage of hemlock, he stood trial for corrupting the minds of the young.  Having traipsed around Athens asking people difficult questions, never arriving at a certainty and always pushing deeper questioning above all else, Socrates was thought to be challenging democracy in politically turbulent times.  The judicial remedy, of course: to kill him.  

I use Socrates as an example because, in his story, it is moot to argue whether or not he explicitly criticized democracy.  That is to say, it wasn’t what he said, but rather, his trial seems to have been about his teaching method—persistent questioning of one’s ideas.   Whereas I’d like to say that pedagogy and politics be left to their respective corners, Socrates’ story suggests the two occupy a round room.  In terms of Socrates’ trial and sentence, there seems little difference between pedagogy and politics.

It seems to me that healthy thinking necessarily critiques any subject matter.  To think is to, as objectively as possible, learn certain content matter and then develop questions out of it.  But, I might ask, what is one to do with the questions and conclusions one arrives at? If, as a professor, I study the way students have been taught to read over the course of western education, and I arrive at the conclusion that reading has been taught at the expense of oral expression, what do I do with that conclusion?  Do I begin each course with pontification: “Reading, as it always has in our country, oppresses oral communication!”? Do I write on the top of my syllabus, “Reading kills the mind”?  Do I campaign on campus for legislation that privileges oral communication over reading? 

Hardly.  As a professor, my role would be to share with my students the various arguments taking place around a specific topic or question and then to share my own perspective.  My students, I hope, would then arrive at their own conclusions.  In short, I argue for this: Dialectic over rhetoric.  If professors present the latter while calling it the former, they perpetuate the type of sophistry that Socrates warned of, the result of which is intellectual manipulation. 

This particular Times article presents the retiring professor as politically mindful and active.  Professor Olneck, of the University of Wisconsin, for example, begins his syllabus for a course called Race, Ethnicity, and Inequality in American Education thus: “Schools in the United States promise equal opportunity. They have not kept that promise. In this course, we will try to find out why.”  Those seem to be the words of a sophist, for they presuppose the outcome of inquiry thereby preventing students from genuinely (and safely) arriving at their own conclusions.  Where is the room for true dialectic when the course begins at its own end.  How will students respond to the statement, “They have not kept that promise”?  Is there room for disagreement here?  And if there is, how is a student going to know that? 

The article later discusses the work of Gerald Graff, current MLA president and professor at University of Illinois – Chicago, who, when writing about the culture wars taking place in American universities posits the notion of “teaching the conflicts.”  For Graff, the role of the professor is to present to students the various conflicts in a given field and let them decide for themselves.  In later works, Clueless in Academe most notably, Graff goes on to say that professors need to model thinking for their students, especially in the form of verbal and written argument-making.  Academic culture is, for Graff, one of argument.  This take on academia seems to differ slightly from the recent lectures and writings of Graff’s contemporary, Stanley Fish.  Fish, as I’ve noted previously, thinks that professors need to keep their political views out of the classrooms.  Graff would hardly take issue with that.  Fish goes on, however, as he did at a lecture a few months ago at Teachers College, to argue that the professor is the content expert in the classroom whose job is to transmit knowledge.  I suggest that as long as a professor or classroom goes in with the attitude that he is the expert, his students are likely to genuflect at the altar of his expertise.  A fair and genuine argument seems highly unlikely. 

The Times presents the notion of a “sensibility gap” between the older generation of professors and the new.  A fledgling professor, Sara Goldrick-Rab, describes how “’Senior people evaluate us for tenure and the standards they use and what we think is important are different,’ she said. They want to question values and norms; ‘we are more driven by data.’”  It is the ideological older generation who demands that newer scholars “question values and norms,” whereas the younger generation seeks objective data.  I caution others not to be duped by the suggestion that data necessitates objectivity.  As the French thinker Jean-Francois Lyotard discussed in his Postmodern Condition, knowledge creation can be created by anyone willing to pay for it.  And perhaps this is an understated and paramount point: funding.

We can talk all we want about political-activism verses data-driven research.  If neither side at least acknowledges that paychecks play a part in the debate, then it’s an empty argument.   I don’t think the paycheck point stunts the dialogue, but it must be at least acknowledged.  This is where Socrates again serves as a model: in Apology, Socrates is described as not accepting payment for his work.  Perhaps only the pauper can claim to be a pedagogue.  The rest, whether they call themselves social activists or data-driven researchers, are the descendants of sophists.