Welcome to the APA Mini-Series Blog organized by the APA Committee on Professional Rights and Academic Freedom, formerly, the Committee on the Professional Rights of Philosophers. We changed our name last year in order to highlight the centrality of Academic Freedom to our charge. Given recent events, it was not a moment too soon.
It is a stressful time for those of us who value philosophy education and scholarship. Learning and research require freedom to explore ideas and their consequences, unconstrained by political or academic fashion. This freedom is endangered by polarized dogmatists and demagogues. Students, teachers, and families are confused, scared to express opinions for fear of ostracism or worse. As protection, some academics wield rights: to freedom of speech, as enshrined in our laws and Constitution; or academic freedom, as described in the commitments of professional societies and unions. There are good reasons to protect even some offensive speech in our capacity as scholars. Even when such speech causes harm, restrictions on speech are often a greater harm. But free speech and academic freedom are unhelpfully blunt and heavy-handed tools for the challenges that face the philosophy classroom. As philosophy instructors, we face a dilemma. Our free and candid speech both is necessary and undermines our pedagogical goals. I’ll explain.
Our students come to us with conflicting or incoherent views about the topics we study: bodily autonomy, the existence of God, responsibility, race. We ask them to subject these often deeply held convictions to thoughtful examination. Good philosophers, we tell them, allow ourselves to be epistemically vulnerable. We admit that we might be wrong about even some firmly held core beliefs. We open our minds to change and are willing to adopt new versions of ourselves that the old versions might find repugnant. We show them arguments and share stories. We expect them to follow rationality, to give up their inconsistent views, and to change their minds on what seemed like settled topics. We disrupt our students in the service of their learning. These are difficult tasks. Learning is change and change is hard.
We can protect students from stressful changes of mind by asking them merely to regurgitate information: to learn terms like ‘deontology’ and ‘determinism’. We can ask them to memorize categories or inference tools and apply them to novel cases. Such activities keep them safe at lower levels of cognitive development, e.g. on Bloom’s taxonomy.
But the kinds of changes that make philosophy exciting and important for students disturb strands central to their webs of beliefs. We want our students honestly to analyze and evaluate controversial claims. We encourage them to find their own views about the nature of self, morality, and justice, about race and cognition and language. We want our students not merely to learn about philosophy, but to do it.
We’re facing something like a pandemic of mental health problems in young people, so we must be cautious of the kinds of stresses that we impose. When students enter our philosophy classrooms, we invite them to be vulnerable. We ask them to be willing to make changes in their core beliefs and attitudes that may bring them into conflict with trusted friends and family. Such changes may lead to ostracism, isolation, and loneliness. Our students have developed their beliefs in community with friends and family. We ask them to trust that they can live happily even after bonds to those they value most are tested or severed. In place of those bonds, we ask our students to trust us and our methods.
We can, relatively easily, encourage a kind of bullshit trust. We can pretend to care about them without challenging their beliefs. We can ask them to report on what experts say without asking them to take the conversation into their hearts. This kind of approach leads to a dull and dead classroom.
Philosophy comes alive when we authentically confront open questions. The philosophy classroom thrives when we instructors are open and vulnerable ourselves, rather than acting as authorities dispensing dogma. If we expect our students to be vulnerable, we have to model that authenticity, stating what we believe and subjecting it to responsible scrutiny. Free speech is important to us because it is essential to good philosophy and to good philosophy instruction. Honest engagement builds an atmosphere of trust that facilitates real learning.
But free engagement in the philosophy classroom is problematic. As a teacher, I must help all of my students to learn, even the ones whose beliefs I find reprehensible. On Wednesday, November 9, 2016, I stood in front of my logic class, trying to demonstrate first-order derivations, mostly crying. Trump had been declared the winner of the US presidential election, and I was questioning my life decisions. How did I end up teaching logic to privileged kids when I could have been helping people that really need it?
In my classroom that day was at least one student who was thrilled with the election result. With my tears and reflections, I may have gained some empathy from the students who shared my politics. I certainly lost some trust from the students who did not. By being my most authentic self in front of the class, I lost some of my students. But my responsibility is to all of my students.
Moreover, it’s the students who disagree with me on core issues that I most want to trust me. I don’t need the students already committed to women’s bodily autonomy or the importance of mitigating climate change to alter their views. I’m happy if they critically examine those views and come out with better-grounded beliefs. But it’s the folks who arrive with problematic beliefs that I really need to trust me. It’s not just that I am paid to teach all of my students. It’s that I most want to reach the students who most disagree
with me. I want to hear their stories and their reasons, and I want them to hear mine.
That’s the dilemma: In order to do my job as a philosophy teacher, I have to be as authentic as possible, to speak freely about my honest views. But being my truest self in the classroom undermines my ability to do my job well. Conversely, in order to reach all of my students and get them to be the kinds of open-minded critical thinkers that I want them to be, I have to mask my truest self by restricting my speech. It’s not a question of whether I have the right to cry in front of my class after election day, or whether I should have the right to teach the topics that I choose and to say what my beliefs are. It’s that I cannot effectively say, “I’m angry as hell that Trump was elected, but trust me, I’m here for all of you…” just as another instructor cannot effectively say: “I’m delighted that Trump was elected, but trust me…”
We have rights to express our political views and we might have a responsibility to do so. We also have a responsibility to recognize that exercising that right can naturally undermine our effectiveness as teachers. When my students see me marching for Planned Parenthood or the ACLU, they make judgments about whether I am trustworthy. They bring those judgments into the classroom. Some of them will fail to open their minds and I will then fail them as a teacher.
We must find ways to maximize our authenticity while fostering the kind of trust and openness that leads to real learning. This is not an easy task. We have to get to know our students and communicate that we care about them. We have to trust them to make up their minds about controversial issues. What we can’t do with any expectation of success is expect that our challenges as philosophy teachers are easily answered by appeal to something as crude and heavy-handed as a right to free speech.
We hope you enjoy these excellent contributions to our Mini-Series blog. Please email: mzinkin@binghamton.edu, if you would like to submit a short paper to this blog on any topic related to academic freedom and the professional rights of philosophers.
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