Last year I walked to class one day with a student. He told me that where he comes from professors are highly respected and that for him it was an honor to be walking to class with me. He also expressed surprise and curiosity about my being a professor at such a young age, since in his country the title of professor is usually attached to much older people. Finally, with no prompting from me, he began to explain to me why he is a proud Republican.
an honor to be walking
He told me that, as a devout Christian, he would like abortion to be completely outlawed. Furthermore, as an immigrant to this country, he would like all forms of governmental safety net to be abolished, forcing people to work harder and making things “more fair.” Finally he suggested that U.S. society can basically be understood as a conflict between white people and black people in which black people are responsible for most of the problems.
I was rendered nearly speechless by this analysis of American culture. At the same time, I had the distinct sensation that the young man was trying to be provocative—not in order to get a rise out of me but in order to test some ideas that were not fully his own. I suspected, in other words, that he was indirectly asking me, as his teacher, to prove him wrong. It was like an implicit challenge: Explain to me why this is not so.
explain to me why this is not so
It’s one thing to hear rich, white politicians make racist comments and espouse patriarchal, capitalist ideas. It’s another thing to speak with a dark-skinned African immigrant and find out that he holds the same views. But more than this, what caught me by surprise was the confusion I felt about my role as teacher in this liminal moment. Class had not yet begun, so I was not yet teaching. But I was still the teacher, and the student’s earlier comments made me even more aware of this. I felt the pressure of responsibility in two directions: to intervene clearly and directly in the content of what he had said; but also to do so in a pedagogical way, by questioning his premises rather than simply telling him he was wrong.
What sticks with me from that moment is the intersection of ethics and politics. As a teacher, I think of my responsibility to students as primarily ethical. It is based on personal, embodied relationships and to a certain extent it is independent of (protected from) contemporary political debate. Of course I know that politics are always at work in the classroom. Ethics is simply politics on a smaller scale, and I think about the politics of my teaching all the time. But for the most part, this politics remains implicit.
to intervene clearly and directly
That day in class, I had students working on short plays by William Butler Yeats and John Millington Synge. Both one-acts take place in single-room dwellings hemmed in by a natural environment that is as awesome as it is deadly. In Yeats, this is the forest of pre-Christian magic with its deadly temptations. In Synge, it is the violent sea where young men go to drown, generation after generation. My questions for the students were: How will you make this sense of the natural enviroment appear in our classroom? How will you invoke the terror and beauty of nature pressing in upon us? And what does this power mean to you?
As an adjunct, I sometimes experience my classroom this way: as a small, isolated space hemmed in by larger forces on every side. Perhaps if I felt more integrated within a larger teaching context—department, school, or university—I might find a different balance between ethics and politics. As it stands, the appearance of raw political debate at the edge of my classroom feels more like the wind knocking at the door, rattling the windows and sending a shiver through this small ethical terrain.
this small ethical terrain
1. Inhabitants of Academia (where I myself have dwelled) sometimes take it for granted that no sane person would think that abolishing the social safety net might affect work habits or that abortion should be illegal or restricted. But there is in fact a wide world outside Academia brimming with varied and colorful political opinion of all kinds. And not everyone out there is a fool. Let’s work against the crappy *arguments* on both sides, but let’s listen to each other.
2. Why presume that the student’s ideas were, contrary to his own assertions, not really what he thought? What supports such a presumption? And anyway, even in the unlikely event that the student was in fact “test[ing] some ideas that were not fully his own,” is that so strange? Testing ideas that are not fully one’s own often goes along with fairly harmless things like “scholarship,” “learning,” and “dialogue.”
3. The author writes:
“It’s one thing to hear rich, white politicians make racist comments and espouse patriarchal, capitalist ideas. It’s another thing to speak with a dark-skinned African immigrant and find out that he holds the same views.”
Yes, and it is yet another thing to read uncomfortably similar views in this very post. (a) Black people are not uniformly social liberals. (b) This is 2012, not 1712 — isn’t it a little late in the day to be surprised by hearing someone “espouse capitalist ideas” even if he is “dark-skinned”?
4. The author writes:
“I felt the pressure of responsibility in two directions: to intervene clearly and directly in the content of what he had said; but also to do so in a pedagogical way, by questioning his premises rather than simply telling him he was wrong.”
Sometimes it is appropriate to “intervene” to correct a blatant misconception, like if someone said, “Yes, but Obama is a Muslim” or “It’s just not true that Jefferson owned slaves; he was an abolitionist.” But when discussing completely debatable political propositions with students let’s try to remember to question *our own* premises too, before we get around to “tell[ing] him he was wrong”.
5. The post treats as self-evident the very unorthodox and crushingly depressing idea that “ethics is simply politics on a smaller scale.” Is there really no daylight between our political views and our sense of what is right and wrong? On the contrary, I think very few people would say that voting for Clinton was unethical or morally wrong and voting for Obama was ethical or morally right, or vice versa, etc. That’s because political questions usually do not admit to moral/ethical analysis.
6. Finally, I’ll end where the post ends. The idea of the literature classroom as a refuge is actually, I would argue, a defensible one, perhaps even one we should be working harder to realize. But it comes with an important qualification that I think is ignored in this post. For the classroom-as-refuge idea to have merit, I as the teacher must be honestly committed to treating Yeats or whoever else *apolitically*. If this is the case, then I can feel justified in wanting to have my classroom be a refuge. If, on the other hand, I am admittedly dedicated to mixing politics and literary study – even though I choose to do so “implicitly” (that is, un-forthrightly), – then I am seeking to mute or muffle not the cacophony of politics per se, but just *other people’s* politics. And that does seem ethically problematic.
Hi Ryan,
Thanks for your comments. I won’t say much about your first four points because I don’t feel a great distance between them and what I’ve written. You are misreading the post if you think I’m being naive about the diversity of political opinion in this country, the complexity of racial identity, or the difficulty in knowing what is right or wrong. All of that is exactly what the post is about.
Underneath all this is the question of ethics and politics. What’s hard for me about blogging is that I tend to want to consider big, complicated questions, and there isn’t really enough space to do it thoroughly. A lot of what you are disagreeing with has to do with the definition of ethics and politics. I didn’t offer any explicit definitions in this post, but tried to illustrate what I mean by these terms through a single concrete example. The one place I clearly disagree with you is on the idea that teaching can be apolitical. I don’t think of politics as a category in which some actions belong and others do not. I think of it as a type of analysis having to do with the distribution of power on a large social scale. So it’s not that a given approach to Yeats could be either political or apolitical. It’s a question of whether and when we choose to analyze it that way.
I agree that it’s often unhelpful to analyze personal interactions politically, just as it can be useless to talk about voting for a particular candidate in terms of ethics. What the post is *really* about, it seems to me, is the fact that ethics and politics come together in a unique way in the institution of the university, precisely because this institution works across a wide range of scales, from teacher-student interactions to the administration of departments and schools. Hence my comment about being an adjunct.
This post was a working through of questions, not a proposal of answers. What has come up for me from writing it is the realization that, as an adjunct professor, I really only have control over the “small ethical terrain” of the classroom. The classroom is a political space, always, but its politics are determined by many forces of which I am just a small part.
I had held back these comments with the idea of letting the original poster have the last word. I don’t know if that’s part of the blogosphere’s chivalric code or not, but it seemed fair. But I disagree Ben’s characterization of our exchange in his more recent post and I think his response to my comment here does not address most the points I raised. In what is below I take Ben’s words as starting points for discussion:
BEN: “I won’t say much about your first four points because I don’t feel a great distance between them and what I’ve written. You are misreading the post if you think I’m being naive about the diversity of political opinion in this country, the complexity of racial identity, or the difficulty in knowing what is right or wrong.”
- I don’t necessarily think that Ben is “naïve about the complexity of racial identity.” I just think that he might want to explain more fully why he expects certain political opinions from white people and certain political opinions from black people.
- If he is not being “naïve about the diversity of political opinion in this country” then why does he assume that the opinions expressed by his student were unambiguously “wrong”? He also apparently assumed that all his readers on cac.ophony would reflexively agree with him. Why?
- I don’t know whether or not Ben is “naïve about knowing what is right or wrong.” I think that his claim that the difference between politics and ethics is one merely of scale is controversial and should be argued, not asserted.
BEN: “What’s hard for me about blogging is that I tend to want to consider big, complicated questions, and there isn’t really enough space to do it thoroughly.”
- Ben’s post had about 675 words. There is a post on cac.ophony that has 1,900 words. So I don’t see where space is really an issue.
BEN: “A lot of what you are disagreeing with has to do with the definition of ethics and politics. I didn’t offer any explicit definitions in this post . . .”
- The first part is true. But as the second . . .
Ben: “Ethics is simply politics on a smaller scale.”
Ben: “I think of it [politics] as a type of analysis having to do with the distribution of power on a large social scale.”
Ergo: “Ethics is simply a” “type of analysis having to do with the distribution of power on a large social scale” “on a smaller scale”.
I have no idea what that means, but it is the definition that was offered.
BEN: “So it’s not that a given approach to Yeats could be either political or apolitical.”
- But I would insist that some things are not “a type of analysis having to do with the distribution of power on a large social scale” – i.e. not everything is politics. If that’s the case, then it is incorrect to assert that we have no choice of whether to approach Yeats politically or apolitically. We do have that choice. We can approach Yeats asking questions about “distribution of power on a large social scale” or we can decline to do that. The choice is real. Literature is not politics’ slave.
BEN: “Underneath all this is the question of ethics and politics.”
- Here, I agree. But I have a question. Let’s say for a moment that we’re all trapped inside politics in our classrooms, like it or not, and that the hope that we might approach a poem apolitically is a fantasy – granting all that, why is it acceptable to keep political commitments implicit and covert, instead of explicit and open? Isn’t that less than honest to students?
Ryan,
I don’t have a great deal of experience with blogging, but I’m not at all attached to having the last word here, so please feel free to comment as you please. After all, I had the first word!
To clarify: I certainly don’t expect race and political opinion to correlate in any simple way. Furthermore, as I think was clear in my original post, I don’t have any reason to suspect that this particular student sees himself as a “black person” at all. This was part of the point of my discussion and the reason why I used the phrase “dark-skinned African immigrant.” In the United States, most people will easily “read” him as black based on his appearance. (This is what you did, based on my description.) What was interesting to me was that being readable as a black person didn’t make this person feel aligned with or sympathetic to the concerns of black people as a cultural and historical community. Instead, he took a racist perspective and apparently dis-identified with the category.
In comparing him to rich, white politicians, I was really making a point about my own reaction and how I understand what forms peoples’ political views. Obviously the reasons why different people arrive to hold racist views vary greatly and this is also what I was getting at in my post.
I agree that my definition of ethics and politics was too short and perhaps unclear. I won’t try to fix that now, but I highly recommend Saba Mahmood’s POLITICS OF PIETY for a great discussion of the relationship between ethics and politics.
What interests me more in our discussion is the question of politics and academia, and especially your question about making political commitments overt in the classroom. It’s not at all that I want to keep my politics “implicit and covert.” It’s much more a question—a real question, to be explored in both theory and practice, not just a rhetorical one—about how to articulate the intersections of politics and knowledge. When I talk about the politics of the classroom, I don’t mean identifying ourselves by whom we vote for or what kinds of laws we would like to see enacted. I’m talking about how the structures and movements of society influence and shape what we do in the interpersonal space of teaching and learning. I do find that, as a teacher, one of my responsibilities is to articulate my politicized responses in the language of the material we are working on in class. But perhaps this is what you mean by taking an “apolitical” approach.
For example: Fairly often, in my acting class, young men who do not present themselves as stereotypically gay will spontaneously perform gay or “effeminate” roles in front of the class. I often see this as a case of unfriendly parody and am slightly personally offended. But in my comments to them, I rarely critique them on the grounds that they are acting in a potentially hurtful way against a visibly oppressed identity group. Instead, I usually point out that their performance was not believable or sympathetic to the character—that it was obviously a parody—and I challenge them to do it “for real.” This has the effect of asking them to confront their distance and discomfort about different ways of performing gender, but without rendering the discussion explicitly political. In other words, I use the language of acting technique to articulate what for me is also a political point.
I don’t consider this deceptive or that I am in any way “hiding” my politics here. That’s because I think the language of acting technique and the language of politics are equally real and genuine in this moment. The fact that it’s so easy to make fun of supposed “gay-ness” is part of the current political situation. But the point about taking a character seriously and not turning them into a parody is applicable to many other situations as well. (Think of someone who makes a melodramatic parody of suffering instead of taking on the reality of pain.) Given that this is an acting class, I usually feel better responding in this way because acting—and not identity politics—is the shared language we are intentionally cultivating throughout the semester. I wouldn’t call this “apolitical,” since my own politics are at work; nor is it dishonest. It is a moment of negotiating politics through work on a specific craft.
I’m also very interested more broadly in the politics of academia. What does academia stand for? What does it actually mean to work on knowledge in a way that, as you said, “is not politics’ slave”? I’m going to be writing several more posts on this topic, focusing specifically on how the university can or should take a political stance without erasing those ways in which it differs from other institutions and organizations. The first one is here:
http://cac.ophony.org/2012/03/09/knowledge-politics-1-critical-university-studies/
Thanks again for this provocative exchange.
Ben