Identity, Democracy, and College Teaching
If we could only get politics out of education. It’s a comforting sentiment, heard often since the Progressive Era at the start of the 20th century. As educators, it allows us to believe that our work is virtuously outside the civic fray. Or as Hannah Arendt controversially argued at mid-century, it suggests our job is to prepare future citizens, who can articulate their “own ideas” before they engage in “full-fledged political battle[s]” about the possibilities of public institutions. At the time, Ralph Ellison strenuously disagreed. As political philosopher Danielle S. Allen notes in her important Talking to Strangers, Ellison believed that rituals affecting the social order — including education — “inevitably involve children in politics, however one might wish the case otherwise” (Allen, 2004, p. 25–27).
I’m with Allen and Ellison and others. Tax-funded education, at any level, makes schooling a political activity. As educators, we need to discard any lingering notion to the contrary. There’s no cloistering in labs or stacks. We must embrace and candidly attend to the civic implications of what those in public life have long understood: there is no such thing as a purely academic education.
From our nation’s founding, schooling has been used by those in power for explicitly political aims: to prepare an informed electorate that defends democracy; to acculturate immigrants into an American Way of Life; to persecute Indigenous people in government schools that ‘killed the Indian to save the man’; to bring veterans into the middle class and win a research-intensive geopolitical space race; to give women the same opportunities as men and make education more accessible for all; to unequally segregate or bring races together; to keep some down while lifting others up.
Wherever education is provided by the state, the state uses schools to shape minds and values. Under authoritarian regimes, most have no say in these purposes. In democratic societies, we’ve an obligation to raise our voices, both as citizens and educators. Democracy, with the civil liberties it requires, is our doctrine to indoctrinate. Even Dewey’s famous imperative, to teach students how to think but not what to think, is itself a deeply political idea about learning in an open society.
I write this in light of the Women’s, African American, Latino, LGBTQ, and similar programs that are currently the object of so much political ire. Do they cross Dewey’s helpful demarcation? Must they be supported by tax dollars? Is a democratically elected leader sufficiently authorized to start or stop them?
Some history is helpful. When higher education established these programs in the 1970s and 80s, their founders “could not describe themselves as attempting to use tax-supported resources… to pursue political goals.” So argued pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty, nearly a quarter century ago, in his effort to understand how, within academia, the concept of “cultural recognition” eclipsed an older vernacular about prejudice, stigma, and our common humanity (Rorty, 2000, p. 8 & 12).
Rorty maintained that writing about women’s history, celebrating Black achievements, “and the like… [was] the only thing we academics could do, in our specifically professional capacities, to eliminate prejudice.” Plus, there was much work to do. At the time, the humanities and social sciences had largely neglected many stories in need of telling, new questions to pursue, and novel interpretations to consider.
The justification for these programs had much to do with academic politics — and perhaps the particular politics of elite institutions where Rorty taught. In his estimation, “accommodation to the customs of academic life,” meant:
…you cannot persuade a university faculty to institute a new academic program by pointing out that such a program will help change the manners and morals of the citizenry for the better — that it will correct the opinions of the students and cause them to be less prejudiced than their parents. You need to describe the projected new program as pursuing some apolitical, purely academic, purpose. (Rorty, 2000, p. 12)
In other words: a fig leaf on a very slender reed. Admitting as much, Rorty described opponents’ criticism of the programs’ political implications as “accurate enough.”
But amidst our current polarization, higher education can ill afford any disciplinary dissembling for sake of custom. First, there are important philosophical reasons in defense of these programs given their benefits to democracy. Second, the programs’ intellectual contributions have generated practical considerations that every discipline should take to heart. I will address each in turn.
To begin, in engaging with feminist philosophers Catherine Mackinnon and Marilyn Frye, Rorty amplified the need for marginalized and persecuted groups to create “a language, a tradition, and an identity” that is outside of the “current linguistic and other practices” prepared for them by those in power. Doing so asks that we take seriously two ideas: “as yet unrealized possibilities… and moral abominations resulting from failure to envision those possibilities” and “the suggestion that we do not presently have the logical space necessary for adequate moral deliberation” (Rorty, 1990, p. 7 and 15).
Such suspension of belief may be challenging for the layperson and inconvenient for the elected official. If the current tradition serves you well enough, it is certainly more comforting to believe that “all important truths about right and wrong can not only be stated, but be made plausible, in language already to hand” (Rorty, 1990, p. 4). But as educators in a democracy, it is our professional duty to acknowledge that there are yet to be discovered unknown unknowns, to find and use in the fight against prejudice.
Second, Frye’s treatment of feminist separatism forced Rorty to consider:
…that what a human being is, for moral purposes, is largely a matter of how he or she describes himself or herself… and what you experience yourself to be is largely a function of what it makes sense to describe yourself as in the languages you are able to use… For if you want to work out a story about who you are — put together a moral identity — which decreases the importance of your relationship to one set of people and increases the importance of your relationship to another set, the physical absence of the first set of people may be just what you need… making things easier for [a person] to define themselves in terms not yet presently available… to try out new ways of speaking and to gather the moral strength to go out and change the world. (Rorty, 1990, p. 26, 30 & 32)
History is full of such separatists: Goethe and the controversial “Jena Set” (Wolf, 2022), who created German Romanticism in the 19th century; America’s colonists in the 18th, secretly reading Tom Paine and plotting a revolution; the first Christians, who worshiped in hiding to escape Roman persecution. In Hegelian terms: if no stage of separation, no subsequent assimilation, and no new synthesis. If “no carefully nurtured pride in membership in a group which might not have attained self-consciousness were it not for oppression, no expansion of the range of possible moral identities, and so no evolution of the species.”
We should consider Women’s, African American, Latino, LGBTQ, and similar programs in this light. They are intellectual places outside of the given semantic assumptions, endeavoring to establish new authority. They are also institutional spaces, outside of existing departments, gaining some freedom from existing beliefs about all there is to know. More simply, they are places that “continue doing what colleges and universities have, thank God, been doing more and more of in recent times: helping the societies which they serve become more generous and tolerant” (Rorty, 2000, p. 12).
Do such programs indoctrinate? Yes, to the extent that democracy and an open society are their politics. It is then that their work, by creating new ways to understand human flourishing, expands the space for moral progress. Given the history of ruthless suppression of marginalized groups, it is in a democracy’s interest to support spaces that serve its own rejuvenation.
Nor is any student coerced into being, for example, a Woman’s or LGBTQ Studies major. To those who do pick these or another identity program (and despite risk of stigmatization), we owe a debt of gratitude. They are finding the new language that takes democracy forward, those “imaginative and courageous outcasts” (Rorty, 1990, p. 32) helping others become full-fledged members of society. And if they are impatient with those of us who are slow to adopt this new language, perhaps some grace is in order: they are fighting for people’s lives, metaphorically and, at times, literally.
Should such programs be funded by the state? As a citizen, my answer hinges on what kind of country I want. Democracies can be kind or mean. They can serve the few or work for the many, through actions that progressively exclude fewer and fewer people from the public good that is our polity. To the extent that such academic programs serve to make our country more fair and just by reconceiving our moral universe, I welcome tax dollars put to the purpose. The expense is a relatively small and by no means complete safeguard against the tyranny of an intellectual or electoral majority.
Such philosophical arguments may give sympathetic educators more reason to appreciate these programs. But ideas struggle to compete with realpolitik. Turning next to practical considerations in our current context, what are we obliged to do, as educators, to make society more kind and just? Particularly when political authority is democratically decided every two or four years. Are the speech acts and legislation made by elected leaders, by definition, democratic? Requiring, when we disagree, that we wait for the next election to organize a winning coalition for change?
That is certainly our civic right. But in the meantime and as educators, what political influence can I assert, given the inherently political nature of our work? As it affects those students who are not yet full citizens, by law or custom, as well as students who currently enjoy and will go on to reproduce the kind of democracy they prefer? Particularly when neither group has the luxury to put their academics on hold, waiting for electoral politics to deliver an education that helps them, and our democracy, along?
Our profession vests us with intellectual authority that can keep us from being mere agents of an administration. Exercising it requires that we better imagine our work as a kind of societal fifth estate,* to lead with independence on questions of knowledge and values. Scientists have long established such authority on matters physical; social scientists and humanists have work to do on matters moral. Admittedly, too few of us enjoy the academic freedom to take such risks. The most recent federal data show that over 650,000 faculty members — 44% of the professoriate — are part-time workers, many without due process rights that protect scholarship and speech (NCES, 2023).
But fortunately, and finally, scholarship about previously neglected areas of human understanding is not “the only” thing we can do, as Rorty believed, to change the manners and morals of the citizenry for the better. We can — and must — improve our teaching, regardless of our subject.
Rorty’s focus on our scholarly duties neglects our extraordinary influence, moment to moment, through our instruction. I am not surprised by his oversight. He was a creature of his time and place. The quality of college teaching is only starting to get its proper due. But we dare overlook it no longer. Graduates are twice as likely to be leading fulfilling lives in in rewarding work, when a professor teaches well (Gallup, 2014). As philosopher Harry Brighouse remarked in a recent talk at Stanford University — home of teaching guru and Nobel laureate Carl Wieman — “instructional quality is the most important and most neglected equity issue on campus” (Brighouse, 2023).
The fundamentals of effective teaching — these small yet powerful pedagogies that deepen learning — create the conditions necessary for respectful deliberation. These approaches honor a student’s lived experience as a source of knowledge and relevance for new learning. They are mindful of what constitutes fact while engaging with values and opinions. They invite doubt and dissent. They ensure that each and every student is engaged and help them persist in their studies. They help us respect who students are in the language students choose to describe themselves. It is a craft that recognizes them as individuals who also share a common humanity.
Our knowledge of what constitutes effective teaching has deepened in recent decades. It’s been informed by discoveries in the learning sciences and through the yeoman fieldwork of teaching centers and discipline-based researchers. I think we must also pay a debt of gratitude to identity studies programs, for helping us cast off old abominations like “look to your left, look to your right, one of you won’t be here next year” — to find new language and pedagogies that better serve all of our students.
Effective teaching does not require that we teach about diversity and, if we are being honest, there are academic and professional programs in which doing so would simply be out of place. But there is a difference between teaching about something and teaching in ways inspired by something. Such instruction does expect that we are mindful of the cultural, intellectual, and experiential differences of our students, to better calibrate our instruction for deeper learning. Doing so also allows us to model with our students the anti-authoritarian modes of engagement that democracy requires in our day-to-day interactions with neighbors.
Evidence-based teaching is fully within our specific professional capacities and responsibilities yet remains woefully absent from too many classes. We were trained as scholars and not also as instructors. This must change, and it is in our control to do so, without delay, in every field. Effective instruction, in every class, would ensure that our profession’s civic and social contributions are not limited to a small number of politically targeted majors. Great teaching gives us all an opportunity to fight prejudice, in ways that can be removed from our work as easily as air from the sky.
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Jonathan Gyurko, PhD, is President and Co-Founder of the Association of College and University Educators (ACUE). His forthcoming book, Publicization: Restoring the Common Purpose of America’s Schools, will be published by Columbia University, Teachers College Press.
References:
*Or ‘sixth estate,’ given that social media has been dubbed the fifth, despite the fact that the first four “estates of the realm” were assigned to groups of people, not virtual platforms.
Danielle S. Allen, Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship since Brown v. Board of Education, The University of Chicago Press (2004).
Harry Brighouse, “Instructional Quality is the Most Important and Most Neglected Issue On Campus,” https://digitaleducation.stanford.edu/events/instructional-quality-most-important-and-most-neglected-equity-issue-campus-harry-brighouse (2023), accessed 3/21/2023.
Gallup, “Great jobs, great lives. The 2014 Gallup-Purdue Index report. A study of more than 30,000 college graduates across the U.S.” (2014), file:///C:/Users/jonat/Downloads/The_2014_Gallup-Purdue_Index_Report.pdf accessed 3/23/2023.
Richard Rorty, “Is ‘Cultural Recognition’ a Useful Concept for Leftist Politics?,” Critical Horizons, 1:1 (2000).
Richard Rorty, “Feminism and Pragmatism,” from The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, University of Michigan, December 7 (1990).
National Center for Education Statistics, https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/csc/postsecondary-faculty, accessed 3/21/2023.
Andrea Wolf, Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self, Knopf, New York, 2022.
