In fact, the cancelled course was listed by the administration without consulting me at 8:10 am. No other elective course in political philosophy has ever been assigned this hour, and with good reason. It’s not good for enrollment. As for the required course with just one student, President Chodosh omitted the fact that it had been listed only at the end of this July, three months after registration had closed and before students were back on campus. Once students were actually in a position to sign up, enrollment was just fine. And discussion lively.
A fish rots from the head. In November of 2015, Mary Spellman, then Dean of Students at Claremont McKenna, was forced to resign over protests by minority students over her alleged lack of sensitivity for having emailed a Hispanic student that she would work hard to help those “who don’t fit the CMC mold”. Ms Spellman’s sincere and decent offer to help a struggling student was met with this response, “How dare you say we don’t fit the mold?” That was her crime. She resigned.
While this immediately affected the way Faculty dealt with the president, I failed to realise the effect this incident would have on students. I received a text this week from an intelligent, self-possessed and assertive woman, a CMC student here at the time of the Spellman fiasco. She feared I might now be next for the undercarriage and confessed, “I remember feeling quite scared to come out then as someone who even questioned what happened there.” Afraid to come out. Afraid. Even to question. I had no idea.
The situation of students today is bad. As many others have noted, they live in a world without much depth, dominated by digital communication and social media consumed on a flat screen that makes sustained reading difficult. They fear, and not without good cause, that any misstep will be engraved on the internet forever. They live under conditions of mob-rule. No one should blame them for being cautious.
Yet it is less the internet than the over-valuing of the genuine democratic virtues of kindness and sensitivity that poses the greater threat to education today. The lively exchange of view-points is discouraged in elementary and high schools as likely to injure someone’s feelings. The habit of arguing falls into disuse. Students are miserable at it, not for want of intelligence, but from lack of practice. This inability to argue makes them distrustful of reason. This distrust turns into a belief that reason gives no guidance at all on any important question. The principle of equality assures them that everyone else is in the same boat. Contentious issues can therefore be determined only by authority.
Upset by something spoken in a classroom? Don’t make an argument. Run to the dean to make it stop. Someone, not themselves, needs to make and enforce the rules. The dean listens. It is stopped. This confirms in their minds that this is the way to get results, but without them even noticing the full extent and deepening of their dependence and the growth in the dean’s power. This is a school for politics, not, however, of a healthy democratic kind.
Fear and timidity, especially by those with university positions, are also a large part of the problem. Conformity is in all times and places a special danger to intellectuals. What is the point of assigning Frederick Douglass when those with tenure lack the courage even to read in class what is on the page? The liberating power of books, particularly those written in times and places distant from our own, is destroyed when they are bowdlerised and filtered through the sieve of contemporary sensibilities.
Foot soldiers rarely get to choose the hill on which they are stationed. They must deal with the concrete circumstances in which they find themselves. Frederick Douglass defended free speech over the course of his long career as a freeman. He had no choice. He understood that the cause of liberty for millions of blacks required unfettered discussion and criticism of slave power, the US Constitution, and even his fellow abolitionists. “Liberty is meaningless where the right to utter one’s thoughts and opinions has ceased to exist. That, of all rights, is the dread of tyrants.” He risked his life and liberty to write his Narrative. I stand for the original genius of his book, exactly as he published it. Frederick Douglass deserves that, and much, much more.
Huck Finn wavered between winning praise as an informant or suffering social opprobrium and eternal damnation for helping to liberate a fellow man from slavery. Lacking the benefit of Claremont McKenna College training, he chose to tear up his letter to Miss Watson informing her of Jim’s whereabouts. “All right, then,” he concluded, “I’ll go to hell.” No wonder the reading and discussion of Mark Twain’s book is discouraged by authorities.
I owe a debt to Frederick Douglass and to Mark Twain for taking the trouble to educate me, or, at least, for having tried. So I lodged a formal grievance against the dean and went public. The grievance has yet to run its course. I can, however, report that two weeks after filing it, when it also became apparent to the administration that my, and other similar cases at Claremont McKenna, would be made public, the dean decided to allow me to teach Introduction to Political Philosophy this fall, a course I have offered 19 times in the past 15 years, and one that had originally been on my department’s master schedule.
To date, my success has been partial. The editor of a campus paper recently interviewed students from my courses. He found critics, but many more who profited from and appreciated my approach. Yet not one of the latter would go on the record. I’d like to think they are mistaken. But I’m not sure.
When I left Ukraine in 1994, I was pessimistic about the future of political liberty there. The people as a whole were so atomised and enervated by the Soviet system that it was hard to imagine them engaging in any collective action to defend their rights and liberties. But the young people I taught at Kyiv-Mohyla had not yet had their spirits crushed. Somehow, despite the horrific economic and political corruption of the Nineties, Ukraine avoided the descent into one-party, one-man rule. In the moment of greatest peril, my former students’ university became an important point of resistance to the puppet regime in 2014. Their generation went to the streets and overthrew a corrupt government during the Maidan Revolution. Their courage then and now leaves me shamefaced both for myself and my fellow academics who can no longer even stand up for reading historical texts as written.
I am much more pessimistic about the fate of liberal education in America than I ever was about political liberty in Ukraine. Many, perhaps most, professors and students oppose free speech and free inquiry as an obstacle to the creation of a more equitable world. Ukrainians know how that ends. Others favour free speech and free inquiry, but give increased devotion to conformity, too cowed and cowardly to secure their blessings. I hope I am as much mistaken about America as I was about Ukraine.
A classroom is not a public space, it does not have the same purposes and responsibilities as a political community. It therefore requires different rules to govern and preserve it, among the most important is civility. I am not a free speech absolutist. In the course that first got me in trouble, I tried to help a student see the power of Plato’s case for censorship. How then could I have come to utter the forbidden “n-word” in a class knowing full well the distress it might cause in some, or even most, of my students?
Civility in the classroom is not the end but a means that makes the discovery of truth more likely. Liberation from falsehoods and the discovery of truth is the most important purpose of any classroom, indeed, the highest end of liberal education — not comfort and safety. College is not a resort hotel. When the means obstruct the end, reason allows their modification.
If liberal education, that is, an education that makes us worthy of being free, is to have a future, it can only be secured by a movement from below, not by corrupt administrators who profit from and manipulate the current situation. As teachers, we need to take back our classrooms. We need to fight on whatever hill we find ourselves.
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