// features //
Spring 2016
Politics, Activism, & the Modern College Campus:
An Interview with Professor Michele Moody-Adams
Ethan Herenstein
The modern campus is combustible and confusing. Buzzwords that are as ubiquitous as they are misunderstood—safe space, social justice, free speech—get tossed around by pundits trying to explain campus politics to an increasingly impatient audience. Students are frustrated; administrators are flustered. Controversy after controversy, headline after headline, people are left wondering: what is going on?
If anybody is equipped to tackle this elusive question, it is Professor Michele Moody-Adams. Professor Moody-Adams has written extensively on academic freedom and is a widely regarded voice on the topic. She is currently Joseph Straus Professor of Political Philosophy and Legal Theory at Columbia University, where she served as Dean of Columbia College and Vice President for Undergraduate Education from 2009-2011. The Current interviewed Professor Moody-Adams to explore her perspective on the fraught atmosphere percolating in universities today, and to help us get a handle on the modern campus and its goings on. This interview has been edited and condensed.
CURRENT: Walk me through the history of college protests. What has changed—tactically, ideologically, demographically—since the 1960s protests, and why do you think that is? What were students fighting for then, and what are they fighting for now, assuming it even makes sense to speak of ‘activists’ as a cohesive group?
PROFESSOR MOODY-ADAMS: Even in the 1960s, activism was never fully cohesive, and this is true even on a campus like Columbia’s, people’s memories sometimes create more cohesion than there was. There was certainly a lot of anti-war activism—that was one of the dominant forces at Columbia, and it did bring a lot of different voices together. At the same time, there was a lot of activism about social and economic inequality that sometimes got overshadowed by the anti-war activism. In fact, the occupation of the Dean’s Office was begun by students who were protesting racial inequality, particularly racial and class inequality that seemed to be shaping the construction of a proposed gymnasium in Morningside Park.
As challenging as a lot of people felt the student activism of the 1960s was, we have a lot to thank those activists for. Even though it was often a rough time during the midst of the activism, and I don't personally support the takeover of buildings or the use or threat of violence on campus, the protesters helped to open the contemporary college campus to a lot of new voices—gender-wise, ethnicity-wise, class-wise—that didn’t really have a place or any influence on a lot of college campuses in the ‘60s. So, for that I thank them, and I think all of us should be thankful.
One challenge, though, is that they didn’t necessarily create a legacy of discussion, contest, and conflict that allowed people to understand how to carry out their conflict and still remain respectful of the people with whom they disagree. They may have said that those things didn’t matter then: let’s just open things up, let’s get our grievances aired, let’s show our political commitments, and let’s challenge the system.
So, we’re living with both the good and the bad legacies of those years. Most of it, I think, is good, but the bad legacy is that now when people engage in conflict, we don’t know how to preserve two things that make a really robust debate possible. One of them is genuine respect for the people we disagree with, and the other is genuine trust. As I said, the student activists of the 1960s did their part: they opened the campus up, they protested genuine injustice, and I think they exposed the difficulties of a war that ended up being generally unpopular anyway.
We need a new kind activism that keeps the contestation there but shows how to balance it better with more civility.
CURRENT: How is or should freedom of speech be different on campus than, say, in broader society?
MMA: Freedom of speech issues do take on a different character on a college or university campus. In part, this is because they are communities where, unlike communities outside the university, it isn’t so easy to get away from the people who are expressing the attitude with which you disagree. If somebody wants to protest in your neighborhood, they move in and they move out and they go home. But if you’re protesting as a fellow student on a shared space that everybody passes through every day, this can create a sense that the community is turning in on itself. That’s what limits students’ abilities to get beyond some of the conflicts they have—they don’t have as many opportunities to put the conflict on the backburner for a while.
It’s difficult sometimes to get away, to get a little perspective, to get a little distance. Every challenge that comes up on a campus—it’s on the newspaper, it’s on Bwog, it’s on a radio station, your friends are talking about it when you’re eating, you hear it in the classroom—it’s such a small community, there’s never a chance to get away from it.
CURRENT: You’ve written in defense of academic freedom, of the right of academics to explore and defend all sorts of radical ideas. How important is it that professors feel free to pursue radical or even distasteful ideas? Do you, as an academic, feel that academic freedom has come under assault?
MMA: Academic freedom certainly has come under pressure. But I don’t know that it has ever not been under pressure, because if people are exercising academic freedom robustly, they’re going to say something that upsets or challenges or offends someone. It doesn’t matter which community you are addressing; and it may not even be the content of your argument, but the tone that offends. But this is the risk you take when you take on the responsibility of being an academic.
The thing I always like to stress is that although academics have the right to offend, they must do so responsibly, and they must to be able to defend the origin of the academic freedom of the right to offend and show that they exercise it in a way that’s as responsible as possible. Sometimes this means, if there is something on your syllabus that troubles a student, showing why that allegedly troubling thing involves a reasonable choice to appear on an academic syllabus; or why talking about a topic in a certain way is a reasonable choice for an academic to make.
Showing that your choices reflect certain intellectual virtues of sincere, respectful pursuit of debate and disagreement is also important. To me, the challenge is that some people use their academic freedom in ways that seem to be divorced from these virtues. And they are going to get in trouble, because people wonder, if they are going to be offended by you, why don’t they also have to see that you’re serious and sincere in your exercise of your right to offend.
There are times when even an academic with academic freedom needs to practice a little bit of self-censorship. For example, you might want to discuss a controversial topic one way with undergraduate students, and in a different way with graduate students. Or you might decide that your students need more preparation than you could provide at the beginning of a semester if you are bringing up something that will churn up a lot of bad feelings. I’ve discovered that I can talk about a lot of very challenging topics with a group if I work hard to have them trust not just me but each other. And it takes time for them to realize that they can disagree without it turning personal, and that they can bring in alternative views in ways to try and at least bring some balance in.
Lastly, a classroom is not the same thing as the public forum. If academic freedom has any substance, students can’t have the exact same level of freedom to say whatever they want in a classroom as professors do. Even Supreme Court Justices have said: when you pay for a college education, you’re actually consenting to sometimes experiencing or hearing things that you don’t agree with, and to not having the equal right to speak back to it in the classroom. A student can rightfully speak more freely outside in the hall and out on the quad and on the steps of Low Library—there are academic spaces and there are non-academic spaces. But if academic freedom has any substance, the students’ freedom to learn doesn’t give them the freedom to control the content of the course to the same degree that the faculty member has.
CURRENT: Is there a specific way in which professors gain that skill of navigating these sensitive conversations? Is that the sort of skill that PhD programs should instill in their graduate students?
MMA: It is a difficult topic, because we are trained as professors to do lots of things, but we aren’t always trained in these larger questions about what it is to use our academic freedom responsibly, and what it is to articulate the values that ought to be appealing to the world outside the academy. Why should the public put their trust in us? Maybe we do need to spend more time talking about professional responsibilities of professors, as teachers, and as researchers. I wouldn’t mind it if we required people in every graduate program to have a bit of training, where they had to think about what values are at stake in academic freedom.
If somebody from outside the academy comes to me and says, “Why should you have the right to say these things when nobody else can do that with this kind of impunity?” We need to be able to articulate an answer. Why does academic freedom even matter? Why is it important that you protect the university?
I remember having students (at another university) who didn’t want to read Martin Luther King’s, “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” One of these students said, “I know there’s a holiday, but I was taught that King was a communist, and I don’t have to listen to him. Why is this on my syllabus?” You want to respect students, and not just say that they are wrong. So, what I might say is: “Here’s why my discipline thinks these ideas—linked to Socrates, linked to Tolstoy, linked to Augustine and Aquinas—are worth your thinking about. Here’s why you’re reading this.” And then I would certainly add: “King wasn’t really the bad person you think he was,” but that’s not where you start.
In addition, I try to avoid assigning a paper where the student has to write on a topic that they were deeply troubled by. So I say: read the assigned works; if you don’t want to write on it—I’ll give you other options. But I think it’s my duty, as part of exposing you to all the issues, to have you read it.
CURRENT: Some professors and, more broadly, some departments, have come under fire for bringing politics into the classroom. In some departments—like Philosophy—it doesn’t seem to be that big of a deal if a Metaphysics professor spends the semester passionately arguing for one ontological principle over another. But the problem does seem more acute, say, in the Political Science Department, where professors might espouse particular views on a controversial political debate. What sort of balance should professors strike between, on the one hand, presenting ideas in a neutral, even-handed way, and advocating for their own positions, on the other?
MMA: I will be quite frank with you: my wisdom on this sometimes runs out. The challenge is that sometimes what we value in scholars is that they take a difficult, controversial position on an important topic. Then if somebody is in a political science department, for instance, and they offer you their expertise, and that expertise involves a particular disputed perspective on a very controversial subject, it’s almost going to be impossible for them to say anything from their standpoint that won’t be offensive to some of their students.
I don’t know how to meet that challenge. I admire the academics in the relevant disciplinary areas who find a way both to continue to do the work they are best at, and yet, as they present it, not seem to be silencing those who disagree. I don’t know how they do it. I don’t think I could do it.
But maybe I’ve gotten close. I have taught courses like “Contemporary Moral Problems,” for instance, where I have students read something like Peter Singer’s writing on non-voluntary euthanasia. Then I have had to figure out: how do I present these views?
I should also stress, though, that whenever I walk into a classroom, for some students my very presence there is like a political argument. If a student comes from a community where he or she has been brought up to believe that black people couldn’t possibly be smart enough to deserve a PhD—a black professor walks in, and these students are stunned. Still to this day, I know that the first five or ten minutes when I speak in some classes, there’s a whole range of students for whom it’s like an argument about political equality just for me to be there.
It is also worth remembering that sometimes your expertise is in itself troubling to some students, and when it is it’s not an easy thing to find a balance. So, imagine the fundamentalist Christian who goes into an evolutionary biology class. That student has to ask: “If I’m going into a class where the expertise is bound to upset me, what is it that I can expect in the way of an educational experience from this? What do I need to be ready to tolerate? Can I respectfully disagree with the expertise, without undermining everything about this experience I say I want?” Similarly, if a student goes into a political science class taught by somebody whose expertise they know is going to offend them, my question is: “What did you expect?”
Some colleges offer classes taught by psychology professors whose research claims to prove the intellectual inferiority of particular racial groups. And frankly, this is not a class that I would have tried to take as a student. So, I wonder if students should sometimes ask themselves whether there just aren’t some disciplines where exposure to the expertise of their professors isn’t almost intrinsically going to feel like advocacy. Students have to ask themselves: “Am I ready for this challenge? Is this the instructor that I believe is most responsibly able to use that freedom that will challenge me as nothing else will?”
CURRENT: Given the conception of a university as a space in which to explore ideas, some pundits have pointed to the irony, or perhaps hypocrisy, of my generation's insistence on safe spaces and trigger warnings, on ‘insulation’ from scary ideas. Do you think these accusations hold any weight? Are college students more sensitive than ever before?
MMA: I used to think that students had become more sensitive. But I’ve come to believe that it’s something else. Now I believe that students are giving expression to a cultural development that has encouraged people to think that their identity, and the things that matter most about them, has to be defined in terms of the grievances they have and the suffering they undergo. I am never going to tell you that suffering doesn’t matter, that it isn’t real, that it doesn’t have moral, and even intellectual, weight. I am never going to say that people don’t have real grievances, or that they don’t need to have their suffering and grieving respected. But as a culture—and I think students are only reflecting what the culture has encouraged all of us to do—we’ve stopped understanding that a whole human identity is not just about the grievances we have and the suffering to which we have been subjected over a lifetime.
I’m not saying: toughen up, get resilient. I think resilience and grit are important, but I think as a culture we need to ask: what are we saying about human identity when every time we have a disagreement with someone the first thing we feel we need to say is: “protect me from anything in that disagreement that might actually cause me distress”? No one denies distress is real, but robust disagreement that might actually help you transform a conflict into something constructive sometimes means you’re probably going to be upset by something. It’s not that the students are more sensitive; they’re just reflecting our cultural acceptance of the idea that we can just take a portion of our identities as human beings—that part connected to suffering and hurt—and assume that that’s all we are.
I also worry about students who, in a classroom setting, demand that they don’t ever have to confront something that they find upsetting. There are stories—maybe they’re apocryphal, maybe they’re overplayed—of law students in a law clinic about women’s issues saying to the teacher: “Don’t make me read those reports about women having experienced sexual assault because it churns up terrible feelings in me and that’s too much for me to bear.” Nobody denies that it’s a lot to bear. But my question is: can you be a responsible advocate for women’s issues as a lawyer when you leave law school if you’ve never been forced to confront that suffering yourself?
I’ll get on a soapbox and say this anywhere: a lot of people who see themselves as progressive have so narrowed the range of experience they know how to understand that I don’t know how they are going to be activists of any kind. They are going to be activists for their own personal distress, perhaps. But what about the homeless man sleeping outside the gates of the campus on 116th & Broadway? Yes, as a Columbia student, your suffering matters, but the “safe space” you are demanding from your professors may be keeping you from recognizing suffering that isn’t yours, that you need to understand.
CURRENT: Activists have created a "with us or against us" atmosphere on campuses, not entirely unlike George Bush’s 2001 proclamation “you’re either with us or against us,” and it seems as if there is no such thing as an innocent bystander. Do you think this is best way for activists to solicit help from potential allies?
MMA: This is not a new question. In the 1960s the phrase was: if you’re not part of the solution, then you’re part of the problem. And of course, the “with us or against us” stance is not unintelligible. One thing it sometimes does is produce guilt, and guilt sometimes has political consequences that are good. But sometimes guilt has a very dangerous half-life. People get fatigued if you’re always making them feel guilty and if you never stop to ask, what constructive appeal might get them to join in the cause. You need to ask: what are the broader, shared interests that might go beyond your hardship. Guilt has a place, maybe even shame sometimes, but guilt and shame have limits as morally motivating forces. If you want to connect people with each other, you need to look for commonality, for shared experience. “You’re with us or against us” is not really a way of getting people to share.
Are there innocent bystanders? I will leave that as an open question. But even if there aren’t, if you want to get people to join a cause and to be motivated in a constructive way to help, making them feel guilty or ashamed has profound limits. It’s not a very constructive way by which to build a coalition.
CURRENT: There has been a lot of noise at Columbia recently about how identity politics should inform the creation of The Core, and the experience of students inside the classroom. Columbia recently announced the addition of Toni Morrison to the LitHum curriculum, garnering praise from those who felt that people of color are underrepresented in Columbia’s conception of the Western Canon, while also receiving some criticism from those who felt that identity politics ought not play a role in formulating curricula, that it’s the quality of the book, not the identity of the author, that matters. Is one side more right than the other? Do you have any thoughts as to how universities should navigate this issue?
MMA: Let me first give you one example about the philosophy canon because we need to be cautious about saying the main and only reason that any canon looks the way it looks is that everything in it is simply the best of the best. Challenging this claim doesn’t mean it isn’t good. But a canon—whether in philosophy or literature or any other subject—is formed by the victors. So, in philosophy, Descartes, Locke, and so on—that selection of texts is certainly justifiable. But are there works that were left out for all kinds of reasons that have nothing to do with its quality? I would venture to say yes.
It’s tempting to say the canon is fixed for all time. But Plato’s Apology, Euthyphro, and Crito were once a part of LitHum; they are not anymore. Why would you cut these works out? Well, you had to make room for something else. So, is the decision purely this is better than that? Or is it, here’s what the interests of those shaping the canon right now lead them to choose?
Toni Morrison is a great writer. Her presence in LitHum is a wonderful thing. The addition of that text may mean that something else has to go, but that happens all the time. I wish people didn’t have to turn it into fight just about “representation”; it ought to be framed as a fight about the inclusion and exclusion of texts that are good but whose goodness was never recognized.
Here’s the problem with turning it into a debate about “representation”: some people want to represent a particular ethnic identity as one thing, and others as another thing. There’s so much internal disagreement about what any particular ethnic identity is, that I think we should be wary of too great a reliance on that idea of “representation” in the canon. The identity of any group is a lot more complicated than a lot of people want to accept.
So let’s try and include great texts that have, for various reasons, been excluded, overlooked, left out. And let’s be ready to make an argument about why they belong that isn’t just: this person thinks they represent this identity. You don’t need to have a fight about what blackness is before you decide to put Toni Morrison in the Core Curriculum. Look, Morrison won a Nobel Prize! What’s the delay?
CURRENT: Let’s talk about intersectionality. Can students find common ground with activists on certain causes but not others.
MMA: If we don’t have room in the 21st century for the idea that a person’s political commitments can be complicated, I don’t know what we have room for. Here’s one danger with not accepting this: we start to assume that once you know someone is committed to X, now you know everything about that person. But I don’t want to live in a world like that. I want to live in a world where I can be surprised, because people really are complicated and surprising.
It’s tempting to use labels—liberal, conservative, progressive—but they don’t tell us anything about a person. Given how complicated human beings are and how complex political issues are, we cannot say that there should be one set of commitments that every progressive thinker shares. We shouldn’t want that. This is the influence of John Stuart Mill on my thinking. Why can’t we imagine that somebody we disagree with on one issue might be able to enlighten us about something important that we didn’t know we needed to know?
CURRENT: On Facebook, last semester, a student of color requested to switch from her Contemporary Civilization section into one taught by a professor of color. This led to a heated conversation about the role that race, ethnicity, religion, etc., should play in constructing the classroom experience. In your mind, is a professor of color better suited to teach CC to a student of color than his or her white counterpart? Or, conversely, is a student of color better equipped to learn from a professor of color than his or her white counterpart?
MMA: Of course, sometimes commonality—or presumed commonality—of experience and perspective can give students a feeling of connection to their instructor, and to the material, that they might not otherwise have. But I’m not entirely sure that that’s something that only comes from shared ethnicity.
I became a professor because I wanted to teach. Period. I didn’t want to teach just students of kind X or students of kind Y. There are academic institutions that have classrooms composed of only one kind of student. There are historically black colleges and universities and there are women’s colleges; and in fact I proudly went to a women’s college. I went because I did want a certain aspect of that commonality of experience. But my concern is: if you decide not to attend a women's college or a historically black institution, or any institution where people might unite around a certain kind of identity or shared experience, should you go in expecting that you should sort out solely on the basis of your identity? Every student who’s here could have gone to Spelman or Morehouse, or Wellesley or Wabash. But they came here.
I want to inspire every student who walks into my class. I want to be open to learning from every student. If I wanted a different experience, I would have chosen a different kind of institution.
CURRENT: With all this in mind, what advice would you give to graduating students, many of whom will be leaving the confines of the university community and entering the ‘real world’?
MMA: This is the hardest question you’ve asked yet! My answer is: be ready to be surprised by people. Be ready to surprise yourself. Be open. Wonder is the spirit that leads people to want to learn and investigate: so be open to wonder. And be willing to have hope even it when looks like there’s no reason for it. People like Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, Viktor Frankl—these are people who managed to survive because they held out hope even when it looked like human action had destroyed every ground for hope. We have a duty to hold onto hope. If you don’t have hope right now—what with everything going on in the news—how will you keep going?
If anybody is equipped to tackle this elusive question, it is Professor Michele Moody-Adams. Professor Moody-Adams has written extensively on academic freedom and is a widely regarded voice on the topic. She is currently Joseph Straus Professor of Political Philosophy and Legal Theory at Columbia University, where she served as Dean of Columbia College and Vice President for Undergraduate Education from 2009-2011. The Current interviewed Professor Moody-Adams to explore her perspective on the fraught atmosphere percolating in universities today, and to help us get a handle on the modern campus and its goings on. This interview has been edited and condensed.
CURRENT: Walk me through the history of college protests. What has changed—tactically, ideologically, demographically—since the 1960s protests, and why do you think that is? What were students fighting for then, and what are they fighting for now, assuming it even makes sense to speak of ‘activists’ as a cohesive group?
PROFESSOR MOODY-ADAMS: Even in the 1960s, activism was never fully cohesive, and this is true even on a campus like Columbia’s, people’s memories sometimes create more cohesion than there was. There was certainly a lot of anti-war activism—that was one of the dominant forces at Columbia, and it did bring a lot of different voices together. At the same time, there was a lot of activism about social and economic inequality that sometimes got overshadowed by the anti-war activism. In fact, the occupation of the Dean’s Office was begun by students who were protesting racial inequality, particularly racial and class inequality that seemed to be shaping the construction of a proposed gymnasium in Morningside Park.
As challenging as a lot of people felt the student activism of the 1960s was, we have a lot to thank those activists for. Even though it was often a rough time during the midst of the activism, and I don't personally support the takeover of buildings or the use or threat of violence on campus, the protesters helped to open the contemporary college campus to a lot of new voices—gender-wise, ethnicity-wise, class-wise—that didn’t really have a place or any influence on a lot of college campuses in the ‘60s. So, for that I thank them, and I think all of us should be thankful.
One challenge, though, is that they didn’t necessarily create a legacy of discussion, contest, and conflict that allowed people to understand how to carry out their conflict and still remain respectful of the people with whom they disagree. They may have said that those things didn’t matter then: let’s just open things up, let’s get our grievances aired, let’s show our political commitments, and let’s challenge the system.
So, we’re living with both the good and the bad legacies of those years. Most of it, I think, is good, but the bad legacy is that now when people engage in conflict, we don’t know how to preserve two things that make a really robust debate possible. One of them is genuine respect for the people we disagree with, and the other is genuine trust. As I said, the student activists of the 1960s did their part: they opened the campus up, they protested genuine injustice, and I think they exposed the difficulties of a war that ended up being generally unpopular anyway.
We need a new kind activism that keeps the contestation there but shows how to balance it better with more civility.
CURRENT: How is or should freedom of speech be different on campus than, say, in broader society?
MMA: Freedom of speech issues do take on a different character on a college or university campus. In part, this is because they are communities where, unlike communities outside the university, it isn’t so easy to get away from the people who are expressing the attitude with which you disagree. If somebody wants to protest in your neighborhood, they move in and they move out and they go home. But if you’re protesting as a fellow student on a shared space that everybody passes through every day, this can create a sense that the community is turning in on itself. That’s what limits students’ abilities to get beyond some of the conflicts they have—they don’t have as many opportunities to put the conflict on the backburner for a while.
It’s difficult sometimes to get away, to get a little perspective, to get a little distance. Every challenge that comes up on a campus—it’s on the newspaper, it’s on Bwog, it’s on a radio station, your friends are talking about it when you’re eating, you hear it in the classroom—it’s such a small community, there’s never a chance to get away from it.
CURRENT: You’ve written in defense of academic freedom, of the right of academics to explore and defend all sorts of radical ideas. How important is it that professors feel free to pursue radical or even distasteful ideas? Do you, as an academic, feel that academic freedom has come under assault?
MMA: Academic freedom certainly has come under pressure. But I don’t know that it has ever not been under pressure, because if people are exercising academic freedom robustly, they’re going to say something that upsets or challenges or offends someone. It doesn’t matter which community you are addressing; and it may not even be the content of your argument, but the tone that offends. But this is the risk you take when you take on the responsibility of being an academic.
The thing I always like to stress is that although academics have the right to offend, they must do so responsibly, and they must to be able to defend the origin of the academic freedom of the right to offend and show that they exercise it in a way that’s as responsible as possible. Sometimes this means, if there is something on your syllabus that troubles a student, showing why that allegedly troubling thing involves a reasonable choice to appear on an academic syllabus; or why talking about a topic in a certain way is a reasonable choice for an academic to make.
Showing that your choices reflect certain intellectual virtues of sincere, respectful pursuit of debate and disagreement is also important. To me, the challenge is that some people use their academic freedom in ways that seem to be divorced from these virtues. And they are going to get in trouble, because people wonder, if they are going to be offended by you, why don’t they also have to see that you’re serious and sincere in your exercise of your right to offend.
There are times when even an academic with academic freedom needs to practice a little bit of self-censorship. For example, you might want to discuss a controversial topic one way with undergraduate students, and in a different way with graduate students. Or you might decide that your students need more preparation than you could provide at the beginning of a semester if you are bringing up something that will churn up a lot of bad feelings. I’ve discovered that I can talk about a lot of very challenging topics with a group if I work hard to have them trust not just me but each other. And it takes time for them to realize that they can disagree without it turning personal, and that they can bring in alternative views in ways to try and at least bring some balance in.
Lastly, a classroom is not the same thing as the public forum. If academic freedom has any substance, students can’t have the exact same level of freedom to say whatever they want in a classroom as professors do. Even Supreme Court Justices have said: when you pay for a college education, you’re actually consenting to sometimes experiencing or hearing things that you don’t agree with, and to not having the equal right to speak back to it in the classroom. A student can rightfully speak more freely outside in the hall and out on the quad and on the steps of Low Library—there are academic spaces and there are non-academic spaces. But if academic freedom has any substance, the students’ freedom to learn doesn’t give them the freedom to control the content of the course to the same degree that the faculty member has.
CURRENT: Is there a specific way in which professors gain that skill of navigating these sensitive conversations? Is that the sort of skill that PhD programs should instill in their graduate students?
MMA: It is a difficult topic, because we are trained as professors to do lots of things, but we aren’t always trained in these larger questions about what it is to use our academic freedom responsibly, and what it is to articulate the values that ought to be appealing to the world outside the academy. Why should the public put their trust in us? Maybe we do need to spend more time talking about professional responsibilities of professors, as teachers, and as researchers. I wouldn’t mind it if we required people in every graduate program to have a bit of training, where they had to think about what values are at stake in academic freedom.
If somebody from outside the academy comes to me and says, “Why should you have the right to say these things when nobody else can do that with this kind of impunity?” We need to be able to articulate an answer. Why does academic freedom even matter? Why is it important that you protect the university?
I remember having students (at another university) who didn’t want to read Martin Luther King’s, “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” One of these students said, “I know there’s a holiday, but I was taught that King was a communist, and I don’t have to listen to him. Why is this on my syllabus?” You want to respect students, and not just say that they are wrong. So, what I might say is: “Here’s why my discipline thinks these ideas—linked to Socrates, linked to Tolstoy, linked to Augustine and Aquinas—are worth your thinking about. Here’s why you’re reading this.” And then I would certainly add: “King wasn’t really the bad person you think he was,” but that’s not where you start.
In addition, I try to avoid assigning a paper where the student has to write on a topic that they were deeply troubled by. So I say: read the assigned works; if you don’t want to write on it—I’ll give you other options. But I think it’s my duty, as part of exposing you to all the issues, to have you read it.
CURRENT: Some professors and, more broadly, some departments, have come under fire for bringing politics into the classroom. In some departments—like Philosophy—it doesn’t seem to be that big of a deal if a Metaphysics professor spends the semester passionately arguing for one ontological principle over another. But the problem does seem more acute, say, in the Political Science Department, where professors might espouse particular views on a controversial political debate. What sort of balance should professors strike between, on the one hand, presenting ideas in a neutral, even-handed way, and advocating for their own positions, on the other?
MMA: I will be quite frank with you: my wisdom on this sometimes runs out. The challenge is that sometimes what we value in scholars is that they take a difficult, controversial position on an important topic. Then if somebody is in a political science department, for instance, and they offer you their expertise, and that expertise involves a particular disputed perspective on a very controversial subject, it’s almost going to be impossible for them to say anything from their standpoint that won’t be offensive to some of their students.
I don’t know how to meet that challenge. I admire the academics in the relevant disciplinary areas who find a way both to continue to do the work they are best at, and yet, as they present it, not seem to be silencing those who disagree. I don’t know how they do it. I don’t think I could do it.
But maybe I’ve gotten close. I have taught courses like “Contemporary Moral Problems,” for instance, where I have students read something like Peter Singer’s writing on non-voluntary euthanasia. Then I have had to figure out: how do I present these views?
I should also stress, though, that whenever I walk into a classroom, for some students my very presence there is like a political argument. If a student comes from a community where he or she has been brought up to believe that black people couldn’t possibly be smart enough to deserve a PhD—a black professor walks in, and these students are stunned. Still to this day, I know that the first five or ten minutes when I speak in some classes, there’s a whole range of students for whom it’s like an argument about political equality just for me to be there.
It is also worth remembering that sometimes your expertise is in itself troubling to some students, and when it is it’s not an easy thing to find a balance. So, imagine the fundamentalist Christian who goes into an evolutionary biology class. That student has to ask: “If I’m going into a class where the expertise is bound to upset me, what is it that I can expect in the way of an educational experience from this? What do I need to be ready to tolerate? Can I respectfully disagree with the expertise, without undermining everything about this experience I say I want?” Similarly, if a student goes into a political science class taught by somebody whose expertise they know is going to offend them, my question is: “What did you expect?”
Some colleges offer classes taught by psychology professors whose research claims to prove the intellectual inferiority of particular racial groups. And frankly, this is not a class that I would have tried to take as a student. So, I wonder if students should sometimes ask themselves whether there just aren’t some disciplines where exposure to the expertise of their professors isn’t almost intrinsically going to feel like advocacy. Students have to ask themselves: “Am I ready for this challenge? Is this the instructor that I believe is most responsibly able to use that freedom that will challenge me as nothing else will?”
CURRENT: Given the conception of a university as a space in which to explore ideas, some pundits have pointed to the irony, or perhaps hypocrisy, of my generation's insistence on safe spaces and trigger warnings, on ‘insulation’ from scary ideas. Do you think these accusations hold any weight? Are college students more sensitive than ever before?
MMA: I used to think that students had become more sensitive. But I’ve come to believe that it’s something else. Now I believe that students are giving expression to a cultural development that has encouraged people to think that their identity, and the things that matter most about them, has to be defined in terms of the grievances they have and the suffering they undergo. I am never going to tell you that suffering doesn’t matter, that it isn’t real, that it doesn’t have moral, and even intellectual, weight. I am never going to say that people don’t have real grievances, or that they don’t need to have their suffering and grieving respected. But as a culture—and I think students are only reflecting what the culture has encouraged all of us to do—we’ve stopped understanding that a whole human identity is not just about the grievances we have and the suffering to which we have been subjected over a lifetime.
I’m not saying: toughen up, get resilient. I think resilience and grit are important, but I think as a culture we need to ask: what are we saying about human identity when every time we have a disagreement with someone the first thing we feel we need to say is: “protect me from anything in that disagreement that might actually cause me distress”? No one denies distress is real, but robust disagreement that might actually help you transform a conflict into something constructive sometimes means you’re probably going to be upset by something. It’s not that the students are more sensitive; they’re just reflecting our cultural acceptance of the idea that we can just take a portion of our identities as human beings—that part connected to suffering and hurt—and assume that that’s all we are.
I also worry about students who, in a classroom setting, demand that they don’t ever have to confront something that they find upsetting. There are stories—maybe they’re apocryphal, maybe they’re overplayed—of law students in a law clinic about women’s issues saying to the teacher: “Don’t make me read those reports about women having experienced sexual assault because it churns up terrible feelings in me and that’s too much for me to bear.” Nobody denies that it’s a lot to bear. But my question is: can you be a responsible advocate for women’s issues as a lawyer when you leave law school if you’ve never been forced to confront that suffering yourself?
I’ll get on a soapbox and say this anywhere: a lot of people who see themselves as progressive have so narrowed the range of experience they know how to understand that I don’t know how they are going to be activists of any kind. They are going to be activists for their own personal distress, perhaps. But what about the homeless man sleeping outside the gates of the campus on 116th & Broadway? Yes, as a Columbia student, your suffering matters, but the “safe space” you are demanding from your professors may be keeping you from recognizing suffering that isn’t yours, that you need to understand.
CURRENT: Activists have created a "with us or against us" atmosphere on campuses, not entirely unlike George Bush’s 2001 proclamation “you’re either with us or against us,” and it seems as if there is no such thing as an innocent bystander. Do you think this is best way for activists to solicit help from potential allies?
MMA: This is not a new question. In the 1960s the phrase was: if you’re not part of the solution, then you’re part of the problem. And of course, the “with us or against us” stance is not unintelligible. One thing it sometimes does is produce guilt, and guilt sometimes has political consequences that are good. But sometimes guilt has a very dangerous half-life. People get fatigued if you’re always making them feel guilty and if you never stop to ask, what constructive appeal might get them to join in the cause. You need to ask: what are the broader, shared interests that might go beyond your hardship. Guilt has a place, maybe even shame sometimes, but guilt and shame have limits as morally motivating forces. If you want to connect people with each other, you need to look for commonality, for shared experience. “You’re with us or against us” is not really a way of getting people to share.
Are there innocent bystanders? I will leave that as an open question. But even if there aren’t, if you want to get people to join a cause and to be motivated in a constructive way to help, making them feel guilty or ashamed has profound limits. It’s not a very constructive way by which to build a coalition.
CURRENT: There has been a lot of noise at Columbia recently about how identity politics should inform the creation of The Core, and the experience of students inside the classroom. Columbia recently announced the addition of Toni Morrison to the LitHum curriculum, garnering praise from those who felt that people of color are underrepresented in Columbia’s conception of the Western Canon, while also receiving some criticism from those who felt that identity politics ought not play a role in formulating curricula, that it’s the quality of the book, not the identity of the author, that matters. Is one side more right than the other? Do you have any thoughts as to how universities should navigate this issue?
MMA: Let me first give you one example about the philosophy canon because we need to be cautious about saying the main and only reason that any canon looks the way it looks is that everything in it is simply the best of the best. Challenging this claim doesn’t mean it isn’t good. But a canon—whether in philosophy or literature or any other subject—is formed by the victors. So, in philosophy, Descartes, Locke, and so on—that selection of texts is certainly justifiable. But are there works that were left out for all kinds of reasons that have nothing to do with its quality? I would venture to say yes.
It’s tempting to say the canon is fixed for all time. But Plato’s Apology, Euthyphro, and Crito were once a part of LitHum; they are not anymore. Why would you cut these works out? Well, you had to make room for something else. So, is the decision purely this is better than that? Or is it, here’s what the interests of those shaping the canon right now lead them to choose?
Toni Morrison is a great writer. Her presence in LitHum is a wonderful thing. The addition of that text may mean that something else has to go, but that happens all the time. I wish people didn’t have to turn it into fight just about “representation”; it ought to be framed as a fight about the inclusion and exclusion of texts that are good but whose goodness was never recognized.
Here’s the problem with turning it into a debate about “representation”: some people want to represent a particular ethnic identity as one thing, and others as another thing. There’s so much internal disagreement about what any particular ethnic identity is, that I think we should be wary of too great a reliance on that idea of “representation” in the canon. The identity of any group is a lot more complicated than a lot of people want to accept.
So let’s try and include great texts that have, for various reasons, been excluded, overlooked, left out. And let’s be ready to make an argument about why they belong that isn’t just: this person thinks they represent this identity. You don’t need to have a fight about what blackness is before you decide to put Toni Morrison in the Core Curriculum. Look, Morrison won a Nobel Prize! What’s the delay?
CURRENT: Let’s talk about intersectionality. Can students find common ground with activists on certain causes but not others.
MMA: If we don’t have room in the 21st century for the idea that a person’s political commitments can be complicated, I don’t know what we have room for. Here’s one danger with not accepting this: we start to assume that once you know someone is committed to X, now you know everything about that person. But I don’t want to live in a world like that. I want to live in a world where I can be surprised, because people really are complicated and surprising.
It’s tempting to use labels—liberal, conservative, progressive—but they don’t tell us anything about a person. Given how complicated human beings are and how complex political issues are, we cannot say that there should be one set of commitments that every progressive thinker shares. We shouldn’t want that. This is the influence of John Stuart Mill on my thinking. Why can’t we imagine that somebody we disagree with on one issue might be able to enlighten us about something important that we didn’t know we needed to know?
CURRENT: On Facebook, last semester, a student of color requested to switch from her Contemporary Civilization section into one taught by a professor of color. This led to a heated conversation about the role that race, ethnicity, religion, etc., should play in constructing the classroom experience. In your mind, is a professor of color better suited to teach CC to a student of color than his or her white counterpart? Or, conversely, is a student of color better equipped to learn from a professor of color than his or her white counterpart?
MMA: Of course, sometimes commonality—or presumed commonality—of experience and perspective can give students a feeling of connection to their instructor, and to the material, that they might not otherwise have. But I’m not entirely sure that that’s something that only comes from shared ethnicity.
I became a professor because I wanted to teach. Period. I didn’t want to teach just students of kind X or students of kind Y. There are academic institutions that have classrooms composed of only one kind of student. There are historically black colleges and universities and there are women’s colleges; and in fact I proudly went to a women’s college. I went because I did want a certain aspect of that commonality of experience. But my concern is: if you decide not to attend a women's college or a historically black institution, or any institution where people might unite around a certain kind of identity or shared experience, should you go in expecting that you should sort out solely on the basis of your identity? Every student who’s here could have gone to Spelman or Morehouse, or Wellesley or Wabash. But they came here.
I want to inspire every student who walks into my class. I want to be open to learning from every student. If I wanted a different experience, I would have chosen a different kind of institution.
CURRENT: With all this in mind, what advice would you give to graduating students, many of whom will be leaving the confines of the university community and entering the ‘real world’?
MMA: This is the hardest question you’ve asked yet! My answer is: be ready to be surprised by people. Be ready to surprise yourself. Be open. Wonder is the spirit that leads people to want to learn and investigate: so be open to wonder. And be willing to have hope even it when looks like there’s no reason for it. People like Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, Viktor Frankl—these are people who managed to survive because they held out hope even when it looked like human action had destroyed every ground for hope. We have a duty to hold onto hope. If you don’t have hope right now—what with everything going on in the news—how will you keep going?
\\ ETHAN HERENSTEIN is a senior in Columbia College and Managing Editor for The Current. He can be reached at [email protected].