June 12, Jill DeTemple, professor of religious studies at SMU Dallas, for a piece challenging the position that what faculty members teach incites students and community members to protest. Published in the Dallas Morning News under the heading Blaming faculty when protests erupt ignores how we teach: https://tinyurl.com/3c533a9p
Student protests in support of Gaza have captured the attention of Congress, editorial writers and everyday citizens. Some have expressed solidarity with protesters, characterizing them as “invest[ing] in what’s happening in the world,”or “exercising their fundamental human rights.” Some have condemned them as “disruptive,” “uninformed,” “antisemitic” or “violent.”
Any of these descriptions could be true to a degree as the protests, like the conflict to which they respond, are complex social phenomena happening in the midst of profound political and social instability. Students demanding divestment, chanting slogans, and responding to death and destruction have themselves lived through the prolonged disruption of a global pandemic, a nation at war for the vast majority of their lives, and political polarization at a level as high as it’s been since the Civil War.
Professors aren’t indoctrinating students despite what you read.
By Jill DeTemple
Student protests in support of Gaza have captured the attention of Congress, editorial writers and everyday citizens. Some have expressed solidarity with protesters, characterizing them as “invest[ing] in what’s happening in the world,”or “exercising their fundamental human rights.” Some have condemned them as “disruptive,” “uninformed,” “antisemitic” or “violent.”
Any of these descriptions could be true to a degree as the protests, like the conflict to which they respond, are complex social phenomena happening in the midst of profound political and social instability. Students demanding divestment, chanting slogans, and responding to death and destruction have themselves lived through the prolonged disruption of a global pandemic, a nation at war for the vast majority of their lives, and political polarization at a level as high as it’s been since the Civil War.
It is puzzling, then, when so many editorial writers, op-ed contributors, and pundits — especially those who oppose the protests — want to pin the tail of blame on the donkey of university faculty. They righteously tell them to “consider carefully what they are teaching,” often with the assumption that faculty are “creating an unquestionable orthodoxy” that reduces the world to oppressor and oppressed. This characterization has been repeated so often that, like many of our unexamined beliefs, it may seem to be a fact that requires no further explication. But is it?
As a professor of religious studies with nearly 25 years of experience, I work with students as they encounter and learn to navigate some of the world’s thorniest philosophical, historical, political and theological realities. I have found, over and over, that students who begin a semester with the kind of undeveloped certainty that critics of the protests find problematic frequently leave the semester with a deep, uneasy regard for complexities that defy any simple solution or approach. As one student, frustrated with such complexity, put it on a course evaluation: “We start with stupid question minute and it just never ends!” Classes begin with an invitation to students: Ask anything about anything related to the course.
In a polarized climate where adherence to one side of an issue can seem to demand the complete rejection of opposing views or the people who hold them, complexity can be an unwelcome reality. University classrooms are precisely the places where students encounter and meet such complex challenges.
The work of faculty in presenting these challenges, however, has become increasingly difficult as some states constrain teaching content and students are reluctant to share personal views, sometimes because they fear professor reprisal, but more often because they are afraid of saying something that will upset other students. We do have a problem with groupthink, but the problem appears to be less with faculty nefariously insisting on liberal views than with far larger and more powerful groups of youth peers and the present moment in American culture.
Making spaces where students can move past the simplified thinking that protest critics decry is not just vital — it’s a common goal held by the critics and the educators they disparage. As a practitioner and developer of classrooms designed to support constructive student speaking and listening, I have the privilege of working with dedicated faculty at institutions across the country. These educators craft what my colleagues and I call Dialogic Classrooms. These are intentional spaces that invite students to bring all of their experiences, values and identities into open and productive conversation in the service of learning better and more deeply across curricular areas.
Students in such classrooms report feeling more willing to speak and listen, even across social differences, and that they learn course content better. The fact that so many professors give up valuable personal time in order to hone their skills in consciously supporting a variety of student voices in their classrooms should further trouble the easy but reductionist story that professors exercise indoctrination at the expense of real diversity of thought, experience and expertise. It is true that a majority of American faculty are at least moderately liberal and vote for Democratic candidates. But the reasons they do so are varied, as are the ideas and causes they support and decry, something I see over and over as I work with faculty across the country, inviting them into conversations about their identities as educators. Any real analysis of higher education would need to take this reality into account.
My students had a dialogue about Israel-Hamas this semester. They didn’t agree. They did come away realizing they needed to know more in order to develop more informed opinions. They also reported feeling more comfortable in the complexity that human differences create. For those worried about undue professorial influence, I did not speak, at all, during the dialogue.
One of the commitments my students make at the beginning of the semester is to check out the assumptions of others and to clarify intent. Those who blame campus protest on the imagined goals and worldview of faculty would be better served if we all agreed to do the same.
Jill DeTemple is a professor of religious studies at SMU and an associate at Essential Partners, a nonprofit dedicated to conflict transformation through dialogue.