Dear Professor Elfenbein,

Reading your op-ed, “Students don’t need faculty to inform their political convictions,” several months ago, I found myself confused. You seem to believe professors hold a great deal of power in the classroom, to the degree that you feel we can dictate students’ deeply held beliefs in enduring ways, whether they assent to our viewpoints out of desire to impress us or out of fear of our grading pens. In this near-dystopian vision of the way power works in the classroom, students are cast as weak-willed information receptacles, so motivated by grade-based fear that they will readily submit to a set of politics that contradict their own, while professors are cast as authoritarian dictators whose judgment cannot be questioned, even respectfully.

This is not who I am; this is not who my students are. And this is not what my classroom looks like.

Your argument is marked by a strange contradiction. Do you believe students are strong and capable political thinkers in their own right who must “set boundaries” with “older adults” by kicking us out of their protests, or do you believe they are so delicate and fragile that a professor sharing political ideas with them is akin to a professor engaging in a romantic relationship with them? (Bizarrely, you deploy a University of California, Berkeley policy on student/professor romantic relationships in order to argue that we shouldn’t share our political stances with our students. For my part, I’m not sure I’m ready to live in a world where the sharing of a political stance ought to be subject to the same scrutiny as the sharing of a bed.) 

In argument structure, the warrant (the foundational belief that undergirds the claim) is where the real argument lives, and it is often left unspoken. From where I’m sitting, you vastly underestimate your students’ abilities to discern the warrant in various “objective” truth claims. In other words, I promise, your students know what your politics are, perhaps all the more so because you claim to be neutral. And those students who say they appreciate your objectivity are likely those who simply agree with you.

In my Argumentation classes, one key concept I teach is that there is no such thing as objectivity. I introduce this idea by asking students to write a summary of a tendentious debate that occurred at Hamline University a few years ago around the issue of classroom trigger warnings. When students read their partners’ summaries, they can easily guess the classmate’s position on the issue, even though I told them to make their summary as factual as possible. Details selected, details removed, tone, and turn of phrase — these are the symptoms of political belief.

I extend this idea to a discussion about our course syllabus. I could “hide” my own political views, I tell them, in some misplaced attempt at objectivity, which I don’t believe in anyway, but my politics are written all over my syllabus — from the pieces I select for us to read and discuss, the papers and projects I assign them, and the questions I devise for class discussion, to the more seemingly mundane things like grade breakdown, attendance policies, and the distribution of participation points. After all, second-wave feminists and early Black studies scholars taught us that, in the life of the university, there are few acts more political than the creation of a syllabus. 

All this aside, if I merely disagreed with you about the place of politics in the classroom, I might not have felt compelled to write this response. For various reasons, I still hesitate to do so. But there’s a deeper, more insidious strain of thinking buried in your encouragement that we all adopt political objectivity, and it’s important to bring that strain of thinking out into the open. It has almost always been the case that those in positions of power — white people, wealthy people, Westerners, and men — are most apt to make claims to objectivity. 

Objectivity, in other words, is one of the master’s tools. Those of us whose relationships to power are more contingent, more conditional should wield those tools at our own risk or, perhaps, not at all. Instead, we should model for our students what it looks like to destabilize the truth claims made by those in positions of power — with deep respect, but rigorously. Instead of giving our students no space to disagree politically in the classroom, we should show them how to disagree with those in power and disagree well.

I can tell that we’re both deeply worried by attacks on the institutions of higher education — worries that have become even more salient following the election last week — and want to do whatever we can to combat the misapprehensions that lead to those attacks. I also believe we both have our students’ best interests at heart. However, the only solution I see to the problems we’re facing begins by inviting my students to understand me, their professor, as a fellow thinker in the world with my own experiences and beliefs. When a student questions something I’ve said, as they often do, I know I’m on the right track. Doing my job the best I can also means promising my students — and holding myself to the promise — that I will never issue grades based on my own political agreement or disagreement, something you seem to think is impossible, but I think is a requirement of the job. 

When a right-leaning student tells me, at the end of the semester, that he’s never felt he had to stifle his voice in our classroom, despite knowing that I disagree with him on some key issues, I know I’m on the right track. Indeed, one benefit of my openness about my own beliefs is that students know they can be open about theirs too, and that any argument, whether left or right, offered in good faith can be entertained in my classroom. 

Ultimately, I refuse to pretend, when I teach the components of argument, post-structuralist literary theory, or Walt Whitman, that our classroom exists in some other place — out of space, out of time, out of history, and out of politics. This frankness is one way I show my deep respect for my students, both those on my end of the political spectrum and those on the other end; for myself, as a professional and as a thinking person; for my colleagues, who I know are doing the best they can to navigate the important and sometimes complicated role we play in students’ lives; and for the institution to which I’ve chosen to dedicate my working life.