An Enemy of the First Amendment

The fight against the education establishment extends to you too. The faculty, from adjunct professors to deans, tell you what to do, what to say, and more ominously, what to think. They say that if you voted for Donald Trump, you’re a threat to the university community. But the real threat is silencing the First Amendment rights of people with whom you disagree. – Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos at the Conservative Political Action Conference, 2/23/17. 

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As I wind down 17 years in the college classroom, it’s been a bit of a difficult semester.

Not in the classroom. The classroom is always great. Even when it’s not great, it’s great because there’s always the potential for discovery, for learning something we didn’t know before. I can't remember a week without saying, "I hadn't thought of it that way before."

But it is difficult to know something that’s provided so much meaning is coming to a close.

I am leaving voluntarily, but not by choice. As I’ve written previously, I cannot reconcile the work I believe to be so important with a system that functions to treat that work as disposable and its workers (some of them, anyway) as fungible.

Perhaps the comments of Secretary DeVos, our nation’s top education public servant declaring me an enemy of the First Amendment is another sign it is time to go. A woman who has purchased access to the levers of power through a kind of wealth that is hard for me to conceive believes that I am a threat to students.

It is not true, but it matters that someone in her position either believes it to be so, or is willing to use her statement as red meat for a partisan crowd. Like the press, I suppose I am now an enemy of the state.

The myth of liberal instructors brainwashing students is a handy political cudgel, but it is nonetheless, a myth. All those college-educated people successfully attending CPAC should be proof enough. That the evidence consistently demonstrates that professors do not have this sort of influence on their students should also matter, except it apparently doesn’t.

The myth is too useful to die.

I have never told a student what to think. Though, I have often required them to think. This is the core purpose of education. I use this quote from Cornel West as my guide:

I want to be able to engage in the grand calling of a Socratic teacher, which is not to persuade and convince students, but to unsettle and unnerve and maybe even unhouse a few students, so that they experience that wonderful vertigo and dizziness in recognizing at least for a moment that their world view rests on pudding, but then see that they have something to fall back on. It's the shaping and forming of critical sensibility. That, for me, is what the high calling of pedagogy really is.

I wonder if Secretary DeVos would find this statement objectionable. Perhaps so, since Dr. West identifies as a socialist. Perhaps we are also now in an era when it is unacceptable for faculty to ask students to think in a way that induces this “wonderful vertigo.” The challenge itself is akin to brainwashing, or attempted brainwashing as it were.

Of course, I have been subject to students revealing to me that my own world view “rests on pudding.” That knowledge can be provisional is the most humbling and awesome thing I’ve experienced working in education.

Anyone who has taught for as long as I have and talked with and listened to students is likely to have been far more influenced by them than vice versa. 

For example, I just recently referred to my childhood friends as my “squad,” as I was instructed to by my students. What other indignities will they force on me if I continue in the classroom? It’s a good thing I’m leaving before I start saying things like "whatevs" or "adorbs."

Secretary DeVos’ rhetoric is part of a long, even bipartisan tradition of undermining public education as a public good. Previous Education Secretary of Education Arne Duncan used the identical “failing schools” rhetoric as Secretary DeVos. The result has been a steady funneling of public money to private corporations who promise panaceas and deliver nothing. Secretary DeVos promises to double and triple down on this failed approach.

The age of the public institution is over. It maybe has been for some time and we are merely late to pronounce the body. The institutions haven’t failed us.

We’ve failed them.