Faculty on the Front Lines - Concrete Advice on Teaching in the Wake of the Presidential Election

America is still feeling the aftershocks of Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 presidential election. The protests and unrest that have swelled across the nation have especially surged on college campuses. That is not surprising, given that millennials (people aged 18 to 35 in 2015) largely voted for Hillary Clinton. (Had only millennials, America’s largest generation, voted, Clinton would have received 473 electoral votes and Trump would have received 32.)

But there’s more to campus climate right now than millennials perceiving they have simply lost, or won, an election. A deeper upheaval has been unleashed, and college campuses, populated with large groups of young people, are experiencing the same high levels of racial and religious frustrations and tensions that are playing out on other national stages.

Graph from the Southern Poverty Law Center indicating locations of harassment during election week.

Faculty members on the front lines of interacting with students face some difficult questions. What role should we play in working through all of this? How do we fulfill our responsibilities to teach students while also finding ways to support them in a divisive and sometimes even dangerous climate?

Some students may feel compelled to dampen or publicly quell their conservative viewpoints. Others may be fearful, anxious or angry about what a Trump presidency means for their future. Still others perceive themselves as wholly excluded from the current bipartisan system. If these are points along a spectrum of the climate of our campuses, we know students are experiencing even greater pressures in the many spaces where they spend their time outside faculty purview.

Given all of this, our role as educators on college campuses today is as crucially important as it is complex. So how should we respond? We have outlined five action items that faculty members can contemplate in the coming days, weeks and months.

Define and exemplify what it means to be political. We must begin by helping our students understand different meanings of the word “political.”

Many faculty members have a long practice of carefully navigating politics in our teaching. That is particularly true if we define “politics” as encouraging discourse about legitimate, differing views people hold on what policies best address the collective, common good of our nation. Faculty members regularly make diverse and reasonable decisions about educating students to engage those issues without taking a side. Legitimate, even divisive, policy disagreements are OK, healthy even, and can foster greater understanding for our students and ourselves.

But racial hostility and violence are unacceptable on college campuses. We must help our students understand that. A political climate in which rhetoric has been used in and after an election to instigate racial harassment on our campuses is not good for anyone, regardless of party affiliations.

We can offer opportunities to talk about the issues without succumbing to being partisan. We can facilitate conversations without targeting individuals. Talking about candidates, or even specific issues, may create more fissures, but talking about shared questions and concerns about the common good can open the door for deeper reflections.

Listen to, but do not lie to, students. We must allow people to vent without interruption when they share their experiences with hostility and violent rhetoric. Many students are literally facing affronts to their lives and personhoods. Some have been attacked and threatened -- receiving group text messages calling for a “daily lynching” and being attacked while expressing political viewpoints. Others may lose their health care. Still others may have their families torn apart. By some estimates, there are more than 200,000 undocumented students are enrolled in American colleges and universities. They face a very real and present threat of deportation in the near future.

We cannot predict what will happen to our students, but we must provide them support systems. Support means resisting the desire to assure them that “everything will be OK” or that we will “get through this together.” We do not know if this will be the case, and we must not lie. Those of us who are white, male or non-Muslim must not tell our students who are people of color, Muslim or female, “I know exactly how you feel.” Our students need us to join them in the space of not knowing what is going to happen and validate that their vulnerabilities are legitimate.

Encourage students to actively engage in their communities and with one another. All of our students, whether they are members of historically marginalized groups or part of dominant racial and gender ones, need to be encouraged to stay engaged in their communities. Students may not have yet developed the understanding that our political system works, in part, through various kinds of organizations and that they can get involved at the local level. This is critical information for them relative to the risk of their becoming hopeless or immobilized with the despair of “what can I do?”

Whether they have an affinity for grassroots organizing, participation in state and local government, or national politics, we can help them direct their frustrations and interests in productive ways. With all of its imperfections, democracy is something we participate in to shape and mold. Sitting on the sidelines will only ensure that nothing changes, and connecting helps work against isolation. We, as faculty, can help students find and express their own political and moral agency.

Assess your own classroom. Consider your own pedagogical approach to the classroom. As one teaching and learning expert has asked, what strategies are we using to ensure that we "include all of our students in the class space and collective endeavor of our courses" at our institutions? We should reflect on the interactions that take place in our classes, both between ourselves and our students and among the students themselves.

Regarding specific assignments, consider integrating reading and other material that crosses social, cultural and political boundaries. Do you provide students with the opportunity to share different viewpoints? If not, are there constructive ways to do so?

We can use the classroom to teach students how to respectfully engage with each other. We can allow them to practice having discourse that is simultaneously civil and disagreeable. In fact, we must do that, because we become what we practice. We do not have to insist on getting to common ground on a matter too quickly, if at all. We do, however, have to create new spaces and new methods for having difficult discussions.

Hold the university accountable. It is too early to know exactly how the president-elect’s campaign promises will play out in terms of actual policy implementation. We can be sure, however, that higher education will be impacted if any of the proposed immigration, law enforcement, federal financial aid or health care policies are realized. Students who are part of the most marginalized groups may be vulnerable to significant disruptions in their daily lives. We must begin to ready our institutions to protect intellectual freedom, student well-being and civil liberties.

Faculty members need to start having these -- probably difficult -- dialogues now among ourselves as well as with university administrations. Those of us with tenure should be particularly attuned to the specific impact the campus climate has not only on students but also on untenured faculty members -- especially those from groups most marginalized by the rhetoric, harassment and unrest unfolding across the country.

How we show public solidarity and support may vary by institution. But we must engage in public recommitments to a discourse of inclusion based on the institutional policies, charters and statements that govern us.

It is not too early to push our institutions to create structures that will respond to impending campus challenges, including having clear reporting mechanisms for harassment and public positions on both Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals students and undocumented students without DACA status.

We are not trying to toll an alarmist bell within the academy. We are simply highlighting the shared questions that faculty members around the United States must begin to answer on their campuses. In the days since the presidential election, hundreds of incidents of violence and harassment have occurred on college campuses. Regardless of political ideology, we cannot ignore that campus climates are in a state of unrest.

To that end, we who are committed to the well-being of students and to insisting on the contribution education makes to democracy must begin responding to these many challenges today.

Shontavia Johnson is the Kern Family Chair in Intellectual Property Law and directs the Intellectual Property Law Center at Drake University Law School. She curates content related to law and policy at www.shontavia.com and can be found @ShontaviaJEsq. Jennifer Harvey is a professor of religion and currently serves as the Baum Chair of Ethics and the Professions at Drake University. She is the author of Dear White Christians: For Those Still Longing for Racial Reconciliation (Eerdmans, 2014).

This article was first published on InsideHigherEd.com. Read the original article. 

Comments

[Doug Richmond]

How is any of this discussion relevant to, or appropriate for, the vast majority of law school classrooms? I can think of all sorts of courses where there is no logical opportunity or reason to "integrat[e] reading and other material that crosses social, cultural and political boundaries." Do you really think it is necessary to help law students understand that racial hostility and violence are unacceptable on college campuses (or anywhere, for that matter)? Heck, don't you think that the overhwleming majority of undergraduate students know that without being told by a faculty member? As for your statement, "Support means resisting the desire to assure them that 'everything will be OK' or that we will 'get through this together'; [w]e do not know if this will be the case, and we must not lie." Get through what? What might not be OK? You mean the election of, and governance by, a president and administrative team whose possible policies you personally dislike?

I am no Trump fan. Indeed, I disagree with all of his stated views and find his behavior dismal. I am dismayed by almost all of his cabinet and other senior administrative choices. But this sort of infantilization of students is absurd. To the extent individual students with personal concerns may approach individual professors whom they consider mentors or friends or role models outside of class, those professors should of course be appropriately empathetic and supportive. But the broad approach you seem to advance--and which comes across as mostly if not exclusively one-sided--seems to me to be beyond the scope of most expected faculty-student interactions.

[anon]

This is just a partisan screed wrapped up in the language of "reasonableness." This screed would not have been written had the outcome been reversed.

Doug is entirely correct. Although any course in "law" can be spun to accommodate the radical views of some (e.g., an insensitive and bigoted comment like: "Those of us who are white, male or non-Muslim must not tell our students who are people of color, Muslim or female ..." which presupposes that only some groups feel pain or must overcome obstacles), most cannot be plausibly seen as platforms for this sort of race baiting and divisive presentation. In fact, this entire screed can be seen as invitation to preach at students by implication and invite disharmony and antagonism among groups of student in entirely inappropriate ways and contexts.

Alarming students with hyperbolic bs is not the answer here. If you have been assigned to teach "The Evilness of Being White, Male and Old" then, fine, go for it. Otherwise, pause to reflect about whether it is exactly this sort of bigoted approach that is the reason for the outcome of the election.

And remember, the election would not have been the same had not those 200 counties that voted twice for Obama flipped (all ignorant bigots, right?), and if not for the 30-40% of one of the labeled groups of persons you seem to believe are cowering in fear right now who apparently do not agree that the end of days has come.

We are in for tough times, it seems. Mainly, because of attitudes like the one expressed by the post above. Look at yourself: examine your irrational hatreds (which are thinly veiled). Ask yourself how you judge and label and slice and dice us based on you preconceived notions about superficially defined groups. Ask yourself how your attitudes affect those who believe your approach to be demeaning and disrespectful of the values you purport to advance. Teach yourself a bit about tolerance and acceptance and stop assuming that all people who don't belong to your favorite gender and race are badly motivated.

And keep your petty prejudices out of the classroom!

You've been telling others to do this. Try it yourself. You might like it.

[anon]

BTW, while we are speaking of "fake news" consider this:

"(Had only millennials, America’s largest generation, voted, Clinton would have received 473 electoral votes and Trump would have received 32.)"

KQED:

How Millennials Voted in the 2016 Presidential Election (with Lesson Plan), based on a Tufts study ("About half the number of eligible voters between the ages of 18 and 29 ... cast ballots in this election. That rate falls well below the estimated general voter turnout rate of roughly 58 percent. About 55 percent of those millennial voters supported Clinton, as compared to the 60 percent who supported Obama in 2012 ... .");

The Atlantic ("Though voters ages 18-to-29 skewed liberal, more than a third did not: Fifty-five percent of young voters chose Clinton, down from the 60 percent that backed Obama in 2012, while 37 percent chose President-Elect Donald Trump.");

Bloomberg ("Had only millennials voted, Clinton would've won in a landslide ... Among the younger portion of the millennial generation, 18 to 29 year olds, Trump earned 37 percent of the vote to Clinton's 55 percent.")

The bold claim about the electoral college comes from the last cited article. I could find no support for it. It appears bogus, but, it is of no moment.

The fact is that the writer above is recommending subjecting at least 40% of her students to offensive agitprop, which, in the apparent (but misguided view) of the writer, will shame the tiny minority of persons who do not agree with her lopsided view of reality.

[anymouse]

"Had only millennials, America’s largest generation, voted, Clinton would have received 473 electoral votes and Trump would have received 32."

Had only HRC voted, HRC would have received 538 electoral votes. #Amazing!

[Captain Hruska Carswell, Continuance King]

I can offer something pithy: This will all become moot when the Russians take over because our Supreme Leader is the smartest guy in the room. Seriously, the best antidote for a law professor is to teach to the Constitution and emphasize the role and Rule of Law. Our SHARED history is inspirational and law students are the next generation to carry that forward. That carried me through the darkest years of GW and his Patriot Act.

[Captain Hruska Carswell, Continuance King]

Further, tell students to take a trip to Philadelphia, Topeka (Sumner Elementary School National Park), Memphis, Little Rock (Central High School--A Republican enforced the law) and DC. That should recharge batteries and show students that the LAW is bigger and more enduring than any president, especially the smartest guy in the room. Believe me.

[anon]

Yes! We will take the children on a field trip!

(Just so long as they get a note from their mothers giving permission.)

And, after their field trip, we'll feed them some ice cream and talk about how evil white, male Christian people have hereditary ice cream privileges!

Perhaps the children could then draw in their coloring books the evil old white male Christian people with horns and tails.

Oh wait, I forgot, the horns are reserved for the evil "Zionists." Well, tails, anyway, and ugly monster eyes.

Brilliant!

[an on]

"Those of us who are white, male or non-Muslim must not tell our students who are people of color, Muslim or female, “I know exactly how you feel.”"

So sayeth the Boss.

The more I think about this sentence, the more concerned I become about the author having access to students.

First, who is the author to dictate whether "white people" are allowed to say to "people of color" "I know how you feel."? This is almost a textbook example of judgment based solely on race, i.e., racism. It should be called out for it is: disgusting and unacceptable. "White people" should not be judged by the some overly broad dictate by a law professor based on race. That she does this is more than a bit troubling.

Second, she seems to consider religion to be a separate basis for her bigotry. Although to be sure it isn't clear, she seems to suggest that "non Muslims" are to be judged by a different standard as well (unless, of course, she is only slamming white male Christians, which is of course possible).

Third, her intolerance and bigotry is tossed off in the common and casual way that legal academics do. They simply assume that everyone agrees with their prejudices and hatreds. This suggests that she regularly intimidates and subjects her students who do not belong to a favored group in her prejudiced view of things to humiliation and embarrassment without any empathy or concern.

For one, and I am quite sure their are many, I have had quite enough of remaining silent while the race, religion and gender of some are regularly slimed: while they are accused, demeaned and subjected to a "different set of rules" by self righteous ideologues, many of whom have lived lives of privileges that few will every enjoy.

Preach this bigoted clap trap somewhere other than in the public square, where racism, sexism, gender discrimination and ageism are not only attitudes to be deterred, but usually result in acts inconsistent with the law, such as telling students what they may or may not say in class based on race.

EVERY TIME someone slams a group of persons in this invidious way, students and the academy need to stand up and say, STOP!

[anon]

More fake news:

"we cannot ignore that campus climates are in a state of unrest."

This is pure bunk. The author is just inventing facts. Wishful thinking.

(If there have been some isolated demonstrations, there has been no appreciable difference in the last thirty days. At most, there have been a few of the usual demonstrations, which are mostly peaceful and mainly meaningless, as they continue unabated for a whole variety of reasons about which the general public is uninformed. The general public pays little or no attention, and these demonstrations are not making a whole lot of news, because the general public expects but does not care that college kids protest incessantly in any event. To characterize the state of American campuses as "in a state of unrest" is blatantly false - just like so much of the agitprop that is going around now. These fake news stories are propounded by those who cannot accept that their team lost an election and so they need to pretend the world is ending because of it and do everything possible to undermine the election and legitimacy of the result. It is pitiful to see these hypocrites now, after they whined for weeks about how devastating questioning the election results would be.)

[Leo]

Thanks you to all those who commented here. This sort of BS has to be called out for what it is and you folks have done a good job of it.

[VoteTrump]

Thank God Trump won. Lets give Trump a chance and lets stop the insanity. With all due redpect to the author, her comments are an absurd and as a White Man I am pissed.

[Captain Hruska Carswell, Continuance King]

VoteTrump,

I had you pegged as a Millionaire Republican, Last of a Dying Breed.

Your friend,

Captain Carswell, Hottie-American