Recently, I was notified that a former student of mine had testified in February before the Montana House Judiciary Committee in an investigation into alleged bias against conservative students in public institutions of higher education. The student claimed that, in 2019, I had discriminated against her because she voted for Donald Trump. 

According to her testimony, I gave her an F on an essay about voting for Trump and offered no feedback other than the words “I disagree.” She also told the committee that, when she appealed this grade, first to me and then to one of my colleagues, she was told that there was nothing that could be done for her. 

While it was thrilling on some level to be offered a fight I could win (her account is unsupported by the evidence), I didn’t get into teaching because I wanted to win fights any more than I got into teaching to propagate my personal views, political or otherwise. 

I started teaching wanting to help students see writing as William James saw metaphysics: as “an unusually stubborn attempt to think clearly.” If they could see writing this way, I hoped, its usefulness would be self-evident.

I have often wondered in which cases and to which degrees my efforts in the classroom have been rewarded in the minds of my students. Watching the recent testimony, I found out definitively that, with one student, at least, I had failed. The impression I gave her was not the one I intended.

The semester she was in my class, we were using the textbook They Say/I Say, which treats forms of argument as frames for developing one’s thought. The version of the book we used includes Robert Leonard’s New York Times opinion piece, “Why Rural America Voted for Trump.” 

According to my notes, on the day we discussed Leonard’s piece, I wanted us to consider the author’s point of view, his assumptions about his audience, the soundness and validity of his argument, and any counterarguments he fails to anticipate. Let’s assume — because I cannot recall — that we more or less did those things more or less successfully. The question I’ve been asking myself is what else, speaking extemporaneously, I might have said to give my student the impression that as a teacher I cared who she voted for.

I don’t tend to bring politics into the classroom. Mostly, I consider it irrelevant to — not to mention a huge distraction from — our intellectual pursuits. But the first Trump years being what they were, politics were on everyone’s minds, including mine. Even They Say/I Say contained multiple essays reflecting on the phenomenon of Trump. 

So, the president’s name would have come up semi-regularly. And I’m all but certain that I would have made passing remarks disparaging our president’s habitual bullshitting, which I would have reminded my students is anathema to our shared project of using language with care and sincerity.

I started teaching wanting to help students see writing as William James saw metaphysics: as “an unusually stubborn attempt to think clearly.”

By contrast, our previous president, Barack Obama, had given a commencement speech at Howard University that was included in the textbook as an example of the kind of writing we should emulate. I would have made no secret of my great admiration for Obama’s prose and rhetoric, and I would have done so in the faith that my students both could and would recognize a distinction between the respect we were paying to Obama, the man of letters, and our lack of interest in Obama, the former president. 

I knew full well that any classroom I entered in Montana would contain at least a sizable contingent of Trump supporters. Given the nature of the discourse in most media outlets and on campuses generally, they would have been primed to identify a professor who condescended to them (whether or not he really did).

The predominance of liberal professors is well established, particularly in the humanities, where it is not uncommon for self-identifying conservatives to be outnumbered ten-to-one by self-identified liberals. While I want to maintain that this skew does not in itself indicate bias and therefore does not indicate a failure, we live in a time when the need for viewpoint diversity according to race, gender, and orientation are taken as given. Should we not by the same logic demand diversity in political opinion?

I ask this because I’m trying my best to see my classroom from the point of view of my unhappy student, and I can only assume that, to her, I presented as another in a series of professors who were intolerant of her views. I imagine that she saw herself as a victim and me as her oppressor.

In a way, if this speculation is accurate, I’m empathetic to her. My own undergraduate education at the University of Oregon took place in the context of a distinct leftward lean. Political tensions at the time were high, due to the contentious presidential vote in 2000 and George W. Bush’s subsequent prosecution of the War on Terror. While most of my classes remained reasonably apolitical, several professors regularly voiced their opposition to Bush and the war, some with impressive vitriol.

This is relevant, first, because I considered myself a libertarian at the time and had learned from experience that, when I expressed my views to a professor, I could be met with anything from amused condescension to polite dismissal to something like low-grade hostility. In the worst case, a professor interrupted a presentation I was giving to tell me that he would not hear a positive treatment of libertarian principles while so many children in Oregon were living with food scarcity. These things happen. 

The second reason this is relevant is that the atmosphere on the University of Oregon campus kind of annoyed me but didn’t really bother or threaten me. It was what it was, an unmistakably liberal environment, the only world I’d ever known. It didn’t occur to me that I needed to have professors who agreed with me or who at least concealed their disagreement. It still doesn’t occur to me that I should have been entitled to that or that I would have wanted it. 

But I can imagine how it might have been different. It is a very small step from knowing that your views aren’t appreciated to feeling like you are not appreciated, perhaps unwelcome. It is the easiest thing in the world to be the victim in the story of one’s own life. Not everyone is as naturally suspicious of fitting in as I am.

Part of my job is to make students feel welcome in the classroom, whoever they are. But the limits to that responsibility don’t extend as far as refraining from disagreement or even, sometimes, offense. There is no such thing as a sacred idea in a serious education, no commitment that is beyond challenge. This entire project of intellectual life hinges on the separation of ideas from the people who hold those ideas. One of our core values as intellectuals is preserving the willingness to change our minds.

The saddest thing to see now, as the political pendulum swings wildly to the right, is the attempt to impose a new set of acceptable opinions to replace the old set of acceptable opinions. Liberalism (in the classical sense) is the belief that even unacceptable opinions should be engaged via reason, not force. A society in which the universities are illiberal is not a society that will be able to preserve liberalism elsewhere. It hardly matters whether the illiberalism comes from the left or the right.

Returning to my examples from the classroom, my view that Trump is an archetypal bullshitter and Obama a generational orator is either supported or unsupported by the evidence. Regardless, neither label bears on the character of those who favor either man as president. That strikes me as fundamentally a different question. 

As long as we respect the boundaries of intellectual discourse, disagreement — even between teacher and student — is welcome and can be productive. But those boundaries must be apparent. My student’s mistake was thinking I cared who she voted for. Mine was letting her.