On March 6, Georgetown University professor of justice and peace studies and philosophy Dr. Mark Lance spoke in the Science Center Auditorium. Marianne Janack of the Hamilton philosophy department introduced Lance, pointing out that in addition to his scholarly work, Lance has been an activist for more than 20 years.
In order to put the ongoing debates on politicization in the classroom into historical perspective, Lance began with a famous anecdotal story from Ancient Greece. As the story goes, a semi-secret society known as the Pythagorean Order arose around the famous mathematician Pythagoras. The society held that all numbers could be represented as integers, and when one audacious member proved that one number was not in fact in a ratio of integers, but was what we now recognize as an irrational number, the Order tied him into a small boat and shoved it into the sea. This kind of reaction to iconoclastic views, according to Lance, is parallel to what academics are facing today.
Lance immediately stressed that people who ask if we should "bring politics into the classroom" are posing the wrong question. All questions involve presuppositions, and this question assumes that politics don't have a natural place in the classroom. Lance happens to believe this presupposition to be wrong, but mainly wants people to recognize its existence. To illustrate the concept, Lance made an example of Professor Janack. The facetious question "Marianne, have you stopped beating your child?" falsely perpetuates the notion that Professor Janack is a child abuser. If she answers no, she implies she is currently beating her child, but if she answers yes, she has still beaten her child in the past. Lance then applied this critical thinking to current pressing questions, clarifying that asking if America can succeed in bringing Democracy to Iraq presupposes that was America's aim, just as asking if the legal privileges of marriage should be extended to gay couples presupposes marriage is the only possible institution.
According to Lance there are two types of political content, explicit and implicit. While campaigns to depoliticize classrooms may stifle explicit political content, they do nothing about the much more dangerous and unstoppable implicit variety. Implicit political content exists not only in questions, but in debates, classes tied to training for particular societal roles, included history and information, and assumptions about what is relevant to academic genres. At Georgetown, there is a masters program in national security studies, but no department of "studies in activism." There is military science, which Lance translates as "how to launch missiles," but no course on "how to become a suicide bomber," for example. Every time professors choose to discuss one historical set of phenomena rather than another, according to Lance, they are making a political choice. Most students have learned about Valley Forge and Normandy, but couldn't tell you what happened at Haymarket (the Haymarket Riot of 1886). Many people fought and died in all of these places, but somebody is making implicit political choices about what gets taught.
Lance believes that attempting to remove political content from a course is attempting to remove content from a course, an obviously undoable task. Norms that forbid politics into the classroom eliminate explicit political discussion, which effectively creates a ban on critical scrutiny of inevitable implicit political content. This ban becomes a powerful control that makes what is already assumed invisible to the people it is working against. To Lance, the injustice lies not in arguing for the status quo, but in "making it invisible."
It irks Lance when organizations like Accuracy in Academia claim professors should be neutral. Lance isn't sure what "neutral" means, as he views neutral description of any situation as an idealistic myth. Neutrality cannot exist in a world where people naturally use varied terminology and focus on different information. Defining neutrality as displaying all sides of a debate further proves its impossibility, as there is no debate for which there are only two sides. Debates on the Israel-Palestine conflict are where one hears the most vitriolic demands that the "other side" (which Lance finds is usually some variant of the Israeli side), be heard. According to Lance, hearing "both sides" essentially means "We should hear whatever you want to say, and then my side." But there are actually many sides. The multitude of sides, such as the Hamas side, the PLO side, the Israeli-Anarchists-Against-the-Wall side, etc., rarely get heard in the truly partisan two-sided debates on the conflict, Lance said.
With the many sides to all issues in mind, Lance noted that professors should grade not on what students argue, but on whether or not they make a reasonable argument for that view. "The goal of a good teacher," explained Lance, "is the same as the goal of the good parent: to create an adult who will surprise you with what they will say to you." Decent professors listen to students' arguments, and treasure new ideas that make them uncomfortable, he said.
Ultimately, the goal of teaching should be to empower creative, virtuous, and wise students who will make us better. People recall skills better than they recall facts, and students should be taught above all else to think critically. Lance encouraged professors in the audience to clarify from day one what political ideas are being brought into the classroom, and put their own views out in the open. "Why would you spend the time to learn about a subject if you had no opinion in it?" asked Lance, "Be honest. If you are trying to represent the views of those you disagree with, don't caricature them, note that you can't give views you find reprehensible justice. Tell students who the smartest people are that (you are) arguing against, so they can go take classes with them, and argue against them."
Lance reminded listeners of important questions that are not addressed in classrooms. Why are hundreds of millions of people starving in a world that produces more than enough food? Why do Americans work more now than peasants did in the Middle Ages? Why are the rich and the poor equally more effected by violence and drugs now than they were in the 18th century? Students need to move together to bring into discussion the questions and ideas that they find to be the most important.
In closing, Lance advised students to "make people nervous about their adherence to the status quo." We live in a society where people go to federal jail for professing ideas that make us uncomfortable, but Lance believes it is a risk worth taking. Student-activists may pay a price for challenging prevailing authority, but win or lose (or more likely "some ambiguous in-between state"), what students choose to question and what they do with their answers will define their lives, as well as where history will go from here.
-- by Mariam Ballout '10
