by Joseph M. Knippenberg
I have followed with interest, but thankfully from a
distance, the back and forth regarding speakers recently invited to the Trinity
campus. Beginning with last year’s Milo
Yiannapoulos extravaganza (not sure what to call it), and extending to this
year’s lectures by Ryan Anderson and Dinesh D’Souza, the campus has been roiled
by controversy. Should the speakers have been invited in the first place? Do students have a right to protest them? Does
that right extend to shouting them down, as
happened to Charles Murray recently at Middlebury College? Or is the
appropriate response to listen respectfully to what they have to say, and then
challenging them vigorously and rigorously in the question period?
I think you can tell where I’m going by the way I posed my
questions, but let me begin by laying my own cards on the table. I’ve been a
Trinity parent since 2014, a college professor since 1985, and a campus denizen
of one sort or another since 1974. Though I have on a few occasions
demonstrated for or against particular points of view, I have never protested a
speaker. I have, to be sure, hosted a speaker students regarded as
controversial, so I know something of what it feels like to be on the receiving
end of student hostility. (To be clear, you couldn’t pay me enough to be in
that position day in and day out. My
skin is thick, but not that thick.)
I am committed to a vision of a college as a place of
learning that requires the free and full exchange of ideas and opinions. Some—but
most emphatically not all—of that goes on in the classroom, which requires that
I both encourage students to tell us what’s on their minds and articulate
points of view that they may find challenging and sometimes even repugnant. Students
in my classes will read and talk about Aristotle’s defense of natural slavery and Thomas Hobbes’s snarky critique of
the Greek philosopher’s inegalitarianism, Alexander Stephens’ critique and Abraham Lincoln’s defense of the
egalitarian reading of the Declaration of Independence, and Supreme Court Justice
Anthony Kennedy’s argument that a right to same-sex marriage is found in the
Constitution and the dissenters’
searching criticisms of that position. My approach to teaching requires me to
make it difficult for students to take the easy way out. It’s not good for them
not to have to wrestle with and respond to serious challenges to the truths
they happen to believe are self-evident. Not to confront those challenges as
serious alternatives is to hold their views as mere opinions and to be
incapable of thoughtfully and articulately defending them. Stated another way,
a genuinely liberal education requires that students come to understand, so far
as possible, the reasons for the
opinions they have. And that requires, as I have said, that they consider the
arguments for their opinions as live arguments with serious opponents, not as
unchallenged and hence effectively dead dogmas.
But I’m really here to talk about what goes on outside the classroom, which constitutes
a very important part of every student’s education. I have some preferences
there too, but much less—indeed almost no—control. Leaving aside the dorm room
conversations that go on way past my middle-aged bedtime, let’s focus on those
pesky invited speakers. Sometimes faculty like me do the inviting, but often
it’s the students. I know what I want—smart, articulate, thoughtful speakers who
will do from a different point of view and perhaps better what I’m trying to do
in the classroom. I’ve been there and done that a lot—both as the organizer of
lecture series and conferences that have as their principal audience the
college’s undergraduates and as an invited lecturer (offer me a little money
and a nice meal, and I’ll think of something more or less edifying and
educational to say to your students.)
Students are not educators, so that when they invite someone
to campus, it may not be to promote the respectable pedagogical aims of the
faculty. They may merely want to be entertained, or they may want to be fed
some ideological red meat by someone who vividly and effectively articulates
what’s on their minds. The talks may not be intentionally educational, and
sometimes they’re not even all that informative, but I’m here to tell you that
that’s OK. Your hard-earned tuition dollars are not being wasted. (Let me hasten to clarify something, lest I
be misunderstood: in many cases—indeed, in all the controversial recent Trinity
cases, if I’m not mistaken—the funds that pay for the speakers are provided by
external organizations. All that the
University is doing is permitting the event to occur on its campus. Your
tuition dollars are literally not
paying for Milo, or Ryan Anderson, or Dinesh D’Souza.)
So why are these sorts of talks a good thing? First of all,
they provide a kind of practical learning experience for our students. They
learn how to deal with all the complicated logistical arrangements of hosting
an event; they learn how to organize support and/or opposition for the
speaker’s point of view; and they may even learn how to manage conflict with
friends on the other side of the fence. These are important civic skills that
can’t as readily be cultivated in the classroom. Yet if we don’t somehow
cultivate them, we risk losing some of what it takes to be a self-governing
people.
Second, we faculty aren’t just bystanders here. Because
speakers invited and hosted by student groups are (by definition, I suppose)
interesting to students, these sorts of events actually engage the
students. They care about them,
sometimes quite passionately. And that’s a passion that we teachers can use in
the classroom. These are the proverbial teachable moments, when something
outside the classroom gets brought inside and becomes the basis for a
discussion in which the walls separating the realm of books and ideas from the
“real world” are breached. Wow, is that fun!
And, wow, is that important because we don’t have to work all that hard
to get our students to care about it! And we can take the material they’ve
provided, which they didn’t think of as part of their education, and make it,
yes, “educational.”
Let me say one last word about the faculty role. My
preference is for hospitable treatment of and respectful engagement with
outside speakers. Whatever may happen “on the street” or at a Congressional
town hall, the college setting is supposed
to be different. We’re supposed to be collegial, cooperating with one another
in the search for the truth. This requires civility, which of course requires a
kind of self-restraint. We faculty members certainly should require that
civility of ourselves and also of our students, who won’t always get it exactly
right. (And that’s OK. I prefer a few unintentional missteps to the resentful
self-censorship which doesn’t let anyone actually engage with the question
and—perish the thought!—actually learn something.) So we should attend those controversial
lectures and provide a kind of model of civil and critical engagement with
those with whom we disagree. That too is
a civic skill, one that we need to cultivate if we are to continue to be able
to govern ourselves.
If you want more food for thought, let me recommend the
following things:
About Joe
