Missing data

This most recent salvo in the professorial politics wars seems to be missing something: students.  (The first comment makes some valuable points about doing "[a]n ethnographic study of classroom practices.") I don't doubt the percentages of self-reporting faculty, nor do I think the faculty are lying or exaggerating.  But I also don't believe that most of us, even the most self-reflexive of us, possess full self-awareness about our performance in the classroom.  At the risk of making us all sound like the speakers in a dramatic monologue, our tics, crotchets, hobby-horses, and what-have-you all have a bad habit of manifesting themselves when we least expect it--and, often enough, without us knowing.  I'm skeptical about Stanley Fish's neo-Arnoldian vision of the classroom--a utopia of disinterestedness--precisely because we may unwittingly betray ourselves every time we step in front of the class to lecture.  Even the most controlled professor is still liable to slip now and then.  Self-reporting tells us what faculty think they're doing, or what they think they ought to be doing, or what they think the interviewer thinks they ought to be doing.  It does not, however, always tell us very much about what happens.

Ergo, students.  But students aren't a straightforward resource, either.  They may have partial information (e.g., their own grades, not necessarily anyone else's) or they may confuse a novel idea with a politically biased idea.   For that matter, they will have their own political, cultural, and religious biases, all of which will affect how they recognize and interpret their instructors' biases.   (And, of course, some of them may not really be going to class...) In fact, the inequality built into the faculty-student relationship may cloak some biases, even as it renders others visible; a freshman may not recognize a skewed syllabus, for example.  Nevertheless, a broad representative sampling should allow an interviewer to control for most of these variables.

To complicate matters further, though, I think students need to be asked about politics in the classroom at least twice: once while they're students, and once several years down the road.  Looking back at my undergraduate years, for example, I can think of two occasions when, at the time, I definitely thought that Someone Was Out to Indoctrinate Me.  In retrospect, I still think that was true in one instance--an absolutely infuriating assignment that couldn't be completed satisfactorily unless you bought the politics involved, no matter if you had empirical evidence to the contrary--but not in the other, which was a case of my confusing new information with biased information. (Obviously, whatever else concerned me as an undergrad, political bias was low on my list--like most of my fellow undergrads, my complaints usually focused on professional lapses that had zilch to do with politics.) 

Comments

[Brandon]

This seems plausible to me. I think the confusion of novelty with bias plays a role across a rather extensive range of intellectual life. For instance, students will also occasionally confuse something that they themselves don't believe with a caricature; for instance, students who are Calvinists sometimes tend to think that the Calvinism they were raised in is the Calvinism, and will sometimes confuse historical Calvinist views different from their own with attempts at caricature.

I also think, though, that students are more savvy about such things than is usually assumed in such discussions; unflattering as it may be to our egos, they are not usually passively sitting there waiting for us to form their minds but are sometimes, when they are really paying attention to us at all, listening to what we say with considerable skepticism. In undergrad I knew students who would go out of their way to give back to their professors what they thought they wanted to hear, even if they themselves thought that the ideas were completely absurd.

(Having known so many students like that has made me slightly paranoid about it. Whenever I get garbled answers on tests, where even a little common sense would have sufficed to give a better answer, I get the sneaking suspicion that my students are trying to do this to me.)

[Miriam]

Oh, sure--I remember students saying whatever they thought the professor wanted to hear, then snarking about it outside of class. Of course, sometimes they were wrong about that, too!

[RLapides]

A teacher's silence about politics can amount to agreement with accepted truth, and sometimes accepted truth is very mistaken.

I recall how grateful my classmates and I were in the 1950s when a teacher had the rare courage to disagree with establishment views, not something we ever heard anyone do. When I started teaching in the '60s, I felt it my responsibility to educate my white students about racism. Years later some of them thanked me for having done this -- but not at the time.

Someone has to raise students' consciousness about social and political reality, and if we remain silent, the corporate media will be their only teachers.