Teaching is Authoritarian

Why I no longer teach like I'm "just asking questions"

A couple of recent pieces on teaching have caught my attention. First, Adam Smith on “Higher Education’s False Egalitarianism”:

In the academy, “hierarchy” is always a word of opprobrium, and faculty are very fond of emphasizing “how much our students have to teach us.” The irony of professors teaching students that all hierarchies are bad is not much acknowledged, except by some who prefer the equally wrongheaded view that all hierarchies are good.

Second, and more pointedly, Freddie deBoer on “the cool professor”:

They hope to blow everyone’s minds when they theatrically announce that in their classes, students pick the readings, because the students are the ones who really know what’s worthy of their time. They describe themselves as “friends” or “guides” or “partners,” not as teachers or professors. They disdainfully invoke the words “rigor” and “standards” only with ironic scare quotes and want you to know that they don’t believe in deadlines.

The Cool Professor fundamentally does not want to teach, as teaching requires the teacher to sometimes be the bad guy.

Smith and deBoer alike make the point that the relationship between teacher and student is inherently unequal. If it wasn’t, if it was just a kind of peer tutoring situation, it’s hard to see why students should work and sweat (or save and pay) to earn an education. If their teachers aren’t authorities, they might as well just watch YouTube.

Smith helpfully qualifies that such a statement about the inequality of teacher and student isn’t about politics:

I happen to oppose many of the hierarchies that structure our current world, including the one that ruthlessly sorts society into college-educated winners and uncredentialed losers while the people who do the sorting talk incessantly about toppling hierarchies. And I’m not interested in returning to the explicit hierarchies of race or gender that attract certain reactionaries.

I agree. There is nothing liberating about declining to teach, and nothing reactionary about insisting that, as a teacher, you have something to offer your students.

Conventional wisdom among academics holds that our job is not to tell our students what to think, but teach them how to think; that we are always “the devil’s advocates” rather than teachers of wisdom; that we should avoid expressing our opinions, letting students make up their own minds; that we dare not dictate to our students what they should want or who they should be. Even the most politically strident pedagogy tends to mask its advocacy under a guise of neutral questioning, of helping students “unmask false consciousness.”

I was always uneasy with this model. I felt it left a lot on the table. As an undergraduate, I did not feel empowered or aided when my professors avoided telling me what they thought—I felt frustrated. I wanted to know their thoughts on serious matters. Because I respected them as authority figures, I wanted to hear their candid views. It frankly never crossed my mind that such candor might be perceived as trampling on my independence as a student. I assumed that I would make up my own mind, whatever my teachers thought.

Admittedly I was not the typical undergraduate. I was academically ambitious; I was (and am) insufferably confident in my own ideas. But I do not think I was alone in looking to teachers for wisdom. As a humanities professor, it is often my job to entertain varying arguments and, yes, to play the devil’s advocate. But sometimes—on those matters of deepest concern, or sometimes just a tricky matter of textual interpretation—I can sense that students want to know what I really think. When I begin speaking for myself, the energy in the room changes. The quality of students’ attention shifts. Such candor is generally received with gratitude. Young people need honesty from mentors about the real challenges of life and the complexity of the ideas involved in a liberal arts education. I have come reluctantly to accept that I am one of those mentors, and that sometimes my students deserve to have me speak to them openly, no matter the risk that I might unduly influence their views.

Accordingly, I am drawn to the perspective offered by Stanley Hauerwas:

I start my classes by telling my students that I do not teach in a manner that is meant to help them make up their own minds. Instead, I tell them that I do not believe they have minds worth making up until they have been trained by me. I realize such a statement is deeply offensive to students since it exhibits a complete lack of pedagogic sensitivities. Yet I cannot imagine any teacher who is serious who would allow students to make up their own minds.

I’m not quite as abrasive as Hauerwas—I’m the son of a Midwestern therapist, not a Texan bricklayer—but I am willing to be the bad guy. I give out Ds and Fs. I tell my students what I think, not to quash dissent or to prevent independent thought, but rather to prompt it. You can’t argue with a shrug. “What do you think?” is one form of invitation to further dialogue, but so is “Here’s what I think.”