On Being a Professor in a Time of Extremism
Most of us in higher education hold to a set of ethical standards that govern how and what we teach. As a historian, I want to help my students develop a nuanced view of the world, I want them to recognize the importance of contextualizing problems in both time and space, and I want them to nurture an empathic understanding of the perspectives and worldviews of people unlike themselves. These aren’t just intellectual and pedagogical goals; taken together, they sketch a broad moral framework grounded in a commitment to democratic citizenship.
These values are under threat in many parts of the world today, which places scholars in a difficult position. The pursuit of our seemingly banal educational goals places us at odds with some powerful political movements, whether we are in the United States, Poland, Hungary, Turkey, Russia, India…the list is long and growing longer. Yet we continue to value scholarly impartiality, nonpartisanship, and “unbiased” inquiry. Reconciling these two sets of ideals is becoming difficult.
As an American who specializes in Polish studies, I feel doubly burdened right now with the rise of Jarosław Kaczyński and Donald Trump. I have been explicitly and publically critical of the former, leading to accusations that I have sacrificed my intellectual credibility as a neutral observer. I am still trying to figure out how I should react to the latter—not as an ordinary citizen (that decision is easy) but specifically in my capacity as a professor at a public university. The rules at my institution are clear: I cannot claim, or even allow to be inferred, that any statements I make regarding any politician or political moment are sanctioned or endorsed by my university. Following that proscription seems easy enough, since I’m writing this blog at home, on my personal computer, and publishing it on my private website. Oh, if only things were that straight-forward!
I’m currently teaching a class called “Poland in the Modern World, 1900-the present.” What do I do when we get to “the present” on the syllabus? The current government in Poland, led by Jarosław Kaczyński’s “Law and Justice” movement (Prawo i Sprawiedliwość, or PiS), has openly defied Poland’s constitutional court, transformed the public media into a government mouthpiece, purged the civil service, and launched legal procedures against political opponents based on dubious conspiracy theories. These actions have led to a constitutional crisis and threaten to derail the stunning accomplishments Poland has achieved over the past two decades. I take the preceding two sentences to be a mere summary of recent events, but supporters of PiS would say that I have betrayed my ideological predilections by spreading misinformation. They insist that they are just trying to restore national pride and improve the lives of ordinary Poles, and that accusations like mine serve the entrenched elites who are trying to block much-needed reforms. So have I undermined my standing as a scholar by expressing an opinion in a contested public debate? And would I further compromise myself if I fail to show “balance” when I present this material to my students?
I take those rhetorical questions seriously. Even when I present to my students issues of far greater moral clarity, I strive to offer them alternative viewpoints. When we studied the communist seizure of power in Poland after WWII, I had them read documents from both the communists and their opponents. When we discussed interethnic relations in the 1920s and 1930s, I provided texts from liberals, socialists, and nationalists, as well as from Poles, Jews, and Ukrainians. And when we do get to the part of the class that deals with current affairs, my students will be assigned primary sources illuminating a range of views.
Yet if my foundational pedagogical goal is indeed to cultivate democratic citizenship, cultural empathy, and a nuanced understanding of social and political relations, then I would be a hypocrite to treat all the aforementioned views as equivalent. I don’t hesitate to describe the Stalinists as violent authoritarians, to characterize the Nazi occupation during WWII as genocidal, to label the interwar nationalists as antisemitic. Should my treatment of the current government be different? If I criticize the communists for ignoring constitutional constraints and for manipulating the media, should I present examples of the same phenomena today as mere differences of opinion? To do so, I believe, would place me alongside biologists who won’t talk about evolution, or climatologists who remain silent about global warming.
Even if I was to conclude that I should avoid present-day controversies in the classroom, what about my other public statements and writings? I have received some criticism for abandoning the ideal of “unbiased” scholarship by writing critically about Kaczyński. My opinion, however, is that those of us with a public platform, however small, have a duty to say something during a moment of crisis like this one. I have the luxury of being a full professor at an internationally recognized institution, without any of the vulnerabilities that untenured scholars in the US or any of my colleagues inside Poland might face. Whatever tiny bit of visibility might come with that position of security carries with it the obligation to at least publicize what’s going on in Poland today. Sure, doing so demonstrates bias, but not doing so demonstrates cowardice or (just as bad) apathy.
To me the choice to write about the danger to democracy in today’s Poland was relatively easy. A much harder challenge faces the American academy in the months ahead, as we move closer to a presidential election in which one of the candidates, Donald Trump, represents a worldview and a political style frighteningly similar to what the Poles have confronted this past year. Throughout my career, I made sure that my public writings and statements avoided explicit commentary on US politics, mainly because the topic is outside my professional expertise. Even when I talked or wrote about issues with obvious resonance in the present, I always took care to keep it abstract, perhaps criticizing a certain set of policies but never a specific party or individual in the United States. But can this balancing act be sustained in the age of Trump? I have no professional standing to speak with any expertise about what’s happening to my country. I’m just a citizen, so maybe the ethically correct stance is to retain a firewall between by views as an American and my views as a scholar. But can such a firewall persist when there is an actual threat to the core values of liberal democracy?
For anyone inclined to declare an absolute principle of neutrality in such circumstances, let me just dive right into the argumentum ad Hitlerum. Professors in German universities in the 1930s, regardless of academic discipline, had to choose how to respond to the rise of Nazism, and posterity has not been kind to those who opted to adjust their teaching to accommodate the strictures of the new regime. Even those who simply kept their heads down and tried to avoid politics often implicated themselves, at least tangentially, in the crimes that followed. I fully understand why someone may have followed a strategy of disengagement, particularly if they taught in a field that did not initially seem relevant to the Nazis. But I’m sure that we all admire most those who used their public positions to speak out, to protest, to mark the point at which they had to declare non possumus.
I jumped immediately to that most extreme case not to suggest that in 2016 we have returned to 1933; instead, I merely want to note that such moments of decision might potentially arise. If we grant that, then we must ask ourselves how bad things must get before the ethical issues arise. Unfortunately, it will rarely be clear until it is too late—but on the other hand, we are always vulnerable to false alarms that might make us look foolish in retrospect. I’m setting aside the question of what we might do, or how effective we could possibly be. Those concerns only arise if we first decide on the right thing to do. On the one side is risk that we will confirm that oft-leveled accusation that we academics are biased, and that the universities are bastions of leftist ideologies. On the other side is the possibility that our children might someday ask why we squandered whatever limited cultural capital we possessed, back when there was still time.