If Not Educators, Then Who?
Recent months have seen a hasty retreat from leaders in higher education - education writ large. Buffeted by withering and inappropriate Congressional windbags, admonished by big donors and chastised by governing boards, most college presidents and school heads have played duck and cover. It is not the place, critics say, of educational leaders to be activists or even take any controversial positions.
Of course it is just dandy for business leaders, think tank executives, religious titans, sports stars, pop musicians, various “influencers” and movie stars to use their bully or actual pulpits to spout off. Somehow it is beneath the dignity of leaders who represent actual intellectual enterprises to state their minds. I suspect it’s more above the courage than beneath the dignity.
I suppose it’s silly to apologize for self-reference in a blog post. Everything I write is directly or indirectly self-referential. But I nonetheless apologize for quoting myself at such length.
In early February 2017, right after Trump’s inauguration and months before my retirement, I wrote the following letter. Apparently leaked by a parent who did not share my opinion, the New York Post gave me front page attention. Fox News picked it up thereafter. I received hundreds of angry, often disgusting, messages. I answered them all. Some were death-threatish, meaning a fervent hope I would die, but not threatening to do it directly.
If you don’t find it too tedious, I encourage you to read the letter, then the Post article, to see the magic of journalistic malpractice.
Dear Members of the Calhoun Community,
I am not inclined toward understatement. (Perhaps that’s an understatement!) But to say we are living in challenging times may be significantly understated. Since I lead a school, not a retirement community, I am somewhat more “mature” than most members of the extended Calhoun family. I lived through the war in Vietnam (literally “lived,” as I was an U.S. Army Officer and, by good luck alone, never saw combat). I walked the complex inner-city streets of Cleveland during the racial unrest of the 60’s. I was in rural Georgia when Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in Tennessee. I watched every moment of the Watergate hearings that led to the resignation of Richard M. Nixon. I watched soot-covered New Yorkers grimly trudging north on West End Avenue on September 11th, 2001.
I am more troubled now.
During the last week, Heads of schools around the country have been debating whether or not to address the political events roiling our nation. Many have demurred. I will not.
One in my position must be scrupulous in avoiding partisanship. Leadership doesn’t require neutrality, but it demands open-mindedness and civility. On any of a number of political and social issues, a progressive institution like ours must resist the seductive ease of conformity. Throughout my tenure I’ve tried to be mindful that students, parents, alumni, faculty and staff have diverse experiences and political views. Our responsibility is to be acutely sensitive to the values and beliefs of those who might not be in the majority.
But there are matters that transcend political diversity. A prominent physicist once said, when discussing attacks on evolutionary science, “Keeping an open mind doesn’t mean you have to let your brains fall out.”
Some things demand our attention.
As a progressive educational institution, we are committed to inclusivity and justice. As a human community we care deeply about all our children, women and men, without regard to race, ethnicity, gender or sexual identity, circumstance, faith or lack of faith. Equality and equity are not partisan matters. They are Constitutional guarantees and are the bedrock of our democratic republic. The ways in which equity and equality are now threatened are deeply troubling, including the constitutionally suspect and arguably discriminatory efforts to restrict or prohibit immigration based on religion and/or ethnicity.
As a progressive educational institution, we value science. As a human community, we cherish our planet. Climate change is not a partisan matter. We may quarrel about how to save the Earth. We cannot quarrel about whether to save the Earth. The various ways in which the Earth’s environment is now threatened by political appointments and executive orders are deeply troubling.
As a progressive educational institution, we value the rights encoded in our Constitution, particularly those enumerated in the First Amendment. As a human community we invite dissent, we encourage critical thought and we abhor censorship. Freedom of speech, freedom of the press, the right to peaceably assemble and the right to petition the government, are not conditional or situational rights. They are promises we have made and must keep. The ways in which powerful government officials are now criticizing and threatening the press and the way individuals in government agencies are being silenced are deeply troubling.
As a progressive educational institution, we value the elegance of our democratic system and the balance of powers implicit in our founders’ intentions and explicit in several hundred years of the American experience. As a human community we depend on the institutions and mechanisms of government to steady us in times of crisis. When we experience external threats or domestic turbulence, it is the institutions and mechanisms of government on which we must rely. Perhaps most alarming in the current environment is the erosion of respect for the institutions and mechanisms of government and the crass partisanship that is grinding the wheels of government to a deadly standstill.
And so our responsibilities to our students and to each other are clear.
We must invite our students and each other to assertively insist on justice and equity for all and to speak up and out about any person, program or policy that diminishes the value of, or opportunity granted to, any individual. We must provide an environment where our students discard assumptions, open their minds and hearts and learn to genuinely appreciate and respect one another.
We must teach our students about science and insist on critical inquiry, skepticism and the expectation of evidence. We must demand rigorous examination of all claims, whether environmental, scientific, historical or political. There are no alternative facts.
We must teach our students about the rights that protect them and that they must protect. We must unequivocally support a free press and the unfettered right of each person to express her beliefs or opinion. We must respect these rights and privileges within and without our school. We must fiercely protect all students’ right to expression and their right to be silent.
We must teach our students about the institutions, mechanisms and traditions of governing. We must hold these contradictory notions: We must respect these institutions and simultaneously accept our responsibility to challenge these institutions.
There is a great deal of understandable emotion arising from the election and the early days of the new administration. Some people are fearful and uncertain. Others are passionate and concerned about the real or perceived changes that lie ahead.
Just as the antidote to hateful speech is loving speech, the antidote to troubling governance is more governance. Anarchy is corrosive. Impulsivity should be countered by patience. An assault on government institutions should be met by participation in government institutions.
Most of all, we must encourage our students and each other to be civil. The current political environment is hot and caustic. But lasting change does not come from sustained heat. In the most searing moments of the recent campaign, there were frequent allusions to “taking the high road.” Taking the high road does not mean going silently. It means speaking truth to power with dignity. It means putting a flower in a rifle barrel. When it comes to inflamed or coarse rhetoric, it means not fighting fire with fire, but extinguishing fire by not giving it the oxygen of our attention.
Peace,
Steve