The issue of classroom political advocacy crops up here quite often and Evan Maloney’s documentary, Indoctrinate U, illustrates just how far advocacy can go, and how corrosive to probity it can be. A key scene in Maloney’s film concerns psychology professor Laura Freberg, who faced a campaign of harassment by left-leaning colleagues and was told, “We never would have hired you if we knew you were a Republican.” Freberg’s students later admitted they’d known she was a “closet Republican” precisely because she didn’t use the classroom to air her political views.

A recent post on classroom advocacy at Crooked Timber, a site popular among left-leaning academics, has prompted some interesting comments: 

There’s really just the media and you, the universities, between civilization and chaos, and you are natural enemies because reality is liberal and media is corporatist. […] If we lose to McCain, at some point you can say goodbye to your pretty little university system. […] I’d say meet in darkened caves in the middle of the night if that’s what it takes to get out the truth.

Some take a more nuanced view:

I expect my students to respect my statements in class as authoritative (although not necessarily correct), and so I have a responsibility to limit what I say in class to what is warranted by my expertise. Since candidate preference is not a matter of expertise, it would be remiss of me to indicate a preference for a specific candidate when teaching. However, this doesn’t apply to my non-teaching related interactions with students at the university where I teach.

It’s not all bad, of course.

Indoctrination only makes sense if you believe reasoning won’t actually win over the students.

But even if we set aside the not insignificant issue of whether professors of, say, literary criticism have any business trying to “win over” their students and mould their political outlook, reasonably or otherwise, there is another problem. Is the student-professor relationship sufficiently equal and reciprocal to ensure evidence and reason prevail? Is there no pressure on students to defer, to please? Can we simply assume that improper leverage will never be brought to bear – for instance, in terms of grading or more subtle signs of displeasure? And isn’t there an unavoidable air of… predation?