Ten Secrets to Academic Success | Fighting Educational Malpractice Personally: What Do I Do with a Politicized Prof – or Teacher

Others in the series:

#1: Remember Why You’re Going to College

#2: Give Yourself the College Orientation You Deserve

#3: Great Debates About Great Books Yield Deep Knowledge, Sharp Minds and Constructive Citizens

#4 Make for Yourself a Teacher – Acquire a Friend

#5 Turn It Off! Managing Social Media, Middle East Minefields, and Political Difference

As I travel, speaking to students, hearing about their teachers, I often feel like an alien. I’m not naïve. In my day, we had plenty of arrogant professors who built themselves up by belittling undergrads. More frequently, we encountered scholarly misfits, forced to teach despite having left any people skills they might have once had on some dusty shelf deep in the archives.  Nevertheless, they were anomalies. They weren’t part of an institutionalized agenda to subvert the consensus position which celebrated classrooms as hothouses encouraging thoughtful, open-minded, liberal and critical inquiry.

By contrast, today, even after the Trumpian backlash, many professors still champion a mass, determined attempt to reduce the sacred educational podium to a political platform. Thousands of colleagues from most leading universities signed one anti-Israel petition, “Palestine and Praxis,” insisting “that the critical theory we generate in our literature and in our classrooms must be backed in deed.” 

In 2018, Altheria Caldera, Ph.D., then an assistant professor at Texas A&M University-Commerce, published “Woke Pedagogy: A Framework for Teaching and Learning” in the journal Diversity, Social Justice & the Educational Leader.  Characteristically preferring advocacy to analysis, demanding that “teachers exhibit activist care,” Caldera asserted: “The sociopolitical context of schooling demands that teachers acknowledge the ways their students’ and their own experiences are shaped by the intersections of racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, and other discriminatory factors …” 

Denouncing “colorblind pedagogy” – I call it “treating each student equally, respectfully, as an individual” — Caldera instead endorsed “Woke pedagogy … grounded in Black ideology,” which “like critical multicultural education, is defined by teaching practices that integrate critiques of contemporary justice-related issues with academic content in a learning environment that encourages introspection, interrogation, and insurgence.”

By the time a brutal Minneapolis police officer killed George Floyd in May, 2020, waves of woke alumni were imposing their doctrines in the media, in corporations and, most disturbingly, from “Woke kindergarten” to “Woke U.” They spread the “woke” language of microaggressions, macroaggressions, triggering, intersectionality, anti-colonialism and white privilege. 

Rather than fine-tuning America’s meritocracy, democratizing that process, grievance groups competed for goodies. This intellectual corruption intensified the victimology Olympics, squabbling over which groups suffered most and deserve the greatest payoff. This results-oriented “equity,” fueled by a politics of vengeance, trumped the traditional liberal-democraticcommitment to seeking equality opportunity and an ever-fairer process.

Meanwhile, all too often in “red America,” teachers ban books, impose their partisan agendas and fight the elites’ heavy-handed left hand with a heavy-handed right hand of their own.

If there’s medical malpractice and legal malpractice, this is educational malpractice. Expose the con: “academic freedom” doesn’t free teachers to bully students into parroting every political position the classroom authority takes. Universities must start scrutinizing what’s happening in the classroom and redefine educational protocols. If students don’t feel free to ask, challenge, express themselves and come to conclusions their teachers may reject politically, the teachers are failing; the classroom needs fixing. When the orthodoxy is imposed intentionally, the malpractice is “premeditated.”

If students don’t feel free to ask, challenge, express themselves and come to conclusions their teachers may reject politically, the teachers are failing; the classroom needs fixing. 

So what’s a thoughtful student to do? What happens when you’re paying $96,078 for tuition room and board, and – true story – your professor spells U.S.A. “u*s*a” and Israel “isr*el” treating these democracies’ names as curse words, not worthy of capitalization? What happens when you’re attending medical school and you must take a full course – not one lecture, which would be reasonable – called “Decolonizing Anatomy?” 

The advice I give students may surprise many – and I’m happy to be corrected, or at least trigger a robust debate. My first answer is: “feel free to do nothing at all. Remember, your main job is to be a student. Play the game, get the grade you can.” That answer shows that my job as a professor – and an activist – is not to guilt students. I do, however, want to reassure them that they have options, while inviting them to clarify who they are and what their goals are.

I add two thoughts.

First, I say, “at the end of the day, you must pass the mirror test. You want to look into the mirror and like what you see. So feel free to flow with your prof – or feel free to take a stand – but do it for you, not for me or anyone else.”

Then, I offer a constructive middle path. “Here’s another strategy,” I say. “Take the course. Don’t rock the boat. Get that A. But, whenever the prof goes wacko partisan or anti-Israel, during the semester, document it.” I add advice I hate adding: “and if it’s anti-Zionist, see if you can get a non-Jewish student to confirm that too.

“When the semester ends, and grades are in, do what these fanatics often don’t do with us. Be a mensch. Give the professor the benefit of the doubt. Visit during office hours, and respectfully share your detailed concerns. In short, model the kind of constructive ‘I-thou’ relationship you seek. Then, if the teacher shuts you down or denies it, you can always go to the administration, ombudspeople, the press. But, first, honor the sacredness of the teacher-student interaction.”

There’s a beautiful Jewish concept called “Milchemet HaTorah” – the Torah war. It can refer to wars the Torah justifies – especially wars of self-defense like Israel’s war today – but that’s a gratuitous jab at our hypercritics, I confess. The phrase also refers to the purer, back-and-forth between two students, or a teacher and a student, debating what the Torah means, and teaches. 

That acknowledgment of doubt, that invitation to argue, is sublime. There’s a Jewish tradition that when such arguments erupt, God descends – just to listen in and delight, not opine.

The Harvard University I attended was indeed “godless Harvard” as many critics loved calling it. But in most classrooms, among most scholars, there was that kind of apolitical, open-minded, liberal, purity a godliness. That transcendent classroom given isn’t for Donald Trump to restore to defeat the left – that’s an ideal approach for every educator to restore, to sharpen our minds and lift up our souls.

Gil Troy, a senior fellow in Zionist thought at the Jewish People Policy Institute, is an American presidential historian. Last year he published, “To Resist the Academic Intifada: Letters to My Students on Defending the Zionist Dream” and “The Essential Guide to October 7th and its Aftermath.” His latest, “The Essential Guide to Zionism, Anti-Zionism, Antisemitism and Jew-hatred” was just published and can be downloaded on the JPPI Website.