While 63.6% of college students in 2021 believed the political and social climate on their campus prevented people from freely expressing themselves, Tufts professors disagree over how student political discourse has changed in the last few decades. Still, faculty remain committed to the delicate balancing act of re-incorporating students who feel alienated by the fraught political discourse while moderating others who embrace polarization. As many students remain trepidatious to enter the battleground of polarized political discourse, what role do their professors play in providing a space for open dialogue?
Alon Burstein, a Visiting Assistant Professor and an Israel Institute Fellow in the Department of Political Science, has taught contentious subjects such as terrorism, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and ethics over his decade-long career. He believes that students feel “more pressure to share their opinions” and “a lot more of a requirement to have an opinion with regards to politics, and with regards to things that often have nothing to do with what they know about or care about.”
When asked to share their thoughts on fraught issues such as the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, students feel uncomfortable saying “I just don’t know.” To combat this, Professor Burstein emphasizes in his courses that “all opinions are accepted, and all questions are accepted.”
Burstein is concerned about the dialogue surrounding policy questions. He believes we are in a “post-policy era,” where people justify positions “based on their own political allegiances” instead of substantive arguments. In other words, party allegiances dominate reason. He often contends, “If the…same policy is implemented by the other side, people are going to end up arguing how terrible it is.”
Deborah Schildkraut, a political science professor, disputes the supposed collapse of substantive discourse at Tufts, perceiving her students to be increasingly concerned about polarization. When teaching Introduction to American Politics, she asks students in a survey to name the most important problem the country faces: “I have seen a lot of change in that over time. It used to be very issue-based. People would talk about the economy, climate change, abortion, racial inequality. And those things still come up, but the number one issue, far and away now, is polarization.”
Though some students perceive polarization as a salient threat to a nation, it is not clear that this fear also extends to campus life. A 2022 Tisch College study found a decline in graduates who feel that Tufts helped them talk and listen to diverse people. Perhaps Tufts is politically charged, but genuine polarization requires the existence of vocal dissent.
Peter Levine, the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs of Tisch College, proposes two hypotheses for the perceived decline in ideological diversity: students may have a higher standard for diversity than in the past, or the country may simply be “more polarized,” with Tufts falling “basically on one side of the polarization…[and] doing a worse job of teaching people diverse perspectives.” He admits that he can not draw a firm conclusion either way.
Professor Levine has noticed — nationally and at Tufts — that people in higher education are more ideologically sorted. Despite more than half of the country voting for Donald Trump, those voices are largely absent at Tufts: “You really have a hard time finding students articulating a reason why they voted for Donald Trump here.” The trend started in the 2016 election, where Levine noticed “little celebration of the candidate who won.” However, he recalls that Tufts students supported Republicans like Mitt Romney or George W. Bush; it may be the quality of the political leaders that has changed, not the students or the campus climate.
Like Schildkraut, Levine does not agree that the First Amendment is a forgotten precept on college campuses. He recalls his experiences as a student in the late 1980s, when there was a similar debate about supposedly decaying free speech. He remembers hearing “the same critique that colleges were politically correct and that you couldn’t say anything that wasn’t politically correct…I might be wrong; there might be a change for the worse, intolerance, but I am waiting for somebody to prove it.”
While classroom discourse may be generally respectful and tolerant, some professors are conscious of the frequency of discourse. Professor Consuelo Cruz, an expert on Latin American politics and state-building, feels “comfortable moderating a discussion, should one occur, between the students” and herself. She says the most significant barrier to productive dialogues is that “nobody raises their hand. So, I go on because I cannot force students to say something they don’t want to say.”
Cruz adds that professors may avoid contentious conversations out of a lack of appropriate training in defusing strategies. She says, “Students are arguably more passionate about Gaza than they are about American politics at this point, and if a heated discussion opens up and takes place in my classroom, I am not equipped with the knowledge to take a dispassionate approach.” Because of this concern, she has experimented with new ways of making her classroom amenable to discussion, though [the] results have been mixed. When broaching a topic relevant to contemporary political discourse, Cruz tries to “offer a little opening for the students; sometimes the students take it, sometimes they don’t.”
What can be done to increase student knowledge undergirding hot-button issues? Cruz urges students to seek education outside of the classroom, namely through “dedicated panels with experts that are on campus.” Not only can the knowledgeable panelists “really engage with the students,” but the approach also weeds out disinterested students, ensuring all attendees are engaged.
America’s harshly divided political landscape offers students a binary choice: engage or detach. The stakes of specific issues often balloon to apocalyptic proportions, discouraging political participation for some and galvanizing others. Many students feel intimidated hearing the existential rhetoric surrounding today’s politics and are cowed into apathy.
The barrier to entry into political engagement can often seem even higher since the terms of the debate often comprise the discussion itself. Schildkraut lauds her students for becoming more cognizant of their terminology when referring to racial or ethnic groups. She believes that some uncertainty is “not out of fear, or feeling like I can’t say what I want,” but instead because students want “to be respectful, and they don’t always know the right way to do that.” While many students may welcome discussing these contentious identity issues to the political discourse, others might feel further alienated.
When professors like Cruz “leav[e] small openings for debate” in their classes, these students keep their hands lowered. Unlike the students that Professor Burstein described, who feel required to express clear convictions on murky topics, these detached individuals recede into the background of campus discourse. They forgo a hallmark of college education: making oneself intellectually vulnerable for the sake of challenging and refining personal views.
Despite these roadblocks — detachment is curable. Many, like Professors Schildkraut and Levine, believe that classrooms already provide a place where discourse is strong and barriers to entry are lowered. Others, like Professor Burstein, perceive the increasing national polarization affecting student discourse but adapt their classrooms to combat these pernicious trends and foster productive dialogue. Invigorating free speech at Tufts starts in the classroom.