Many of my classmates seem hesitant to question the words of graduate students and professors. The predominant fear is that saying anything contrary to what the instructor espouses will cause their grades to fall like a freak snowstorm at the end of March. If we as students feel uncomfortable sharing our views or commenting on how class material diverges from our perspectives, how can we hope to gain anything from our courses? It isn’t as though we learned silence on our own. This self-censorship doesn’t stem from within, but rather it can be traced to departmental censorship.
Departmental censorship is far from a myth. A number of instructors have been told to avoid certain topics such as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for fear of inciting student ire. Silence in the classroom is problematic. I’ve seen professors say controversial things in the classroom only to have students reach for their phones to call parents, who in turn call department heads and administrators to complain. When educators are afraid to speak their minds in the classroom, students become afraid to do the same. It is dangerous and feeds the cycle which dampens classroom relationships and educational methodology.
I don’t believe that everything stated in a classroom by an instructor should or can be taken as fact. I want my fellow students to be open minded, yet critical. Terry Pratchett wrote “the trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.” An open mind doesn’t need to be an unfiltered mind. As students, we need to be able to hear new ideas and concepts. We need to understand that the world does not exist in black and white, us and them.
One of my friends, majoring in history, told me that even when she had multiple classes which focused on the same area of the world, during the same time period, the interpretation of history differed vastly from course to course. Even views of the same historical figures were contradictory. There is room for gray areas in the liberal arts, and we should embrace that, not shy away from it. Embracing this doesn’t mean adopting others’ views as our own, but rather understanding and being able to rationally discuss points and counterpoints. If a professor is limited in entertaining multiple points of view, students will be limited in arguing with ideas as well.
Due to time constraints, it isn’t always appropriate to divulge the nuances of your principles and beliefs and parse through the entirety of an argument in discussion section. This is where office hours come in. These meetings provide a better ground for tangents, whether historical, religious or political. I encourage each of us to challenge ourselves and our instructors in respectful discourse. We, as students, will not learn unless we challenge and are challenged. We need to create a space where both students and instructors feel free enough to voice their beliefs and ideas.