N
ot long ago, I was an assistant professor of history at the most racially and ethnically diverse university in the country. There, diversity, equality, and inclusion took priority over all other goods. And it showed. My classrooms were full of students of different races, ethnicities, nationalities, sexual persuasions, and ages, all getting along famously. There was one catch, though: Everyone had to agree about everything of consequence, which they almost always did.
Intellectual diversity was negligible. Every now and then, whether out of naivete or bravery, a few students would contradict the party line. When that happened, before I could get a word in, students would attack, firing away at the poor deviants with a barrage of relativism (“But that’s just your truth!”) combined with an absolutist, puritanical devotion to equality and inclusion. The class would then turn to me, assuming I would put a professorial seal on their admonishment. Instead of obliging, I would rearticulate the most valid aspects of what the shamed students were trying to say. Once, a student in my class on religion and politics in the U.S. expressed regret for the loss of prayer in public schools. Her peers rushed to explain that school prayer was wrong because not everyone shared her religious beliefs. OK, I responded, “What if every single person in an entire school district supported school prayer? In that case, would forcing those schools to eliminate prayer still enhance religious freedom?”
In every such case, my goal was to clarify the real terms of disagreement and try to initiate a real debate. I’d invite my freethinking students to add more to the discussion, but because they had just been shamed, and because no one had ever before taught them how to articulate beliefs outside the party line in reasoned language, they usually demurred, leaving me to represent an unpopular idea alone.
This got old. You can only use the phrase “let me play the devil’s advocate” so many times before students start to think that maybe you’re not just playing.
