One of the most important things that a liberal education offers students is training in the habits and capacities needed to be informed and engaged citizens, which may mean engaging in direct political action. During Alumni Weekend, I was privileged to interview Tipper Gore (CAS ’70) before a large crowd in the Tsai Auditorium. When I asked her about her strongest memories of Boston University and what has changed, she immediately said that things were so very different. “Where are the students marching in the streets?” she asked rhetorically. In her day, motivated by the existence of a draft, nearly every young person felt they had an immediate stake in the Vietnam War. Then students were willing to organize, march, and even put their bodies on the line in the name of freedom and social justice. She went on to express surprise, even disappointment, that the students are not out there now, given the precarious state of our democracy today.
This conversation struck me, and led me to ask myself some questions: Are we as educators doing enough to support and encourage our students to engage civically today? What exactly is our role as faculty and administrators in encouraging activism? Because of the heat of our political moment, these questions pose major challenges to educators and weighing what our role should be is timely and important.
There is a rising tide of protest and resistance today against institutionalized racism, police brutality, and anti-immigrant policies, matched by a wave of rightwing backlash. As I write this, there are widespread protests taking place during games in the NFL, responding to President Trump’s condemnation of Colin Kaepernick and other players who “take a knee” in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement. This year alone, the Boston Common has been the site of rallies for women, universal health care, and truth and science, and rallies against the travel ban and against Unite the Right, the white supremacist group that marched in Charlottesville. The week following Charlottesville, there was an overwhelming show of opposition to the so-called free speech rally. Nonetheless, one might agree with Ms. Gore that our divided political culture, and the frequent flashpoints of injustice and bigotry since last year’s presidential election, cry out for more voices to be heard, and especially those of our students. As a recent issue of The Economist put it, the grand democratic experiment that is the United States is in peril. This is a time, like that of the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War, when all citizens are needed to stand up for progress and justice.
How do we best help our students to take a courageous stand? One way is through educational programming that features the themes of protest, resistance, and social movements, such as what the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Program is doing with their theme for the year, and the ongoing Conversations on Race at Boston University. Another way is by setting a moral example ourselves, like the professors who organized the “Stand Up and Speak Out Campaign,” which is supporting faculty who are being targeted for harassment and bullying by the Right. Elie Wiesel, our departed colleague who was remembered during a daylong symposium on Alumni Weekend, was the epitome of the moral exemplar. We can teach history and point to examples; however, such detached methods may not be sufficient to teach non-cognitive skills and virtues.
Another way is to directly immerse students in political activism, but this must be done with care. It is one thing to assign students to volunteer for community organizations or to do what is called service learning or engaged research – education and research with and for a community for the mutual benefit of students and the community. These are things that faculty should involve students in to the degree that they achieve important educational objectives, such as some of those that have been developed for the BU Hub. It is quite a different thing to encourage one’s students to protest political and cultural events or conditions. With such protest lie the dangers of coercing students into agreement with one’s own partisan political stance, and of unnecessarily politicizing our classrooms. Thus, there are additional criteria to apply; not only must participation achieve an important educational objective, it must also not require of students that they agree with the view of the professor. For example, it would be unacceptable to require that students attend a rally against President Trump’s travel ban. Yet faculty clearly have the freedom to attend such protests, to inform students about them, and discuss how one might decide about whether to attend them, so long as faculty do not use their authority to coerce students into participating.
It seems likely that opportunities for direct engagement in protest will soon come to BU’s campus, as they have to others, either in the form of an event that catalyzes a student group to wage a rally or sit in, or a visiting speaker whose speech many will find abhorrent and intolerant. As I wrote earlier this year, it is vitally important to permit such speech, though that by no means rules out non-violent protest and response. These will be teachable moments and we should embrace them, for both their political and educational value. By helping students to see that their participation is important, and by encouraging the development of moral courage, we fulfill at least one of the critical goals of liberal education.