Pedagogy and demagogy

Cross posted on Political Arguments.

David Velleman unveils what hinges on his office door.

On one or two occasions in the past, I have posted political items on my door. But then I realized that students who visit my office hours should not be subjected to political messages as a price of consulting me. I also decided that I didn't want my political beliefs to be part of my pedagogical persona. The less my students know about me, the more they'll focus on what I'm trying to teach them. Or so I can hope. In any case, I no longer post anything with overtly political content.

But here I am, posting my political views on the Internet for all to see. And when students learn that one of their professors is a blogger, they log on to have a look. Some of the views that I have expressed on the blog are already known to my students. For example, I don't try to conceal my views on abortion when I teach bioethics, though I do bend over backwards to ensure that students don't feel obliged to agree with me. But most of the views that I've expressed here have to do with topics that I don't ordinarily teach. So students who read the blog will know far more about my opinions than they could glean from any of my lectures.

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I've mentioned before, with reference to Max Weber and Stanley Fish (sub req'd for the latter), that using one's academic position to preach to one's students is to confuse pedagogy with demagogy. The academic ethos requires an openness of mind and generosity of spirit that are, in principles, not present in philosophical, political or religious confession. Students should approaching a professor with the confidence that they are both engaged in a collaborative intellectual enterprise, not a catechism or a competition for ideological supremacy. The professor should also serve as a model of scholarly virtue. That means stressing that academic virtues respond to the internal values of academic practice, not to external values of, again, philosophical, political or religious practice.

But I don't see why a professor who maintains his or her office open, in both a physical and symbolic sense, to all arguments and reasons would feel constrained from blogging from a partisan or sectarian perspective. Quite the contrary. The values of academic life are internal to that practice; inasmuch as they shouldn't be dominated—I wax Walzerian—by the values of other practices, they need not consume the whole of a worthy life. Students know that their professors have views, or so they should—that is, the professors should have views and the students should know it. But the very act of separating one's academic from one's partisan activity attests at once to the difference and the value of both. And hopefully, if the blogging is informed by the author's intellectual pursuits, it also offers pupils an example of integration and balance.

So by all means let us (present and future) scholars blog, and hope that our students will read what we post. That they don't hear us echoing our ramblings in the classroom or the office should speak volumes about the values of our profession.