Dear Governor, State Senator, or Representative,
Thank you for your interest in my course, [redacted]. You probably discovered my course by accessing “Simple Syllabus” or scouring our course offerings page, rather than engaging in some other constituent concern. I appreciate your devotion to higher education and ensuring that students get the maximum opportunity to learn in a school in our state.
I noted in your social media post that you consider my course “woke” and “DEI” or part of some “progressive left agenda” to indoctrinate your children. Just for clarification, I don’t think you mean your actual children, all of whom you sent to Harvard and not to the state university at which I teach. I suspect you meant your constituents’ children.
Effect On Taxpayers
I understand that you are concerned about the massive amount of tax dollars spent on my course. I assure you that is not the case, neither in terms of my course as a percentage of aggregate tax dollars nor even as a percentage of each individual taxpayer’s overall liability. My course is small potatoes. Even if you were to look at the percentage of classes you deem “woke” versus total class offerings at my university, you would not conclude that the “woke” courses are in any way breaking anyone’s bank.
Nor could you know what financial impact my course has on the university, absent more investigation. You have not examined enrollment patterns for the course, which is surprising given you are a firm believer in markets and “liberty.” Thus, it’s hard to determine, absent more, whether my course subsidizes the university, mitigating tax dollar requirements, or vice versa. I’m sure you agree that if a course has high demand, liberty dictates that we offer this course to your constituents.
You point out that taxpayers (in part) pay my salary. I’ll start by saying thank you very much for my 3% pay raise over the past eight years. But beyond that, you are measuring the opportunity cost between offering this course and offering a different course. Which is of highest value? Is it a wise use of your time to try to make that determination without any information other than the course description when there are provosts, deans, department chairs, and faculty who have experience with this?
In sum, be assured if no students were taking the course, or if they uniformly hated the course, or if some other courses could be regarded as of higher value, I’d be teaching something else instead, and we wouldn’t be having this conversation. To paraphrase Gil Scott-Heron, not only will the revolution not be televised, it won’t be listed in the course catalog if no one wants to take the course. Even a mandatory course which is subject to hostile evaluations and attack is not likely to be long-lived. Markets work, sometimes.
Is My Class ‘Woke’ Or ‘DEI’?
Discussing a societal issue in a course does not mean a course is “woke” or “DEI.” In my opinion, both terms have now become terms that do not mean what you think they mean. DEI, before you altered the term to mean any course you hate, meant inclusion of diverse groups on an equal basis. For example, as some have pointed out facetiously, your argument for greater inclusion of more conservative professors is a DEI claim.
Including LGBTQ+ courses does not make it DEI or woke. For example, let’s assume there is a course called “Dealing with Clients,” in which “LGBTQ+ issues will be addressed.” Your search of courses would flag this and suggest that it is wasting taxpayer dollars on woke issues. But did you consider some alternative explanation for the course before summarily dismissing it? For example, if this course were offered in a medical school, law school, school of social work, department of psychology, or other department, it may very well mean assuring the competency of the student to handle clients. You don’t always get to pick your clients, and foreclosing understanding of clients merely because a state senator doesn’t understand that would be to not fully train my students in the hopes of saving my own skin. You would seek to make our students worse off using your “standard.”
Am I Indoctrinating Students?
All signs suggest I’m not indoctrinating my students, even the one or two who have fully read my syllabus.
First, indoctrination probably doesn’t mean what you think it means. Correct me if I’m wrong, but you seem to think that if a student walks into my class there is some power I will hold over them to compel them to my beliefs, whether it be my charisma (thank you), Jedi mind tricks (insulting to students), or some other mechanism which you don’t describe in detail. Indoctrination is far more complex, and that complexity explains its impossibility.
Second, there is a difference between indoctrination and education, and I believe you often conflate the two. Introduction of an idea might give the idea temporary appeal, even if the idea is presented in a fashion that lists all of the idea’s caveats. Without more, that temporary appeal comes from novelty and dissipates over time. Second, it is not as if the course is a cult. I have no ability to isolate the student on an island and use force to compel the drinking of the Kool-Aid. Even a threat of a final exam can be an exercise of “fodder in, fodder out” without acceptance of any indoctrination. Thus, exposure to ideas isn’t indoctrination, unless your definition of indoctrination is so broad as to suggestion all education is indoctrination.
Third, evidence suggests that indoctrination (from faculty) simply does not exist. The Economist (hardly a leftist rag, I’ll note) discusses the phenomenon and concludes that faculty indoctrination of students is unlikely.
Even if one were to think that, despite all evidence, indoctrination exists, other sources appear to be stronger contributors than what professors do in the classroom. As one commentator noted, to “the limited extent that student views do shift during college, the changes seem to have much more to do with fitting in with peers than being shaped by their professors or the books they read.” Another commentator puts it more bluntly:
Furthermore, um, have you ever met, or been, an adolescent? If so, you might remember that there are a lot of things more likely to influence you than a (most likely) uncharismatic, middle-aged professor assigning a difficult text like Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. There are your friends. Your parents. Religious institutions. Fraternities or sororities, if you belong to one. Your cultural heroes, whether found in sports, entertainment, or (more and more) among the deeply online. If Judith Butler or Angela Davis went to give a lecture at the University of Michigan, I sincerely doubt they would get an audience even five percent of the number who show up for the university’s home football games — probably much less.
(In fairness, this commentator is biasing the numbers, because it’s not as if it’s a HUGE event like an Ohio State Game.)
But seriously, even conservative bloggers who are concerned about indoctrination note that the classroom isn’t the biggest issue: “The trap: Years (usually more than the advertised four) of indoctrination in the classroom and, more harshly, the dormitories” (emphasis added).
Even if I were to indoctrinate students (which hardly seems worth the effort given my salary), it would seem your concern is only about my indoctrination and not the indoctrination of other faculty members. You are hardly scouring business school courses, economics courses, or other schools where there are theories and schools of thought that are incredibly one-sided. In economics for example, you are not concerned that they are only teaching neoclassical economics and not other schools of thought. I’m not saying you should bother, I’m just saying that selective attacks for indoctrination may itself be an attempt at indoctrination.
Personally, I should point out that several of my students have, in the past, worked for your administration, currently work in the Trump administration, or work in similarly conservative administrations. If I’m trying to indoctrinate, I sure do suck at it.
A Guaranteed Way To Increase The Power Of An Idea Is To Suppress It
Finally, I mention what I had hoped would be obvious to students of history (as it is taught in nonoppressive states). Namely, the best way to give force and power to an idea is to suppress it.
Whether it is called the “Streisand Effect” or the “Boomerang Effect,” the principle is the same: Suppressing ideas only makes them stronger. Openly discussing ideas, particularly where trained professors can present the strengths and weaknesses of particular theories, is a better (and more liberal in the classical sense) approach. As Professor Kinsley puts it, “individuals who perceive that their freedom to express a certain position or to offer a certain form of speech is threatened will take actions to continue engaging in the censored expression, thereby contributing their message to the free speech marketplace to a greater degree than before the censorship took place.” Ideas have power. And, by suppressing ideas, you are pouring gasoline on the idea’s fire.
Conclusion
If you’re just posting on X that your universities are woke for cheap political points, carry on. But it seems you are targeting students, faculty, and staff for particular ideas and viewpoints, both in and out of the classroom.
If you’re seriously concerned, I hope this letter is a starting point of discussion. I’m happy to meet with you in person. The bottom line is you are wrongly implying things from a course description that do not necessarily follow. And that has had an impact in terms of faculty holding back on teaching, and, in doing so giving power to ideas you claim you do not wish empowered.
But you are doing more than that. For example, Constitutional Law has an LGBTQ+ component. Consider Obergefell. You may not want me teaching the outcome of the case. You may want to ban me from teaching it. But that means I won’t teach the dissents by Justices Alito, Roberts, Scalia, and Thomas, either.
In suppressing one idea, you suppress five, injuring understanding and my students (your constituents) in the process.
LawProfBlawg is an anonymous law professor. Follow him on X/Twitter/whatever (@lawprofblawg). He’s also on BlueSky, Mastodon, and Threads depending on his mood. Email him at lawprofblawg@gmail.com. The views of this blog post do not represent the views of his employer, his employer’s government, his Dean, his colleagues, his family, or himself.
The post Teaching Law In A Red State (Part II): The Woke DEI Indoctrination Argument appeared first on Above the Law.
