The Daily Pennsylvanian :: Dani Wexler

Hackneyed as it may sound, with great power comes great responsibility. And teachers have great power.

There's a video circulating the web, which shows an elementary-school teacher exerting blatant pressure on her students to support Barack Obama. Teacher Diatha Harris insinuated to the daughter of an American solider that the child's advocacy of McCain would extend her own father's time in Iraq.

And while elementary-school teachers impact the malleable minds of their fledgling students, college professors can also seriously impede our intellectual freedom. They can intimidate us out of expressing our own carefully formulated opinions (even in a purportedly liberal and open campus environment like Penn).

Many Penn students I spoke to were rattled by their professors' aggressive support of Obama, and McCain voters experienced a particular feeling of discomfort and alienation. We love our professors, and we're lucky to have them. But they're in control, and so we hesitate to contradict them. Maybe they'd welcome a challenge to their authoritative proclamations, but most of us shy away from the risk.

It's in that same vein that the majority of my sources either opted out of the column or requested anonymity. One such College senior majoring in English told me that three of her professors openly advocated supporting Obama. She found the first professor's candidness particularly jarring because the class is a small seminar.

The day after the election, he "assumed that everyone was for Obama, like it [wasn't] even a question." According to her, the professor qualified his statement by saying: "I can't assume that all of you are Obama supporters . I can't imagine why not, but ." and then proceeded to gloat about Obama's triumph.

She saw the same pattern in a Legal Studies course. "The day after the campaign a kid was wearing a McCain sticker," she told me. "The professor singled him out, and it seemed as if he was mocking it."

Though he's too radical for my taste, I identify with conservative activist David Horowitz's petition for intellectual freedom: "I think it's unprofessional for professors to be overtly political in the classroom," he said. "It's an abuse of students' academic freedom."

Apparently the tendency crosses disciplines at Penn as well. About a professor in the Biology department, Wharton sophomore Ayesha Chacko said: "It was pretty clear he was supporting Obama." Chacko and another anonymous Wharton sophomore separately described to me their professor's public delight at Obama's victory.

When I spoke with College Republicans chairman Zac Byer, he agreed that professors' political convictions "certainly bleed through."

"It seemed like most professors supported Barack Obama, but as Republicans, we expected it." Byer mentioned a questionable e-mail sent out by a school department offering internship opportunities for only the Obama campaign.

"For that to happen, especially amidst this discussion about not funding student political groups because our events aren't bipartisan, seems to be antithetical to those tenets," Byer told me.

Whether or not these aggressively political professors represent a minority, the issue still stands. University policy doesn't ban professors from political expression in the classroom, presumably based on their first-amendment rights. Truthfully, most of our classes are biased to some extent anyway, so bureaucratically restricting professors' political opinions would be illogical.

A class in the Graduate School of Education recently confronted this issue. First-year graduate student Ayal Robkin said his class, taught by professor Michael Nakkula, decided that a teacher stating his or her political opinion consciously or unconsciously alienates a student and infringes on "a student's development of identity."

That's why I maintain that with great power comes great responsibility, and the responsibility falls on our professors. One student summed it up with the following: "I think it's just plain inappropriate to turn the class into a political forum. Professors take advantage of their position because they know how much influence they have."

That may or may not be true. But the fact is that a contingent of students felt particularly uncomfortable during a time that should have been rife with uninhibited, independent thought. Those students are reason enough to seek the anticipated "change" that so clearly enraptured our faculty in the recent election.

Dani Wexler is a College sophomore from Los Angeles. Her e-mail is wexler@dailypennsylvanian.com. Wex Appeal appears every Friday.

Comments (7)

Dani, Excellent article! I have always maintained that the key to financial success and social ease (and 4.00 GPAs, I might add) in this Great Republic is to pretend to take fools seriously. Penn provides ample opportunities to practice this art. Yes, professors are rather like gods, but largely and particlularly in the sense that H. L. Mencken once described God as "a sick comedian whose audience is afraid to laugh." Professors do like the ebb and flow of academic debate, but only when it is your ebb and their flow. It is easier, I would offer, to give up a car for a bicycle to marginally ameliorate global warming when the automobile in question is a Civic or a Corolla than an Arnage or a Diablo. Keep up the good work. D. James Gilmour BS,MSA,MBA,MS(G,94),MPhil(G,98),MEd,PhD

This is issue so many overlook, and you gave it an excellent treatment, Dani. Dr. Gutmann has said in the past that professors know better than to do this but any honest Penn student knows that just isn't so. Just for the sake of justice, I'm gonna mention names because I know it's less safe for Dani to do so and I'm tired of Penn students pretending this doesn't happen everyday. Dr. Jorge Salessi - One of the worst professors at Penn. Take a Spanish literature course with him and you'll see. If you show up to class wanting to talk about the reading, you're out of luck. He wants to speak only of his personal beliefs and political beliefs. He directly told all the students he thought they should vote for Obama. He would go on at length on multiple occasions telling the class about his adventures online in sex chatrooms. Honestly, no joke. Dr. Stephanie McCurry - She's not nearly as terrible as Dr. Salessi, but she would purposefully insert barbs against George W. Bush, his tax policies, his views on education, etc. in a class called *History of the American South* that ended chronologically with the civil war. So of course she must have thought Bush soooo relevant to class discussion... I think students need to start recording professors and posting them on youtube to stop them from doing this. If that's not legal, then at least we need to have a site online kind of like "Rate my Professor" where students can tell stories of professors' unsolicited political endorsements. They have the power, so a student couldn't easily stand up to such a professor without being shot down (not in an intellectual way, just in the, "Let me tell you something...no I won't let you speak..." kind of way, and because grading is subjective, no one knows how much it could affect that. Professors do it because they know they have the power and can get away with it. If they're blatantly violating basic ethical guidelines of education, they need to have public light shed on them. For full disclosure, I'm actually politically a liberal and voted for Obama. I think political messages shouldn't be set forth in the class-room setting because it corrodes intelligent discussion and it's an immoral attempt to push ones own opinions on students. Certainly, students aren't necessarily going to be easily brainwashed at our age, but that's not the point. It's still wastes students time because every time the professor goes off on a political tangent, it takes time away from the class material. Now if one thinks that endorsing political messages in a classroom is actually perfectly in accord with teaching class' material, then one is the reason why we have this problem.

As a staunch conservative who spent 4 years at Penn, I had mixed experiences. The vast majority of my professors were bleeding-heart liberals who made their views known but were happy to entertain and discuss opposing views. Then I had a few professors, like Ian Lustick, who used class as an opportunity to ram their leftist ideology down students' throats. Interestingly enough, contrary to the assumption that college is a "liberalizing experience," I found myself becoming increasingly conservative as I learned about foreign affairs, economics, and political science.

I'm a Democrat and a junior in the college. Of all the DP articles I've ever read, this is probably the best one. God I love Dani Wexler.

I think it's important to mark a distinction: liberals are not leftists. In fact, today, liberals are conservatives. As a leftist, I supported neither Obama nor McCain, for both are members of the right wing. We are currently facing all the problems that accrue from right-wing conservatives: escalating poverty, a crashing economy, and wealth rapidly consolidating in the hands of a few. Massive unemployment is underway; people are being turned out of their homes and small businesses; and we are facing a huge social security and medicare deficit. Aid to the poor has all but dried up; the soup kitchens and food reserves are unable to serve the masses who line up now for a meal or a place to stay out of the rain. A simple lesson in politics: leftists think that there is something wrong with the system itself (how wealth is cornered; how laborers are exploited; how most are not given access to a good education or health care or decent food, housing, and education; and how all but the very rich are always vulnerable to the whims of the very rich in this nation). Liberals and conservatives now hold pretty much the same positions; their differences are mainly decorative. Should we bomb Iraq or Pakistan? Should we increase taxes for everyone, or just for those earning over $250,000. Should we bail out the banks or the stockbrokers? Should we buy our clothes from Neiman Marcus or Saks? Should we have legalized abortion or just abortions for the rich and privileged who can get around all laws? Should professors discuss politics in their classes? Depends on the class. Should students welcome political discussions in their classes? Yes, they should: but they are too busy these days trying to rack up credits and high grades and get the hell out so they can be rich. Oh wait: that was last year. Now they have no place to go and no more poor or middle class people to squeeze. Perhaps political discussions will become a bit more interesting to them as the days roll on, presuming they'll be able to afford any longer to attend college. In short, the question may soon be moot. Best not to worry your coiffed little heads about politics, and get back to cramming for your micro exam.

Just goes to show that the lot of you are weak minded fools unable to handle dissenting opinions from others. The elementary-school teacher incident is in no way parallel to what may be occurring in the college classroom. Children have no capacity to adequately handle any sort of political situation. I'm sure many of you understand this from either working with kids or taking an intro. psych class. However, as near-adults in a collegiate setting, I hope most people here would be able to rationalize through a professors stupidity. In the end, the professor ends up looking stupid, so, let them look stupid. Quit your crying. Just sayin'. P.S. Mr. Gilmour, what's up with the alphabet soup?

Everything presented to you in a literature classroom is an opinion, a commentary, or interpretation of history, literature, philosophy, politics, art, and all the writing and cultural production in between. If you cannot recognize that, well, I am sorry. It is unfortunate that you paint such a cowardly view of Penn students, afraid to counter their teachers.

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