Antidote to Apathy

How to engage students in political issues and civic involvement was the central question of the panel, English Studies and Political Literacy, held on the first evening of the Modern Language Association conference at the Marriot Wardman Park here in Washington, D.C.

“The only way for us to enhance political literacy is to look at students and the way it has always happened; through civic involvement and inspiring activity,” concluded Adolph Reed, Jr. from the University of Pennsylvania, but Reed took a less than rarefied view at the students themselves.

He said that “kids are sponges” and teachers are facing student conservatism en masse because “over the last 25 years we have been living through a conservative ideological campaign to steer [the nation] right.”

Reed has served on the academic freedom committee of the American Association of University Professors. As Reed sees it, higher education is currently under assault on five fronts.

• Author and activist David Horowitz is “using freedom as a plug to intimidate faculty”

• The marketization or privatization of the university structure is causing the rise of “the notion of students as paying customers”

• There is a growing number of highly paid administrators who are not educators

• Private universities are growing

• A class struggle is going on because many faculty are part-time or adjunct. This was not the last time the class struggle would be invoked at the MLA conference.

Emory University professor, Mark Bauerlein; presenting a stark contrast to Reed, suggested deviating from the standard criticism of humanities classes to provide students with a “critical love of country” explaining that “we need to provide students with a sense of citizenship that is positive [too].”

Bauerlein thinks that a base of factual political and historical information is necessary for these students to then build upon, but in most cases, he finds they lack the foundation. He also suggested that adding materials by Whittaker Chambers and libertarians might be useful as well (the listeners did not seem to accept or reject this idea).

The forum also featured journalism professor, David T. Z. Mindich, and English professors Patricia Roberts-Miller and Kenneth W. Warren as well as retired professor Donald P. Lazere, who presided over the session.

Mindich, who teaches at Saint Michael’s College, tackled the question from the perspective that young people are not consumers of news and that getting them to form habits of news consumption are essential in addition to a diligent press that provides information to the public.

“All power must be checked, and the ultimate check on power is an informed citizenry thanks to a free press,” said Mindich.

Young people are not less intelligent, or disinterested in politics, Mindich asserted. The Daily Show with Jon Stewart is tremendously popular among young people. It is an entirely political show that requires a certain amount of political knowledge, explained Mindich.

Teachers need to find a way to engage their students in a way that elevates them like The Daily Show does, not that condescends to them, Mindich said. “We need to change our expectations of the students and challenge them.”

After Mindich’s talk, Ken Warren presented a paper entitled, “Learning Political Literacy through Chicago’s Public Schools: What’s College Funding Got to Do with It?”
Warren, who teaches at the University of Chicago, sought an answer to missing political literacy by looking back to public education prior to college.

“Those who teach college are limited by what is taught in primary and secondary school – where there is less control and lower funds,” said Warren. He urged involvement on that level, but cautioned would be reformers that it is a struggle and “it takes a lot to change the institution.”

Patricia Roberts-Miller was the final panel speaker, and she discussed the need for fairmindedness. “Teachers commonly think that people will not act unless they have information,” but, said Roberts-Miller, “while it is possible that people learn and remember because they are engaged with the information, the reverse is also possible: that people are engaged with the information and so they learn and remember it.”

She said that there can be a problem with political Calvinism on both sides meaning that one’s identity exists only within this political framework and the result is that one stops listening as soon as they know what the other person “is” (meaning how they would label the other person).

Roberts-Miller does not view this as a healthy way to treat political subjects, rather, she thinks there needs to be civil discourse and more than one viewpoint expressed.

Julia A. Seymour is a staff writer for Accuracy in Academia.