Extrapolating this apparent trend out an additional year might lead to the conclusion that all major points have been made and interest in the topic will have waned, but the proposers of this panel feel otherwise. Three of us, not coincidentally, teach at public universities in three closely divided states (Michigan, Wisconsin, and Ohio) whose electoral votes were individually determinative in deciding the election. As a result, we are particularly attuned to the pedagogical challenges and opportunities posed by the partisan political divide in this country and to the cultural fracture lines of which the election results were just the most manifest example. Now that the lingering shock many MLA members experienced has worn off, this panel seeks to nudge discussion into a new phase. Specifically, how can humanist and literary academics, following the lead of colleagues in political science, psychology, and sociology programs, foster and even celebrate classroom difference and diversity—defined not ethnically, racially, or religiously, but politically—in a time of extreme political animosity and social polarization?
The project is rooted in courses that the three panelists and the organizer have been teaching to great positive effect involving students whose median political affiliation is well left of center. They are all premised on the assumption that the hallmark of a liberal arts education is the ability to entertain and assess a wide variety of moral and ethical stances the evaluation of which necessarily takes one well beyond one’s own experiential limits. Insofar as they encourage respectful but by no means passion-free debate they jibe well with a range of initiatives taken by the Aspen Institute’s “Making Better Arguments” initiative, the Heterodox Academy project, the University of Michigan’s We Listen group, and the thrust of very recent general-readership books like Irshad Manji’s Don’t Label Me: An Incredible Conversation for Divided Times and Arthur C. Brooks’ Love Your Enemies. Standing one’s ground, as Manji points out, does not preclude finding common ground, and vice versa.
To this end, we are proposing three complementary papers. First, Rebecca Haidt, a seasoned expert in Spanish early modernism, will outline how her growing disenchantment with identitarian models of teaching and learning has led her to rethink entirely how she teaches Cervantes’ Don Quixote. Whereas for years she emphasized the work’s narrative complexity and metafictionality, she has now begun to stress the novel’s themes of cross-cultural communication and human commonality. Echoing the panel’s convention’s theme of being human, she will give pedagogical examples of what crossing boundaries and emphasizing human connectedness looks like both in her Quixote teaching and in a required undergraduate literature class.
Next, Peter Paik will discuss his strategies for diffusing what can be the fraught political atmosphere of his classroom in a time of culture war, which, he maintains, can chill speech more than actual war. In dealing with current tensions and mistrust, he created a course on the World Wars in which the readings and films represent the adversary’s perspective, such as Ernst Jünger’s memoir Storm of the Steel, the Japanese film Fires on the Plain, depicting Japanese soldiers mowed down by the victorious US forces, and The Skin, a novel about the liberation of Italy by the former fascist Curzio Malaparte. The syllabus also includes two films that depict World War II from the perspective of the Soviet Union, The Ascent and Come and See. By exposing students to the perspective of the enemy--or an ally that later became an enemy--he has sought to help them understand the perspective of victims of US foreign policy toward the United States. He was inspired to pursue this approach by Simone Weil’s essay, “Iliad: The Poem of Force,” which argues that it is impossible to tell whether Homer’s poem was written by a Greek or by a Trojan because it depicts the laudatory and the blameworthy in both sides.
Finally, Dana Nelson will explain why she now teaches courses—almost regardless of topic and disciplinary approach—that help win over her largely activist student clientele to the value of respectful debate and deliberation. First she helps students discover their own cognitive blinders; then she teaches them to argue more effectively and with a more open and generous mind. To do this, she helps them sort and contextualize arguments for and against issues they care about, develop a more nuanced understanding of various points of contention, understand the values that undergird opposing opinions, refine their own position relative to these debates, and make arguments that might plausibly persuade someone who disagrees with them. In performing the exercises that foster these skills, students learn how to write genuinely informed research papers. She will explain how she builds civic and academic strength by inculcating the value of robust and honest disagreement for making decisions as a polity, as a class, and as individuals.
Speakers have agreed to respect a strict 12-minute presentation limit in the interest of fostering a wide-ranging and, it is hoped, ideologically diverse discussion. It is the goal of the presenters to send attendees back to their home campuses with creative solutions for diffusing the tense ideological standoffs that have been counterproductive to open humanistic debate at too many institutions, particularly in the last two and a half years.