The 1909 from The State News

The 1909 from The State News Trailer Bonus Episode 98 Season 1

Post-election classroom concerns

00:00
Host Alex Walters, along with reporters Theo Scheer and Emilio Perez Ibarguen, discuss how professors are navigating how to talk about the election with their classes amid scrutiny from the university to stay politically neutral. 

What is The 1909 from The State News?

Welcome to The 1909, the podcast that takes an in-depth look at The State News’ biggest stories of the week, while bringing in new perspectives from the reporters who wrote them.

Alex:

It's Wednesday, November 12th, and this is the 19 09, state news weekly podcast featuring our reporters talking about the news. I'm your host, Alex Walters. A week ago today, professors across Michigan State faced a daunting question, how to go about class hours after the results of a truly consequential and divisive presidential election. 2 of my colleagues here tried to get a sense of how the faculty navigated that thorny predicament, and they're here with us today to talk about that. So, yes.

Alex:

Theo, Emilio, welcome to the show.

Theo:

Thanks, Alex.

Emilio:

Thanks for having us.

Theo:

It's good

Alex:

to have both of you guys back. This is, a great story you guys put together quickly last week, talking about how professors went about class after the results of the election. And yeah. Well, let me ask you this. This this is kind of a a sharp moment for this story.

Alex:

Obviously, the election also just sort of an increasing politicization of higher ed and different questions faculty are having to navigate, which I'm sure we'll get into. But before we talk about kind of those big ideas, I want you to take me through let's start our conversation the same way your story starts, with this anecdote about, this comm arts professor waking up Wednesday morning and trying to figure out what he's gonna do in class. Theo, tell me about, Bob Gould's morning.

Theo:

Yeah. So this is last week, Wednesday, just hours after AP calls the race for Donald Trump, and, broadcast journalist professor Bob Gold. He's sitting there before class, and he says he's doing a bit of soul searching. He's gotta decide how do I go about this. I know that students are concerned about the results this election that he says, you know, some may feel as though their status will be marginalized, due to the results here, and he just doesn't know how I'm gonna how am I gonna start off class?

Theo:

How am I gonna address this? And he says he's he's had a similar conversation with himself twice before in his time at the university, once during the Larry Nassar scandal and another time after the, 2023 mass shooting on campus. So it's a very and he says there's varying levels of trauma every time, but he knows that students are gonna be concerned, and he has to say something. But he just doesn't know what.

Alex:

And he's weighing this before class. He's trying to figure

Theo:

out what to do. Yeah.

Alex:

Now, Emilio, you've been covering the selection for us all fall. You did a great job. And so I think you have a kind of a sense of things from, like, the political standpoint. Could you tell me a bit about it sounds like I mean, you know, this professor's comparing this to very MSU specific things. Larry Nassar scandal, campus shooting.

Alex:

I mean, this is a national political election. Doesn't maybe feel like it has the same ties to MSU. Why is the the community so invested in this election? There's something different about it. You know, why would professors be weighing this so heavily?

Emilio:

I think the fact is, right, the the university is obviously a nonpartisan group, but the student body itself was a bit distraught by the results of the election on Tuesday. Around 74% of the campus voted for Kamala Harris in the election. And so I think that the ultimate result showing that Donald Trump was gonna return to the White House for a lot of students was, a cause of stress. You know, throughout the campaign, words about Donald Trump's, you know, potential plans in a second administration, concerns about project 2025 had really risen to the top of students' minds. And, so, you know, and created a climate so that on Wednesday morning when the results were pretty much finalized, a lot of students were in a rough spot.

Theo:

And that's not to say

Emilio:

that, you know, conservative students were also happy with the results, but the campus was fairly divided, and people were stressed out.

Alex:

I mean, is this a downstream effect of, like, we know we hear a lot from the national media and whatnot about political polarization, this election, maybe feels different, more divisive. Is this sort of the inevitable result of that that you have a Wednesday morning with the student body that is I mean, like, you wrote another story about, very feeling this emotionally heavily more so than just sort of like a policy electoral question.

Emilio:

Yeah. Yeah. I think the sentiment on campus is is definitely a a sort of downstream effect, like you said, of this incredibly polarized. Right? If all of politics is polarized and certainly college campuses, which sometimes serve as, like, little epitomes of the national conversations we're having about politics, We're certainly also polarized on campus.

Alex:

And then what about Theo, I think maybe you can speak to this. Take the kind of, like, national political sentiment out of it just from a higher ed perspective. I think this is obviously a complicated time for for faculty, for administrators as they feel increasingly like, politicians, electoral politics are very tightly focused on higher ed and have strong thoughts about what it should be. I mean, is that going into pressors' minds? Are they worried about those factors?

Theo:

Yeah. Absolutely. You mean in terms of how, an institution like an a university responds to the election or just the consequences of a Trump president?

Alex:

Yeah. I think that the place that universities and faculty are in right now with response to kind of political events feels different.

Theo:

Yeah. Yeah. Especially, yeah, with the Israel Hamas war, you know, that we're seeing that a lot of universities, university leaderships are deciding how do we respond to these things that students are very clearly concerned about. We see this huge movement of of divestment, etcetera, and a lot of strong feelings on both sides. But, you know, what's in the university's role in this, in this area, when it comes to world events, politics, etcetera?

Theo:

And we see more and more that people are are moving towards neutrality. A lot of colleges, I think a lot of big Ivy League Schools, especially in in recent weeks, have passed, policies for institutional neutrality, basically saying the university is going to be neutral on all sort of matters like like this. World wars, politics, etcetera. We're sort of seeing that played out in in this election is how are they going to address it. You know?

Alex:

Yeah. Well so let's come back this professor that we started the conversation with. With all this in mind, right, you've got, this complicated predicament. Higher ed feels itself in feeling the need to be neutral amid this, you know, time, as well as just people in general feeling politically polarized. What does this professor choose to do?

Alex:

How does he run his class Wednesday?

Theo:

Yeah. He chose to basically let the the students run the discussion instead of him. He was very neutral. He said, you know, he doesn't wanna, say he chose not to to to tell his students who he voted for, his political views, party affiliation, etcetera, and he just opened up class as a space for students to talk about their feelings. And he said that that's exactly what they did for, in one class.

Theo:

They spent 30 to 40 minutes just talking about how they felt about the election, their their fears, their worries, and and and everything like that. Yeah.

Alex:

And that's, you know, obviously, just one method of handling this. Amelia, you guys talked to a lot of professors with this story who did different things. Tell me about, you know, what's kind of the other way the professors went about this.

Emilio:

Sure. So I spoke with the professor, Brian Ell. He's an assistant professor in the College of Social Science, and he took a very similar approach, to just kind of opening up the room and allowing spaces for students to discuss not only their concerns, but also just how they were feeling post election. But a crucial difference there was in how Alice in this specific example, was very open about the fact that he voted for vice president Kamala Harris. And that seemed to be, you know, professors went either way.

Emilio:

Some state neutral, some explicitly said that they voted for. And for Ellis, it seemed like this decision to let students know how he voted was informed by this belief that if we wanna have a frank discussion about politics and the way it affects people, we ought to be honest with ourselves about that we all participate in the democratic system, and that necessitates the fact that we address that we all made choices. But that doesn't mean that, you know, being open about who you voted for in his mind doesn't mean that you're, making it harder for students who voted the other way to feel welcome in that class.

Alex:

Mhmm. Well, there's a quote in your story where where that professor says that he thinks it's kind of, disingenuous, I guess, to not say who you voted for to be neutral. And so this seems like sort of a disagreement amongst faculty. If someone like Bob Gold, do you talk to Theo, who's very into the idea of, like, by being neutral, I can let the students say whatever they want. Then you have, you know, another professor that you talked to, Emilia, who seemed to think very strongly that neutrality is like a or not neutrality, but saying who you voted for is like a noble way to handle this.

Alex:

What about, and, Emilio, you can talk about this. The the university itself, did they give some sort of guidance? Did they have, like, a preference of how professors should handle this? Did they, I guess, weigh in on this matter or professors free to, you know, kinda choose what they wanted to do?

Emilio:

So it seems like professors right after the election had a fairly large amount of agency to move around in, but right afterwards, university has been kinda walking a a pretty tight line on saying if if professors can or cannot make explicitly political statements. They received concerns that from some students that they from conservative students specifically that if professor were to cancel class or something, they'd feel unwelcome as conservative students. And a spokesperson also said that professors can make statements, but doesn't necessarily advise on whether they should or should not. And so it seems a very, wishy washy.

Alex:

So MSU didn't seem, I guess, take a position on how faculty should handle this, but that's not the only pressure faculty faced. Theo, I want you to tell me about you talked to or not talked to, but you you reported on, professors who faced kind of external threat from people outside the university that were criticizing their decisions. Tell me about that.

Theo:

Yeah. Absolutely. So it's very interesting. There is a, professor within the College of Arts and Letters who announced that, she would be canceling class that day after the election to grieve the results, of of of what happened.

Alex:

Grieve was Grieve was the word that she

Theo:

she used. And and she, you know, made a statement that says, like, you know, as a queer person of color, I can't go about my day like like everything is normal. And and she, you know, made made a very explicit political statement and also canceled class, and it received a lot of backlash. This is a statement that she posted on d two l, and it's very quickly screenshots of it was were shared among conservative outlets. I think they were first shared by these very large conservative, Twitter accounts or x accounts.

Theo:

I think endwokeness is one of them, and then Libs of TikTok is another, which is kind of infamous for tweeting about, educators and people online, and then subsequently, a lot of bomb threats, death threats come to these people. So they have a lot of influences. Yeah. Exactly. So that was that was posted, I think, across, social media platforms.

Theo:

We counted around, like, over 2,000,000 views. And, yeah, in response, you know, her faculty profile is down at the moment. Like, you can't access ways to contact her, as as well as her website, I think, has also been temporarily taken down.

Alex:

But it's it's interesting

Theo:

how we see MSU respond to it. This is one example of of, interesting how we see MSU respond to it. This is one example of of of canceling classes and kind of faculty reactions that MSU heard about, saw the screenshots on Twitter, etcetera. And, and they moved afterwards to tell faculty, you know, kind of how they should respond to the election. So Mark Largent, he's the vice pros provost and, I think dean of of education.

Alex:

He oversees kinda classroom instruction, that kind of thing.

Theo:

Exactly. He met with a lot of top faculty, a lot of deans, I think hours kind of after all this happened on on Thursday of last week. And he basically said, you know, you don't have to share your political views when he's in class. And if you are gonna cancel class, you know, he he reminded them of the policies around that, which states that they must be responsible for meeting their classes regularly and at scheduled times, and they must notify their units if they are to be absent.

Alex:

So he didn't say not to share your political views. He took the opportunity to remind faculty that they can choose not to share them. Right.

Theo:

It was definitely a a word of caution of of some sort, and I think, you know, it's people I'm sure interpret that in different ways. Yeah. So it it's kind of interesting to see how how MSU is is responding to that, whether it's, you know, like like Emilio said, I spoke to a spokesperson who made it very clear that she doesn't want to tell professors that they can't share their views, but they have to walk this line of, you know, sharing their own views, but but making sure they do so in a way that doesn't alienate students who feel differently.

Alex:

And and this this meeting with Largent where they gave this guidance was in direct response to the sort of conservative social media firestorm over that MSU professor?

Theo:

Over that MSU professor and also, she says, other examples of professors canceling classes, and also them hearing from, like Amelia said, conservative students who felt as though that, you know, they're kind of being biased that they're not feeling included by by those decisions.

Alex:

Well, then tell me, you know, you guys wrote about, Wednesday, Thursday of last week, the immediate aftermath, these first classes after the election, but I can't imagine that, you know, anytime soon this just goes away completely. Right? That we're just done thinking about this. If anything, I think I might I mean, a little bit of this has to stick around, you know, every day, I guess, for the next 4 years because these tensions, I think will exist whether or not it's right after the election or not. Did anybody talk to talk about that?

Alex:

I mean, is it, are are there thoughts about how professors will go forward teaching in the 2nd Trump administration with a campus that's so divided over it?

Theo:

Yeah. I mean, I think the sentiment is that with with a lot of of things that we study in in school here, you know, you can't just remove politics from it. You know, it it's a very, it's integrated. For example, I spoke to, Divya Victor. She's a, a English professor in the College of Arts and Letters, and and she said that, you know, she sees creative writing, which is kind of her specialty as as a socially engaged practice where poems and essays are in conversation with realities created by her political choices.

Theo:

So you can't really separate it, and I think that's gonna be something that is gonna be interesting to to see play out over the next, I guess, 4 years. You know, how do you integrate these things into class, and and see how the subject that you're studying interacts with it.

Alex:

Yeah. Yeah. Well, that'll be an interesting challenge for us to navigate, but also something I think in those disciplines they've navigated for a long time. But I'm sure you guys will keep reporting on it. So yeah.

Alex:

Well, thank you so much both for coming on the show. Thank you, Theo, for dressing up. No offense. But yeah. Well, that's all for now.

Alex:

We'll be back next week with fresh reporting from the great minds here at the state news. If you want to read Theo and Emilio's great story, you can on statenews.com or on the cover of our print issue, which came out today. Got a great print presentation. Yeah. Well, thank you guys both again for coming on the show.

Alex:

Thank you to our podcast coordinator, Taylor, for making it sound so nice. And most of all, thank you for listening. For the 1909, I'm Alex Walters.