The University of Wisconsin at La Crosse has issued an apology for an email a professor sent to students last week that blamed the government shutdown on the “Republican/tea party controlled House of Representatives.”
Rachel Slocum, assistant professor of geography, sent the email to all of her students in an online class. Slocum sent the message because students were no longer able to complete a data-gathering assignment for the class when government websites, such as the Census website, closed for the shutdown.
“Those parts that you’re unable to do because of the shutdown will have to wait until Congress decides we actually need a government,” Slocum wrote in the message. “Please listen to the news and be prepared to turn in the assignment quickly once our nation re-opens.”
The email made its way to national news outlets such as The Daily Caller and Yahoo!. Presumably one of Slocum’s students forwarded the message along.
La Crosse Chancellor Joe Gow apologized on behalf of the school i“n an email sent to the La Crosse community Tuesday evening”:http://mediatrackers.org/wisconsin/2013/10/09/la-crosse-chancellor-apologizes-liberal-professor. In his message, Gow wrote that La Crosse officials deemed Slocum’s email inappropriate.
Dueling emails aside, the situation raises an intriguing question: should professors be permitted to send emails to students that betray their personal political convictions?
For professors to air their political beliefs in the classroom raises some obvious problems. First, the podium is not a pulpit. A professor’s political opinions do not belong in, say, a geology class. The professor is there to teach geology, not pontificate on politics. And even in a politics class, a professor’s views should not take center stage. A savvy student might be able to divine a teacher’s political leanings by looking at her publications. But if a professor allows her opinions to hijack her teaching — if she is unable to evaluate arguments on their own merits, play devil’s advocate and encourage receptivity to new ideas — then the presence of political convictions in the classroom makes itself felt as bias and restricts what students learn. This problem is a pedagogical one, we should note. The myth of colleges as liberal-indoctrination mills is not what we refer to.
Second, a professor might make some students feel uncomfortable if she expresses her political beliefs. A conservative student with a liberal professor might fear that his political alignment will negatively affect his grade.
The case for attempted neutrality and open dialogue in the classroom is strong. But does anything change when professors log into their Gmail accounts?
Email correspondence is similar to speech in the classroom or office hours. When a professor communicates with students she must meet certain standards, regardless of the medium.
But it seems unfair to hold emails to precisely the same standards of political neutrality to which we can hold classroom lectures. For one, a professor lectures to a captive audience. Email is a more egalitarian medium. Students can delete or disregard a message in their inbox. So the potential for political bias to disrupt student learning is diminished when the political bias is communicated in an email.
In addition, we can think of instances where professors might betray a political allegiance in a way that benefits students. Imagine that an environmental sciences professor forwards information to students about an environmental-organizing internship. The internship strikes some students as having a liberal bent. Even if the professor did not comment on the internship in her message, passing the information along strikes some students as an implicit endorsement. Has this professor done something wrong? We would say that this kind of email does not violate pedagogical standards. Nor is the email likely to make students feel uncomfortable. The message has hints of partisanship, but it is related to the course and alerts students of an opportunity that some might enjoy.
What about Slocum’s situation at La Crosse? The administration’s response seems like an overreaction. The tone of her email makes it clear that the professor is not sending the message out of a desire to convert her students or brainwash them. The email merely conveys the professor’s frustration at governmental dysfunction having a direct negative impact on her class.
And in Slocum’s case, it wasn’t the professor who inappropriately injected politics into the classroom so much as it was politics that entered her classroom, unwanted, when the shutdown made it impossible for her students to complete their assignments.
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