How Should A Professor Act

The Rocky Mountain News publishes a piece by one Rabbi Hillel Goldberg on the role of the college professor in the classroom. This is in response to the Ward Churchill imbroglio that has been well noted on this site. I find the piece sobering and contains many good lessons for college professors. Rabbi Goldberg (who is a former college professor) writes:

The role of the professor is to teach - to enable students through careful tutelage in critical reading and careful research to reach their own conclusions. The role of the professor is not to spout off, and the definition of a good university is not a place where the spouting is equally balanced between left and right.

Wherein, then, lies quality and diversity in the social sciences and humanities? Not in the university as a whole. Not in a faculty equally liberal and conservative. But in the integrity of every single classroom. Professors in a genuine bastion of the social sciences and humanities expose their students to a variety of interpretations of history, politics and literature, without favoring any particular position.

The professor with integrity in, for example, political science can teach an entire course without his students being able to guess at his political predilections (at least based on his classroom performance).

The professor with integrity can debate, at least to a draw, any religious, political, or cultural position diametrically opposed to his own.

I obviously find his comments on political science professors of special note. I agree that a professor should be able to teach a political science course without the students knowing his politics. I have particular success with this in my bread and butter American Government course where every semester I have half a dozen students asking me what my politics are because they can’t figure them out. They always ask, “Are you a Democrat or Republican,” and my answer is always, “Yes.” Although, in fact, I am registered as an independent, it won’t surprise any reader of this blog that I tend to vote Republican (with exceptions) and have volunteered for the party (for example I am campus advisor for College Republicans, without myself being registered as a Republican). My upper division students, certainly after they’ve taken a class or two with me, can usually guess that my politics are right of center. But they don’t know the exact content of my politics, which are usefully eclectic so I can honestly make arguments that surprise them. I do not think that a professor has to keep his politics in a shell, although I have great respect for those that do, but I do think he must give his students various points of view and show them how to take opposing views seriously. For example, in my current American Foreign Policy course, the students have probably figured out that I am basically a supporter of the Bush foreign policy. But we did spend a day reading Democratic alternatives (from Peter Beinart, Sandy Berger, and Nicholas Von Hoffman) and are currently reading John Judis’ The Folly of Empire which is a critique of the Bush foreign policy from a Wilsonian perspective. My job as a professor is to present these materials in an honest fashion, making sure the students know the basic arguments, and then feel free to subject the works to criticism. We will do the same with Niall Ferguson’s Colossus which is an argument for American Empire (written, interestingly, by a Brit). In this the professor can serve as a model to his students in the proper approach to opinions that are not are own.