On false binaries and teacher neutrality

I was taught and trained by liberal humanists, who relied heavily on the seminar method—we’d read a provocative text, and then come to class and argue about it. The job of the teacher was to mediate the generally vehement debate (it was Berkeley, after all), a task that different faculty enacted in different ways. While some of them clearly favored one side or another (as indicated through raised eyebrows, a smile, or even active participation), most of them tried to keep the debate more or less equal either by staying entirely out of it, and just trying to keep the argument from falling too deeply into ad hominem or ad baculum (although all arguments had at least a few people skid through the edges of those ponds), or a few had the strategy of taking the side of the less-skilled interlocutors (insisting that all points of view be treated as equally valid, even if they weren’t equally well defended) and intermittently playing devil’s advocate of various possible positions. While it was clear that the first sort of teacher was actively promoting a point of view, it was conventional to talk (and think) about the latter two pedagogies as the teacher having a “neutral” stance.

And there are considerable educational benefits of those latter two pedagogies—clearly grounded in the humanist tradition of Mathew Arnold and Kenneth Burke, those teachers treated us not only as though every student’s stance was as valid as any other student’s, but as though our literally sophomoric reactions to the central questions of the Western humanistic tradition were as valid as the authors whom we were reading. One of my favorite professors explained why he had students reading Plato, John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx, and Sigmund Freud in first-year argumentation courses. He said he wanted students to feel that they too could contribute to the long and great debate, and to see that even famous authors had glitchy (or even actively dodgy) arguments. Coming from a working class background himself, he wanted to undermine the notion that Great Authors had nothing to say to non-elite students, and those students had nothing to say back.

I mention all this because, by talking about problems with this pedagogy, I’m not advocating abandoning every aspect of it—I think there is value to honoring sophomoric reactions to complicated texts, and I often say that I benefitted from being trained by humanists who didn’t make an issue of my gender. On the other hand, I equally often say, there were problems with being trained by humanists who didn’t acknowledge that my gender was an issue.

One such moment was when a class was discussing some writings by the Marquis de Sade, and my own visceral reaction to treating rape as a joke and rape-porn as thoughtful philosophy was shouted down, particularized, and pathologized. That course was taught on the basis of the teacher not intervening at all, and I was suddenly profoundly aware that my stance on the material was not equally valid because it was my stance—a woman whose concerns about being raped on the way home from class were dismissed as paranoia.

I was touchy on this issue because, as I walking home from one of the seminar meetings (which ended in the evening) a car full of men started cruising me, with the men telling me about wanting to rape me. I just walked up to a doorway and knocked, and they went on. Not that it matters, but it was in the midst of a bunch of frats with very bad reputations, and they looked like frat boys to me. Berkeley, at that time, was in the midst of an extraordinary number of rapes.

My professors were neutral on that issue, and my reaction to de Sade was explicitly dismissed as not neutral. One of the students in the class (who later wrote his dissertation on de Sade) said that no one could find de Sade erotic, which meant I was now explaining things like snuff and rape porn in a graduate seminar. I was easily moved into the box of “crazy woman.” One of the faculty, the one reknowned for remarking on the asses of women students, and who was having an affair with an undergrad, did, after that, undermine me in all sorts of ways. The other professor became my dissertation director, and told me he would never teach de Sade again. So, which one was “neutral”?

I’m not sure I believe in neutrality as a goal or virtue, but I would say that the person who most worked toward fairness was the one who acknowledged that his personal experience was particular, and that others had (and have) other experiences.

I loved (and still love) my training—I got three degrees there, after all. I’ve had a dream career, and I still stand back and find footing in principles I learned at the Berkeley Rhetoric program. The Berkeley Rhetoric Department had faculty whose commitment to inclusive deliberation, writing instruction as meaningful intellectual work, and passionate commitment to the notion that all students can engage with the intellectual tradition informs every class I teach.

Yet, on the whole, there was a sense of training as the liberal humanist model. And it didn’t always work. The premise of the first-year argumentation course was that papers should be written to be persuasive to the opposition position (a pedagogy that still informs how I teach). In the teaching practicum, we were asked to write papers like that, and a colleague wanted to write a paper about how, for a woman walking alone every strange man is a rapist—to think otherwise is dangerous. That wasn’t her main point. I think she wanted to advocate some change to campus policies regarding safety or training, but I don’t remember because she never got past that sentence in the paper. She was presenting this paper in a graduate course about pedagogy, and the whole discussion exploded. Several males were insulted to be called rapists, which is how they read the argument, and couldn’t read it as a fairly accurate claim from a perspective they don’t have. The goal of a “neutral” classroom meant that her (our) experience as women who have to treat every strange male as a potential rapist were counted as equally valid as his feelings of being insulted.

One last example. I was teaching in a relatively small college in a fairly small and very conservative town, and was continuing to require that students try to persuade opposition audiences, and I was trying to have the same open and vehement discussions I’d had in Berkeley. We had read George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London, and the most talkative student in the class had no sympathy for Orwell or the other homeless—he mentioned smoking cigarettes, so he was clearly using his money irresponsibly. (This is pretty typical of people who believe in prosperity gospel.) My training at Berkeley made me think that I could invite students to make any argument they wanted, and all those arguments would be shared, in peer review, with all the other students.

That made me neutral. But it didn’t at all.

Another student (who had spent some time homeless because his parents had kicked him out of the house for being gay) was livid, but couldn’t make his argument in that college in that community because of the potentially violent consequences to him personally if he came out. Whether I was personally or pedagogically neutral didn’t matter—the classroom wasn’t neutral because the community wasn’t.

One characteristic shared in these examples is the tendency to focus on teacher neutrality as though that is both necessary and sufficient for a neutral classroom, and my point is that it isn’t. I don’t think we can have a “neutral” classroom, and I’ve come to think we shouldn’t. I teach about various genocides, and I feel no obligation to be neutral on issues such as whether they actually happened, whether they were morally defensible, or whether the victims brought it on themselves. They did, they weren’t, and they didn’t. Biology professors don’t have to be neutral about evolution, physics professors don’t have to be neutral as to whether gravity is a fact (or if it’s really “intelligent falling”), and geologists don’t have to allow equal time in the classroom for flatearthers.

But neither does that mean that the teacher has the truth and the classroom should be a place in which we pour our truth into the empty heads of students. My favorite teacher as an undergraduate described teaching argumentation as trying to get students into the range of plausible and well-argued claims. Our job isn’t to reward students for getting the right answer, he said, but for putting together a good-enough argument. And, he said, if you’re doing your job, there should be students getting good grades with whom you deeply disagree, and students getting not good grades who share your politics. That isn’t a neutral classroom, because we bring judgment to bear on the arguments, but neither is it an indoctrination session.

It’s hard for us to think about neutrality effectively in pedagogy because our culture has a sloppy neo-post positivist construction of what it means for anyone or anything (a teacher, a text, an author, a news program) to be neutral. Even in composition studies, there is a tendency to create a binary of epistemologies, and assume that there is either naïve realism (it is easy to perceive Reality) or some kind of extreme social constructivism (so that there is no reality external to language or no human can make claims about it). For naïve realists, a “neutral” statement (aka, objective, unbiased, or factual) is one that immediately appears true to a reasonable person—neutrality is the same as non-controversial. (It ends up being “non-controversial to the in-group”, but that’s a different argument.) For rigid social constructivists, there is no such thing as neutrality, nor even degrees of it, so we are all swamped in our own miasma of socially constructed beliefs (except about social construction, which is a factually-based statement and universally true claim). As is clear from my snark, I don’t think either position is either valid or helpful. But, more important than my judgment is the consequence of the belief that there are only two options: many people defend a simplistic naïve realism because they reject the rigid social constructivism and vice versa.

We can have better arguments about teacher neutrality when we have a richer sense of the range of epistemologies—not all realisms are naïve realism, and not all forms of skepticism are rigid social constructivism. Further, we don’t have to agree on any specific epistemology. To have better arguments about neutrality we just have to acknowledge that there are various kinds of fallibilism—that, because of various kinds of cognitive biases, something might appear to be true and yet be wrong, and we can leave it to others to argue about just how wrong we inevitably are. That is, our job is to make students aware that “neutral,” “objective,” “non-controversial to people like me,” “factual,” and “true” aren’t necessarily the same things. And to acknowledge cognitive biases is not to claim that we have no ability to reflect on our own thinking, to make plausible claims about a shared world, or to assess claims.

In short, I’m saying that neutrality isn’t possible as an epistemological or political position, and refusing to intervene in class discussions doesn’t mean our classrooms are neutral. There is another way to think about neutrality, however, that is potentially useful: that we apply the same standards across all groups regardless of group identity.

Just as there are different epistemologies, there are different biases. And, while we can’t be bias-free (that isn’t how human cognition works) we can be aware of what biases are likely to harm us, our students, and our teaching. The main cognitive bias that makes epistemological neutrality unlikely (perhaps even impossible) is in-group favoritism. We tend to perceive people like us as more reliable (even “objective”), having nobler motives, and providing better arguments (we will tend to fill in the gaps in their arguments). Thus, for instance, the male teachers in my experience thought the male reactions to rape were the unbiased ones, because they seemed unemotional, and an unemotional reaction to the possibility of being raped seemed sensible simply because they shared the experience of not worrying about being raped.

It wasn’t anything about logic or emotion; it was about in-group favoritism, with no awareness that that was what was going on.
We are going to have in- and out-group students in our classes, and we are going to be biased toward in-group members. We can stop trying to be epistemologically neutral and instead strive for being fair.

It’s my passion for fairness that caused me to abandon “open” assignments (which I think are tremendously unfair in all sorts of ways). We can set up assignment prompts that are fair insofar as the projects require comparable amounts of time and effort, will result in “writing” (whether papers, podcasts, multimedia projects, or other kinds of texts) that can be assessed by the same standards, and on which we, the teacher, do not have a “right” (or even preferred) answer.

That last criterion is important. We shouldn’t invite students to write papers that will identify them as members of a group we cannot evaluate by the same standards we would use for members of an in-group. They might be members of groups we find appalling, but we should not set ourselves up as judges of their souls. This emphasis on standards that operate across groups doesn’t mean that there is a level playing field for all points of view. If, for instance, we require that students treat a reasonable opposition argument fairly, and/or use scholarly sources, certain arguments are almost impossible to make. And it’s appropriate that we set such requirements, since those are the conventions of academic discourse we are supposed to be teaching.

One advantage of relatively specific assignments is that it’s more straightforward to ensure that students from various political positions can still write good papers, and even to ensure that writing a good paper does not require students to divulge their political, religious, or cultural views.
And the last point I’d make about teacher neutrality is that many people, especially moderately authoritarian ones (a position that appear anywhere on the political spectrum), assume that we are presenting texts as containers of truth—we should only teach texts with which we agree, and that we think are true. Authoritarian teaching methods—insisting that students agree with everything we say or we have them read—doesn’t successfully inculcate that content (we won’t make students into feminists by having them read Susan B. Anthony). But authoritarian grading methods—insisting that students endorse Susan B. Anthony’s arguments in their projects and class commentary by punishing students who don’t—does model and endorse authoritarianism. And authoritarianism and democracy don’t mix.