College and university professors have taken some heat in the last several years, which has intensified during the presidential campaign. On the one hand, the absurdity of these attacks has been great for business—especially for those of us who teach subjects deemed unpatriotic, or “woke.” In general, my undergraduate students have never been more engaged. They desperately want to know anything that would be banned in Florida. On the other hand, it’s getting scary. Those of us employed at colleges and universities are people—your neighbors, friends, and fellow Americans—who work hard to support our students. Instead of denigrating us, we could use some help.
In the recent debate between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump called out Harris’ father—an economics professor emeritus at Stanford University—as a Marxist. Surely, Trump argued, the apple didn’t fall far from the tree. “Her father is a Marxist professor in economics, and he taught her well.”
Teaching about Marxism and actually holding Marxist views are very different things. And perhaps more importantly, actual Marxists don’t count Vice President Harris among their ranks.
A student sits in a lecture hall.
Sina Schuldt/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images
Trump’s vice presidential nominee, Yale-educated JD Vance, has been even more vocal about his dislike of the professoriate and what he sees as their left-wing agenda. Vance openly views universities as “hostile institutions,” and while campaigning for the Senate in 2021, quoted Richard Nixon saying, “Professors are the enemy” because we’re dedicated to “deceit and lies, not to the truth.”
Despite characterizations of professors as elite ideologues, most university teachers in this country are state employees. And that comes with strings attached. To be a professor at the University of California, for example, I had to take an oath of office, pledging my allegiance to uphold the constitutions of the state and of the United States and affirming that I would not overthrow the government. I guess tenure and academic freedom really do have their limits.
The idea that professors have the ability to transform students into socialists, or anything else, is particularly astounding. If only we had such power! As any professor will tell you, we can’t always get our students to come to class, or read the syllabus.
Still, it’s difficult to teach courses on U.S. slavery and abolition or the Civil War and Reconstruction—my areas of scholarly expertise—without feeling under siege. It’s tough being accused of “enforcing dogma that is hostile to American conservatives,” as Vance proclaimed earlier this year, just for being honest about the historical record.
As I always explain to my students, I don’t teach that slavery caused the Civil War because I want it to be true for personal or political reasons. I teach it because that’s the justification secessionists gave. Read it for yourself. Stating its “prominent reason” for leaving the union, Mississippi’s declaration of secession reads, “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery.” It’s not particularly ambiguous.
There is nothing inherently radical about giving students access to the American historical record. Nor is it unpatriotic. To the contrary, it’s quite the opposite. One of the great virtues of the American system of government is that the state does not have the authority to limit speech or the circulation of ideas. Citizens can and should draw their own conclusions about important issues based on the free flow of knowledge.
In our era of never-ending gun violence, however, identifying me as an enemy or suggesting my colleagues are hostile toward anyone with certain views comes with very real danger. For one, it’s rarely true. More important, we know that violence occurs on college campuses with disturbing regularity. My home campus made headlines in 2014, when a shooter killed seven people and injured 13 others. Just last year, there were 30 shootings on college campuses. It is not an idle or farfetched worry to think it could happen again at my campus or any other. And the panic buttons in our classrooms offer little comfort.
It doesn’t matter to those looking to score political points that I tell every class that my job is to teach students how to think, not what to think, or that I adhere to the professional standards of my field.
What should matter to us all is that everyone on campus deserves to work and learn in a safe environment and to be treated with basic human decency. That does not change when we have disagreements about curriculum or pedagogy.
The reality is that most of us—faculty and staff—spend most of our time trying to help our students by supporting their academic goals and overall well-being despite budget cuts and disinvestment. It would be a whole lot easier to do our jobs without a target on our backs.
Giuliana Perrone is an associate professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is also a Public Voices Fellow of the Op-Ed Project.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.
