Distinguished Lecturers
Jonathan Zimmerman

From immigration restriction and gun control to the Mueller investigation and the impeachment hearings, our era has witnessed possibly unprecedented levels of political polarization and recrimination. On our airwaves and the Internet, especially, Americans shout past each other in a 24/7 deluge of snark and invective. That creates new challenges for our universities, which are supposed to expand our knowledge of the world and also teach the skills and virtues of democratic citizenship: reason, tolerance, and informed participation. But many of our campuses have not stepped up to this task; instead, they have echoed or even accelerated the polarized tenor of our moment. This talk will critique the spirit of contemporary campus politics and also provide suggestions for improving it. 

Critical Race Theory. The 1619 Project. Mask mandates. As contemporary headlines remind us, American public education is wracked by “culture wars.” But these conflicts have shifted sharply over the past two decades, from religion to nation, marking larger changes in the ways that Americans imagine themselves. From the Scopes Trial over evolution in the 1920s through battles over school prayer and Bible reading in the late 20th century, our bitterest school battles surrounded questions of faith that lacked room for compromise. Either human beings evolved from other mammals, or they did not; either Christ was the Messiah, or he wasn’t. By contrast, conflicts over history instruction were resolved by adding formerly ignored or stigmatized groups to a triumphal national story. Racial minorities and women had suffered injustices, textbooks acknowledged, but they eventually shared in America’s larger bounty of progress and freedom.

By the late 1990s, these patterns began to reverse. Conflicts over religion cooled, as orthodox believers patronized Christian academies or simply taught their children at home. But battles over American history in public schools flared as never before. The elections of Barack Obama and Donald Trump—two diametrically different presidents--triggered angry shouting matches over the idea of America itself. Was the nation born in liberty, or in slavery? Was it fulfilling its promise of human equality, or did racism remain an enduring blot upon it? These were questions about the larger national story, not simply about who was included within it. But the biggest question was whether we retained enough faith in public education—and in ourselves—to let students make sense of America on their own.

College professors are experts in their subjects of study, but they're mostly amateurs in the classroom: unlike research, our teaching lacks consistent standards and practices. At the same time, it has also been a near-constant target of reform. For over 100 years, American colleges and universities have struggled to make college teaching more "personal" via discussion sections and other small-group activities. Technological innovation has aimed to "personalize" teaching as well, by making it more convenient for the student, but it has also rendered teaching more impersonal by widening the distance between student and teacher. The accent on the "personal" has itself been a major obstacle to professionalizing college teaching: the more we associate teaching with individual qualities and characteristics, the less amenable it becomes to real change.

How have different nation-states taught about sex in their public schools? This talk suggests that the United States--often considered a laggard in sex ed--was actually the world leader in the first half of the 20th century, when the US pioneered sex education as a way to fight venereal disease.The American approach came under fire in the post-WWII era from European countries, which tended to stress individual rights and pleasure over social goals and outcomes. In the so-called Third World, finally, sex education--of any kind--was often rejected as a corrupt fruit of the overly sexualized West. How can Western liberals square their twin commitments to sex education and to cultural sensitivity?

In 2003, during a fifth-grade current-events lesson about the United States' newly begun war in Iraq, a student asked Indiana teacher Deborah Mayer if she had ever attended an anti-war protest. Mayer told the class that she had driven by such a protest a few days earlier, and had honked her horn in support. Her school board declined to renew Mayer's contract, noting that she had deviated from the board's approved curriculum. And four years later, a federal appeals court upheld the board's decision on similar grounds.
Across the country, Mayer's defenders decried the apparent assault on her "academic freedom." But K-12 teachers in America have never enjoyed such freedom in a manner that university academicians would recognize. During wartime especially, school boards and courts have discouraged or blocked teachers from engaging their students in an open, critical dialogue about controversial ethical and political issues. Zimmerman's talk will explore these restrictions, the fate of the teachers who broached them, and the implications of this history for contemporary democracy.