When Politics Has a Place in the Classroom

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Credit…Kimberly Elliott

To the Editor:

Re “Colleges Have to Be Much More Honest With Themselves,” by Greg Weiner, the president of Assumption University (Opinion guest essay, March 30):

Mr. Weiner is absolutely correct when he criticizes colleges and universities for encouraging students to conform to liberal ideologies. However, he misses the mark when he suggests that college professors should avoid political topics unless they are specifically relevant to the course material.

He writes that “there is neither conservative chemistry nor progressive calculus.” But, in fact, the production of scientific knowledge is itself inextricably linked to social and political forces. The research questions scientists pursue and the methods they use to do that research are intertwined with both societal and personal values.

Instead of ignoring politics, all professors should address it in a way that encourages healthy disagreement and respect toward differing opinions. Scholars of all disciplines should be aware of how political biases may affect their work.

By promoting one ideology, universities do a disservice to their research — but by suggesting that politics are irrelevant to the sciences, they open up their research to similarly persistent, though less visible, bias.

Sarah Schoeneman
Buffalo, N.Y.

To the Editor:

Greg Weiner asks higher education to take an honest look at itself but unfortunately doesn’t engage with the “left” ideas he decries, referring to them as “incomprehensible” and admitting that he is relying on “a caricature” and “cartoonish extremes.” What he casts as meaningless are actually courses on racism, homophobia, sexism and the history of these parts of our culture.

History shows us how the argument that “a caricature is an exaggerated portrait of something real” was used to justify violence against leftists, gay people and Jews in decades past. As students are grabbed off the streets by masked ICE agents, this history should not be dismissed so blithely.

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