Back to school and the myth of the corrupting leftist professor

It was the custom of the institution where I went to grade school that in the eighth grade, before graduating to high school, every class spent a month or more reading, pondering, and absorbing the U.S. Constitution. It's not a long document, only 7,591 words including the original wording and amendments -- and there were four less amendments back then.

Our eighth grade home room teacher handed out little white books. We slowly read the document through, trying to understand just what those old guys meant when they created a legislating Congress, an executive President, a judicial branch -- and more strangely what they meant by seemingly odd injunctions such as "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion." I think we spent a whole day trying to decipher the 10th Amendment: "powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

I loved what I learned and the process of trying to understand the country's basic law.

What I didn't notice until much later was where our teacher had acquired the little books we were reading: they were distributed by something I'd never heard of called the John Birch Society. My much loved home room teacher was something of a reactionary right winger -- in retrospect, I wonder whether someone else might have directed less attention to what the Constitution forbids the federal government to do and more to the Reconstruction amendments (13th, 14th, and 15th) that extended civil, legal, and citizenship rights to all men in the country (women were a contested afterthought.)

But I certainly didn't come out of that intense study a right winger myself.

It was the spring of 1961. I had seen on TV four years before that African-American children about my age had to be escorted to school through a howling white mob. The year before I had seen images of young black college students covered with glops of thrown food being dragged away when they tried to get served a coke at a segregated food counter. I was young and hopeful and knew instinctively that I was on the side of the brave rule-breakers, even if I had little idea what that meant.

I tell this story in response to a hardy perennial article that turned up right on time for "back to school" in the Times last week. Molly Worthen is trying to tamp down the "conservative fear that universities are packed with leftists leading students into godless socialism ..." She assures them:

The conservative boogeyman of the tenured atheist radical who brainwashes innocent undergraduates is more myth than reality. It’s true that academia has long leaned to the left, especially in the humanities and social sciences, and activist professors do exist.

True. Erudite Partner is one such (without the tenure or the atheism.) But do these profs really turn their charges into radical rebels?

EP thinks not. Just as Worthen (and every responsible observer) suggests, she tries to teach critical thinking: how to understand the assumptions underlying an argument and assemble a factual basis for a response. The method takes if students work to make it their own. What they end up believing is their choice, a far more grounded choice if they have struggled to understand premises and implications.

For today's students, as was true for me way back when, the strongest influence on the political attitudes they build for themselves is the civil and social context in which they live. Contemporary students learn from each other and from the world into which they are trying to make their ways; professors can only nudge, expose, and perhaps amplify, but not so much lead.

Yes, they may come out more liberal than they went in. One of the great political divides in contemporary U.S. society is between those with a college degree and those without; those with degrees are becoming a reliable Democratic constituency. What college students learn in college is how to be among other college educated people -- that's a more powerful incentive toward loose liberalism than any class or teacher.

And then they look around at the world their elders have made: the belligerent ignoramus we put in power; an economy devoid of opportunity for many which hobbles them with debt; the human-generated climate chaos which can rob them of any stable future whatsoever. These realities of context make for a generation many of whom are drawn to progressive and even radical measures, regardless of what anyone is teaching them.

The hardy perennial back to school article defending liberal teaching is getting tired.