What are college students actually being asked to read on the most polarizing controversies of our time — and does what’s on the syllabus reflect the genuine scholarly debate, or only one side of it? That question animated Claremont McKenna political scientist Jon Shields’s presentation at the Heterodox Academy 2026 West Coast Regional Conference, held recently at UC Berkeley, where he discussed “Closed Classrooms? An Analysis of College Syllabi on Contentious Issues,” a working paper co-authored with Yuval Avnur (Scripps College) and Stephanie Muravchik (Claremont McKenna). Drawing on the Open Syllabus database to examine how three flashpoint issues — racial bias in the criminal justice system, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the ethics of abortion — are taught across millions of college courses, Shields finds that students are overwhelmingly assigned the dominant progressive text without its most serious critics. The deepest cost of this one-sided pedagogy, he argues, may not be indoctrination but alienation — of moderate and conservative students who quietly opt out of politicized courses, and of a broader public losing confidence in higher education. The full discussion is transcribed below, including commentary from UC Berkeley statistician Will Fithian and UC Davis law professor Brian Soucek, and a Q&A with conference attendees.
Steven Brint: Our panel is going to focus on a very interesting paper that Jon Shields and two colleagues wrote. Some of you may have read it already, about the closed classroom, how controversial issues are taught in American classrooms. Jon is going to present for about 15 minutes or so. Then we have commentary from two distinguished folks. I should say Jon is a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College. Our commentators are Will Fithian, an associate professor of statistics here at Berkeley, and Brian Soucek, who’s a Martin Luther King Jr. Professor of Law at UC Davis. They will talk for about seven minutes, and then Jon will have an opportunity to respond for five minutes or so, and then we’ll open to Q&A. So, Jon, please.
Jon Shields: Well, thanks to Heterodox Academy for organizing this and having me out. It’s a pleasure to be here. I honestly didn’t know if I’d make it. I got really sick this week, but I’ve been popping pills all week, and I think I’ve turned a corner, so I’m real happy to be here. So today I’m going to just briefly summarize some research that I did with Yuval Avnur and Stephanie Muravchik, both at the Claremont Colleges. And this work really grows out of the belief that education in free democratic societies has some responsibility for forming citizens. And citizens need some fluency with ideas and intellectual traditions that are contending for dominance in a democracy. And they need to acquire some ability to critically assess them. And that raises a sort of question for us in the university, you know, which is how well are we introducing students to the moral and political controversies that shape our democratic life?
And surprisingly, there isn’t a lot of research on this question. We know a lot about the politics of professors, thanks to a lot of good empirical work on this subject. We have surveys, in fact, on professors’ politics going back to the 1950s. But we really don’t know very much about how the politics of professors shapes how they teach. The education historian Jon Zimmerman has pointed out that kind of paradox about college teaching. He notes, “college teaching is a highly public act that has remained mostly private.” And Jon, when he makes this point, always illustrates this with a good anecdote. He’s an excellent teacher, and so some years ago he received NYU’s teaching award and he was invited to a big ceremony that honored him, and the provost introduced Jon Zimmerman, and as he introduced him he read a long list of all of Professor Zimmerman’s publications, right? Because that’s what was most visible, right, about him, and not his teaching.
So we found a way to get a glimpse, at least, into college classrooms, thanks to a large, publicly available database called Open Syllabus. It’s amassed millions of syllabi, primarily by scraping them from websites. The data go as far back as the 1990s, though most of it has been collected in the last 10 years or so. The database doesn’t provide scholars with the raw data, but it provides a sort of searchable database with some useful analytical tools that can help us assess the data. And so for example, it allows us to see how frequently texts are assigned. And importantly, it allows us to see what they’re assigned with.
So we use this database to look at three controversies. And we’re really interested in, you know, actually we began by just sort of asking, like what are some of the most polarizing controversies? Right. And so we looked at three. We looked at racism in the criminal justice system. We looked at the ethics of abortion, and we looked at the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. All three issues, I think, have been uniquely polarizing sources of division in our democracy. Two have been uniquely polarizing on American college campuses over the last decade or so. And in each case, we were interested to explore the extent to which the scholarly debate around these issues is taught to students. So we were not interested in whether demagogues like Tucker Carlson are assigned to students. Rather, we were interested in whether students are exposed to a spectrum of the most reputable and informed thinkers. And we were guided primarily by our own familiarity with the academic literatures in each of the issues we looked at, as well as citation counts. We used that knowledge to first identify some of the most influential texts on each issue. And then we assess the extent to which those texts are taught in conversation with either critical texts or texts that broadly align with their point of view.
So I’ll give you an example, a few examples of what this looks like. So we look, for example, at Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, which inspired a political and moral reckoning over our criminal justice system. You can see its extraordinary influence, right? It’s been cited over 19,000 times since 2010. It was on the New York Times bestseller list for five years. Kendi rightly said, I think, it was one of the sparks that lit the fire of the Black Lives Matter movement. And it became a very popular text in university courses, as it should have. In the database, it appears in over 5,000 syllabi, which places it among the most assigned texts in the database. It appears more often than Shakespeare’s Hamlet or Paradise Lost. And if for some reason you’re not familiar with the book, the core of the book claims that mass incarceration is essentially Jim Crow 2.0, right? It’s a system that was intentionally designed to subjugate and control black Americans, except in some ways it’s more sinister because it seems neutral and colorblind on the surface, right? So it’s more perverse in some ways. So it was a bold and provocative thesis, the kind that tends to stir academic controversy, which it did almost immediately. Enter James Forman Jr. Professor Forman is a Yale law professor. He’s notably also the son of the famous civil rights leader, James Forman Sr. And so not surprisingly, he had a deep interest in the claim that Jim Crow, a system his father helped defeat, had suddenly been resurrected. This is a topic that he found, of course, significant both personally and politically. And so he began developing a powerful rebuttal, first as a working paper in 2011 that then became a law review article a year later. And it was pretty critical, right? I mean, in fact, he essentially argued that nearly all of Alexander’s empirical claims were wrong. And not just wrong, but really demonstratively wrong, right? Deeply wrong. And his work culminated a few years later with the publication of Locking Up Our Own, which argued that there was no racist conspiracy at the heart of mass incarceration. Instead, he said the origins of mass incarceration were simply just much more tragic. He argued that black mayors and police chiefs first rose to power at a moment when violent crime was surging, and they responded to that pressing challenge with tough-on-crime policies. The book was a great success. It won the Pulitzer. It was listed by the New York Times as among the 10 best books of the year. And other books soon followed, I’ve highlighted a few here that in various ways also pressed against Alexander’s thesis. Again, all by prominent scholars.
Now to our central question, right, which is to what extent are any of these critical texts assigned with Alexander’s? And if you haven’t seen this data, you might just take a moment and just, you know, guess in your mind how often these texts are assigned with Alexander. And so I’ll show you the data here. You can see that almost never is the answer, right? Really, really very rarely. Forman’s Pulitzer Prize–winning book is assigned about 3.5% of the time. A lot of the other texts, much less. Honestly, these numbers really shocked me, truly did. I thought they would be considerably higher than they were. Still, we wondered, maybe we’re missing something, right? Maybe there’s some other universe of courses that doesn’t teach Alexander, but teaches a kind of anti-Alexander orthodoxy, right? Some smaller universe of courses. So we essentially just flipped the analysis. And instead of starting with Alexander’s classic text, we started with the critics and then asked, okay, what are the critics assigned with? So I’ll show you that data here. And you can see the numbers look really, really different. So at the top there, this is Forman’s working paper or law review article, right? You can see that when that is assigned, Alexander is included about 82% of the time, right? And even Sharkey at the bottom — Sharkey’s, you know, when Sharkey’s taught, Alexander’s included 26% of the time, which is much lower, but actually a lot of other, he’s often paired with other voices in sort of Alexander’s ideological space, right? I think what this suggests, though, is that there’s a minority of professors who really do teach this controversy, right? There’s some division, right? And if there’s a silver lining in this work, that’s it.
Okay, so then the question is who is assigned with Alexander if not her most important critics? Who do professors assign with her? These are the top three titles. By the way, I think all great books to teach, I’ve taught a couple of them, but clearly books that are not going to generate a lot of tension with Alexander. And in fact, you can look at the next hundred most commonly assigned texts, and you’ll find a lot of books more or less in this same ideological space. They’re not works that are deeply in tension with her argument. And it’s not just this controversy. We also looked at the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. There we find the same broad pattern. Voices that are sharply critical of Israel are frequently assigned. Those that are more pro-Zionist in their orientation are rarely taught.
But I want to, in the interest of time, I want to look at our third case on the ethics of abortion, partly because it’s different than the other two. And I think the variation is interesting here. The three cases we looked at, the ethics of abortion was sort of the least unbalanced. It was the topic that was most liberally taught. And we really didn’t expect that going in. And so I’ll offer some reflections as to why that might be the case. So in the case of the ethics of abortion, it’s clear that there’s no work that’s been more influential than an essay by Judith Jarvis Thomson called “A Defense of Abortion.” It was published in the early ‘70s prior to Roe. It’s also a great essay to teach, one I’ve taught many times. And she made this classic case for the pro-choice position. She says, you know, regardless of what the moral status of the embryo is, women don’t have a moral obligation to carry these embryos, right? And she came to this conclusion by way of a now-famous thought experiment that’s familiar to generations of college students. She says, imagine you’ve been kidnapped and attached to a violinist who’s quite sick, and not just any violinist, but a really famous one. And you’re told you just need to stay connected to this violinist for nine months, after which the violinist will be cured, he can go on his way, and you can as well. And she asked, would it be unjust to disconnect yourself from the violinist? She said, no, of course it wouldn’t be. You don’t have an obligation to support bodily the life of this other person. It was a really creative, inventive argument. It invited a lot of criticism, particularly by pro-life philosophers.
And so I want to quickly get to the data here. So these are the top titles assigned with “A Defense of Abortion.” You can see what’s interesting here is that the most assigned work, by Don Marquis, is a pro-life essay, right? So historically different, I would say, from the way race in the criminal justice system is taught. And so here you’ve got a substantial minority of professors who are really teaching the controversy. If we flip the analysis again and start with, say, Don Marquis rather than Thomson, we see again the same kind of pattern. So these are the most commonly assigned titles with Marquis’s pro-life essay. Judith Jarvis Thomson is number one, 75% of the time. Mary Anne Warren — that’s also a pro-choice argument. So here again, when the critic is taught, the pro-life critic is taught, in nearly every case there’s a pro-choice perspective that’s assigned with it.
And so I think these findings raise a sort of interesting question, which is why is the ethics of abortion taught in a broader way than, say, racism in the criminal justice system or Israel-Palestine? It’s not as if professors are especially sympathetic to pro-life points of view, right? And it is sort of surprising that professors are more willing to make room for a conservative position on abortion than a center-left one on race in the criminal justice system, right? And so part of the explanation we theorize here might be just disciplinary. These are the fields that are most likely to assign Thomson’s essay. You can see that it’s almost taught by philosophers, presumably by analytical philosophers. And of course, you know, philosophers are a sort of famously disagreeable lot. They have a, you know, they’re sort of open to contending positions, arguments, et cetera. And so there might be a greater commitment to liberal education in that field. By way of contrast, these are the disciplines that teach The New Jim Crow. And you can see there’s, first of all, there’s quite a range. And so some of these fields might not have a lot of expertise, first of all, in the criminal justice system. And additionally, some of them are perhaps more politicized than the field of philosophy is. I was struck, for example, that it’s sort of striking that English literature professors seem to teach it more often than political scientists do.
I want to close here by asking a kind of more normative question, which is to think about why this matters, right, or why it might matter. One reason sectarian education might be a problem is that it might be alienating more conservative and moderate students. And I think there’s lots of good evidence that’s true. I’m happy to talk about it. But I think the populist right tends to emphasize indoctrination, which may be the wrong emphasis. Instead, maybe there should just be more emphasis on alienation. It sort of pushes lots of students away who don’t find this kind of education on the serious, or alienating. So just as Americans are sorting into red and blue communities, college students may be doing the same thing on campus, right? Where more conservative, moderate students are picking less politicized majors, classes, etc. It also might be alienating the public. Lots of Americans are worried that higher ed has become too sectarian. And it’s not just Republicans, interestingly. It’s lots of independents. And it’s a minority of Democrats, too — a sizable minority of Democrats worry about this. It also might matter because of some of the civic reasons that have been discussed already, right? Students need some civic knowledge. There’s often so much emphasis on, like, civic discourse and civility, but they also just need knowledge, right? And I think, I fear that if we present controversies as if they’re orthodoxies, we’re really not preparing them to think seriously about these issues, right? Instead, we’re signaling that the nation’s most polarizing issues shouldn’t be polarizing at all. The lesson is they’re not very complicated, or they shouldn’t be complicated, and they shouldn’t be divisive. And then finally, I think civic skills. Students just need to develop the habits of mind to become good citizens. Things like curiosity, skepticism, intellectual humility. And also perhaps maybe something that doesn’t get emphasized enough is we need to elevate just the authority of reason in young people’s minds, right? Such that they’re willing to change their mind in the face of powerful evidence and arguments. Thank you.
Will Fithian: Thanks very much, Jon, for your presentation and for the work that you’re doing. I’ll start by saying I’m very sympathetic to the core thesis of the paper, that we’re failing to encourage students to think critically about dominant progressive narratives or to remain open-minded to competing narratives. There’s no question that there’s widespread fear in academia that seeming to challenge those narratives can draw professional sanctions or angry and disruptive crowds. There are plenty of examples from the University of California one can point to over the last several years to justify these fears for the issues you studied.
At UC Berkeley, we have a recurring problem of angry crowds besieging events on Israel, as Daniel Sargent alluded to. And at UCLA, a prospective hire in the psychology department was canceled when it came to light that that candidate had questioned on a podcast whether it was wise for universities to require diversity statements. Faculty fears unquestionably reach into the classroom. I’ve been told by more than one Berkeley law professor that they’d be afraid to teach a criminal law class because they’d be afraid to teach established criminal law doctrines around consent and self-defense, fearing that some of the students might be so enraged just to learn what the law is. So it would be surprising to me to learn if faculty weren’t flinching from presenting works on the criminal justice system that challenge the progressive frame. Fortunately, the kind of headline-grabbing events faculty fear are still comparatively rare, and what I think is worse than the attacks and what enables them is a kind of tacit community norm that certain narratives just aren’t supposed to be challenged. Most faculty do know how to hold calm, reasoned discussions about contentious issues, and making a conscious effort to lead by example and expose students to divergent perspectives on controversial issues is one of the most effective things faculty can do to establish better norms.
To move toward better practices, it helps to measure them, and your analysis paints a nuanced picture of the three case studies you consider. Having said that, I don’t think I’d be earning my keep as the statistician on the panel if I didn’t find something to attack about your methodology. One thing I’d like to have seen is a control group. So your three examples had two variables in common. First, that there were broadly two different perspectives or clusters of perspectives. One that currently occupies a more dominant position in the academy and another that pushes back and offers a competing narrative in response. And second, that the dominant narrative has a more progressive political valence in contemporary American politics, while the competing narrative, if not explicitly conservative, is at least less far to the left than the dominant one. In all three cases, you show that works presenting the progressive narrative are assigned more often than the works presenting the competing, less progressive narrative, and you attribute this difference to the political valence. But I’m not sure I have a good intuition for what the numbers would have looked like if the political valence were absent. So I think the numbers would make a more compelling case if you compared them to analogous data for other academic controversies where the debate between the dominant frame and the main alternatives either has little left-right political valence, or where the polarity is reversed. As an example of the first, it might be interesting to compare the literature of more dominant cognitive behavioral approaches in psychology with more sort of dissenting psychoanalytical approaches. And as an example where the usual valence is reversed, we might consider a comparison of neoclassical economics to less market-positive strains like Marxist or Keynesian approaches. If you see similar patterns in those cases, you might be identifying something broader about university pedagogy rather than something that’s specifically driven by left-leaning bias.
The second point about your methodology: one great strength of your work is your focus on the kinds of works that we would expect to see on college syllabi, influential works by well-respected scholars. But in a way, I think it is also a limitation that you use academic metrics of influence to identify works that are neglected in academic instruction. Using that inclusion criterion, we can’t detect well-evidenced perspectives that have been more comprehensively excluded from academic syllabi because they couldn’t get a fair hearing in academic discourse in the first place. Of course, the danger of broadening the lens to include such perspectives is that we might fall into what we might call the flat-earther trap. I think we all agree that the fact that a third of Americans believe in ESP doesn’t mean it should be taught in psychology classes, but it could be very interesting to look for perspectives that have been influential among expert authorities outside of academia, such as federal judges or regulatory bodies. As an example of the second, we might think about the Cass report that’s been very influential among medical regulators in the area of youth gender medicine. If this report and other works like it are still being excluded from syllabi for relevant courses in gender studies or medical schools, even after winning the argument among many regulatory experts, that could raise questions without falling into the flat-earther trap.
Finally, I want to make a broader point that I think sometimes gets lost in discussions about viewpoint diversity. One of my favorite things this paper does is that it advocates for making better use of the viewpoint diversity that already exists in academia. When we talk about how to import more diverse voices into our community, I think we sometimes forget how much we can accomplish by finding ways to give voice to the many students and faculty who are already members of our community, who have been drawn to institutions of higher education because they’re curious and they enjoy critical thinking, but who have been intimidated into silence by feeling like they’re alone or feeling like they would be violating institutional norms by vocalizing their criticisms of certain viewpoints. Exposing our students to the diversity that already exists in the academy is one of the highest-leverage actions we can take to show our students that there’s more dissent among academics than they might realize, even on hot-button issues.
Brian Soucek: Jon’s paper is so wonderfully provocative, and I’m going to put off until the end of my comments what exactly I am hopeful that it will provoke. But I worry about Jon’s claim that there is a reluctance — he says this on page 48 — a reluctance to teach academic controversies in full. Because I don’t think Jon knows, or I know, or any of us knows what “in full” means in that sentence, outside of our own discipline. So let’s take a look, for example, at the philosophy example, at Thomson’s canonical article on abortion. My PhD is in philosophy. I don’t think that philosophers have better marks here because we’re somehow innately more open-minded or anything like that. I think philosophers at their worst can be as doctrinaire as anyone. It’s certainly the most sex-imbalanced and probably sexist department in the university. At philosophers’ best, there’s an emphasis on virtues like the principle of charity, where we are trying to give the best version of our opponent’s arguments. And in fact, that might be a reason why sometimes we need more time on a particular article as opposed to teaching it alongside its opponent, because in a survey class like the sort that Thomson’s article is generally taught in, you need that time in order to have the students draw out the very best of what she’s saying.
I asked a philosophy colleague on the way here this morning why he thought his colleagues in his department might not teach other articles alongside Thomson’s. And there’s a variety of answers. One is, her article is so perfectly written, it’s so funny, that almost anything you would assign next to it is just going to pale in comparison and seem like an unfair fight. As I said, you might need the time, especially in a busy survey course, to do charitable readings of a number of canonical articles. But most of all, I think the most important fact is something about Thomson’s article itself, which gets under-emphasized, I would say, in Jon’s article, which is to say the structure of the argument, of Judith’s argument, is to, at the outset, grant her opponents — grant the pro-life faction its principal claim — which is to say the personhood of the fetus. So this is not a case where the normal political debate, as we encounter it in American political life, where we need to pair Thomson against someone else, someone who thinks that a fetus is a collection of cells or something versus someone who thinks a fetus is a person with a soul. That is not the debate here, because Thomson grants as her opening move, this fetus is a person. And yet the bearer of that person doesn’t have the responsibilities, for the reason she goes on to say using the violinist example. So Thomson’s article is a particularly interesting one in how it crosses the polarization of the usual debate as it exists in American political life.
And I think that’s actually quite common when we don’t operate at a 35,000-foot view of controversies, but delve down into actually how they play out within particular disciplines. I would parenthetically be very interested to learn more about why 13.5 percent of the people assigning Alexander’s New Jim Crow are in English departments. I tried calling a few English professor friends last night to get — they had no insight for me, but I have to imagine that the reason it’s being assigned so often in an English lit curriculum is, if we looked and figured out why she’s being assigned there, I wonder whether the precise kinds of controversies that, say, Forman has with Alexander might just prove irrelevant to the purpose that that book is serving within that particular discipline.
I can say in my real discipline now, law, these kinds of things play out in different ways, mostly because of the overwhelming predominance of the case method within law. So one unusual factor there, which might be interesting for study, is so many of our at least most controversial cases, the ones we spend the most time on, are cases in which there’s both a majority opinion and a dissent. So we have two sides of the issue built in to the very thing we’re teaching. And then of course there would be an open question of how often are law professors assigning both the majority opinion and the dissent. I get asked every single year near the start of class why it is that I assign so many dissents. After all, the students are there to learn — think that they’re there to learn the law, and learning the law doesn’t come from the dissent. Doctrine is based on the holding, which of course requires five votes at the Supreme Court, which means the majority. So they say, why are we even reading this? And of course, we all know the answer. Everybody here knows why you want to hear the other side of an argument.
I think it would be completely irresponsible to teach the Harvard, North Carolina affirmative action majority opinions, in order to tell my students what current doctrine actually is in my equal protection class, without also teaching the dissents by Justice Sotomayor and Justice Jackson. Similarly, on the flip side, I think it would be completely irresponsible, professional malpractice, to teach Justice Kennedy’s opinions in the gay marriage cases, Windsor and Obergefell, without teaching at least Justice Scalia’s dissents in those cases. But even that wouldn’t be good enough, because to really get anything close to teaching the controversy in full, I would need to also be teaching the critical race perspective on the affirmative action cases, which is neither conservative nor liberal. In fact, the closest person on the court to the critical race perspective is actually Justice Thomas, in saying, you know what, we wouldn’t need affirmative action in the first place if universities weren’t so focused on their rankings, being driven by their elite status, and so concerned about legacy admissions and athletic admissions and admission preferences for donors. It’s blowing up the whole system. Same with Obergefell. We wouldn’t just teach the conservative and liberal approach, but also a critical queer approach, which wants to blow up the institution of marriage as a whole, seen as a patriarchal sexist institution.
So you need to delve down into each particular discipline in order to have any idea what amount of the controversy is being taught and whether that amount is appropriate or not. And that talk of disciplinarity then necessarily gets me to what I think is the key point in all of this, which is academic freedom. Certainly it’s the key point in any thought of what do we do about the insights of Jon’s article. But I don’t mean this just in the sense of, academic freedom, there’s nothing to do because academic freedom means I get to teach whatever I want and design my own syllabus. That is not my point. I want to emphasize instead the responsibilities that are inherent in academic freedom. So at the University of California, for example, we of course support our academic freedom in teaching in the same way we do relatedly to the way we do in terms of research. It is left to the individual scholar to decide how best to pursue their research and bring that research into the classroom. But there is a more profound basis for our protection of academic freedom in teaching here at UC, and it’s explicit in our policies. It’s to say that the goal of education at the university level — when you’re not a seminary, you’re not a high school or grade school, you are a true university — is to instill in our students a mature independence of mind. And that requires not just this kind of giving them the materials to have a mature independence of mind, showing them the dissent as well as the majority, as well as those positions that aren’t even represented on the current court at all. Those things are needed, but so too we have to model for the students that kind of mature independence of mind, what it would mean to be open-minded. We need to model the kinds of virtues that I think are at the core of academic freedom, a kind of modesty, which I think we need more of in terms of judging the English department, for example. Let’s actually ask what English is doing with these kinds of texts. Modesty, open-mindedness, an openness to revisiting your conclusions, a resistance to indoctrination. Those are the kinds of virtues that I think academic freedom depends on if it’s to achieve its aims in the classroom.
And so the last thing I would say, just because academic freedom is at heart a virtue doesn’t mean we can’t do things institutionally to try to instill or reaffirm those virtues. I myself, in part because of the provocation of Jon’s article, would be very open to asking professors when they write their teaching reports, for hiring, for tenure, for promotion, ask them to say, what have you done to instill a mature independence of mind in your students? One thing I think that would do, which is one of the great virtues of Jon’s article, where I think the provocation really lies, is to make all of us think, what have I done to instill that kind of mature independence of mind? What have I done in my syllabus? Whether or not statistically Jon’s article holds up, one thing it does do is force me to ask, well, does it hold up in my own practice? Am I giving the kinds of diversity of readings that are necessary to achieve the ends that we’re trying to instill?
Now, of course, what I’ve just described is exactly the same thing that I’ve long described — many of you have heard me describe — in terms of diversity statements. I think diversity statements done the right way would be asking the exact same question. What have you done to fill any gaps within your discipline, within your classes, in terms of diversity, equity, inclusion? And the value there, too, I hope saying that doesn’t make you just disregard my former proposal, because what I would rather you see is that in both cases, if it’s done well, what it does is to, one, prompt a discussion among disciplinary communities about what they could be doing better, including in their assignments. But also, and more importantly, it’s less in how you get judged based on those statements and more on what those statements, much like Jon’s article, force you to think about — your own practice and your own virtues in these areas. Thanks.
Jon Shields: Thanks, gentlemen. I really appreciate it. And I appreciate particularly some of the critical engagement with it, some of which I agree with. So, I mean, Will makes the point that it would be interesting to look at other issues that aren’t quite so hot-button, right, and I basically agree with that. I think that would be interesting. You know, he also suggests, I think, that there’s a lot of professors — you know, if you just read the paper, you might get a misimpression of the professoriate as a whole. There’s lots of more moderate professors out there who are less activist in their orientation, who might be afraid to teach some of these topics, perhaps. And I think really one of the keys to reforming the university is persuading some of the professors that Steve Teles calls liberal institutionalists. These are folks who tend to be left of center, but really believe in liberal science and liberal education, to actually teach some of these topics. I think one of the reasons the findings are so stark is because those professors with the strongest incentive to teach some of these courses tend to be the most activist in their orientation. And so again, I think one of the keys to broadening the curriculum is just getting lots of kind of more normie professors to teach some of these topics. And once they do that, it really creates a political mark, a kind of different kind of marketplace for students too, right? They don’t have to choose, like, either a very one-sided course on Israel-Palestine, for example. They can choose something more interesting.
Teaching controversies in full. I mean, I agree with it in part, right? Like, I guess, and maybe I wouldn’t have used quite that — I wouldn’t have put it quite that way, because I don’t know that, I think I kind of agree that, it’s not as if I think professors need to teach every relevant sort of perspective on a given issue. I think really what we’re trying to capture, though, is that courses can be relatively closed or they can be much broader, and capture some of the deep disagreement that really does surround these issues.
Is Thomson perfect? You know, I mean, what’s sort of interesting about this is, actually, a lot of the Thomsonites that followed her would say no. You know, they spent their careers trying to fix the problems they saw in Thomson’s classic essay. I mean, thinking of people like David Boonin. But I also would just call for some humility here, too. I think when there’s a scholarly controversy, we’re, of course, going to have different perspectives on the merits of various scholarly positions. I mean, just speaking for myself, I mean, I’ve taught The New Jim Crow a number of times. I think it’s a bad book, you know, if I’m just being frank, mostly, right? Like, I think it’s kind of conspiracy theory with footnotes. But lots of people who are smarter than me think it’s a great book, right? And it’s at the center of the scholarly controversy, and so I teach it. And so I think, you know, we all have some responsibility to doubt our own judgment in these matters.
I also don’t think — actually I think Thomson’s essay does fit very neatly with the broader political polarization. I think pro-choice organizations basically took a version of her argument. You know, they said, you know, we can’t really know about the status of the fetus. That’s a question that’s hard to answer. But what we can know for certain is that women should have a right to control their own bodies.
I guess I would just ask, too, a kind of general question, like, if these findings, you know, aren’t concerning, my question is, what would we have found that would have been concerning, right? Like, what would have been the finding that — at least maybe for Brian, right — that would have raised some real concern about, you know, like, would lead you to believe that, oh, actually, yeah, higher education is becoming too sectarian, at least in some of these questions.
Steven Brint: We have a little time for questions, so please raise your hands for questions.
Audience member: I love that point about the normie professors, and how — because, like, a conversation that we’ve had, that I’ll just make public then, is that, like, one of the things that’s interesting when you look at the data is if you look at the share of classes, of all the syllabi, like, where Michelle Alexander, for instance, or Foucault or Marx or anyone is assigned. So, like, Foucault is the most cited person, but he’s only cited in, like, 2% of all syllabi or something like that. And so this point that you made about how, like, one of the big problems — I thought it was just a really insightful point — but how one of the big problems actually is that it’s not the case that in most college classes, students are, like, being pushed Michelle, you know, New Jim Crow on them, and then nothing in between. I think a bigger problem is that there’s actually a space in a lot more classes to have kind of more normie people who are not activists in orientation talk about these topics. I thought that was just a really beautiful point. So I just wanted to double-click that.
Jon Shields: Yeah, I mean, I will, on the point of exposure, right? I mean, I do think it depends a little too on the kind of university we’re talking about, right? I think it’s, some of the selective institutions, for example, exposure to, say, Michelle Alexander is much higher, right? I mean, I was just at Amherst College, for example, and just asked the students in the room to raise their hand if they had read the book, and nearly all raised their hand, right? So I think with some of the ideas, right, it’d be good to have better data on this, of course, but my sense is the exposure to some of these political intellectuals is pretty broad. But actually, I think one of the arguments that maybe we don’t make well enough and we need to do more with is just — I mean, actually, I think some of these contentious issues need to be taught a lot more than they are, right? And as students are underexposed to some of these controversies, take Israel-Palestine. I mean, the vast majority of students just don’t know anything about it, like, even just the rudimentary, like the real basics. And so I’d like to see some of these topics taught a lot more than they are, for sure.
Audience member: Hi. I have a little bit more of a broader methodological question. Will, your point of there not being a control group, per se — I think that is an important one. And I’m curious, I’m not as familiar with the Open Syllabus database in terms of how it can be used, but is there a way to use it as more of an exploratory measure to kind of see what potential areas that we’re not prescribing of, like, kind of these hot-button controversial issues? Is there a way to use it in a more exploratory way to see where there is potentially asymmetry in various topics? And to Brian’s point of how these things vary across fields — I know you presented some data of how those vary across fields, but as Brian mentioned, the use case may be different depending on the discipline and type of course. I’m curious of just how this can be used to see how there may be asymmetry in teaching of topics that aren’t necessarily these hot-button issues, and what we could learn from that.
Jon Shields: Yeah, I mean, sure. I mean, you can — I mean, it’s very good at, as I said, I mean, you know, it’s, like, very good at, you know, getting a sense of what texts are taught and then what are they taught with. And I think, so I think the method can be applied to, like, a whole range of disciplines, topics, et cetera. And I certainly hope that other professors do some adjacent sorts of studies. I mean, we picked some of these controversies, again, probably ‘cause we thought they were important, also because we were just familiar with them. And so, some of the — I think, to Will’s good suggestions, it’d be interesting to get scholars who have other concentrations and expertise to really sort of explore it. The one thing I’d say is, it would be — look, it would be troubling if — maybe this is a more normative point, right — it’d be troubling if we saw the same pattern across a whole range of scholarly controversies, not just the ones that are most polarizing. However, I think there’s something particularly upsetting, like, or concerning, if we’re not teaching the most politically polarizing controversies, right? And to me, that’s partly because it goes to the heart of the public trust problem that we’re dealing with. And so I think it’s especially important those controversies are taught well.
Audience member: Hi. I was curious if you had — my senses of those three issues you pointed out, Israel and race and the abortion. If, because most of us, at least speaking for myself, I know someone or probably have experience with abortion, in my senses. But professors probably have more experience with that issue, and even students do, compared to those other two issues you brought up. And so does that, you know, closeness to the issue perhaps lead professors, or perhaps force them, to consider a broader perspective? I’m just trying to understand the question.
Jon Shields: You mean because people, because young people get abortions, and—
Audience member: Yeah, young people do. Professors do. All of us know probably someone who’s had one. Anyway, so does that level of experience lead to a greater, you know, broadening of perspectives in the classroom compared to the other two issues where there’s less experience, perhaps less direct experience.
Jon Shields: You mean, do you get a wider variety of student voices and perspectives because it’s familiar?
Audience member: Yeah, well, and the professors themselves teach perhaps both topics, both sides of it.
Jon Shields: I guess going into this, we actually expected — I mean, without knowing anything about what we’d find, I thought abortion might be the most one-sided in some ways, just because, I mean, the one thing that surveys consistently show is that the social liberalism of professors is really high, right? And so there aren’t — there doesn’t — right, there aren’t many professors with pro-life sympathies, whereas, you know, views on things like Israel and Palestine, the professoriate is much more divided. And so, or you take a radical perspective like Alexander’s on the criminal justice system — and again, on those issues, I would have expected just a greater range of voices because professors themselves are more divided on them.
Audience member: Hi. I’m sort of kind of a sociologist and sort of kind of not, but since there are two sociologists on the panel, I just thought I’d throw out a theory here. And that is, it seems to me that what makes abortion different from Israel-Palestine or questions about race and criminality is, in my opinion, we misconceive gender as a driving variable as opposed to a subordinate variable. And I think about the work of somebody like Maurice Bloch, which shows that in a crisis, people very often — women — tend to subordinate gender over to things like clan identity or group identity. So what it seems to me is that race and questions of Israel and Palestine automatically activate a different type of identity commitment. And in spite of all the magical thinking that people want to see with gender solidarity, I honestly don’t think of the idea of womanhood being actually a sufficiently stable identity to create the types of campus opposition that we see with these other issues.
Jon Shields: Maybe. I would just observe, if you look at, like, a text like Judith Butler — you know, she’s not, I mean, she tends to be taught with other kind of like-minded critical theorists. So there might be something — so I’m not sure the issue of gender in general is taught in a—
Audience member: I’m not talking about the talk. I’m talking about facts on the ground, in that gender doesn’t create actual coalitions that are affected in the same way as Palestine or Black Lives Matter or something. We want to see gender as an activating variable that at the end of the day is nowhere near as powerful as other types of social identity.
Will Fithian: Well, that may be true in a sense, and I’m not a sociologist, but I don’t have as much disciplinary humility as what’s being called for sometimes. But I guess I would say it hasn’t stopped people from being extremely fearful of openly discussing gender issues in the classroom, I think, for sure.
Audience member: Hi there. Thanks for your presentation. Two questions, one for Brian, one for Jon. Brian, I’m curious, as I’m hearing the arguments and critiques that you’re leveraging, they seem to be rooted a lot in what’s ideal or what’s theoretical about teaching. But I’m wondering if, when you consider the results from Jon and his colleagues, if you still would consider that to be a signal that something has gone awry or something’s amiss. We can’t know what’s being taught in every class — and if we did, then we’d have strong evidence. But if you still think it stands as a signal. And then, Jon, maybe there’s detail in the paper, but I’m curious, have you looked at your results over time to see if the pairings, or the mismatch between how frequently things are or aren’t taught on both sides of the argument, have changed over time? So is it that back in the 2020s there’s a big mismatch, but then now, here in more recent years, that mismatch has disappeared a bit?
Brian Soucek: So I hope I didn’t communicate in any way that I wasn’t troubled by Jon’s paper. That’s the whole provocative point. I’m deeply troubled. I think every single one of us should individually be deeply troubled. And I think that the next step to that should be thinking very hard about our own syllabus and those of our colleagues, because those are the only ones that I have any position from which to judge. So that even this last comment, talking about Judith Butler and a bunch of similar things — Jon, I don’t think you’re in a position to say within gender studies what counts as a similar position. Gender studies is one of the most — I stay far away from it because it’s so fraught. It’s a terrifying place to venture, not because as an outsider coming to it, but within it. I mean, I’ve organized amicus briefs with, you know, leading, you know, with Catharine MacKinnon and people like this. And it is just terrifying. And I will not beg the question that there is less diversity there, less contestation, than there is in the typical economics department. And I can’t answer whether that’s true because I’m not in either of those departments. And so that’s my concern, that this needs to be a matter of disciplinary discussion. So I would love to see — to answer what would make me happy — to see this being done on the level of a discipline, you know, where we could really be thinking through, with co-authors that know that discipline, you know, that are in it and that kind of thing. And maybe the law idea is one, although there is the problematic part of that that I mentioned, which is there’s a reason why people aren’t always teaching dissents the same, you know, because it’s not law. But seeing whether there’s a political difference would be very interesting there.
And so, that I’m not overly ideal — I’ll just add one other thing into this, which is what is driving, what is doubtless driving some of this, is not just closed-mindedness of professors. Because what we see, and what Will said about so many law professors in Crim not teaching rape law — that’s because of their student evaluations. They know they are going to be raked over the coals in their student teaching evaluations, which are — because they are outsourcing to definitionally non-experts in the field — a per se violation of academic freedom. And that’s something that we should be thinking about as well. We have studies that say that we all get punished for deviating too far from the political views of our students in either direction. And so that’s a real constraining force, then, on what people are teaching, and one that has to be acknowledged.
Jon Shields: Yeah, so the question about, do we look at this over time — the answer is no, for a couple reasons. One, it’s just sort of hard to do the kind of analysis we did given the constraints of the website. But the other — additionally, most of the syllabi are fairly recent, from the last 10 years or so. One thing we really wanted to do but couldn’t do is look at the age of the professors. I mean, our working hypothesis is, it may be that there’s — that that’s relevant, that older professors tend to be, you know, somewhat less in the activist-scholar mold. And so you might have found, for example, that they’re better at teaching, you know, the broader controversy than younger professors. But again, we weren’t able to do that.
Steven Brint: So we’re gonna have to end it there. Let’s thank Jon, Will, and Brian.
