Teaching politics during political turmoil
2024 has been a contentious year, with elections at all levels of government across the country. What is it like to be a professor during such politically tumultuous times?
Photography by Haley Scull/The Barnard Bulletin
By Lauren Chao
December 22, 2024
Political participation has been a historical hallmark of the Barnard population, and the conversations surrounding the elections among students became more and more intense as November 5 drew closer. Barnard students have been taking action on election-related topics, such as voter mobilization and information, by taking part in numerous organizations such as Barnard Votes, Columbia Votes, Columbia Democrats, and many more.
Barnard students have also participated in politics by taking part in political science classes at the school. This fall, Barnard’s political science department is teaching 25 classes to students, meaning that there have been many opportunities for political discourse and discussions about the political climate of the country.
However, with the context of protests surrounding campus, it will be interesting to see if there are instances of self-censorship as an attempt to avoid further conflict and disagreement, which, at an institution that is known for being critical and contrarian about current events, especially political events, seems unsettling. Keeping in mind the current administrative policies and increased caution in how certain information is disseminated, this article will explore if and how professors, especially political science professors, are conducting their classes differently in this environment.
I interviewed multiple professors in Barnard’s political science department to ask them about how they are conducting their classes this year and if it has been any different given the current circumstances. As a disclaimer, I was not able to interview any professors who specialize in American politics, but I think that it gives a different, more unique perspective to the elections as seen in a larger global context.
I first interviewed Professor Alexander A. Cooley, the Professor & Vice Provost for Academic Centers and Libraries who focuses on International Studies, specifically Eurasia and Central Asia, and the legacy of former states under the Soviet Union that are impacted by various global forces today.
He first established his beliefs on his role as an educator: “I have an obligation to help facilitate conversations on polarization, contentious issues, how the domestic interfaces with the international — and to do it in a thoughtful and inclusive and equitable way. But I also strongly believe that we need to find avenues for our students to explore some of these topics.”
Cooley also talked about a previous assignment in his “Sovereignty and Its Challenges” class, where he “explicitly [forced] students to compare and contrast the reaction of a particular international entity [...] with their public statements on the outbreak of war in Ukraine compared with Gaza.” From this assignment, he concluded that he has seen students’ desire to have “meaningful conversations” and that “it's up to us to sort of harness and channel that desire to engage on these topics,” which highlights that translation of difficult subjects into productive discussion is possible.
When asked about how he approached divisive current events in his class, he emphasized the faculty’s prioritization of providing students with “scaffolds, whether they're debates, methods, visualizations, or the historical evolution of analytical thought on giving context to these issues” instead of “chasing the news every day.”
In response to a question about how polarization manifests itself in class and what that means for the dynamics in that space, the professor stressed the importance of asking questions such as: “How do we study these issues? How do you test the limits of sort of reasoning or sort of analogies?” By asking these questions, one can acknowledge division of ideas but also focus more on the exigence of those divisions and the issue at hand, which ultimately prevents disputes.
Professor Cooley’s teaching style is to “push the limits of arguments” and if a student is “selective in [their] evidence or [their] argumentation, [he will] call you out on it both in class and on [their] papers,” revealing how his approach is based less on censorship and more on critical questioning of what is believed to be true, especially if there is a bias present.
For Professor Cooley, it did not seem like teaching was much different this year than in previous years because he always taught “really difficult topics like triggering issues — questions of political exiles being targeted and hunted down, questions about human rights, about resurging authoritarianism,” which is a good sign for current and future students taking his classes as it means that they can count on consistency when it comes to dealing with grim issues in the world.
The professor’s closing thoughts revolved around student participation and the diversity of student ideas, stating how “everyone is focused, attentive, [and] engaged” but simultaneously feels responsible for “offering viewpoints and entries and platforms that might not be immediately obvious on some of these topics.” His goal for his students is to “harness this engagement and energy and then ensure that our students have the frameworks, the skills, the methods, the historical understanding to be even more confident in what they believe and what they want to advocate for.”
The next faculty member I interviewed was Professor Marjorie Castle, the Term Associate Professor of Political Science who focuses on regime change in central Europe, with a more recent focus on the integration of American politics with her other areas of expertise, honing in on democratic backsliding and political violence.
For Professor Castle, her interest in elections began with Poland’s election on June 4, 1989 because it “started the collapse of communism in the world” and she remembers being in Poland and seeing “the utter surprise and amazement with which everyone responded to the election results” and how the interest that everyone showed in the elections inspired her own interest in elections.
Now, as a professor, Castle asserted the importance of the 2016 U.S. election and shared her personal emotions that day, specifically that she “had not mentally and emotionally prepared [herself] for it,” waking up the next morning with concern about “how I was going to be able to continue [because I] was very depressed by the election.”
Her next response to the outcome was to write an op-ed titled “Respect election result, but demand more of our institutions” in the Salt Lake Tribune, which “helped [her] cope with a political outcome that [she] found both depressing and a bit scary.” She reflected on her thought process when facing an undesirable situation, and shared that she tries to “deal with it intellectually” by “thinking about the causes and the implications of [the outcome] systematically, whether [she does] so in writing or in teaching [her] students.”
To elaborate on how she relates with students during tense times, she looks to “[show] them how to apply particular theoretical tools to help us understand [the world] better and how we can use them to test our ideas about how politics or the media work.” Castle’s “teaching style is a style where [she tries to] show the students how [she thinks] through ideas, how [she applies] ideas to a set of empirical facts and [she takes] them through [her] thinking encouraging them to do the same.”
To wrap up her ideas about how students approach politics and the election in particular, Professor Castle mentioned that she really enjoys “when times are interesting like this and particularly when times are interesting in terms of American politics because there's greater student engagement.”
Professor Castle also wanted to share some of her classes next semester which she thinks will be interesting in the wake of the upcoming election. One of the courses she will be teaching next spring is “Political Violence,” which will focus on stochastic terrorism and political intimidation in the United States “on the basis of political violence elsewhere” to “understand political violence in a new context and perhaps in somewhat different forms.”
She will also be teaching a class called “Democracy’s Guardrails,” which covers “political actors that have the choice either to betray or support democracy when it's being threatened” as well as a course on democratic breakdowns and backsliding. Courses like these cover topics pertinent to the election as well as the future of political discourse and power in the U.S. and around the world.
Elections affect not only ideological and political issues, but also the well-being of American adults. For the general voting population, talking about elections can result in anxiety about the future, and it can make it more difficult to bring up these conversations in class and on campus.
The American Psychiatric Association conducts a mental health poll each year, and for a pre-election poll, data revealed that 73% of the adults surveyed showed concern about the 2024 U.S. elections. Additionally, access to health insurance as a result of potential election results was an issue that generated a significant amount of concern, with 39% of adults showing stress about this topic.
Since the election, there have been spikes in interactions and usage of mental health providers, support organizations, and communication help lines. Spring Health, for example, saw 24% increase in account creation on November 4 and 5 and 240% more appointments booked on November 3 and 4; the Trevor Project received 125% more calls, texts, and chat messages on November 5; and Crisis Text Line fielded 33% more communications on November 5.
The method in which professors teach their classes will inevitably impact the perspectives of the students in the class, and any hindrances related to freedom of expression and speech should be reevaluated if it affects the integrity of the information that we as Barnard students learn because it will inform our actions on campus and in the broader community. It is important to have faith in the current faculty and their teaching methods for today’s political issues, and as long as students do our best to engage and think deeply about the inception and future implications of current events, we can still have fruitful discourse about topics such as the election while avoiding conflict and misunderstanding.