To be, or not to be (objective when teaching this election)?

That is the question, and political scientist Spencer Piston has the answer.

By Spencer Piston | Boston University College of Arts & Sciences

In the classroom, many professors try to avoid making statements that appear to be politically biased. That is, if they criticize the Republican Party, they attempt to appear objective by making an equivalent criticism of the Democratic Party as well.

However, Donald Trump’s campaign for the presidency has convinced some professors to behave differently. Among other things, Trump has flouted democratic norms by threatening to refuse to accept the results of the election if he loses or by threatening to jail Clinton if he wins. In response to Trump’s campaign, one professor recently argued, “there must be a logical extreme at which even people in my position are morally obligated to speak out.”

In my view, many professors have long been able to hide behind a pretense of objectivity because the candidates of the two major parties fell within the range of viewpoints these professors have found acceptable. Trump falls out of that range, so many of them have decided to abandon this pretense. In other words, these professors were never principled to begin with, just comfortable.

“Many professors have long been able to hide behind a pretense of objectivity because the candidates of the two major parties fell within the range of viewpoints these professors have found acceptable.”

In order to see how to do better, we must figure out what exactly is meant by “objectivity” in the first place. Many people believe that it is “objective” to criticize the two major parties and “biased” to single out one party for criticism at the expense of the other. However, the argument that professors should never single out one party for particular criticism is only applied to the two major parties. Professors who say that Republicans promote false information on Fox News feel compelled to say also that Democrats promote false information on MSNBC, which indeed they do, although not as often. But nobody thinks that if a professor criticizes Republicans she should make an equivalent criticism of the Green Party.

This isn’t just because the two major parties are the most influential. To take an extreme example, the National Socialist Party of Germany has been incredibly powerful, but I have never met a professor who feels that she isn’t being objective if she criticizes Nazis. The two major parties have been so successful at legitimizing themselves that “objectivity” has come to mean focusing heavily on them and treating them as near-equivalents, as mirror images of each other, while ignoring or discrediting other parties.

The bounds of what we call objective discourse in political science, then, are themselves politically determined. While many political scientists would like to put themselves above politics in the classroom, it isn’t possible. Put differently, the need many professors seem to feel to balance any criticism for Democrats with equivalent criticism for Republicans (and vice versa) is itself a political outcome. More generally, teaching political science is inevitably a political act. Even professors who try to focus on “just the facts” are always and unavoidably elevating some facts at the expense of others.

“Teaching political science is inevitably a political act.”

My approach, therefore, is to pull back the curtain a bit, so that students and I can grapple with the thorny questions of course design together. What facts or viewpoints should be taught, and why? What political agendas are advanced, and what political agendas are hindered, if we teach a course in one manner rather than another? These questions do not have easy answers, but posing them helps students take control of their own education. This approach also teaches them that politics is often most successful when it operates invisibly — when, for instance, terms like “objectivity” are used to make political victories sound neutral, inevitable, and just.

It shouldn’t take someone like Trump to convince us to abandon our efforts to be “unbiased” in the classroom. When we try to be objective we are doomed before we begin, just like the thirsty man, lost in the desert, who tries to reach the oasis he sees on the horizon. He will never drink water that he has hallucinated.

Spencer Piston is a political science professor at Boston University. He can be reached at spiston@bu.edu.