My university (Rutgers) is fairly actively encouraging students to register to vote. And I’ve occasionally done a bit to help, hosting students who do a spiel on voter registration and personally encouraging students to vote.
Now I think this is all a good thing. Voting is a good thing, and a healthy democracy requires a decent turnout of voters, so doing our little bit to help democracy is being on the side of the good. It’s not exactly related to the courses we’re teaching, but spending 45 seconds before class is officially scheduled to start encouraging voter registration, or putting voter registration ads on course management software as Rutgers has done, seems far from an abuse of official positions.
Still, voting isn’t the only good thing in the world. It seems to me that voting in the upcoming election for Obama/Biden over McCain/Palin is pretty close to a moral requirement. (For those who are eligible to so vote. I of course won’t be voting for Obama, because that would be illegal, and undemocratic.) But it seems it would be seriously wrong for either Rutgers, or for me, to use our positions of authority to promote voting for Obama. And I think this isn’t a particularly controversial position.
But it’s a little hard to say just exactly why it’s OK for Rutgers (and me) to do what we’re doing, and not do what we’re not doing. Below the fold I have a few thoughts on this question.
We are actually helping Obama.
It’s worth noting that there’s a degree of bad faith in all of this. We don’t think that we should be advocating Obama’s election. But we all know that encouraging more college students to vote will, on net, boost Obama’s vote totals. Indeed, given the possibility of a backlash against explicit advocacy of Obama, actively encouraging voter registration might be the best thing we can do in the circumstances for Obama. So if it’s OK to encourage registration, but not to encourage voting for Obama, this can hardly be on narrowly consequentialist grounds.
This generalises to state entities
If the state of New Jersey spent millions of dollars advocating for Obama’s election, that would seem like a violation of some plausible democratic principles. Part of what it is to have free and fair elections is to minimise the advantage the incumbent party has merely by virtue of being the incumbent. Elections where the incumbents use their position to tilt the electoral results are not free and fair elections, and hence not fully democratic.
To be sure, this kind of thing goes on all the time in America. It’s a commonplace observation that Obama’s chances are much better than they would be were there not so many Democratic administrations in swing states. To a non-American observer this suggests something very unhealthy with the state of American democracy, but perhaps that can be something best fixed at a later date. In any case, even the most corrupt states don’t normally advertise directly for one candidate using state resources, and that’s a good thing.
Since Rutgers is a state university, it seems rules that apply to the state should apply to Rutgers. And since I’m at the head of a class in virtue of my position in Rutgers, those rules should apply to me too. So that looks like a good reason that partisan advocacy in a classroom is out of bounds.
It even suggests a reason why partisan advocacy is different to voter registration work. It is a legitimate state interest to have as many people as possible (legally) voting. So it is legitimate for the state to try to have as many people as possible registered to vote. If the state went about this by, say, blanket advertising registration promotions on TV channels whose demographics had a pronounced partisan bent (e.g. young black women, or old white men) that would be bad. But if the state encourages everyone to vote in a non-discriminatory manner, that’s a good activity. And it’s good even if, as is actually the case, the newly registered can be expected to favour one candidate.
Since neither Rutgers nor I are trying to channel our message exclusively to Democrats, it seems we aren’t doing anything wrong in encouraging registration. Of course, our only possible audience (or at least our only possible audience as state actors) is college students, who are a fairly pro-Obama demographic group. But I don’t think this is any worse than the general position the state finds itself in when doing voter registration.
It’s not all about the state
I’m not sure that can be all the story. If my friends at Princeton ran pro-Obama ads before class started, that would seem to be an abuse of authority as well, even though they aren’t state actors.
I don’t have a good story here to match my intuitions however. If an individual Princeton professor uses her position to promote Obama, she might be guilty of misusing the authority that Princeton gave her. But if Princeton as an institution decided it was supporting Obama, and explicitly authorised professors to make pro-Obama speeches before class, I would still think that’s a bad thing. Universities aren’t the kind of institutions that should be in the partisan business. But I don’t really know why I think that’s a bad thing, and maybe I’m just being too squeamish about politics here.
Are elections different to referenda?
I don’t think it’s undemocratic for the state to take sides in referenda. That is, I don’t think that the state openly supporting one side in a referendum is as undemocratic as supporting one party in an election. (This is subject to two provisos. First, the referendum can’t be a quasi-election; for instance a referendum to postpone the next due election. Second, it would be undemocratic for the state to support one side if there were legitimately passed laws saying they shouldn’t do just this. Assume those conditions are not met.)
So, assuming this is legal, it isn’t obvious to me that it would be wrong for the state of California to campaign against the referendum attempting to overturn its own marriage laws. In fact, given that the laws are morally preferable to the alternative proposed by the referendum, it might be morally wrong for the state to not campaign against it. And if the state does this, the argument above suggests that any professor who wishes should be allowed to make anti-referendum speeches in class, the way I’ve had students make pro-registration speeches.
I’m not sure I quite buy that conclusion. But my intuitions about the wrongness of taking sides on a referenda are nowhere near as strong as my intuitions about the wrongness of taking sides on an election. And the arguments here seem to support that.
But none of this is very decisive. I’d be very interested to hear everyone else’s opinion.
{ 54 comments }
Colin Danby 09.26.08 at 10:19 pm
I see no problem with exhorting people to do their civic duty to vote and helping them do that, especially if we believe the stuff in our mission statements about shaping informed citizens and so on.
I turned down an organization that wanted to send someone into my class to register students, because even though they said their spiel would be nonpartisan, anyone can figure out who that organization wants to win.
MSS 09.26.08 at 10:38 pm
Good points.
On the referendum question, the University of California has in the past sent out advocacy e-mails on behalf of ballot measures that would benefit the University (construction bonds, for example.)
I suppose these went to faculty and staff, and not to students, although I can’t say for sure.
Is that fair game? On the one hand, it is an “interest group” advocating on its own behalf. That’s expected, healthy even, in a democracy. On the other hand, it made me uncomfortable, as an employee, to be having my employer using a state asset (public university e-mail lists) to advocate a voting decision on which the employer had a stake. Of course, I had a stake in it too, and was happy to vote in favor of the measures.
ehj2 09.26.08 at 10:46 pm
I’m not an academic nor a purist (and this topic is a bit like counting angels on the heads of pins for me) but I have a strong opinion here at about the million-foot level.
There’s really just the media and you, the universities, between civilization and chaos, and you are natural enemies because reality is liberal and media is corporatist. While there is a lot of unenforced pseudo-law that says you and the media are supposed to be politics-neutral, the media is owned and run by a handful of families that benefit from deregulation and low taxes and serial crises and, as a consequence, actively support the right wing. $Trillions are at stake and they don’t play fair.
Your opponent is basically across the street checking the lubrication and magazine capacity on an electric cannon to pump you full of depleted uranium slugs, while you’re over here asking if you should declare the weight of a band aid inside your boxing glove as if anyone, including the judges, were going to observe and enforce Canterbury Rules.
I know I’m cranky here, but if we lose to McCain, at some point you can say goodbye to your pretty little university system. Since labor is cheaper in other countries (which provide the education of our workforce), we don’t need taxes for education in this country. We certainly don’t want to help people go to universities, as it’s much easier to lead an anti-intellectual population.
I’d say meet in darkened caves in the middle of the night if that’s what it takes to get out the truth.
Gotchaye 09.26.08 at 10:51 pm
It seems to me that the problem we have with Princeton endorsing a particular candidate is that we understand that political advocacy is detrimental to its academic mission. Though we might wish it were otherwise, a single professor (much less the university as a whole) endorsing one political party over another would very much alienate people who disagree. The act sends the message that Republicans are not welcome. And this is a bad thing because, despite being wrong politically, Republican professors can still contribute meaningfully to academia and Republican students require an education to flourish just as much as Democrats do. Universities should be welcoming places, and they should do nothing that makes it harder to achieve their mission of advancing and imparting knowledge. The key is that we believe universities to have special obligations by virtue of being universities, and we (used to) accord them more respect because of it.
I can’t agree with respect to referenda. Ultimately, the same mechanism is at work – the state (or university) is being used to broadcast the political beliefs of those in power at the expense of those who disagree (or at the risk of alienating those who disagree). Do you similarly have little problem with a conservative professor lecturing his class on the need to support the referendum or a conservative government advertising for its position on one? Sure, you might say that the difference is that he’d be wrong, but that’s not a useful basis for setting general principles.
lemuel pitkin 09.26.08 at 11:15 pm
Some other things it would be wrong to do in the classroom:
* Give your students invesment advice.
* Announce that you’re single and looking to meet someone
* “Invite” your students to help you move.
* Tell embarassing personal anecdotes about your colleagues.
* Ask your students to accept Jesus as their personal lord and savior.
ehj2 09.26.08 at 11:56 pm
Lol. You don’t need to endorse a candidate or party, you need to endorse a way of life — truth, science, integrity, rule of law, etc.
Everything in history supports the liberal view. Torture is bad. The Bill of Rights is Good. If law is good for a nation state, then treaties are probably a good idea, too (if you’re going to have trade).
This isn’t hard guys. And you know that in an interconnected world, nothing is above anybody’s paygrade — we all have to know economics, we all have to understand where energy comes from, we all have to understand what an 11 $trillion National Debt means.
At the end of the day, it’s called informed Citizenship, and it’s what we blame the population of WWII Germany for lacking.
onymous 09.26.08 at 11:57 pm
Interesting post. I have been disturbed lately by how few people I know seem to see a vote for John McCain as a moral wrong — most of them won’t vote for him, but voting doesn’t seem to carry any sort of moral weight for them.
Dan Simon 09.27.08 at 12:06 am
I don’t think there’s anything at all wrong with a university encouraging all its students to go out and vote for Obama. There’s a university in Iowa known as Maharishi University of Management which, I assume, advocates that all its students vote for the Natural Law Party (or at least did, while that party existed). Why, then, shouldn’t a university be able to encourage its students to vote for the Democratic Party?
The main difference, of course, is that Maharishi University of Management declares itself up front to be an institution devoted to studying and promoting Transcendental Meditation, and thereby no doubt forfeits a great deal of respect, support and funding. On the other hand, your university, I assume, does not declare itself to be a partisan institution devoted to studying and promoting the platform and candidates of the Democratic Party. And if it did, it would likely lose a great deal of support, alumni donations, and possibly government funding. So instead, it declares itself to be a non-partisan institution of general higher learning. Hence, for it to promote the Democratic Party while pretending to be non-partisan would perpetrate a fraud on its students and donors (including the federal and state governments).
In contrast, it may well already openly declare its support for the democratic process, and if it doesn’t, it probably could (and certainly should, if it encourages its students to vote) without incurring any loss of support from students, donors or governments. Hence, advocating that voting-age citizens among its students vote is much less problematic.
sabina's hat 09.27.08 at 12:06 am
It is wrong to plump for a specific candidate in the classroom because it is a misuse of your authority as a teacher. I expect my students to respect my statements in class as authoritative (although not necessarily correct), and so I have a responsibility to limit what I say in class to what is warranted by my expertise. Since candidate preference is not a matter of expertise, it would be remiss of me to indicate a preference for a specific candidate when teaching. However, this doesn’t apply to my non-teaching related interactions with students at the university where I teach.
Encouraging people to vote seems different to me. While some don’t think we have a duty to vote, it is rare indeed to find someone who believes it is actively immoral to vote. So I see this as a unobjectionable encouragement to your students to act virtuously–like telling your students to exercise and eat healthily. Not required, but not harmful either.
david 09.27.08 at 12:21 am
Wider agreement that it’s moral to vote than it is moral to vote for Obama over McCain. That this is true is a sign of the moral weakness of the Republic, but what can you do.
vivian 09.27.08 at 1:41 am
(1) As students begin to vote in greater numbers, issues affecting students will take on greater prominence. Like the power of senior citizens, which is important to seniors on both sides of the aisle. Now, pandering to students may or may not be in the interests of the university, but on balance, I’d risk it.
(2) Participation in politics may correlate with participation in class, a definite good for universities or at least the professors. Again, social spillover irrespective of party ID.
(3) Finally, if we believe that our political beliefs are reasoned and thought-out, not just gut reaction to immediate incentives (ooh, tax cuts) or which candidate is taller or better hung, well then we probably want to encourage students to think about politics while they are getting lots of encouragement in thinking about everything.
Indoctrination only makes sense if you believe reasoning won’t actually win over the students.
Matthew Ernest 09.27.08 at 2:29 am
In the end, the electorate will be shown to have a measurable bias.
WF 09.27.08 at 2:47 am
I think there’s a very clear distinction that can be made between encouraging students to register and encouraging them to vote for Obama.
When a professor encourages students to vote for Obama, the students who disagree(and aren’t persuaded by the professor, I suppose) are put in an uncomfortable position: they have to shut up and ignore the whole thing, or they have to try to argue about politics with a person who is in a position of authority and power over them.
This probably wouln’t happen if you just encourage voter registration.
The issue with states and referenda is different, I think. If the split of opinion in the state is (say) 70/30, that’s 30% of the population which is paying to advance views they don’t agree with, which seems wrong.
Tom D 09.27.08 at 4:39 am
I assume that the following people should not give advice of the form ‘You should vote for X in the presidential election’:
– A teacher in her classroom.
– A uniformed police-officer on his beat.
– A parent to her children.
On the other hand, these people could give such advice:
– A newspaper columnist.
– One friend to another in a pub.
– A person on the street with a sandwich-board.
What’s the difference between the people on the two lists? The people on the first list are in positions of authority. What’s wrong with a person in authority telling people whom to vote for? I suggest that the guiding thought here is that voters should make their choices *thoughtfully* and *independently*. When a person in a position of authority tells one whom to vote for, this is likely to prevent thoughtful voting (because people may just follow-the-authority), and it makes people vote in ‘blocks’, rather than independently.
It is obvious why people should vote thoughtfully – but why do I say that people should vote independently? I say this because I think that elections, at their best, take advantage of the ‘wisdom of crowds’ effect – and this effect is reduced if people make decisions in ‘blocks’. (In effect, the number of voters is reduced).
va 09.27.08 at 4:41 am
Rutgers isn’t a purely state u. It’s also funded (at least to the tune of 50%) by Johnson & Johnson, Pepsi etc. Those corporations are politically active, so you might not have to worry so much about advocating for a candidate as a state agent.
andrew 09.27.08 at 10:32 am
But if Princeton as an institution decided it was supporting Obama, and explicitly authorised professors to make pro-Obama speeches before class, I would still think that’s a bad thing.
I’m not an expert by any means, but I believe that Princeton and most private colleges and universities in the US are 501(c)(3) nonprofits, which are prohibited from advocating for or against particular candidates. So in addition to being bad, this would be risking some kind of penalty (loss of tax exemption or a fine or something like that). I don’t know how the law affects advocacy on issues or even ballot measures; that might be allowed under certain conditions.
andrew 09.27.08 at 10:33 am
Apparently placing a “c” between two parentheses creates a copyright symbol automatically.
phil 09.27.08 at 11:51 am
I think it is probably wrong to advocate voting to a class, though not significantly so. As you say voting is not the only good thing, so why should it get special treatment. Although most people think voting is a good thing not evereyone does . I might not vote in the next UK election because 1. Labour will win where I live anyway and 2. I don’t want either Gordon Brown or David Cameron to be Prime Minister.
If people have already decided not to vote then they will be unlikely to change their minds anyway .
Patrick 09.27.08 at 2:11 pm
It depends on the class as well. If you advocate voting in a calculus class, that’s demonstrably outside the subject material, and not the area you, as the teacher, can claim competence.
On the other hand, when I teach freshman comp, I often hear 18 year olds advocate for a lowering of the drinking age. At that point, I ask, “How many of you feel the drinking age should be lowered?” (Almost all of them raise their hands.) Follow that with, “How many of you voted in the last election?” When they lower their hands, a simple, “Do you see the connection?” makes the point.
Which point, let it be said, is a partisan one. Not voting is a statement about the nature of US democracy, and for some people it’s a considered one. Let’s not kid ourselves: we advocate partisan positions all the time, and we can’t escape doing so.
Pater 09.27.08 at 3:03 pm
Would it be wrong to give your students investment advice? For instance, to tell them over decades long periods, stocks outearn bonds, so be sure your retirement fund includes some stocks (with the proviso that stocks are more volatile than bonds, and the future may NOT be like the past). For instance, to tell them studies show that index funds outperform non-index funds, and that expenses do matter and do add up to a lot over the years. For instance, to tell them it’s very very foolish to put all your retirement dollars in one company. For instance, to tell them diversification is highly desirable. For instance, to tell them risk and return are inversely related.
Or, would it be a bad idea, in the midst of fulminating over some horror story regarding a student who lacking insurance delays going to see a doctor and gets an infected gall bladder–would be it be a bad idea to tell them they can for a few hundred dollars get a health insurance policy, and, given that our government fails to do its job, they should endeavor to find the funds to get themselves covered?
christian h. 09.27.08 at 3:22 pm
Clearly, there’s no such thing as an abstract “civic duty” . While personally advocate election boycotts as a way to overcome the corrupt one/two party system, a case can be made that voting strengthens that system. In other words, when universities advocate voter registration, they fulfill their real mission: making students into “useful member of society”, that is, producing cogs in the machine.
ScentOfViolets 09.27.08 at 4:23 pm
Here in the states, the general perception is that those Ancients, the Founding Fathers advocated a participatory democracy. The public is constantly inundated with alarmist stories about the declining rate of voting in eligible populace. A Good Citizen (sorry for all those caps, but I hope the meaning comes through) votes, and votes judiciously, after much deliberation. A Good Citizen, we are also told, is an _informed_ citizen.
Now, it seems to me that the mission statement of most institutions of higher learning say something to the effect that their goal is to take an uninformed student and make him or her into a well-informed graduate.
So how can encouraging voting be bad(except perhaps in the sense of taking away time from class in relevant instruction), but encouraging students to become educated is not? Particularly since the latter is very much in the financial interest of the party doing the advocating?
Apparently the shoot-from-the-hip answer is that this is only because the defacto presumption is that this will favor one party over another. Nothing more. No one rails against the various churches prevailing upon their flock to get out and vote, for example, even though presumably that also involves large-scale differential preferences in types of candidates. (Yes, people do object to people trying to influence their congregation to vote in a particular way, but that’s a different story altogether.) No one chides various organizations for their ‘rock the vote’ campaigns, or PSA’s that inform of us of the dangerous health consequences of smoking or drinking, even though those are most definitely not in the interests of people.
So, no, there is nothing particularly wrong with encouraging students to vote, nor are there any distinguishing conflict-of-interest issues.
Y perlmutter 09.27.08 at 4:26 pm
In the meanwhile, in Canada, the UBC School of Music is actively sending out emails (rightly) denouncing our mock-Bush’s position on funding for the arts (and his philistinism in general).
ehj2 09.27.08 at 5:07 pm
As an engineer, I like totally have a bias towards science, and I can reliably assert after working within govt agencies for the last decades that the right is no friend to science. America, which used to be a leader in raw research (I remember fondly my visits to Bell Labs), now shuts down reporting offices (in NASA, Interior, DoE, EPA, etc.) if the data emerging from our various disciplines disagree with some right wing chimera. I call it pulling instruments out of the dashboard of a failing bus in the middle of a desert.
Part of the problem is all these offices belong to the Executive. The only intellectually honest agency in the Bush Administration is the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office. I argue that even a teacher of Chemistry can forward the notion we need more non-partisan reporting structures. Air and water quality data, for instance, needs to be un-politicized. This Administration even turns off labor data when it wants. These “dashboard instruments” should belong to Congress and the People.
abb1 09.27.08 at 5:16 pm
Why can’t you just teach in a neutral manner, and advocate your political views (whatever they are) outside the hours? Wouldn’t it be simpler?
phil 09.27.08 at 7:04 pm
Kirk Parker 09.27.08 at 9:43 pm
Brian,
So I guess you’re part of the “we might was well have another civil war” camp, then? You do know how close the popular vote has been in recent elections, I hope–you have to go back to 1984 to find a contest that was 60/40. What else do you think will be the eventual outcome if you write off nearly half the voting population as (politically) immoral?
onymous,
You too, eh? So when does the shooting begin?
ScentOfViolets 09.27.08 at 9:45 pm
Well, Phil, you’d have to give an argument as to why not everyone should vote, right? I don’t see that you have; merely a speculation that this is the case. If I were suspicious and paranoid, I’d suspect that you were trying to get me to do all the work, instead of demonstrating a sound argument backed up by facts.
So, the Ancients say one thing. And there are plenty of PSA’s and related messages from concerned organizations that agree. What’s your argument that they’re wrong?
Righteous Bubba 09.27.08 at 9:51 pm
What else do you think will be the eventual outcome if you write off nearly half the voting population as (politically) immoral?
I dunno. Did the “Democrats are traitors” thing turn out with heads on pikes or what?
Asher 09.27.08 at 10:14 pm
The reason for not campaigning in the classroom needn’t be couched in moral terms at all, because when you campaign you are undermining the legitimacy of institutions of higher learning. And as a professor it would seem that you have a vested interest in having the university system seen as legitimate.
As a non-leftist I can say that my experience is that many professors do a very poor job in creating an environment that fosters an honest exploration of ideas. All of those were on what you’d call “the left”, and I went to the University of Washington, which is not known as a university dedicated to political activism.
The problem is that large parts of the American population already views the university system as largely state-funded advocation of leftist politics. That is a problem for the academic class and one only they can address.
ehj2 09.27.08 at 10:32 pm
Asher, @30,
Michael Berube has written a lot about this (including a book, “What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts”), and the fact that as “state funding” has decreased, the goal of the right has been to impose ever more restraints on the university system (with the argument that “we’re paying for it so we get to say what education is”).
More right wing baloney in the pursuit of right wing control.
phil 09.27.08 at 10:50 pm
I would have to make an argument in order for what to happen? People should not vote if they think it is wrong to do so (I don’t see why this needs to be supported by a sound argument backed up by facts). Maybe no one thinks it is wrong, or they are wrong to think that is but that can’t be addressed so easily and may be could not be resolved at all. Anyway one reason not to vote might be that your vote will not have any effect on the outcome of the election. Another might be that whoever you vote for it gives legitimacy to a system you do not agree with. If some people believe this it is a good reason not to vote and I doubt they will change their minds in 45 seconds before a class starts. Organisations with an interest in people voting will encourage people to vote there is nothing wrong with that but it is , it seems to me, a contentious issue. The message could be changed to encourage students to make an informed decision as to whether to vote and if so whom for. There are many other messages that could be advocated before class why is encouraging people to vote the most important?
digamma 09.27.08 at 10:56 pm
You’re registering people to vote in New Jersey, which Obama is going to win handily regardless of your student registration drive. So Obama is not gaining any electors as a result of your work.
digamma 09.27.08 at 11:07 pm
However, I have a bit of experience on the banks of the Raritan, and occasionally students and recent grads will get together and attempt to take over the city on political platforms most charitably described as naive.
So if you want to lose sleep over registering students, worry about local New Brunswick politics.
anon/portly 09.27.08 at 11:41 pm
It’s wrong to push students to vote as a cover for pushing them to vote for a particular candidate. If GOTV efforts among students favored McCain, and you wouldn’t pursue them in that case, then I don’t see how GOTV efforts that you believe will favor Obama are any different than agitating for Obama in the first place. It’s purely self-interested behavior.
The only thing you can really do, as a teacher, at least in my opinion, is educate. If you teach Economics, these days that means you push your students toward the Democrats – at least I don’t see how this can be helped. I guess other disciplines are at a disadvantage, but I don’t see how that can be helped either.
“But if Princeton as an institution decided it was supporting Obama, and explicitly authorised professors to make pro-Obama speeches before class, I would still think that’s a bad thing. … But I don’t really know why I think that’s a bad thing, and maybe I’m just being too squeamish about politics here.”
Suppose you didn’t understand that professors shouldn’t use the classroom to pursue their own interests. (See comment 5). Even then, you might wonder if it will actually have intended effect. Perhaps classroom agititation for candidate or position X has the primary effect of confirming the beliefs of the students who prefer Y. Think about how you (the typical CT reader) feel when you read the comments section on a right-wing blog.
Finally, there is nothing wrong with not voting. The whole idea that there is a duty to vote is just a convenient argument for people who think that more voting will favor their own side. You can make the argument that there is a moral duty to educate oneself about the issues, but why is it wrong for someone who is indifferent or reticent to not feel it best to leave the decision up to others who care more?
trailing wife 09.27.08 at 11:43 pm
I am what used to be called a life-long student, a child of the ivory tower, and now the parent of a brand new freshman. I have gladly paid an awful lot of money over the course of my life to learn the things my professors (and TAs — very important people, the TAs) have presumably worked hard to try to teach me. If they did their job well, I am perfectly capable of researching the histories and positions of the various candidates, and of making the choice that in light of my education, experience and outlook would be best for our republic. Again, if they did their job well, I am perfectly capable of training my National Merit Scholar daughter to do the same.
If you are not teaching the course you described in the catalog, you are stealing from your students and your university. It was you that defined your corner of education; if you wish to teach something else, provide another course. You could perhaps title it, “What I think the world should be like, and why you should, too.” Or perhaps, “Good people vote for Obama, bad people burn in hell.” I’d be very interested in the syllabus and lecture notes for that one; I’m sure it would be very educational indeed.
If your students are intelligent enough to be accepted by your institution of higher learning, they should be intelligent enough to figure out how to register to vote, whether that is a priority just now, and how to research the alternatives on the ballot, all without your no doubt terribly earnest assistance. So please, continue to keep your opinions on matters political, religious, and even what colour is most appropriate for women to paint their toenails quite firmly to yourself and your private circle.
ScentOfViolets 09.27.08 at 11:44 pm
Asher@30: No one is talking about campaigning for issues or candidates in the classroom. We’re talking about taking less than a minute to encourage students to vote. That’s not endorsing any particular view, party, or candidate.
Phil@32: Well, that’s a retreat! In your earlier posting you implied that there was some theory about why not everyone voting who could would be a good thing. Now you’re merely saying that different people might have their various idiosyncratic reasons not to vote.
In case anyone is wondering, no, I don’t encourage my students to go out and vote, and never have. I merely ridicule the notion that doing so is somehow ‘political’ in the sense that churches distributing ‘voter guides’ that plainly encourage it’s members to vote for one candidate or party are political.
ScentOfViolets 09.27.08 at 11:50 pm
anon@35:
I don’t think anyone is saying that though, or would behave in that fashion. I think the discussion is on a bit higher plane than that :-) The issue is, should you encourage students to vote, even if you know that doing so favors your inclinations. The issue is _not_ whether an acceptable way to influence the vote is to proselytize to your students under cover of some sort of ‘voter encouragement’ rubric.
Kirk Parker 09.27.08 at 11:54 pm
Righteous Bub,
Is “tit for tat” the best argument you’ve got?
We’ve gone from Nixon not contesting any of the results in the razor-thin 1960 election, to demonizing our opponents who make up the same percentage of the electorate as we do (give or take a few percent.)
Now you may certainly disagree with me that this approach makes it a bit more likely that our politics will devolve into other, more literal, fighting; but “the other guys did the same thing” does not seem remotely like a responsive argument.
Righteous Bubba 09.28.08 at 3:36 am
Is “tit for tat†the best argument you’ve got?
Versus “we’re headed for civil war” I didn’t feel I needed to try too hard.
tanstaafl 09.28.08 at 12:54 pm
Kirk Parker @ 39
CK Dexter 09.28.08 at 4:58 pm
“So if it’s OK to encourage registration, but not to encourage voting for Obama, this can hardly be on narrowly consequentialist grounds.”
True, but perhaps not a surprising or terribly problematic conclusion. Everyone’s a consequentialist in theory, but everybody’s a deontologist in practice. (Much like everyone’s a moral relativist in theory, but a doctrinaire zealot in practice.)
This is a simple case of switching ethical approaches when it is convenient. On this issue, since it concerns participation in a so-called democracy that falls somewhere between irremediably dysfunctional and purely virtual, I see no point in quibbling about such inconsistency.
Kirk Parker 09.28.08 at 10:32 pm
freelunch,
Ok, right, it’s Nixon’s public performance that I am concerned about here, and think compares favorably to today’s tendency to demonize our political opponents. Maybe it’s just me; maybe all our current “not my president” or “hey, those are our jets now” stuff doesn’t bother anybody else at all.
But I do think they are signs, small though they might be, of a disintegrating body politic. The fact that so many don’t seem contented with disagreeing with their domestic political opponents, and hopefully winning elections against them, is very troubling. If we really do consider the other half of the country to be immoral and evil, or feel the need to posture that way even if we don’t actually feel that way, then yes indeed it is a movement in a dangerous direction.
Righteous Bubba 09.28.08 at 11:02 pm
If we really do consider the other half of the country to be immoral and evil
Who thinks this?
harry b 09.29.08 at 12:29 am
Extracting the snarkiness, and ignoring the final sentence, I basically agree with trailing wife on this. It is remarkably easy to register to vote in most States, and most students ought to have figured out how to and what they think. They (almost) all come from the more privileged 1/3rd of society (at Rutgers and UW Madison the most priviged 1/10th). I never encourage them to vote; I encourage them to consider the issues, learn what they can about them, and deliberate carefully, and to vote only if they have done so (I teach political philosophy, trailing wife, so I don’t think it is odd to do this in my classes).
It is fine, though, to reveal one’s political opinions in class; but, if you think your opinions are likely to be widely shared, I think you have an obligation to figure out how not to alienate those who do not share them. In my experience right wing students do not feel oppressed by left wing professors, but they do find the self-righteous dismissal of their (often unrefelective) peers irritating. I have some fellow feeling for them — my entire undergraduate and graduate years were spent in institutions wth very right wing student bodies.
That said, I tend not to reveal my political opinions in large format classes. So much so that after the last Presidential election I recieved a vicious piece of hate email from one of my students who was furious about the election result and believed that I would be pleased by it. But I suspect that says more about the inattentiveness of said student than my classroom behaviour.
Kirk Parker 09.29.08 at 12:38 am
Bubba, did you read the original post or any of the comments?
Are you of the opinion that the author and commenters who wrote these are just exaggerating for effect, that none of them really mean it? That would be some comfort, I guess.
Righteous Bubba 09.29.08 at 1:57 am
Are you of the opinion that the author and commenters who wrote these are just exaggerating for effect, that none of them really mean it?
I am of the opinion that you are panicking about what was written.
If I tell you that X is a moral requirement and people don’t do it that does not mean that they’re beyond redemption, especially given that all people may not understand my reasons or arguments.
Further, I don’t think the sanctions proposed for offenders – were there any? – extend to violence.
Your “half the people” formula is somewhat ridiculous as Bush’s last vote total was 62,040,606.
Kirk Parker 09.29.08 at 2:41 am
My last word (promise!):
If you want to claim that the views of those who don’t vote are completely different from those who do, go ahead–with some actual cites. Until there, there’s nothing unreasonable about using the presidential vote figures as a very quick-and-dirty proxy for the views of the population as a whole. To boringly repeat myself, both the percentage figures and the swaps between R and D presidents show some kind of rough political parity.
And no, I wouldn’t characterize “expressing a concern about possible future harm” as “panicking”.
Righteous Bubba 09.29.08 at 2:48 am
If you want to claim that the views of those who don’t vote are completely different from those who do, go ahead—with some actual cites.
Action counts.
jim 09.29.08 at 5:11 am
On the Princeton case (and putting aside andrew @ 16’s point about 501 c restrictions), I think the comment ‘Universities aren’t the kind of institutions that should be in the partisan business’ points to the answer. That is, there’s no violation of core democratic principles were Princeton-the-private-institution to commit itself to support Obama – no harm done to the practice of politics in a democratic state. But we would think less of Princeton-qua-university, as institutional partisanship is a poor partner for academic enquiry.
Artemis 09.29.08 at 7:45 am
From what I understand, there are some fairly significant stumbling blocks to students’ voter registration. So as teachers, producing citizens, it still seems worthwhile to ask whether we should advocate for them to register. And it doesn’t have to be about Obama; it can be about the laws that say that bars must close at 2 AM or something that affects students but wouldn’t be on the ballot at their parents’ address. Does the problem change if we advocate that they register to vote in a particular place?
Kirk Parker 09.29.08 at 2:26 pm
Artemis, you raise an interesting point, but after perusing the linked article, I’d say that the title is more alarmist than the contents (big surprise, eh!)
With only 2 exceptions, students should have just as easy a time registering and voting at their permanent home addresses as anyone else; the complexities seem entirely related to their temporary-residence status. And students are the only category of people seeking temporary-residence voting status in large enough numbers to be of interest to anyone.
Those two exceptions are MI and TN, where
That clearly is a big hurdle, though it’s not singling out students per se.
One other, smaller, category that might be impaired is younger students, if their state has in-person registration or confirmation requirements (though unlike the MI/TN situation it could be corrected the first time the student is home after reaching their 18th birthday.) Does anyone know if this situation actually occurs anywhere? Here in WA you can do a mail-only registration as long as you can supply a WA drivers license, WA ID card, or social security number.
RK 09.30.08 at 1:24 pm
It seems as though purely partisan political speech from the bully pulpit in front of the class might be a bad idea for the various reasons mentioned above, most notably the alienation of students whose view differ with yours. However, I also agree with your statement about it being an almost immoral act to vote for McCain. I think that some resolution of these two conflicting forces can be found in the following solution. Academia is by nature a world which relies upon the marketplace of ideas to suss out the good from the bad. Of course like any marketplace the marketplace of ideas must have certain ground rules in place to function. For example falsity can not be knowingly be presented as truth. One of the worst traits of Republican politics in the US is its eagerness not merely to ignore the necessary ground rules but to actively work to pervert them. As the champions of thought, academia is certainly within its rights to aggressively push back against this embrace of ignorance. Pure statement of preference for a candidate runs the risk of alienating those that disagree. However, as a recent college graduate, I can say that students do not take their teachers statements, particularly in realms such as politics to be irrefutable. Thus, a statement of preference justified and presented as an intellectual problem allows professors to seek to correct some of the market failures courted by the GOP while offering a groundwork for a truly enlightened political discussion to take place.
J Thomas 09.30.08 at 4:27 pm
” I have been disturbed lately by how few people I know seem to see a vote for John McCain as a moral wrong”
” Wider agreement that it’s moral to vote than it is moral to vote for Obama over McCain. That this is true is a sign of the moral weakness of the Republic”
Are you of the opinion that the author and commenters who wrote these are just exaggerating for effect, that none of them really mean it? That would be some comfort, I guess.
Are you concerned that they’re jumping the gun? I agree, we can’t be sure how bad McCain would be just from what he says and what he’s done. He could be lying. We should give him the benefit of the doubt to some extent.
Is it a moral failure to vote for McCain because you believe he isn’t at all the way he portrays himself? Maybe not.
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