The latest podcast produced by the Center for Ethics and Education focuses on political disclosure in the classroom. I think a lot of CTers will find it interesting. Several students were interviewed, and they are quite insightful. For what it is worth, my view is that, in general, when teaching about controversial politically and morally-valenced issues it is usually pedagogically better for most of us not to disclose our substantive views about the issues we are trying to get the students to investigate (I can think of examples of people who do disclose where I think what they are doing is pedagogically superior to withholding in the way I do — Jerry Cohen springs to mind — but I think they are the exceptions). In the podcast my co-director Tony Laden expresses sensible disagreement. Well worth listening to, if I say so myself.
(By the way although I suggested the topic after discussing it with a couple of the students who are featured, as with all our podcasts I take no credit for its excellent quality (both in terms of production values and intellectual content), except in that I suggested to our program manager that she might make podcasts, having no idea quite how good she would turn out to be at doing it. A leading podcaster told me how excellent she thought one of them was, and then was horrified to find out just how much of a shoestring we have been operating on!)).
{ 22 comments }
oldster 08.08.25 at 5:02 pm
Carrie Welsh has a great voice for podcasting!
Interesting content, too.
Sashas 08.08.25 at 8:57 pm
Very nicely done with the podcast! There’s an audio blip around 11 minutes FYI.
On the actual topic, I think one factor y’all didn’t discuss is possible circumstances where you might in fact want to suppress certain viewpoints. One that comes up occasionally in my home turf of Computer Science is the idea that women don’t have a legitimate place in a CS classroom. I know some of my students hold that belief. Some of my students are women. Taken in isolation, pretty much anything I do here will cause some of the students to tune out.
Fortunately, we don’t have to take it in isolation. What I actually do is set certain ground rules on acceptable discussion before we get to the more controversial topics, including emphasizing that all of them belong in my classroom and that statements saying some of my students don’t belong won’t be tolerated.
I think I’d handle this very differently in a Philosophy classroom, but it seems to work ok for my CS one.
One other thought I have on disclosure: You should also disclose in advance in situations where “leaking” is inevitable. We needed to talk about queer representation in one of my courses this Spring, and since I’m open with my students about my identity I think it was better to disclose my stance (and make clear that they don’t have to agree with me) rather than hiding my stance knowing they will make confident guesses about it. I think actually the leaking itself is less important than the knowledge that students will confidently guess. One should probably disclose if students are likely to think they know your stance even if they actually don’t.
Harry 08.08.25 at 9:16 pm
She really does. I think she’ll be ok with me saying this: We hired her as our project manager/administrator, and only afterward I found out that we shared an obsession with radio (specifically radio drama/comedy/documentary — yesterday was a VERY BAD day for us both, and maybe I’ll write later about why). Part of our mission is research dissemination, and I wondered if she would enjoy trying to make some podcasts. Yes, it turns out, she did, and is great at it!
engels 08.08.25 at 10:57 pm
all of them belong in my classroom and that statements saying some of my students don’t belong won’t be tolerated
I’m not sure what this intolerance amounts to if the belonging of the people making the statements can’t be questioned.
J 08.08.25 at 11:00 pm
I know Cohen as a great philosopher, and as a funny symposium giver (YouTube), but didn’t know he was a good teacher too. That’s great to hear. Anything specific about his approach to this that is of (quick) note?
Alan White 08.09.25 at 5:35 am
Not political disclosure, but when I taught philosophy of religion I always disclosed at the beginning of the course, with a detailed caveat, that I was non-religious after being a young evangelical Christian. I taught the course assiduously with arguments both pro and con, and in course evals could see that finally some students thought I was lying about my disbelief. I took great solace in that. It is possible to disclose but still teach thoughtfulness about controversial topics. I think the main point is to convey the love of truth over anything like personal views. In today’s political atmosphere that may be the most precious thing we can do, if we can.
Sashas 08.09.25 at 10:03 pm
@engels (4) I think you’re asking me a question but I have no idea what your question is. Can you restate it?
engels 08.10.25 at 9:24 am
I have no idea what your question is. Can you restate it?
Sure: what does this intolerance amount to if the belonging of the people making the statements can’t be questioned?
NomadUK 08.10.25 at 12:06 pm
One that comes up occasionally in my home turf of Computer Science is the idea that women don’t have a legitimate place in a CS classroom.
I’m not sure which is worse: that this point of view is even expressed in a university classroom, or that its existence is so casually referred to as to make it seem unremarkable.
All I can say is, I’m glad I never followed my earlier, nascent interest in becoming a teacher, because I’d probably be up on charges by now if I had to put up with the kind of idiots that apparently populate classrooms these days.
MisterMr 08.10.25 at 1:45 pm
@8
They are still students belonging to the classroom but they have to sit on chickpeas.
absurdbeats 08.10.25 at 6:42 pm
I teach political science and bioethics, and over the years I’ve evolved from nondisclosure to disclosure, a path which parallels my teaching in large lectures to small (~30) classrooms. That’s not the main reason I disclose—I do so because I think honesty is important in developing a trusting relationship with my students—but I do think that teaching in small classroom forced me to think more about that relationship in a way that led me to conclude that disclosure was best, at least for me.
In listening to the podcast, and in considering other arguments about non/disclosure, the key seems to be insuring that all students have an incentive to participate in discussions. For me, disclosing is the best way to do that (because, again, it seems the most honest), but for others, nondisclosure is the way to go. I’d guess that some students respond better to one way than the other, so there is no perfect approach, but regardless of the route taken, we have to show that we remain open to their ideas and arguments.
LFC 08.10.25 at 7:38 pm
One of my few teaching experiences came when, toward the end of my long journey through grad school, I taught an Intro to Int’l Relations course in 2003, coinciding w the US/UK-led invasion of Iraq. (N.b. I went to grad school after working for quite a long time so I was considerably older than most grad students. Not directly relevant but whatever.)
I did not disclose my views about the impending invasion, to which I was opposed. There was a somewhat unwieldy (bc of the size of the class) but fairly lively open discussion one day, toward the start of which a student asked me for my opinion, and I declined to say, saying I’d rather hear what they thought.
OTOH, I did make at least one joke (or “joke”) that, in retrospect, revealed something about my political leanings. I was talking about Nixon’s 1971 decision to take the U.S. off the gold standard, which was part of a process sometimes (misleadingly) referred to as “the end of Bretton Woods.” I said something like: “Why did Nixon do this? He mixed vodkas w something else the night before, woke up, and said ‘I’m taking the dollar off gold’?” One student smiled appreciatively, but as for the rest it was silence and blank faces. Oh well.
LFC 08.10.25 at 7:50 pm
engels @8
Ha ha. The intolerance amounts to intolerance for the statements, not nec. for the people who might want to make them. Since sashas announces at the beginning that the statements won’t be tolerated, the problem presumably never arises. (Remember sashas is not teaching analytic philosophy, so presumably no smartypants is going to try to ensnare sashas in some kind of supposed contradiction.)
Sashas 08.11.25 at 3:21 am
@LFC (13) Thank you for translating! Yes, that’s basically it. We get plenty of smartypantses in CS too, but as it happens I am extremely comfortable educating my students on the “paradox of tolerance”. While it’s certainly possible that a student might tune out upon being informed that the whole class is welcome and valued, I’m not terribly concerned about rescuing that student. I’m more interested in rescuing their victims (i.e. the other students around them). No student has vocally objected, but I’ve definitely had students in class that held the belief I’m suppressing.
@NomadUK (9) The misogynist breed of idiot is as far as I’m aware more common outside the university than in it, and CS is far from the worst offender. But I’m genuinely very happy for you that you have found an industry where it is not common.
Moz of Yarramulla 08.11.25 at 11:17 pm
One slight variation was feminist studies (later more often called gender studies, although I suspect now the TERFs mean it’s called Woke Studies or something. Ahem). Especially in first year classes/tutorials they repeated reminded us that we were studying feminism rather than practicing it, and especially not practicing one particular school of thought withing feminism… we were there partly to study the considerable breadth of feminism (religious studies had similar disclaimers, plus ‘we will discuss ideas that contradict some religions’). Possibly that’s more obvious now that TERFs are so visible, but back in the 1980’s it was easy for a first year university student feminist to assume that every feminist was a privileged white girl who wanted to be Prime Minister…
The disclosures we got were more like sexuality (I started university the year homosexuality was decriminalised in Aotearoa, so at the start of the year it wasn’t), religion and stuff like personal experience of sex work or abuse. Which is a whole other level of ‘do I disclose?’ but it’s also living the ‘the personal is political’ slogan that not everyone accepts.
Back in engineering school there was much less overt disclosure, but some quite firm enforcement of the ‘no telling other students they don’t belong here’ (and some of that was very firm indeed, but private. Although some recipients publicised the process via ‘it’s not fair, they can’t make me STFU’ type whining)
M Caswell 08.12.25 at 7:05 am
“Disclosing” a view might imply that the view is not alterable. One alternative might be “submitting” an opinion for examination, and therefore opening it up to possible revision or rejection. Of course, one would be careful to devote classtime only to those opinions whose examination seems pedagogically fruitful.
Harry 08.13.25 at 9:36 pm
Moz — I just looked up the year that homosexuality was decriminalized. My god, that was late. That’s just 27 years between the decriminalization of homosexuality and the legalization of same-sex marriage. Extraordinary!
Moz of Yarramulla 08.14.25 at 1:28 am
Harry, the 1980’s neoliberal revolution saw a whole lot of rapid change in Aotearoa. The previous Muldoon government was remarkable in a whole lot of ways (right wing ‘conservative’ government wage and price fixing, plus ‘think big’ state owned major projects just don’t map to modern right wing government at all… also a quietly lesbian chair of the Public Expenditure Committee – Marilyn Waring). The new Labour government gave us nuclear free legislation as well as decriminalisation and a fire sale of state assets, floating currency, you name it.
It was an interesting time to be studying, but possibly similar for teachers disclosing aspects of their personal life that have public but not official acceptance. You might not want to tell students “I’m Latino” if you’re teaching in the US, or “I’m trans” if teaching in the UK, regardless of how relevant that might be to the subject matter.
Sorry for derailing your nice abstract ‘do I tell students I vote Liberal Democrat’ question into a more personal type of politics :)
John Q 08.14.25 at 6:12 am
A striking difference between Aotearoa and Oz. In Oz, the phase of rapid social liberalisation, led by Whitlam and (at state level) Dunstan took place in the late 1960s and early 1970s, before the arrival of ne0-liberalism, which included a fair bit of pushback on social liberalism.So, the idea of associating the deregulation/privatisation agenda with personal freedom has almost no traction.
In NZ, the two were vrey much linked. Kiwis I’d expect to be entirely hostile to neoliberalism often see it as liberating, compared both to Muldoon and to the stultified and provincial culture of the postwar era.
LFC 08.14.25 at 6:47 pm
JQ @19
Compare Gary Gerstle’s argument that one aspect of neoliberalism in the U.S. had to do w/ personal freedom to break conventions, etc. — in The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order (Oxford U.P., 2022; pb., 2023), ch. 3.
Harry 08.15.25 at 1:39 pm
Yoz — not at all off topic or derailing, just not what we discussed in the pod. I am very deliberate about what I share about my identity. They can tell that I am white by looking and unless they’re very sheltered they can tell my nationality. I don’t disclose that I am heterosexual, but do say I have children (a number of students always think I’m gay). The main thing is that at some point, in my large lecture classes, I disclose that I have had serious mental health problems and that, like 25% of them, take anti-depressants daily. This is because the first time I said it a number of students have thanked me subsequently for enabling them to be more open about their own mental health, and students still thank me (even though I feel the culture is so much more open than it was 15 years ago).
Harry 08.15.25 at 1:40 pm
JQ and Yoz – thanks, that is so interesting.
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