Blog Post 15

Post-Election It’s Political

I have been struggling to write this, to write anything, since November 8. When I arrived at a friend’s place to celebrate what seemed to be a certain, at least likely, victory for the first woman president of the United States of America, my daughter was accompanying me wearing a shirt that said: Girls Always Win with the scrawling of her 9-year old hand on the back that said: The Whitehouse. The next four years will be filled with activism by all sides. But we also must do our jobs, regardless of what we choose to do on the side to either support or fight the impending powers that be. I, myself, plan to fight (I write this with the full awareness that I may have just earned a proud place on the Liberal Professors Watchlist (http://www.professorwatchlist.org/).

I hear you, dear blog readers, wincing and warning, “Keep politics out of it Friedman!” But I can’t. And you can’t. Education in this country is political. I do not mean simply the content of what we teach in the classrooms. I mean the way that our universities are structured: the kinds of educational institutions our students attend before arriving here; and the way that decisions are made and monies spent every day here at FIU. All. Political. So November 8 is likely to impact our FIU, our colleagues, and most of all, our students and their families a great deal. About that there can be no doubt. We must ask ourselves how, as a collective, as an institution, how we want to behave, to react, to be in this new era.

So far there have been a couple of formal collective responses, a few protests on campus, one about FIU Sanctuary campus and another a general protest against the new US president-elect. Our FIU President, Mark Rosenberg, added his name to the collective letter of support signed by so many university presidents across the nation to Call for U.S. to Uphold and Continue DACA. Some of us participate in the Facebook or Twitter world of discussion and politics, while others of us have opened up our classroom to discussions in ways unprecedented after decades of teaching. Others of us have moved along business as usual. There is no one or correct way to inhabit our authority in these times of change. The key, of course, is not to alienate, not to disenfranchise, to be sure there is room for all views, so long as they do not silence others. Not an easy balance—to act and make room for those who choose not to, to speak and to respect those who are silent – and ever-more challenging these days.

But we have a decision to make not just as individuals but as a faculty community because we are responsible for the education of adults in a new era where climate change is questioned, watchlists are circulating, racist, sexist, homophobic and anti-immigrant rhetoric is reported to be rising by the Southern Poverty Law Center and our undocumented students are ever-more vulnerable. Whatever our personal politics, we must thoughtfully act, or choose not to, as a group and as a community.

Perhaps the place to get our direction is from a familiar corner, in our very trades, in our teaching and in our commitment to providing a solid foundational liberal arts education to our students, regardless of major, of department or of discipline. Maybe the answer hinges on providing FIU students what we were privileged to get for ourselves.

Certainly, as you know if you have been reading my words over the past year or so, I am sympathetic to the pressures from above, and above that above. But, since November 8, my empathy has waned somehow, as there seems a new urgency to help educate our FIU students, young men and women who are already the new face of America. And, yes, this seems especially important for our students, many of whom are first generation college attendees, speak Spanish at home, and who are handling jobs, families and studies all at once.

Regardless of where they begin their journey, they must be educated to navigate successfully our twenty-first century world. And we, as a collective, have an opportunity to ensure that as soon as they matriculate into our World’s Ahead FIU that they – all students – are expected and required to do just that: to receive the fundamentals of a liberal arts education. We serve them by providing them with the content knowledge and critical skills that constitute a liberal arts education. That is our gift to them; that is our responsibility. We must guard this as best we can, I believe, as individual faculty members and as a collective.

This poses particular challenges in the era of performance funding, when priorities are dictated elsewhere and when those measures shift to advantage a couple of state universities over the others. And yet, we must take action wherever and whenever we find ourselves selling our students short, by rushing them through, by denying them the opportunity to learn biology or history at college with peers and in a college lecture hall, or fail to require them to take an English literature or rhetorical strategies course as freshman or sophomores.  This, dear colleagues, is our opportunity to shift our political landscape and invest in our collective future.

This is not because I miss the importance – to our students – of getting jobs after graduation. In fact, I am thinking precisely of their future, and the future of our city, our state, and our country. FIU students will be better prepared to get better jobs if they leave us with an education that stands up to the drive to outsource to high schools university-level work, that perfects their language skills in a global world, that gives them, through writing and rhetoric courses, the skills to tell truth from propaganda, that values a solid grounding in scientific knowledge and discourse.

We have to be willing to stand tough, defy the impulse to distort our proprieties to meet the metrics, especially since they are constantly in flux and stacked against us.  In this new age, our students need a good, old-fashioned education. They deserve to get what each of us received in university. They deserve to get this while they inhabit the spaces of our beautiful campus and sit in the classrooms of our world-class faculty… of your classrooms. That is our gift to give and to share. It is our responsibility. And it is political.

What do you think?
Rebecca