On Politics in Class
Minimizing obligation, maximizing intentionality
Last week, Boaz Barak from Harvard wrote an opinion piece that the NYT chose to headline “I Teach Computer Science, and That Is All.” The title is blunt but not unfair— Barak’s whole point is that he makes a concerted effort to be avoid making political statements when teaching his computer science courses, and wishes that colleagues who who push for explicitly bringing political opinions into the classroom would do the same. Predictably enough, this generated a fair amount of indignation on Bluesky, in the now customary mix of “theatrical” and “cryptic”1.
I posted a thread about this over the weekend, but having found myself with an unusual bit of time to kill on a late weekday morning, I thought I’d expand a bit on it here. As I said there, my own classroom practice is probably a good deal closer to Barak’s than that of his detractors— my classes are pretty apolitical— but at the same time I don’t know that I would endorse his policy as a universal rule.
This is to some degree a matter of context— the vast majority of my teaching is in physics, and most of that at the introductory level. There isn’t a very direct connection between that subject matter and any current political controversies, so there aren’t a lot of ways for hot political topics to come up in a natural way. And it’s frankly a mad scramble to cover a minimally adequate portion of the introductory Newtonian mechanics curriculum in our ten-week term without trying to fit in anything politically contentious.
That said, I wouldn’t want to explicitly forbid anyone who feels it’s critical to talk about political topics from doing that even in the context of courses where that’s not explicitly part of the syllabus. After all, as my students could tell you, I’m a bit prone to weird asides about sports, or pop culture, or history-of-science topics, or my kids, and I wouldn’t want anyone to ban me from talking about those things. I go on odd tangents because I think they’re a valid part of the experience— lightening the mood a bit, connecting to real-world contexts, etc.— and if my more political colleagues feel that explicit discussion of current events plays that same role, I’m happy to defer to their judgement.
The core principle, to me, is that we should extend a lot of deference to the classroom practices of highly educated professionals, and refrain from imposing obligations on them to do things that they wouldn’t choose to do if left to their own devices. On the specific question of politics, this goes both ways: I don’t think anyone else should be obliged to refrain from discussing politics in class if they feel that’s important and relevant, and at the same time I don’t want anyone to feel obliged to actively discuss politics if they’re not interested in doing that2.
There are two important caveats to this idea of minimizing obligations, though. The first is that teaching a particular course inherently carries an obligation to cover some particular content, and whatever else you choose to do should not interfere with that. This is particularly important for introductory courses in hierarchical majors— I make weird asides in intro Newtonian physics for engineers, but they’re relatively limited because it’s the first course in the major curriculum, and my colleagues who will be teaching these students in the next course will expect them to have covered certain things. If I didn’t get to the conservation of angular momentum because I chose to spend class time on the NBA playoffs instead, that would be a form of professional misconduct. And I would say the same about a colleague who dropped core physics topics to sing the praises of tariffs or advocate for single-payer health care. If you’re teaching a foundational course, you have an obligation to cover the foundational topics, and if that means you don’t get to “bring your whole self to work,” that’s a shame, but also, that’s the job.
There’s a lot more freedom in upper-level courses, or more free-form majors. If I’m doing a course that isn’t a prerequisite for anything else, I don’t have the same level of obligation to curricular coverage. The level of obligation isn’t zero, but it’s much lower— if I’m offering an “Advanced Topics” course on quantum optics and choose to focus on cold-atom experiments and skip lightly past solid-state applications, that’s entirely up to me, because nobody else is counting on them to have learned about sub-shot-noise diode lasers from me. I still shouldn’t give full class periods over to complaining about the starting pitching rotation for the Yankees, though (however much I might want to).
The second important caveat is that whatever you choose to do in class should be done as thoughtfully and intentionally as possible. Which means making some kind of considered judgement about both the benefits and the costs of bringing up a particular topic that isn’t in the core curriculum for the class in question.
There’s a tendency to think about all of these side topics as only one or the other— you’re either distracting from the core curriculum or filling a critical need for connection by bringing up a side topic, full stop. In reality, though, all of these decisions will do a little bit of both— when I use my kids as examples in intro mechanics, that’s going to help humanize physics to a certain subset of students, while to others it’s going to feel un-serious. There’s no way to have one without the other, and when I use, say, this video of SteelyKid on the roller slide at the local elementary school to make a point about rotational kinetic energy, I’m doing that because I think the benefit outweighs the cost.
This is the caveat that brings me closest to agreeing with the Barak piece that kicked this off, because I’m not sure this is consistently done in a thoughtful enough way. This is particularly true when the side topics being brought up are not cute-kid videos or the Indiana Pacers, but highly contentious issues in contemporary politics. The stakes are much higher for political topics, but I don’t know that there’s always a commensurate level of consideration given to the trade-offs between benefits and costs.
If you’re going to discuss controversial issues in class, you need to anticipate that not everyone will agree with your position, and that that disagreement will have consequences. If you’re explicitly advocating a particular point of view, you’re going to be pushing people who see that issue differently away, from you and also from the subject that you’re teaching. If those issues are core to the subject, that may be a price you’re willing to pay— someone who isn’t willing to accept the relativity of simultaneity almost certainly should not be a physics major, so driving them away is a net win3. If the issue in question isn’t directly relevant to the content of the course, that’s a different calculation, and you probably at least want to put some effort into making sure to handle the topic in a polite and respectful manner.
The most dangerous and damaging thing to do is to go into class with strong opinions and a conviction that all right-thinking people already agree with you, so you don’t need to hold anything back. If you’re discussing some topic where the public opinion split is 60-40 but talking like it’s 95-5 with only idiots and sociopaths on the short end, things can go really wrong, with the potential to do serious damage.
If you think it’s important to bring politics into courses whose content is not explicitly political, and can do that without compromising the topic coverage that your colleagues will rely on, more power to you. And similarly, if you choose not to discuss current events in courses that don’t directly involve them, that’s great, too. But whichever path you choose, make sure it’s an intentional choice, and not just impulsive spouting off.
So there’s your lukewarm take for the week. If you like this sort of thing and want more, here’s a button:
And if you feel so moved, the comments will be open:
There’s a Thing that people seem to be doing more frequently over there where they make only oblique references to whatever the outrage of the moment is. I think the logic is that these pieces are fundamentally clickbait and thus should not be rewarded with links, but it makes for a weird and disorienting experience. I probably saw half a dozen people cryptically dunking on Barak before I saw a direct link to the piece and figured out what the hell they were mad about.
As previously discussed, a lot of arguments about how “science is inherently political” are really attempts to insist that scientists must advocate for particular positions, and I find that pretty problematic.
A win for both physics and whatever engineering discipline they choose to have a long career in before retiring and sending cranky emails to the authors of pop-science books.
Barak's stand is sanctimony couched as principle. Well, congratulations Mr. Computer Science professor for not talking about political topics in your class! Huzzah!
Now do History. Especially when there are people with the power to impact higher education claiming that the very fact of teaching civil rights is "CRT" and that CRT, or their dystopian interpretation of it where all discussions about race are CRT, is political. Or that we have to teach both sides about Jim Crow. Or the Holocaust. Or apartheid. Yeah, you probably shouldn't be talking about due process, which inevitably has implications for the current political dialogue, in a programming class. You had better damned well be doing so in a good number of American history classes. If people draw inferences, well ...
I teach film studies classes in an English department and I make it a point to not bring in politics or talk about my opinions on politics. Why should my opinions or students' politician opinions matter to film or literature?