Maybe it’s small, but as the fall semester approaches I find myself personally resenting this whole thing. Last year, I found the perfect paper to frame the first week of one of my upper level major courses. By that point, students feel like they know a lot and the paper wonderfully undermines everything that they had been taught, calls into question pretty much everything I would teach the rest of the semester, and shows how small and provincial their education is. A paper that says I’m a small-minded idiot hurting the education of all of my students by perpetuating a racist framing of their field seems worth exploring in an upper level class.
There was some slight political resistance to the premise (“why does everything have to be about race?”), but the moment of realization about the glaring hole in their education was wonderful. It’s important to be periodically reminded how little you know about subjects that you know so well. Those moments are the foundation to a good education.
The paper/lecture borrows heavily from the language of CRT. It was some heavy lifting last year, but this year I’m not sure if it’s worth the cost of entry. It was a means to an end for deeper understanding (kind of like CRT), but now I know a good portion of the students will never get past the politics.
Maybe I’ll still roll with it or maybe I’ll find some less politicized way to tell them that everything we’ve been teaching them is arbitrary and closes their mind as much as it opens it, but every subsequent cohort misses out either way. The subject has been poisoned.
Of course, poisoning uncomfortable subjects seems to be the point. Something else, however small, has been lost in the culture war.