By Ziv Carmi, Contributing Writer
A few weeks ago, a friend of mine, who was wearing a hat with an admittedly controversial Republican slogan on it, and I were speaking when someone walked over and initiated a friendly conversation with the two of us. As soon as my friend saw someone approaching, he took off his hat and stuck it in his pocket.
While this incident was innocuous, his self-censorship is not an uncommon occurrence, especially after he had been insulted on several other occasions for his politically charged attire. In several other separate instances, conservative-leaning friends have told me that they do not wish to join College Republicans (CR) or even tell their other friends that they are attending CR meetings.
As a seemingly ideological minority on campus with a history of intolerance directed towards us, sometimes it appears that at times we have been intimidated into silence, self-censoring our views and opinions and negatively affecting the beautifully diverse perspectives that set apart our institution as a liberal arts college.
These sentiments extend into the classroom. While, to their credit, the faculty in my experience has been extremely respectful of diversity of thought (a testament to the strong academics here), many students sometimes feel like they are ideologically outnumbered by their classmates and will face some kind of consequence if they speak their minds. Even though the class is, as it should be, an area for free speech and a flow of ideas and thoughts, many conservatives have an image of other incidents where ideological minorities were met with some kind of abuse for their belief, and thus, remain quiet.
The question then stands: What can the faculty do to ensure that their classrooms are ideologically inclusive? I’d like to use an example from a Civil War Era Studies course I took last spring semester about American slavery, which, of course, is an extremely difficult topic to address and one of which people might not be comfortable to speak for a variety of reasons—mainly, in my experience, due to just how uncomfortable and hard it can be to face our past head-on and grapple with it in a manner that does such a terrible and complex institution and those who suffered from it justice.
On the very first day of class, before we even began to dive into the course outline, my professor said (and here I am paraphrasing the verbiage on his syllabus) that we should all be free to disagree and speak our minds provided that we are respectful and support what we say with evidence from the readings; we should also be accepting of other ideas and concede to other people’s arguments if they are persuasive and well-reasoned.
My professor repeated this every time we had a discussion on an especially difficult, sensitive, or controversial topic, and, at least to me, it felt like it helped ease the atmosphere between myself and my classmates, and also, facilitate a complex and multifaceted discussion that truly enhanced the course experience, which remains a highlight amongst a series of many other outstanding classes.
As superficial as it may seem, I believe that a reminder from faculty that they will ensure free opinions so long as they are respectful and relevant, and that they will hold every student in their courses to that same standard, would do wonders in helping create an ideologically inclusive environment.
Our strength as a liberal arts college lies in our ability to embrace and challenge views from every single perspective, and I think that is not emphasized enough in our daily routines. While it exists even without one, I do believe that the occasional reminder can be necessary to ensure the diversity of thought remains in our classrooms, ensuring a rich and beneficial education for us all.
This article originally appeared on page 18 of the December 6, 2021 edition of The Gettysburgian’s magazine.
