As the campus protests against the war in Gaza spread across the country this past spring, affecting hundreds of colleges and resulting in the arrest of some three thousand protesters, academics and intellectuals responded according to a familiar pattern. Mainstream liberal and conservative commentators tended to counsel ignoring the protesters. From their perspective, college students are not independent agents making reasonable political and moral appeals that can be discussed and debated, but rather the tools of malignant forces they do not understand—in this case their postmodern professors or, possibly, distant puppet masters in the Middle East. In the rare instances they might be acting on their own, it is alleged that they are just children and, after all—as one author put it in Persuasion—“Who gives a fuck what college students think?”
Progressive and left-wing commentators, on the other hand, often voiced a completely different argument: for them, the students were not merely reasonable political actors, they were the moral conscience of the nation. According to this view, which echoes the half-ironic warning not to trust anyone over thirty, the kids are not only alright, they are “heroes.” More sensitive to injustice than their elders and probably better informed, they represent the only hope for cleaning up the mess that preceding generations have made of the world. Though for opposite reasons, the argument culminates in a parallel suggestion that there is little point in arguing with the students; instead, wherever possible, we are instructed to clear the way for their advancement.
The vehemence and endurance of these two ways of thinking about campus protest testify to the special, and contradictory, role that students have long played in the American political imagination. College students are, by definition, mostly new to thinking about politics, and their participation in elections is notoriously low. Nevertheless, going back to the formation of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the mass protests over civil rights and the Vietnam War in the 1960s, students have been cast as central protagonists in the drama of our political life. Indeed, the final chapter of SDS’s founding document, the Port Huron Statement, was entitled “The University and Social Change,” and argued that students were well-positioned to serve as a political vanguard. “The university,” it reads, “permits the political life to be an adjunct to the academic one, and action to be informed by reason.”
The statement contains no instructions for what one should do when political and academic life come into conflict—a topic that comes up a few times in this issue’s special section on Education and Society. But its focus on the political significance of universities raises even more fundamental questions: What is the student’s role in American democracy? Are there alternatives to viewing students as either mere containers for the ideologies of their elders or infallible guides to progress? And what do we, who are no longer in college, owe politically to those who come after us?
●
In her 1954 essay “The Crisis in Education”—yes, it was in crisis even then—the German émigré philosopher Hannah Arendt argued that students have a special place in American society because they are the living embodiment of the “extraordinary enthusiasm for what is new, which is shown in almost every aspect of American daily life.” The essay, published six years before the founding of SDS, is an early and prescient attempt to understand the roles that students would play in the politics of the West—and especially in America—over the next half-century.
The idea that education and politics are connected is, of course, very old; it was already taken for granted by the ancient Greeks. In any society, the educational system develops within the context of, and prepares its subjects to participate in, a preexisting political community. But Arendt points out that the eighteenth century, when America’s educational ideals were formed, gave rise to a new understanding of the connection between education and politics. With the spread of democracy and the mania for progress set off by the Enlightenment, the student became not only a vessel to be educated into an already-established society but also a potential source of criticism and, so to speak, renewable energy, without which that society might become backwards or moribund.
It is in this connection that Arendt identifies a tension or danger. Every educational system is bound to reflect, to some extent, the values and objectives of the society that creates it. But in a non-traditionalist country like America, it must also create some semi-protected space where the student—a being who is neither a child nor an adult, but rather in what Arendt describes as a “state of becoming”—can formulate their own values, including those values that encourage opposition to that society. The intermediary between the society and the “becoming” being is the teacher, whose job it is to channel the student’s values such that they can “come to fruition in relation to the world as it is.” It was critical for Arendt that teachers embrace the authority that comes with this role, as opposed to sloughing it off by deferring completely to the student, something she predicted would be especially tempting in America, where “tradition and authority” were viewed with suspicion, and “change” was often fetishized as a good in itself. But it was equally critical that the teacher understand the legitimate source of their authority, for this authority lay, importantly, not in their knowledge of how things should be, but in their knowledge of how they actually are. “It is as though [the teacher] were a representative of all adult inhabitants,” writes Arendt, “pointing out the details and saying to the child: This is our world.”
Arendt insists on a conservative—“in the sense of conservation”—aspect to education. The teacher must explain what is old or established to the student, or else the student can have no clear sense of what should change, much less what they ought to strive to preserve or cherish. But this does not mean that a teacher should project conservative political values in the classroom or, as far as they can help it, any political values at all. For Arendt correctly perceived that if one of our temptations is to treat students as morally and politically unteachable—because already more advanced than their teachers—another is to treat them as blank slates whose political education depends merely on exposing them to the right political text or interpretive framework.
Famously, in April of 1969, with Cornell University’s campus engulfed in protests over the demands of a coalition of African American activists and their partners in SDS, a group of students who had been studying Plato’s Republic with the political philosopher Allan Bloom decided to distribute a selection from the dialogue to the protesters. The students, as Bloom would later recount with no little delight, “had learned from this old book what was going on … [Socrates] had diagnosed the complaint of the ambitious young and showed how to treat it.” The story is apt to strike us as eccentric, but it is only a highly literal enactment of a fairly common impulse. Although emerging from the opposite end of the ideological spectrum, there were many echoes of it this past spring, when professors at elite colleges hastened to point out, with a pride that was the flipside of the professional commentariat’s suspicion, that the protesters on their campuses were merely “acting on what they had read”—in this case meaning not Plato but Edward Said and Frantz Fanon.
One only had to glance at the activists’ signs and slogans, with their heavy emphasis on the vocabulary of decolonization, for evidence that they had indeed been influenced by their postcolonial studies syllabi. One viral image even featured a protester holding a sign reading: “Columbia, why require me to read Prof. Edward Said, if you don’t want me to use it?” Still, the idea that the majority of today’s students required postcolonial theory to be inspired to action by the daily images from Gaza on their news feeds is almost as absurd—and as falsely flattering to their teachers—as the notion that Plato could “solve” a debate about racial justice and academic freedom at Cornell. The fantasy of the teacher, not to mention some of the teacher’s most devoted students, is that some specific book or text from the past can, on its own, release us from the burden of demonstrating political judgment in the present. In fact, the teacher who indulges this fantasy is not only overoptimistic about the ability of past wisdom to settle present controversies—having betrayed, as the representative of “all adult inhabitants,” the adult’s weakness for viewing the new strictly in terms of the old—but he confuses the source of his legitimate authority as a teacher.
The teacher is not like the parent, who may with some right endeavor to pass down their own values to their child, whether via a canonical text or not. But the teacher does have a responsibility to the student. First and foremost, the teacher does what she can to protect her students from the outside pressures that always threaten to throttle the development of the new—a task many professors undertook this past year when they stood up for their students’ prerogative to protest in public. The teacher’s second duty is more complicated and seemingly, for many of today’s teachers, less intuitive. Teachers, wrote Arendt, must “assume responsibility” for the established world that the student is still coming to know; and they must do this even though “they themselves did not make it, and even though they may, secretly or openly, wish it were other than it is.” If some professors traced the impetus behind the Gaza protests to their reading assignments, others proclaimed that now they were the students, or broadcast their endorsements for the student’s brave truth telling. These are all ways, according to Arendt’s argument, of misunderstanding the special value of the teacher to the student. The teacher is not tasked with either endorsing or opposing their students’ values, and she can never join them fully in protest—for part of what they protest is the teacher herself, as a representative of the old, whether she likes it or not.
This does not mean that the teacher must be mute on the political questions that consume the student. The teacher can help by taking students through the history of the struggles they care about, and by showing them how to weigh the conflicting arguments and interests that have shaped the world as it is. (Not Plato or Fanon, but Plato and Fanon.) In so doing, they model what it means to step back from what Arendt elsewhere characterizes as the “remorseless activity” of political life and to soberly evaluate the likely consequences of their actions—including by comparing them with actions that have been undertaken in the past, by young people with imperfect knowledge just like themselves. This is no small thing. But if the teacher is to remain a teacher, she has to trust the students to do something by themselves. This means shielding the student not only from the incursion of outside forces but also from the teacher’s own inherent desire, sincerely motivated as it may be, to impel the student in the direction of her choosing. “Our hope always hangs on the new which every generation brings,” wrote Arendt, “but precisely because we can base our hope only on this, we destroy everything if we so try to control the new that we, the old, can dictate how it will look.”
●
Arendt’s discussion of the teacher’s responsibility to her students offers some guidance for how all of us might begin talking about college students in ways that do justice to their role in our society, without reducing them either to empty vessels or moral saints.
Since its inception, this magazine has stood for the idea that education does not end with college—that we are all, in some respects, always students. But we are not always students in every respect. Students of the kind that populate our colleges and universities play a special role in our political life in part because they are young, and thus tell us something about the future, and in part because they live together in a bounded community with ample time for political discussion and organization, which most adults lack. Repeatedly, students have posed questions to their societies that adults have only demonstrated their ignorance and callousness by dismissing. In forcing us to contend with these questions, students make us consider what in our world is worth preserving, perpetuating or fighting to eradicate. That the students in the encampments were far from infallible, morally and otherwise, should not distract us from the significance of their appearing in public on behalf of a humanitarian impulse that has petrified in the hearts of many of us “educated” adults.
Yet to cede moral authority and political judgment to these students would be as much of an abdication as to stop up our ears to the challenge of their chants. If the students bring something new to the political realm, more experienced intellectuals, writers and academics also have something essential to contribute: a knowledge of the past and present that the students lack and, ideally, a practical wisdom borne of our own political successes and frustrations in a world that is no longer new to us. Our responsibility for that world, moreover, means that we cannot only oppose it, as the students can, for we are implicated in its stupidity and corruption—as well as in its fragile bestowals of goodness and grace—in ways that they are not. To remember this responsibility is to meet the students’ political appeals with the critical seriousness and the serious criticism they deserve, while also maintaining the space they require to come to their own conclusions, which bear within them the potential to alter the world in ways we can neither predict nor foresee.
In case it needs to be said, we should all give a fuck what college students think. For the future that the students usher into being will be, of course, intergenerational; it will be our future as well as theirs. And the dialogue between the generations, which sometimes goes by the name of education, is where the adults in society decide, as Arendt puts it, “whether we love our children enough not to expel them from our world and leave them to their own devices, nor to strike from their hands the chance of undertaking something new, something unforeseen by us, but to prepare them in advance for the task of renewing a common world.”
Art credit: “Marine Corps Recruiting Protests,” Columbia University Libraries Online Exhibitions, accessed September 29, 2024.
As the campus protests against the war in Gaza spread across the country this past spring, affecting hundreds of colleges and resulting in the arrest of some three thousand protesters, academics and intellectuals responded according to a familiar pattern. Mainstream liberal and conservative commentators tended to counsel ignoring the protesters. From their perspective, college students are not independent agents making reasonable political and moral appeals that can be discussed and debated, but rather the tools of malignant forces they do not understand—in this case their postmodern professors or, possibly, distant puppet masters in the Middle East. In the rare instances they might be acting on their own, it is alleged that they are just children and, after all—as one author put it in Persuasion—“Who gives a fuck what college students think?”
Progressive and left-wing commentators, on the other hand, often voiced a completely different argument: for them, the students were not merely reasonable political actors, they were the moral conscience of the nation. According to this view, which echoes the half-ironic warning not to trust anyone over thirty, the kids are not only alright, they are “heroes.” More sensitive to injustice than their elders and probably better informed, they represent the only hope for cleaning up the mess that preceding generations have made of the world. Though for opposite reasons, the argument culminates in a parallel suggestion that there is little point in arguing with the students; instead, wherever possible, we are instructed to clear the way for their advancement.
The vehemence and endurance of these two ways of thinking about campus protest testify to the special, and contradictory, role that students have long played in the American political imagination. College students are, by definition, mostly new to thinking about politics, and their participation in elections is notoriously low. Nevertheless, going back to the formation of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the mass protests over civil rights and the Vietnam War in the 1960s, students have been cast as central protagonists in the drama of our political life. Indeed, the final chapter of SDS’s founding document, the Port Huron Statement, was entitled “The University and Social Change,” and argued that students were well-positioned to serve as a political vanguard. “The university,” it reads, “permits the political life to be an adjunct to the academic one, and action to be informed by reason.”
The statement contains no instructions for what one should do when political and academic life come into conflict—a topic that comes up a few times in this issue’s special section on Education and Society. But its focus on the political significance of universities raises even more fundamental questions: What is the student’s role in American democracy? Are there alternatives to viewing students as either mere containers for the ideologies of their elders or infallible guides to progress? And what do we, who are no longer in college, owe politically to those who come after us?
●
In her 1954 essay “The Crisis in Education”—yes, it was in crisis even then—the German émigré philosopher Hannah Arendt argued that students have a special place in American society because they are the living embodiment of the “extraordinary enthusiasm for what is new, which is shown in almost every aspect of American daily life.” The essay, published six years before the founding of SDS, is an early and prescient attempt to understand the roles that students would play in the politics of the West—and especially in America—over the next half-century.
The idea that education and politics are connected is, of course, very old; it was already taken for granted by the ancient Greeks. In any society, the educational system develops within the context of, and prepares its subjects to participate in, a preexisting political community. But Arendt points out that the eighteenth century, when America’s educational ideals were formed, gave rise to a new understanding of the connection between education and politics. With the spread of democracy and the mania for progress set off by the Enlightenment, the student became not only a vessel to be educated into an already-established society but also a potential source of criticism and, so to speak, renewable energy, without which that society might become backwards or moribund.
It is in this connection that Arendt identifies a tension or danger. Every educational system is bound to reflect, to some extent, the values and objectives of the society that creates it. But in a non-traditionalist country like America, it must also create some semi-protected space where the student—a being who is neither a child nor an adult, but rather in what Arendt describes as a “state of becoming”—can formulate their own values, including those values that encourage opposition to that society. The intermediary between the society and the “becoming” being is the teacher, whose job it is to channel the student’s values such that they can “come to fruition in relation to the world as it is.” It was critical for Arendt that teachers embrace the authority that comes with this role, as opposed to sloughing it off by deferring completely to the student, something she predicted would be especially tempting in America, where “tradition and authority” were viewed with suspicion, and “change” was often fetishized as a good in itself. But it was equally critical that the teacher understand the legitimate source of their authority, for this authority lay, importantly, not in their knowledge of how things should be, but in their knowledge of how they actually are. “It is as though [the teacher] were a representative of all adult inhabitants,” writes Arendt, “pointing out the details and saying to the child: This is our world.”
Arendt insists on a conservative—“in the sense of conservation”—aspect to education. The teacher must explain what is old or established to the student, or else the student can have no clear sense of what should change, much less what they ought to strive to preserve or cherish. But this does not mean that a teacher should project conservative political values in the classroom or, as far as they can help it, any political values at all. For Arendt correctly perceived that if one of our temptations is to treat students as morally and politically unteachable—because already more advanced than their teachers—another is to treat them as blank slates whose political education depends merely on exposing them to the right political text or interpretive framework.
Famously, in April of 1969, with Cornell University’s campus engulfed in protests over the demands of a coalition of African American activists and their partners in SDS, a group of students who had been studying Plato’s Republic with the political philosopher Allan Bloom decided to distribute a selection from the dialogue to the protesters. The students, as Bloom would later recount with no little delight, “had learned from this old book what was going on … [Socrates] had diagnosed the complaint of the ambitious young and showed how to treat it.” The story is apt to strike us as eccentric, but it is only a highly literal enactment of a fairly common impulse. Although emerging from the opposite end of the ideological spectrum, there were many echoes of it this past spring, when professors at elite colleges hastened to point out, with a pride that was the flipside of the professional commentariat’s suspicion, that the protesters on their campuses were merely “acting on what they had read”—in this case meaning not Plato but Edward Said and Frantz Fanon.
One only had to glance at the activists’ signs and slogans, with their heavy emphasis on the vocabulary of decolonization, for evidence that they had indeed been influenced by their postcolonial studies syllabi. One viral image even featured a protester holding a sign reading: “Columbia, why require me to read Prof. Edward Said, if you don’t want me to use it?” Still, the idea that the majority of today’s students required postcolonial theory to be inspired to action by the daily images from Gaza on their news feeds is almost as absurd—and as falsely flattering to their teachers—as the notion that Plato could “solve” a debate about racial justice and academic freedom at Cornell. The fantasy of the teacher, not to mention some of the teacher’s most devoted students, is that some specific book or text from the past can, on its own, release us from the burden of demonstrating political judgment in the present. In fact, the teacher who indulges this fantasy is not only overoptimistic about the ability of past wisdom to settle present controversies—having betrayed, as the representative of “all adult inhabitants,” the adult’s weakness for viewing the new strictly in terms of the old—but he confuses the source of his legitimate authority as a teacher.
The teacher is not like the parent, who may with some right endeavor to pass down their own values to their child, whether via a canonical text or not. But the teacher does have a responsibility to the student. First and foremost, the teacher does what she can to protect her students from the outside pressures that always threaten to throttle the development of the new—a task many professors undertook this past year when they stood up for their students’ prerogative to protest in public. The teacher’s second duty is more complicated and seemingly, for many of today’s teachers, less intuitive. Teachers, wrote Arendt, must “assume responsibility” for the established world that the student is still coming to know; and they must do this even though “they themselves did not make it, and even though they may, secretly or openly, wish it were other than it is.” If some professors traced the impetus behind the Gaza protests to their reading assignments, others proclaimed that now they were the students, or broadcast their endorsements for the student’s brave truth telling. These are all ways, according to Arendt’s argument, of misunderstanding the special value of the teacher to the student. The teacher is not tasked with either endorsing or opposing their students’ values, and she can never join them fully in protest—for part of what they protest is the teacher herself, as a representative of the old, whether she likes it or not.
This does not mean that the teacher must be mute on the political questions that consume the student. The teacher can help by taking students through the history of the struggles they care about, and by showing them how to weigh the conflicting arguments and interests that have shaped the world as it is. (Not Plato or Fanon, but Plato and Fanon.) In so doing, they model what it means to step back from what Arendt elsewhere characterizes as the “remorseless activity” of political life and to soberly evaluate the likely consequences of their actions—including by comparing them with actions that have been undertaken in the past, by young people with imperfect knowledge just like themselves. This is no small thing. But if the teacher is to remain a teacher, she has to trust the students to do something by themselves. This means shielding the student not only from the incursion of outside forces but also from the teacher’s own inherent desire, sincerely motivated as it may be, to impel the student in the direction of her choosing. “Our hope always hangs on the new which every generation brings,” wrote Arendt, “but precisely because we can base our hope only on this, we destroy everything if we so try to control the new that we, the old, can dictate how it will look.”
●
Arendt’s discussion of the teacher’s responsibility to her students offers some guidance for how all of us might begin talking about college students in ways that do justice to their role in our society, without reducing them either to empty vessels or moral saints.
Since its inception, this magazine has stood for the idea that education does not end with college—that we are all, in some respects, always students. But we are not always students in every respect. Students of the kind that populate our colleges and universities play a special role in our political life in part because they are young, and thus tell us something about the future, and in part because they live together in a bounded community with ample time for political discussion and organization, which most adults lack. Repeatedly, students have posed questions to their societies that adults have only demonstrated their ignorance and callousness by dismissing. In forcing us to contend with these questions, students make us consider what in our world is worth preserving, perpetuating or fighting to eradicate. That the students in the encampments were far from infallible, morally and otherwise, should not distract us from the significance of their appearing in public on behalf of a humanitarian impulse that has petrified in the hearts of many of us “educated” adults.
Yet to cede moral authority and political judgment to these students would be as much of an abdication as to stop up our ears to the challenge of their chants. If the students bring something new to the political realm, more experienced intellectuals, writers and academics also have something essential to contribute: a knowledge of the past and present that the students lack and, ideally, a practical wisdom borne of our own political successes and frustrations in a world that is no longer new to us. Our responsibility for that world, moreover, means that we cannot only oppose it, as the students can, for we are implicated in its stupidity and corruption—as well as in its fragile bestowals of goodness and grace—in ways that they are not. To remember this responsibility is to meet the students’ political appeals with the critical seriousness and the serious criticism they deserve, while also maintaining the space they require to come to their own conclusions, which bear within them the potential to alter the world in ways we can neither predict nor foresee.
In case it needs to be said, we should all give a fuck what college students think. For the future that the students usher into being will be, of course, intergenerational; it will be our future as well as theirs. And the dialogue between the generations, which sometimes goes by the name of education, is where the adults in society decide, as Arendt puts it, “whether we love our children enough not to expel them from our world and leave them to their own devices, nor to strike from their hands the chance of undertaking something new, something unforeseen by us, but to prepare them in advance for the task of renewing a common world.”
Art credit: “Marine Corps Recruiting Protests,” Columbia University Libraries Online Exhibitions, accessed September 29, 2024.
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