Yesterday I blogged in anticipation of my "Donuts & Faculty" session on Politics in the Classroom. As I said there, I was nervous about this. I had no idea who would show or what kind of mood they would be in. At one point last night, I thought I should be really provocative. In the end, I chose something rather safe.

Ann Althouse describes the object lesson that I used to start the session, and offers some thoughts. The idea was to split the participants into two groups: conservatives and liberals. A few people (including Ann) simply could not bring themselves to play in either camp. This was, of course, part of the point. When we listed 15 or so current issues and defined the conservative and liberal positions, other people started to express discomfort at that lack of nuance. Not only did most people not embrace all of the stated positions of their group, but even when they endorsed a particular position, they felt that justifications for that position might differ within the group. My main point here is that we demand recognition of our own complexity, but we tend to caricature the other side. As one person noted afterwards, we tend to see people who place themselves in the other group as cartoons.

Most of the rest of the session was spent sharing experiences. We talked a fair amount about respecting other people enough to find out the nuances. It all seems kind of touchy-feely now that I am writing it, and maybe it was at the time, but these sorts of discussions are exactly the remedy for ideological segregration. Most of the students said that felt that the problems lay more with themselves than with the professors, but I am not sure this is a consensus view. All in all, I was pleased to have done it, even if the world is probably not much different tonight.

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