The Mourning After: Teaching Research and Critical Thinking in the Time of Trump

I am exhausted and devastated by last night’s election results. If you know me, this is no surprise. I have been outspoken on Facebook and Twitter and even Instagram about my politics since day one of joining those sites and elsewhere long before that.

I am also outspoken about politics — or well, about injustice and inequality — in my classroom. I teach college writing. Currently I teach at three different universities (one in Manhattan, one in New Jersey, and one in Brooklyn where I live). I can’t see spending time teaching students to read, think, and write about things that have no impact on our lives. And social inequalities have great impact on all our lives. So we read about racism, about gender discrimination, about income inequality, about homophobia, about the inner workings of socio-economic class, and about so many other things. We read James Baldwin. Every semester. And bell hooks, and Julia Alvarez, and Audre Lorde, and Dalton Conley, and David Sedaris, and Louise Erdrich, and Joan Didion and Maxine Hong Kingston and more. We talk about how and why these authors put (or try to put) their arguments and their themes together in a way that has an effect on the reader. I try to get students to think about their own lives in relation to these texts and to ask what are these essays and these stories saying about the world? For me this is almost always political. I don’t shy away from it. I don’t think I have to.

But in 16 years of teaching, never have I spent time in my classrooms reading and talking with students about an election other than to encourage them to vote. Until now. In the past if a student asked me who I was voting for I would tell them, of course. But that was pretty much it. This semester and last, we spent a ton of time talking about the election. And to be honest, mostly Trump. It was, as I saw it, a very different type of election and he was a very different type of candidate. So it was one of the focuses of my courses this semester and last, to some extent. Often my students were the ones to bring it up. Some student would throw out a comment about something Trump said and another student would retort with, yeah “But Hillary…. or “Yeah but the Democrats…” Inevitably I would respond mostly by talking about how and where we get our information. How do you know that’s what Trump said? How do you know that’s true about Hillary? Are you sure? Can you show me where you got that information? Where is your evidence?

It never takes long these days for at least one student during these discussions to offer up the old adage: “you can’t trust the media.” “All media is bias,” other students chime in. And so we discuss this. What are students really saying when they say you can’t trust the media? I try to explain that everyone has bias. All of us. We are human and we look at the world through the lens of our own experiences. That is inevitable. There is a difference between “bias” and “fabrication.” Or between subjectivity and, as I like to say, “just making shit up.”

So. How do we go about making distinctions between the different types of media sources that exist? Does it matter whether a media corporation has a lot of big corporate sponsorship or if it is largely run by member supported dollars? Does it matter if a news publication has been around for 100 years or 50 or 5 or 5 months? Does it matter if something you read on the internet comes from a website that is known to have a good (or bad) reputation versus whether or not you’ve ever even heard of this site? What can we tell by websites and online publications just by looking at them? What does it mean to do “research”? Why do your instructors often ask you to use sources from scholarly journals? What even is a scholarly journal? How do you assess a source? What does it mean to analyze a text? To question it? What kinds of things do you look for? All of this has been part of the conversation in my classrooms in all of the universities where I teach. Not just this semester but for a long time now. Of course, this is part of our job as writing teachers. It’s hard to talk about these things though especially when students over time have become more and more convinced that everything they read is biased and not to be trusted. And yet they quickly rattle off claims that they simply “read online somewhere,” as though they were absolutely true or probably true or at least possibly true.

I was thrilled the other night when one of my students told me that he had not been planning on voting in this election, but now that we’d been talking about it so much he changed his mind. We talked about how you could go online and look up what your state and your district had on the ballot, that you could find out online where your polling place is just by putting in your address. We talked about the fact that there were many other things to vote on in this election besides the office of President. And we spoke about the idea that it is up to each of us to research candidates and issues and to become well informed.

Two students had been staunchly anti-Hillary and making pretty heated claims about her emails. I asked them if they could find evidence to back these claims up. I sincerely invited them to email me copies of the articles where they said they had read that she had done illegal things and that there had been a giant government cover up. I told them I wanted to see credible sources and if they didn’t know whether a source was credible or not we could discuss it together and try to figure it out. I never told my students to vote for Clinton. I never even said they should like her. I admitted that even I had mixed feelings about her, but that didn’t negate the fact that she has been quite misunderstood and maligned by a sexist and conservative media for the past 25 years. I admitted that I could see how there are plenty of things to criticize about Hillary but that the things the mainstream media is criticizing — the things that my students were bringing up, I didn’t understand. And I asked them to help me understand. With the exception of one student, no one came to me with any piece of information that helped them make their point. The one student who did present me with “evidence” of Hillary’s untrustworthiness produced on his phone, an article from Breitbart.com that claimed Hillary had laughed at a 12 year old rape victim. Of course I knew this story already. It’s one that has been explained and discredited by many other media sources many times over. I asked my student why he would believe Breitbart over other sources? He didn’t know.

Today I am seeing so much chatter on social media, and much of it is by grown ups — people who either did or did not go to college themselves. Even after the election, they are still making wild accusations — some about Hillary (that she supports Sharia law, for instance) and several claiming that Trump has never said anything sexist or racist or misogynistic, but that it’s just been Clinton spinning it that way to make it look as though he has.

I have friends on the right and far left who are ultra critical of Hillary Clinton and of neo-liberal democracy in general. I do understand my friends on the left who criticize her for her hawkishness and her establishment politics. I myself was incredibly disappointed in her response to Black Lives Matter and to the North Dakota Pipleline controversy. But I also suspect that almost all American politicians are corrupt because that is the system we live in. That is, I think, the nature of capitalist patriarchy. And America is a super power in the world.

I have hoped we could find ways to dismantle that unchecked power from within the system because standing on the outside and trying to tear it down seems almost futile to me. And so I did not want to hear or make too stringent a critique of HRC during the election because I absolutely felt we needed her to beat Trump (a much worse alternative) and because, like many other smart and politically engaged people I know such as Roxane Gay, there are also things I like and admire about HRC. This despite the fact that many people I care about and respect on the left have pointed out all the ways I shouldn’t. I’m willing to admit that my soft spot for Hillary (or what allows me to have it) has much to do with my white, western privilege. But I also think it’s more complicated than that.

The left probably isn’t influenced much by the sexist ways she has been maligned for the past 25 years — at least not consciously. But the fact is she HAS been treated that way in the press. Hillary Clinton (or her image/public persona) has not escaped the effects of misogyny and sexism that all women face in this country, and the criticisms by the people who are center or on the right so clearly come out of that space, even if subconsciously. They might not hate her because she is a woman. But the narrative and the images that have emerged about who she is have absolutely been constructed by a sexist media machine. Just watch the film Miss Representation if you don’t believe me. Or call me and we can talk about it over coffee or a beer.

Why are so many conservative and right wing people — people who hate Hillary — why are they so quick to hold up these ridiculous stories about her character (she laughs at child rape victims, she worships the devil, she supports Sharia law)? The only thing that I can gather here is that these people, like several of my students, have not been taught how to research or think critically. They don’t follow or even believe in fact based media. Many of them even say they don’t believe in “facts.” They get their “news” — their information from one or two very specific sources. And sometimes even when they get it from a legitimate source, they haven’t been taught how to properly analyze it so that they can actually understand what is going on. Perhaps this sounds elitist of me. It probably is. But I am an English teacher and I have had so much experience watching students misread texts. I know just how real the struggle is.

So many people buy into the soundbite, they believe the hearsay, and they run wild with it into their social media feeds, into their homes, schools, and work places. I get it. It’s easy to do. I’m sure I’ve been guilty of it myself on occasion. But ultimately too many Americans are unwilling to ask questions or think critically about where their information comes from. Too few are willing to take the time to dig, to investigate. Either that or they don’t know how. And it’s killing us.

NPR’s “This American Life” did an episode recently entitled “Seriously?” It addressed this very issue. I recommend you listen to at least the first segment (it’s about 25 minutes long) because it gets at this idea that many people believe what they see on TV, hear on the radio, from friends, or “on the internet,” and do not bother to look more deeply into the matter. I have seen this too with liberals and people on the left. It’s not just a conservative, right wing problem (though my sense is that it is more prevalent among conservatives. I have a theory for why that might be. But that’s a thought for another post. Hint: it hasn’t much to do with education or intelligence but how we think about authority).

Ira Glass, the host of “This American Life” (and my not-so-secret man-crush) starts out the segment with this claim: “With so many of us getting our news from social media and from sources that we agree with, it’s easier than ever to check if a fact is true, and yet facts matter less than ever.”

This is a devastating reality that we as intellectuals, as scholars, thinkers, and concerned citizens need to confront. But even when some of us try, it poses significant challenges.

In today’s political climate if you simply disagree with anything anyone on the right says (even if you base your claims on research and facts), you will be branded as having a liberal bias and therefore seen as suspect. You will be accused of being a proponent of political correctness, rather than viewed as a critical thinker and a culturally sensitive intellectual. And you will possibly lay yourself open to the charges of brainwashing students towards your agenda. But should it be this way?

Truthfully, I am at a loss to think of more ways to convince students that simply because an idea goes against “conservative” or Republican beliefs — that simply because it challenges the conservative and traditional ideas they were raised with or the narrow interpretations of the Bible that have been handed down to them for generations that it is automatically “liberal.” This idea that colleges and universities are all just full of professors spouting liberal propaganda is one of the myths that is pervasive in our culture today. Yes, college educated people tend to be more on the left end of the political spectrum, but there are plenty of conservatives and neo-liberal professors teaching America’s college students today. And not all of them are necessarily wrong about everything or bad professors or bad thinkers either.

But it does seem that the more you question assumptions, the more you use critical thinking skills, the more likely it will be that your ideas will line up with ideas that are now commonly thought to be “liberal” ideas.

We all see the world from our own perspective. We all have “bias.” That’s OK. It’s also OK and possible to shift and try to see the world from someone else’s perspective too. In fact, It’s crucial for our survival that we do. But bias does not negate the existence of FACTS. Facts are out there. They do exist. What you do with them — how you juxtapose them, interpret them, or manipulate them is another matter. But ignoring them or acting like there is no such thing? That is dangerous.

Glass, is bewildered by what he finds as he works on “Seriously?” “Facts do not have much power against a set of beliefs,” he concludes at the end of the segment.

We need to talk about this as a bigger problem in the culture and certainly within the university. I feel like I’m floundering. I cannot keep doing it alone. I need help. I need someone to teach me how to best teach my students to think critically, to research, find, and use credible sources and information. And how to analyze their findings.

I wonder, can we have a workshop on this? Maybe a series of workshops? I don’t want to presume anyone’s politics but I want to propose this to the colleagues where I teach. It can be a bipartisan effort. Or a non-partisan effort. Or whatever. Can we at least come together as faculty and agree on some basics when it comes to how students and scholars gather and use “evidence” in the classroom, how we use it in our own research, and in the ways we gather and process information in our every day lives? I would love to take a workshop on this. And if Ira Glass is available to lead this workshop all the better!

I need help breaking this all down. I need a space to come together with my peers and discuss approaches to talking with students about all of this. It feels like such hard work. But it feels like important work, now more than ever.

I also need people who are not disappointed in the election outcome to stop acting as though the loss that I and many of my friends, students, and colleagues are feeling right now is on par with our favorite sports team losing the world series. It is not the same thing. This election, maybe more than any other we’ve had so far, determines so many real world consequences for millions of people both on our shores and abroad. I had to take the day off today. I couldn’t face my students. I had been ill in the night and suffering from a migraine all day. I sat around in my big comfy Tori Amos sweatshirt and ate a huge bowl of pasta and pesto. I cried. I raged. I despaired. I texted and emailed with friends near and far to commiserate and strategize. I’m tired. But I know I can’t quit. There’s too much at stake for my students, my friends, my son, the world. So we have to find a way. I’m taking solace in poetry and in other artists — warrior poets — who have gone through this and much worse before.

Much of my political work is done in the classroom and I’ll go back there tomorrow and continue to talk to students about ideas, about literature, about words, politics, about the world around us and how all of these things are interconnected. I needed a day to sit and think and write. It was comforting to know I wasn’t alone; several friends and colleagues messaged to say they were doing the same.

Today we mourn. Tomorrow we’ll fight.