As part of our regular Opinions series, “Office Hours,” we feature a range of perspectives from Swarthmore faculty on topics relevant to the Swarthmore academic community and higher education in general. We gather responses by reaching out to the entire Swarthmore faculty over email, and each contribution is edited for clarity and syntax only. In our eighth edition of this column, we asked professors to share their thoughts on the following question:
What is the relationship between your pedagogy and your personal political views? More broadly, to what extent should professors share and incorporate their political opinions into their teaching? Should the answer depend on the particular class or department in question?
Mark Lewis, Assistant Professor of Educational Studies
Teaching is a political act. When educators show their students that they matter, we are acting politically. I can understand someone thinking, “but that’s not politics — that’s good teaching,” yet “Who deserves respect and care?” is a profoundly political question. In fact, I can’t think of anything that human beings need about which there is a baseline political consensus that we all deserve it. Creating a world in which we all have what we need is a political struggle. I don’t separate that value from how I teach or what I share with my students.
However, I grant that this isn’t the kind of thing people usually have in mind when considering a teacher’s “personal political views.” I’ll give a more narrow example of what it’s like to teach in a field like education, which has such clear immediate policy connections. In 2022, John Krill, a lawyer for the Republican state legislature unsuccessfully defending Pennsylvania’s unjust school funding system, argued that children “on the McDonald’s career track” do not need to study algebra. (Class, stay tuned, we’ll read about this in Week 10.) When I discuss this case in class, it would be impossible to hide my rejection of Krill’s position.
At the same time, if I don’t leave sufficient room for students to stake out their own developing ideas about how teaching, learning, and justice intersect, I’m not fulfilling my responsibility as a teacher. So I speak personally about my “political opinions” or policy prescriptions only rarely — any class time I take up purely with my ideas is time not available for students to share theirs.
Syon Bhanot, Associate Professor of Economics
I try very hard not to let my politics influence my pedagogy. It is quite hard given that I’m a social scientist, and I teach classes that sometimes have the word “policy” in the title! But I think it is very important for us as faculty to do our best to keep teaching and politics separate. The (somewhat cliché) expression is true, in my view: faculty should teach students HOW to think, not WHAT to think. Furthermore, creating an inclusive learning community requires us to ensure that students with a range of views feel that our classrooms are not hostile environments for their perspectives. I also believe that an important part of the faculty role is preparing students for the world they will soon enter. I do not feel that a slanted or politicized classroom environment helps achieve that. Regarding whether the answer should depend on the class or department, I think it should not. As someone with three degrees in public policy, I took many classes on politically charged topics over the years, and I had many great professors (often ones with known views “outside” the classroom) who successfully kept their politics out of the class. So it can be done, and I think it’s part of our job to do it.
Kirby Conrod, Assistant Professor of Linguistics
Here’s a short answer to your question this week: my pedagogy is highly informed by this essay by Jeffrey Moro, “Against Cop Shit.” The part I find myself quoting and thinking about all the time is this:
“Cop shit is seductive. It makes metrics transparent. It allows for the clear progress toward learning objectives. (‘Badges’ are cop shit, by the way.) It also subsumes education within a market logic. ‘Here,’ cop shit says, ‘you will learn how to do this thing. We will know you learned it by the acquisition of this gold star. But in order for me to award you this gold star, I must parse you, sense you, track you, collect you, and — ’ here’s the key, ‘I will presume that you will attempt to flout me at every turn. We are both scamming each other, you and I, and I intend to win.’ When a classroom becomes adversarial, of course, as cop shit presumes, then there must be a clear winner and loser. The student’s education then becomes not a victory for their own self-improvement or -enrichment, but rather that the teacher conquered the student’s presumed inherent laziness, shiftiness, etc. to instill some kernel of a lesson.”
I do not think it is possible to enter into a teacher-student relation without politics, because the way humans relate to one another — how we think of hierarchies and power especially — is inherently political. If a teacher believes that students should raise their hands before speaking in a classroom, that is a political belief. It’s a political belief if a teacher thinks that students learn better when the chairs are organized in a circle. It’s a political belief if a teacher decides that it is the student’s responsibility to correct their teacher if they get their name or pronouns wrong. And so on. So, my personal political views are that it is bad pedagogy to take an adversarial approach between myself and my students, and there is no way for me to teach that isn’t about that on some level.
Donna Jo Napoli, Professor of Linguistics and Social Justice
The more I do research in my own field, the more I realize how little I know to be true. Mostly, I can say what is clearly wrong about a hypothesis — and I am well-armed to do that. But what’s right? I don’t know.
I am not a political scientist or an economist. So how on earth do I have the right to waste my students’ time (and money) talking about my perspectives on those areas?
The most I can do is treat my students properly according to my own beliefs and conduct my classroom in the way I believe promotes argumentation skills and a chance at knowledge — things that I hope will inform life for all of us. The foundations for that are: no hypotheses are unworthy of being considered; smart people say stupid things all the time so don’t be afraid to speak up; everyone attacks all hypotheses posed to us, including ones they proposed themselves; collaboration opens eyes/hearts/minds, so jump in.
Sunka Simon, Professor of German, Film and Media Studies
Pedagogy is about equipping students to support their arguments based on established facts using analytical thought processes derived from and in critical dialogue with time-tested disciplinary and interdisciplinary methodologies. My personal political opinion should not get in the way of that. In essays or projects, students need to be given the means and tools to express themselves free from the fear that I will grade them harsher because I disagree with their objectives. There is, after all, a power hierarchy here, and especially first years often come from high school asking “what do you want me to say/write?” We have to be mindful of that and teach by encouraging them to become a partner in knowledge production instead.
Pat Devlin, Professor of Statistics
I have eventually come to suspect that all speech is ultimately political, but as a math professor it certainly feels like a lot of the course content (and my speech within the class) often ought to be substantially less political than the speech in many other classes at Swarthmore. Without a doubt, certain classes — especially those in the social sciences and humanities — simply must engage with political topics in a way that arguably a lot of math classes “ought not.” For this reason, I have historically tried very hard and very consciously to avoid incorporating any politics in my classes. My thinking was that when teaching a class like Math 025 (Calculus II), I as the instructor have an obligation to teach the material on the syllabus which includes the seemingly apolitical (but still deeply human and intellectually enriching) concepts of abstract mathematics.
I used to feel that if I were to engage with anything even vaguely political, that would be a disservice to the students [who signed up for the class to learn about math, not my thoughts on life], and I also felt like I was not academically expert enough in “political matters” to teach on them anyway (comparing myself to my wonderful colleagues in other departments who live and breathe these things all the time). But in the last few years, I’ve found that this has changed considerably.
When it comes to the human aspects of my discipline (e.g., who is implicitly and explicitly included, what is the history of each result, who are the people that mathematicians revere as historically “important” and what biases contribute to that), I am in fact an expert, and my students would in fact benefit from thinking about these matters. I realized that discussions about the human aspects of math would benefit my students in their general development as humans but also in their development as mathematicians in particular. And I now try to give results in historical context, especially being mindful of how historical (and modern day) prejudice has influenced the way experts discuss the material today.
As an example, in October of 2025, RFK suggested as an established fact that Tylenol causes autism. The most generous interpretation of his intent would be that this conclusion is an inappropriate interpretation of available data, and it’s an example of flawed statistical inference. At the time, I was teaching Stat 011 (Introductory Statistics), and I decided to devote the entirety of the next class session to a discussion of the available research studies on the subject, and as a class we discussed the nuances of what proper statistical inference would look like in this setting. We also critiqued RFK’s claim about Tylenol and autism using the tools from the class, and students were required to read some articles discussing the best practices used within the scientific community (and how these deviated from RFK’s “methodology”).
Prior to these class discussions, I was initially very hesitant to explicitly engage with anything even remotely political, but I realized that training students to critically engage with misinformation is in fact one of the main learning goals that I have for that statistics class, and ultimately I felt convicted that it would have been inappropriate for me to ignore that current event. I now freely discuss social issues that I feel are relevant to my discipline (e.g., in my differential equations class, we spent an entire class session this semester sitting in a circle discussing the social [and mathematical] implications of AI generated mathematics — particularly important considering that the subject of differential equations was arguably fundamentally changed as a result of recent AI breakthroughs this semester).
In short, I historically have tended to avoid politics entirely because I felt “it’s not in the scope of my job” as a math professor (other disciplines are an entirely different story). But I have since realized that addressing issues of social inequity within my discipline and equipping students to identify and combat statements of statistical misinformation are both very much what I aspire to be doing as a mathematician. Now, I feel obligated to bring these things up whenever relevant, and I do so without hesitation. I like to blissfully imagine a world where the only things that we “need” to discuss in my math classes fit neatly within the dry boundaries of abstract mathematics and statistics, but as long as there are social problems immediately related to my discipline, I want to engage with those in my classroom.
