Leaders of schools and colleges around the country have been debating whether or not to address the political events roiling our nation. Many have demurred. I have not. This is what I wrote for my school’s parents, teachers and alumni:
One in my position must scrupulously avoid partisanship. Leadership doesn’t require neutrality, but it demands open-mindedness and civility. On any of a number of political and social issues, a progressive institution like ours must resist the seductive ease of conformity. Throughout my tenure I’ve tried to be mindful that students, parents, alumni, faculty and staff have diverse experiences and political views. Our responsibility is to be acutely sensitive to the values and beliefs of those who might not be in the majority.
But there are matters that transcend political diversity. A prominent physicist once said, when discussing attacks on evolutionary science, “Keeping an open mind doesn’t mean you have to let your brains fall out.”
Some things demand our attention.
As a progressive educational institution, we are committed to inclusivity and justice. As a human community we care deeply about all our children, women and men, without regard to race, ethnicity, gender or sexual identity, circumstance, faith or lack of faith. Equality and equity are not partisan matters. They are constitutional guarantees and are the bedrock of our democratic republic. The ways in which equity and equality are now threatened are deeply troubling, including the constitutionally suspect and arguably discriminatory efforts to restrict or prohibit immigration based on religion and/or ethnicity.
As a progressive educational institution, we value science. As a human community, we cherish our planet. Climate change is not a partisan matter. We may quarrel about how to save the Earth. We cannot quarrel about whether to save the Earth. The various ways in which the Earth’s environment is now threatened by political appointments and executive orders are deeply troubling.
As a progressive educational institution, we value the rights encoded in our Constitution, particularly those enumerated in the First Amendment. As a human community we invite dissent, we encourage critical thought and we abhor censorship. Freedom of speech, freedom of the press, the right to peaceably assemble and the right to petition the government, are not conditional or situational rights. They are promises we have made and must keep. The ways in which powerful government officials are now criticizing and threatening the press and the way individuals in government agencies are being silenced are deeply troubling.
As a progressive educational institution, we value the elegance of our democratic system and the balance of powers implicit in our founders’ intentions and explicit in several hundred years of the American experience. As a human community we depend on the institutions and mechanisms of government to steady us in times of crisis. When we experience external threats or domestic turbulence, it is the institutions and mechanisms of government on which we must rely. Perhaps most alarming in the current environment is the erosion of respect for the institutions and mechanisms of government and the crass partisanship that is grinding the wheels of government to a deadly standstill.
And so our responsibilities to our students and to each other are clear.
We must invite our students and each other to assertively insist on justice and equity for all and to speak up and out about any person, program or policy that diminishes the value of, or opportunity granted to, any individual. We must provide an environment where our students discard assumptions, open their minds and hearts and learn to genuinely appreciate and respect one another.
We must teach our students about science and insist on critical inquiry, skepticism and the expectation of evidence. We must demand rigorous examination of all claims, whether environmental, scientific, historical or political. There are no alternative facts.
We must teach our students about the rights that protect them and that they must protect. We must unequivocally support a free press and the unfettered right of each person to express her beliefs or opinion. We must respect these rights and privileges within and without our school. We must fiercely protect all students’ right to expression and their right to be silent.
We must teach our students about the institutions, mechanisms and traditions of governing. We must hold these contradictory notions: We must respect these institutions and simultaneously accept our responsibility to challenge these institutions.
There is a great deal of understandable emotion arising from the election and the early days of the new administration. Some people are fearful and uncertain. Others are passionate and concerned about the real or perceived changes that lie ahead.
Just as the antidote to hateful speech is loving speech, the antidote to troubling governance is more governance. Anarchy is corrosive. Impulsivity should be countered by patience. An assault on government institutions should be met by participation in government institutions.
Most of all, we must encourage our students and each other to be civil. The current political environment is hot and caustic. But lasting change does not come from sustained heat. In the most searing moments of the recent campaign, Michelle Obama said, “When they go low, we go high.”
Going high does not mean going silently. It means speaking truth to power with dignity. It means putting a flower in a rifle barrel. When it comes to inflamed or coarse rhetoric, it means not fighting fire with fire, but extinguishing fire by not giving it the oxygen of our attention.
Steve Nelson lives in Sharon and New York City, where he is the head of the Calhoun School, a private school. He can be reached at steve.nelson@calhoun.org. He will be talking about his new book, First Do No Harm: Progressive Education in a Time of Existential Risk, Wednesday at the Norwich Bookstore in Norwich at 7 p.m.