Professors and Pickets

Richard Michael Fischl, a professor at the University of Connecticut, wrote "The Other Side of the Picket Line," about the SEIU's organizing effort at the University of Miami last year (when Fischl was a Miami law professor). He explores what it means to teach classes in the middle of a janitorial strike, focusing on the question of whether he should move classes off-campus so that neither he nor his students would be forced to cross a picket line to get to class. The piece is layered and nuanced, and Professor Fischl makes a number of points that make it clear that he is a dedicated and thoughtful teacher.

The piece set me thinking about credit cards. Credit Slips bloggers are professors, most of us at universities that get big bucks from permitting credit card companies access to our students with on-campus solicitations, mailing lists, dorm mailboxes, noticeboards, etc. So what if a group--say PIRG--organized a student protest? What if they made a demand on the administration to rid our campuses of these lenders? And what if they organized a boycott or called for a general student and faculty strike? Where would we stand?

Professor Fischl offers his own explanation of a teaching moment, ultimately permitting his contract law class to vote on whether to move classes off-campus. He uses the his article (no link available, so far as I can find--in the forthcoming issue of NYU Review of Law & Social Change) to explore the limits of contract law as well, asking whether some issues transcend majority voting and tying people by agreements.

I teach about credit cards, and I give more than a passing nod to some of the data about the growth in credit, the increased vulnerability of people who are carrying large credit loads, and even the tricks and traps of credit card pricing. I try not preach. I don't ask them to believe me as a matter of faith. I ask them to learn about the facts and the theories and to end up wherever they end up. I owe a duty to all my students, regardless of their politics, and so long as they are thinking hard, I tell myself I am glad. 

But I confess I'm not entirely comfortable with that self-congratulatory story. If the students read our scholarly work or our quotes in the press or the work we do pro bono, can't they figure out our political views? Am I just kidding myself about outcome neutrality?

In fact, I wonder if there any "neutral" way to teach about something like credit cards?  If one believes that the market works perfectly, that the "democratization of credit" has been good for working class people, and that people in trouble mostly got their just desserts, won't the students figure that out?  And if the teacher thinks the most salient information relates to the empirical (and unproven) premises behind the claim that the market works, that much economic failure is the consequence of adverse events and a thin social safety net, and that huge amounts of wealth are being transferred from the unsophisticated to the sophisticated, won't the students figure that out too? Sure, I know how to do the on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand shuffle, but get serious. The students are smart enough to know when our eyes light up.

Professor Fischl puts the question squarely--what should he do when the janitors go on strike? The students who aren't sympathetic to the unionizers' cause claim a contract right not to be forced to attend classes away from campus. But he asks if there is not an equally strong/weak argument that the students who are sympathetic have a contract right to attend classes without crossing a picket line. The upshot of his paper is that neutrality is an illusion.

I used to think that because I taught in commercial law, I could avoid these kinds of activist questions.  But now I'm less certain.

Comments

[lmclark]

Good observation, Elizabeth. But frankly, I have never thought of commercial law as apolitical. Commercial law sets legal rules that decide who gets the wealth and who doesn't, who has a voice and who doesn't in an arena that normally touches people far more directly than do most "political" issues. Consider for example what has happened to the law of adhesion contracts. That principle held sway for centuries until it proved an obstacle to mass market one-sided take-it-or-leave-it contracts that business interests claimed were needed to make a profit. Soon enough, the courts began to trim down the doctrine until it barely exists today. The political dimension to that shift in contract/commercial law is unmistakeable.

I don't teach for a living, but what I do do also calls for a level of evenhandedness, and I strive to aspire to it. Yet it cannot be doubted that many commercial decisions of the courts reflect a certain political bias, not only in their outcomes but in the way the decisions are reasoned and supported. Is that a bad thing? Would the answer depend on your politics?

[Peter C. Fessenden]

There is a distinction between neutrality and impartiality. The former relates to the content of the debate; the latter relates to the debaters. A professor or a judge need not be neutral. Indeed, it may not even be wise. We should not be neutral between truth and falsehood (to set up a pretty clear dichotomy - admittedly, it gets grey eventually). We should not assume that the parties always fall on one side or the other, but should evaluate them impartially based on all the facts.

I wonder why academics are not more open about their beliefs. And why, when there is abuse on campus by the credit card industry or the student loan industry or other self-interests, professors are not more active in confronting the effects of those abuses.

Academics and others who are obligated to be impartial need to be scrupulous in the articulation of what their opinions are and how those opinions were created. And to be intellectually honest enough to change them with the facts warrant.

Those who know the most have an obligation not to be uninvolved dispassionate observers. Congratulations to you for your on-going activism for social and economic justice. I look forward to more of it.