Professors’ residential segregation from students breeds self-declared liberalism masking classroom conservatism

Evidence

If professors take seriously, respectfully, the student body, we are compelled to acknowledge that we are addressing folks who are part of history. And some of them are coming from histories that might be threatening to the established ways of knowing if acknowledged. This is especially the case for professors and teachers who, in the classroom, come face to face with individuals they do not see in their own neighborhoods. … Many of their communities are very isolated, not reflecting the racial mixture of people that are on their campus. I think that this is why so many of these professors see themselves as liberal, even as they maintain conservative positions in the classroom. This seems especially so with issues of race. Many of us want to act as though race doesn’t matter, that we are here for what’s interesting in the mind, that history doesn’t matter even if you’ve been screwed over, or your parents were immigrants or the children of immigrants who have labored for forty years and have nothing to show for it. Recognition of that must be suspended; and the rationale for this erasure is that logic which says, “What we do here is science, what we do here is objective history.” — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 261

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s material on knowledge embedded in social position and how institutions claim objectivity. — connects to: Canonical ignorance is policed socially in feminist classrooms, alienating black newcomers — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as…, 210; Classroom decorum rules covertly enforce bourgeois values on working-class students — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as…, 353; Class self-segregation in cities makes citizens’ views of others hostage to fantasy — Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and…, 759 (+8 more)

Broader Connections

• Professors can teach radical content while enforcing bourgeois classroom decorum #corroborates (0.88) — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 358
• Class self-segregation in cities makes citizens’ views of others hostage to fantasy #corroborates (0.82) — Philip Pettit, Republicanism, 759
• Residential segregation is central to reproducing social inequality #expands (0.79) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 2433
• Dominant groups switch from paternalism to reason-based ideology when segregation replaces personal control #expands (0.78)
• Policy choices about university size created physically segregated cities of youth #expands (0.76) — Lyn H. Lofland, World of Strangers_ Order and Action in…, 418
• Residential desegregation fractured white working-class solidarity into defensive individualism #complicates (0.74) — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight, 191
• Classroom decorum rules covertly enforce bourgeois values on working-class students #exemplifies (0.72) — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 353