By Mira Sucharov, Associate Professor, Department of Political Science
When teaching controversial topics, particularly the kind that are known in everyday discourse to be polarizing, the question of professor “bias” is sometimes raised. Does every professor necessarily have a bias, and if so, is bias something that should be disclosed to students?
According to my online dictionary, bias means “prejudice in favour of or against one thing, person, or group compared with another.”
In the context of teaching protracted conflict, and especially in my area of focus — Israeli-Palestinian relations — bias is a seductive concept. But it’s also problematic. It can serve to promote binary thinking. And it may not be as revealing as we think.
I am Jewish and I love modern Hebrew and I have a soft spot for 1970s Israeli folk rock. But that doesn’t tell us much about my political commitments. So let’s use a much tougher example — one that has been used to criticize at least one New York Times Jerusalem correspondent. Let’s say I, as a professor at Carleton, happened to have a son serving in the Israeli military. (I don’t). What would that tell us?
Would having a hypothetical son in the IDF mean I’m more supportive of Israel and its policies writ large? Maybe my hypothetical son has taught me to see the power of the sword in solving political dilemmas. Or maybe, so that my hypothetical son won’t see further combat, I despise Israel’s uncompromising approach towards the Palestinians. The Israeli peace movement, after all, was founded in the late 1970s not by flower children, but by Israeli military officers and soldiers.
And none of this would necessarily reveal anything about my degree of compassion and concern — or indifference or derision — for the Palestinian experience. Neither would it reveal how I understand concepts of justice and fairness.
In short, in the realm of policy ideas and political judgments, “revealing one’s bias” isn’t the logical silver bullet we might think that it is.
But there is a related concept — one which I think has much more pedagogical value: that is the concept of subjectivity, meaning who we are as emotional, psychological, bodily and intellectual beings in the world.
I do have a fairly clear sense of my subjectivity. My subjectivity — what really makes me tick — is an innate drive to get people to see multiple sides of an issue. I find I have marked emotional and physiological responses to dogma and to certain forms of political certainty and attendant demonization of other perspectives. It’s deeply rooted in me; I’ve been this way since I was a kid.
Sometimes, when it comes to Israel/Palestine, this particular subjectivity of mine leads me to challenge deeply-held beliefs in the audience for which I’m writing or teaching. On one hand, this subjectivity leads me to urge caution around using a stark label like “apartheid” to describe all of Israel — on both sides of the Green Line. At other times, through my own writings in Jewish community papers whereby I have frequently criticized Israel and sacred-cow institutions like the Jewish National Fund, this challenging-community-wisdom approach has cost me significant social capital.
And then there’s the question of scholarly understanding — how we, as scholars and teachers, seek to apply concepts consistently across cases. We may not be perfect at it, but presumably we got into this business because we are passionate about this type of reasoning, however deeply rooted are our ethnic or other identities.
In the classroom, my subjectivity — my commitment to multi-dimensionality — means challenging students to consider a different perspective, even if to reject it — once facts and values are carefully considered, of course. Not everyone is amenable to an approach that seeks to challenge them from various angles — the blowback can sometimes be fierce — but it’s a position to which I’m still committed, as long as I can sustain it.