Tufts faculty members have voiced differing opinions about the newly announced Center of Expanding Viewpoints in Higher Education, citing concerns over how it will be integrated with their teaching. The announcement of the center came earlier this month from University President Sunil Kumar and has been placed under the stewardship of its inaugural director, Eitan Hersh, a professor in the Department of Political Science.
CEVIHE was partly born out of student feedback to Hersh’s course, “American Conservatism,” which was one of the first of its kind to discuss conservative values and viewpoints. Hersh explained that it has roots in his own undergraduate experiences at Tufts, shaped by the post-9/11 landscape and talking politics with peers of various ideological tendencies.
He recounted a shift in the student population when he returned to Tufts as a professor in 2017, feeling that conversations across ideological divides that had defined his undergraduate experience were missing from campus.
“I felt like cross-ideological engagement was really missing,” Hersh said. “For one thing, there just wasn’t the same kind of lively conservative ecosystem that there was when I was a student. And to the extent that there was, there just wasn’t a lot of these rooms of engagement across difference.”
Hersh structured “American Conservatism” around discussions of hot-button political issues from multiple opposing views. He shared that the student feedback from the course was mainly positive. After students asked him to expand upon the class, Hersh began to believe that many of the liberal-leaning students he was teaching would benefit from more exposure to conservative ideas.
Despite this, he stressed that there is a balance between presenting conservative ideas and being committed to viewpoint diversity.
“This is going to be a mature political space on campus; it’s not about one side or another,” Hersh said. “It’s about students who want to lean into a core feature of adulthood, especially in a diverse political space, where they are going to try to learn from other people and take them seriously and also challenge them respectfully and benefit from that experience.”
It is a mission that Alon Burstein, visiting assistant professor of political science, finds pressing as well. Burstein, an Israel Institute Fellow whose work centers on violent collective action with a specific focus on the Israel-Hamas conflict, has observed a shift in debate, with student discussion on contentious issues being preceded by an apology in fear of offending someone.
“First and foremost, students are scared in class to present their opinion,” Burstein said. “The amount of times that students start their question with: ‘I’m sorry,’ ‘I’m sorry if this is offensive,’ ‘I’m sorry if this is wrong,’ ‘I’m sorry if I don't know,’ ‘I’m sorry if I’m uneducated.’ It’s exhausting. But also that shows you the level of fear students have. Everyone’s scared cause they feel like they should know.”
Natasha Warikoo, professor in the Department of Sociology, pushed back against certain reasons for the establishment of the new center. She acknowledged that circumstances have changed with the rise of social media and polarization, but opposed the idea that self-censorship among students is a new development.
“I do think sometimes students hesitate to share their views because they worry what their peers will think of them. That has always been the case, that was the case when I was in college,” she said.
Warikoo also questioned a proposed policy of having faculty opt in to have their syllabi reviewed by CEVIHE to ensure courses include differing viewpoints, as a similar program already exists, called the Pedagogical Partnership Program, in which a student can give feedback on syllabi.
Warikoo added that it is a general goal of faculty and in academia to promote differing opinions and induce debate in classrooms.
“I’ve spoken with a lot of colleagues around the country and at Tufts who also really think about pedagogical strategies to encourage students to disagree and to voice dissenting opinions in the classroom,” Warikoo said.
Although both Burstein and Warikoo have different plans on whether to collaborate with the center, both emphasized the importance of the center’s first few years in deciding the level of campus-wide collaboration it will create and the biases the center may be perceived as having.
“I think the way it’s perceived in the first couple of rounds will probably have a lot of impact on whether this is well received as: ‘If you want to diversify, this can help you.’ As opposed to: ‘Oh, this is the university meddling in my syllabus,’” Burstein said.
Hersh said that he is aware of these concerns.
“This is not a right-wing center, this is not an attempt to change the university on the behalf of conservative donors. It’s not like that at all,” Hersh said. “Most people can see that there’s a problem to be solved. … We have a hard time having conversations across differences, not just among students.”
