The first time I lost control of a college classroom, fiction played a starring role. Or maybe it was the absence of concrete facts. I was teaching undergraduates in the Deep South. The course was an honors seminar on race and American politics, focused on current events. That week's topic: voting. The year: 2008.
To get my students thinking, I gave them a discussion prompt: If old enough, do you plan to vote in the upcoming presidential election? If you don't plan on voting, why not? I made it clear I didn't want to know which way they were leaning.
My students came to class ready to rumble.
Passionate—and now familiar—debates broke out over whether then-candidate Barack Obama had been born in the United States or abroad, and whether being foreign-born would exclude him from running for president. Other students argued that Obama was secretly “a Muslim” because his middle name, “Hussein,” has Islamic roots and his father was Kenyan. My students' fiery exchanges surprised me. And their reliance on flat-out fiction unnerved me.
My students' fiery exchanges surprised me. And their reliance on flat-out fiction unnerved me.
There was yelling, crying, and name-calling with little respect for facts. Facts, however, are the active ingredients of truth. My next lesson almost planned itself: I would have to address what I've come to refer to as “Truth Decay,” the diminishing reliance on facts and analysis in American public life.
At the next class, we immediately cut the tension by apologizing to one another for losing our collective composure. We agreed it was OK to be partisan, but we had to fight fairly. We set ground rules for what constituted a reliable source and for what types of evidence could be used to support an argument. Most importantly, students promised to keep their minds open and to treat one another with dignity. During our post-mortem, we realized that the political rhetoric surrounding the 2008 presidential race had hijacked our discussion. Deceptive language commonly used to spread untruths had seeped into our minds and into our classroom.
The students' next assignment was to research—and debunk—the U.S. citizenship and “secret Muslim” conspiracies being used against Obama. Hunting down the truth seemed to invigorate my class. Our focus on truth-digging also inspired me to examine the role Obama's Muslim-sounding middle name played in the 2008 election. (Surprisingly little, as it turned out.)
The class was better for our brush with Truth Decay, and so was I.
The experience made me grow as a teacher. I learned to present sensitive topics oh-so-carefully, and to (mostly) keep my composure when students forcefully disagree. I now see healthy conflicts in my classrooms as a powerful way to reinforce lessons about honesty, civility, and information literacy. The conflation of opinion and fact in that classroom, and others I've taught in since, can be tied to our growing political polarization, and how we too often fail to communicate respectfully in our society.
Sixteen years since that first classroom skirmish, we are now in the throes of yet another presidential election cycle marked by the now-expected spread of falsehoods. Major disagreements about objective facts are as disconcerting as ever. This shift away from a reliance on facts can be traced to yellow journalism, the late 1800s version of fake news. Today's 24-hour news cycle, and the rise of artificial intelligence and social media, have increasingly blurred the line between fact and fiction.
Before the pandemic struck, I relocated from the South to the upper Midwest. The student body at my new university was 90 percent white—and much more reluctant than their Southern counterparts to talk about race and politics. I soon realized that, as a teacher, I might be able to educate and effectively counter the Truth Decay I witnessed in the classroom, but here it would have to be done one student at a time.
My office hours became a safe haven for students to discuss things they weren't comfortable bringing up in class—such as the role of race in the Civil War. Alarmingly, many students in my Social Identity and Politics class believed that the war had nothing to do with Black people, and everything to do with states' rights, economic differences, and growing political tensions between the North and South. I used these one-on-one meetups to talk about the causes of the Civil War, particularly the role that race and slavery played in sparking the conflict.
Today's 24-hour news cycle, and the rise of artificial intelligence and social media, have increasingly blurred the line between fact and fiction.
Through a series of casual and judgment-free conversations in my office—or on nature walks on trails near campus—I was able to help my students see that the role of race in the Civil War is not up for debate. This confusion over the importance of race in the Civil War allowed me to make another point that resonates today: Arguments to the contrary are often made in bad faith by people who are trying to promote an agenda that downplays or denies the significance of race.
The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated Truth Decay. False and misleading information quickly spread on how serious the virus might be and how to control its spread. In most of my classes, I started showing students how to verify statements about the virus. This includes training them to recognize potential biases in sources they consult, to cross-reference multiple sources, and to take advantage of fact-checking websites.
In this ongoing era of Truth Decay, my classrooms have become a laboratory for countering it. This isn't a problem that any one person can solve, but helping society learn how to ferret out the truth is a good place to start. When facts are up for debate and opinions are passed off as truths, it's easy for conversations to become divisive and hostile. This fall, I'm once again reminding my students that the erosion of truth is not just about losing respect for facts, it's also about the dignity we're discarding—for our fellow classmates, citizens, and even ourselves—along the way.
