At the end of this month, just about a week after Donald J. Trump becomes president, I will begin to teach my regular law-school course on immigration law at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas. For the first time, I am apprehensive.
I am not at all afraid of teaching controversial topics. In previous jobs, I taught classes on the most sensitive issues in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at both Tel Aviv University and at the American University in Cairo. At UNLV, at least up to now, I have received generally high marks from students in response to the course-evaluation question about “respect for individual differences including gender, race, and ideology.”
But I fear this time will be different. Thanks to Trump, and the white nationalism he helped usher into mainstream American politics, there seems no longer to be any consensus about the boundaries of reasonable debate. And that will make teaching a subject like immigration law much harder.
At my own institution, I was one of nearly 1,000 people who signed a petition asking our university to declare itself a “sanctuary campus.” Campus protests erupted when a UNLV math instructor posted on Facebook that if he found out that one of his students was undocumented, “I would have to turn you into ICE :). No safe spaces in my classes :).” (He later said it was a joke.)
Meanwhile, pro-Trump students on college campuses are reportedly demanding “safe spaces” to shield them against ideological hostility from liberal students and faculty, and a conservative organization launched a Professor Watchlist to “expose and document college professors who discriminate against conservative students and advance leftist propaganda.”
While I do not pretend to be neutral, it is my job to encourage open debate in class. Students who disagree with me deserve to feel free expressing themselves.
In Las Vegas, I teach immigration law at the literal frontline of America’s immigration wars. UNLV is among the top five most ethnically diverse college campuses in the country, and we have many students who are undocumented or beneficiaries of President Obama’s deferred-action programs. The Pew Hispanic Center estimated that 7.2 percent of Nevada’s population was undocumented in 2014, more than either California or Texas.
Politically, we are a swing state. In 2016, Nevada voted for Hillary Clinton and elected the first Latina to serve in the United States Senate. But both votes were close. Two years ago, our state elected a conservative attorney general who promptly joined the lawsuit that blocked the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals and Deferred Action for Parents of Americans programs (DACA and DAPA) that aimed to help so many families here.
I know that many of my colleagues in academe try to achieve the appearance of neutrality when they teach controversial subjects by hiding their personal opinions. I don’t try to do that. In part, I just don’t think I could pull it off. I don’t hide my opinions very well, and I know that any student who cares enough could look up my publications and find out what I think anyway.
I also wonder if aiming for neutrality in the classroom would be intellectually honest. I teach immigration because I am passionate about it, and I spend most of my working day thinking about it. It would be strange if I did not have strong views, especially now.
But while I do not pretend to be neutral, it is my job to encourage open debate in class. Students who disagree with me deserve to feel free expressing themselves. And if only pro-immigrant students speak up, it is my job to raise counterarguments in class.
Yet, integral to this approach is a sense of boundaries distinguishing reasonable debate from base prejudices and disrespect. For example: I support DACA and DAPA, but I am keenly aware that they do push the boundaries of executive power and that there are substantial arguments that they are not legal. I want students to feel free to voice these critiques, and if no student does so, I will do it. And if students from the left were to allege that DACA critics are inherently racist, I would need to set them straight.
But what if a student were to say that Mexican immigrants have a propensity to be criminals, or that people of Mexican descent cannot be fair-minded judges? Such comments are pure bigotry; they are prejudice without empirical foundation. Moreover, such comments could create a hostile learning environment for other students, especially if the instructor fails to reprimand them and re-establish boundaries.
The trouble, obviously, is that our incoming president has said exactly these things. Does that mean the boundaries have moved? Does it mean that alleging without evidence that Mexico is deliberately sending rapists to America is now an acceptable claim to make in a university classroom? I don’t think it does. And yet, suddenly, to call racism by its name seems like just another partisan attack on the president. I can see why a student might think, Shouldn’t I be able to say the same thing the president says without being reprimanded by my liberal professor?
These challenges are not new. If I had been teaching constitutional law in 1954 — the year of Brown v. Board of Education — would I have needed to treat arguments for white supremacy as within the bounds of reasonable debate? Just as segregation had substantial public support then, Donald Trump has significant support today. I teach at a public university in a state in which nearly 46 percent of voters supported him. Does this mean that I need to treat any support for Trump, or anything Trump says, as inherently acceptable? Or can I, as a faculty member, rely on my own independent moral analysis to set boundaries for my classroom?
I still think bigotry is bigotry, and I do not believe that these boundaries are subject to change by the president. But I can also see that the election of Donald Trump has made these boundaries far more contestable, and far more contested, than they once were. And I think we have to take Trump seriously as a political force and, starting this month, as a policy maker. Students must be able to debate what he says and does — including arguing in his favor — but that does not mean that everything he has said and done is acceptable in my classroom. And that is not an easy line to draw.
Michael Kagan is a professor in the William S. Boyd School of Law at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas.
