‘This Is Much More Important’: How Professors Taught the Kavanaugh-Ford Hearing

Satish Kolluri, an associate professor of communication studies at Pace University, often shows students in his political-satire course clips from The Colbert Report and The Daily Show With Jon Stewart.

But the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing he streamed during his class on Thursday, looking into whether the Supreme Court nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh committed sexual assault in high school, was a break from the usual. It was a historic moment that, in itself, could relate to his courses.

“Yesterday was very serious, extremely somber,” Kolluri said. “Although Colbert and Trevor Noah did their best to make light of it last night. Satire doesn’t work best all the time.”

The discussions prompted by the hearing have extended to campuses across the country. While some professors canceled their classes so students could watch the hearing, others incorporated it into their courses to help students understand the proceedings, and watch history unfold together.

Some professors, like Kolluri, ditched their lesson plans altogether. He also showed the hearing in a public-speaking and cultural-studies class he taught later that day.

“I basically threw the lesson plans for the day out of the window, and I decided that this is much more important,” Kolluri said.

The structure of the Kavanaugh-Ford hearing worked in his favor, he said. Kolluri used the breaks between sessions to open the class to discussion, which he framed around his course subjects.

Two weeks earlier, his “Satire as Political Critique” class had discussed Anita F. Hill’s testimony in the 1991 hearings to confirm Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court. At the hearings, she accused him of sexually harassing her while he was her supervisor.

In one of the breaks on Thursday, Kolluri discussed parallels with the 1991 hearings, including how race, privilege, and class might have played a role in each.

Christine Blasey Ford, who has accused Kavanaugh of assaulting her when they were both teenagers, is considered a “class traitor” because “she comes from a very wealthy Republican family in the suburbs of Washington, D.C.,” Kolluri said, citing a New York magazine article he had read. “Her own parents gave her very lukewarm support.”

Students offered their own insights about the hearing. For example, one student said he thought it was “cowardly” that the Republican members of the Judiciary Committee, all men, had hired a female lawyer, Rachel Mitchell, to question Ford, instead of doing it themselves, as they did with Kavanaugh.

Interest in the hearing extended outside the classroom, Kolluri said. “The kids were all tuned in,” he said. “It was incredible just to see them in the corridors, sitting outside in the courtyard, people watching on their mobile phones. It was quite electric yesterday.”

‘A Resource for His Fellow Students’

Other professors incorporated the Kavanaugh-Ford hearing into their course materials.

Clayton Thyne, a political-science professor and department chair at the University of Kentucky, used the hearing in his data-focused political-science classes. He showed students how running a text-analysis program, recording key words and phrases on a spreadsheet, can be used to quantify the tone of those asking questions and responding at such hearings.

At the University of North Texas, Todd Moye, a history professor, opened his class by letting students voice their concerns. One student, he said, acknowledged that he was a sexual-assault survivor and shared tactics he had developed to cope with trauma.

“He talked about his experience in a way that was meant to provide hope to other people who have had similar experiences,” Moye said. “And put him out there as a resource for his fellow students in case they needed someone to talk to.”

Moye then related the hearing to the subject matter of his course, on the history of the civil-rights and black-power movements. The students talked about Rosa Parks’s 1944 investigation of the rape of Recy Taylor, a sharecropper. When none of the six men who had raped her were indicted, it sparked a national movement against the sexual assault of black women.

For Jordan Collard, a senior in the class, the hearing continues to upset her. She said some women, at the beginning of the class, had shared their concerns of what the hearing might mean for them, such as how they now felt that they might not be taken seriously if they reported a sexual assault.

“It’s upsetting, the reactions that she’s been getting from some of our senators,” Collard said, referring to Ford. “They were saying that they wanted to confirm him regardless of what they heard in the hearing. And then they were in the hearing and not taking into account how upsetting it was to be in a public forum for the world to see, talking about this.”

Some students expressed gratitude toward professors who had given up class time to show the hearing. Kolluri, the Pace professor, received an email on Friday from a student in his political-satire class.

“Just wanted to say thank you for letting us watch in class. It was a hard day, and it made it a little better knowing you cared (more than) enough to let us watch,” the email said. “My roommates had to watch the livestream on their phones with subtitles during classes to stay updated, so I am grateful!”

Follow Andy Tsubasa Field on Twitter at @AndyTsubasaF, or email him at andy.field@chronicle.com.