Idealizing the Classrooms of Yore

To the Editor:

I read Hollis Robbins’s essay “The Classroom Is Not Your Living Room” (The Chronicle Review, January 28) with interest, but fear that it idealizes “the classroom” of the past as a space of equality and civil participation that simply never existed. In what world, exactly, could “A first-generation student ... challenge a CEO’s daughter’s interpretation of Marx without navigating social status”? Does she imagine that race, color, sex, gender, and accents (regional, racial, and otherwise), somehow disappeared at the classroom door, or that students had amnesia about what was said by whom in that classroom? Does she imagine, further, that every university professor was skilled at creating a classroom in which everyone felt free to speak their mind, and in which the professor’s own biases were never reflected in comments, who was called upon, and whose opinions were taken seriously? I share her goals and her skepticism about placing “belonging” above academic values. But I fear she longs for a world that never was.

Diane J. Klein
Adjunct professor of law
Pepperdine Caruso School of Law and Loyola Law School (Los Angeles)