During a lecture on persuasive argumentation, Doug Schaak—my freshman English professor at Multnomah Bible College back in 2005—stated that loving your enemies is the most Christ-like thing a person can do. As Bible students who grew up in the church, the majority of my classmates were already well acquainted with this famous exhortation from Jesus’s sermon on the mount, but our professor recalled these lines at a provocative moment. You see, our class had been debating the topic of marriage equality, which was among the national hot topics in 2005, and most of the students at Multnomah Bible College were morally opposed to same-sex marriage, choosing to write papers against marriage equality to meet the Argumentative Essay requirement for the class. In response to this trend, Doug urged his students to suspend their moral commitments, to try on their opponents’ shoes for a change, and to re-imagine the world from their opponents’ presumably “heathen” perspectives because empathetic critical thinking—which he cleverly framed as “loving your enemy”—is the most Christ-like thing a person can do. The strongest, most persuasive academic essays, he stated, are those that seek to understand in order to represent accurately the perspectives they disagree with.
Imparting this lesson to students has become my primary goal as an educator. The religious exhortation to empathize with your enemies changed the course of my life and its academic application continues to transform who I am as a person. Although I am no longer a Christian, I wholeheartedly believe that the academic practice of empathizing with your enemies should extend to humanities departments the world over. I was therefore delighted when, in search of a textbook around which to structure my courses at Idaho State University in 2011, I discovered Gerald Graff’s and Cathy Birkenstein’s They Say, I Say: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing (2006). To become an exceptional writer, Graff and Birkenstein assert, “you must be able to suspend your own beliefs for a time and put yourself in the shoes of someone else,” inhabiting “the worldview of those whose conversation you are joining—and whom perhaps you are even disagreeing with—[to] try to see their argument from their perspective” (31). At first glance, these lines strike my students as banal and even insipid, but as I point out, this could very well mean empathizing with the racist, the sexist, the transphobic and homophobic, the dogmatic and close-minded—perspectives that most of my students and I emphatically disagree with. Practicing empathy is no easy task—some people will even assert that practicing empathy is morally wrong in these cases—but it is nevertheless an essential component of critical thought, personal growth, and fruitful civic engagement. Teaching my students to empathize with their “enemies” stands firmly at the heart of my pedagogy.
To convey this lesson, my courses embrace what I call debate-centered instruction. For example, I launched the spring term of 2023 in my Advanced Writing and Argumentation course with a debate between feminism and Men’s Rights Activism. The unit began with a general summary of the Women’s Movement, including its second- and third-wave articulations by theorists like Simone de Beauvoir and Judith Butler, respectively. Like myself, the majority of my students enthusiastically identify as feminists and they responded thoughtfully in support of the claim that patriarchal society privileges men over women. In the following meeting, however, I introduced the class to Men’s Rights Activism and their responses were less than empathetic. Most students were resistant to the ideas being presented and some even dismissed MRA as a hate group. But after learning from Jennifer Newsome’s 2015 documentary The Mask You Live In that men are twice as likely to abuse drugs and four times as likely to commit suicide, and after viewing documentarian Cassie Jaye admit to her own gender biases in her 2017 TED Talk, Meeting the Enemy: A Feminist Comes to Terms with the Men’s Rights Movement, even the most resistant students found reasons to question their knee-jerk reactions. In my role as debate facilitator, I use Socratic questioning to uncover the founding assumptions of student beliefs and those of their opponents to demonstrate that virtually all political debates, at their crux, come down to a moral disagreement. But as students inevitably discover on their own, authorizing your moral beliefs as objectively superior to the moral beliefs espoused by your “enemy” is a daunting and maybe impossible task. With this sobering realization in mind, students develop the confidence to explore ideas honestly without the fear of judgment or moral condemnation. These methods have been successful in creating a safe space for students to engage thoughtfully in democratic discussion and constructive disagreement, as my teaching approach, one student writes in their anonymous evaluation of the class, “leads everyone to feel like their thoughts have been considered and accepted, and that different viewpoints are valued.”
Alongside this goal is my desire to teach students crisp, lucid writing, where clarity, logical organization, and carefully thought-out conclusions prevail. As I see it, part of my job as a professor of writing and literature is to help students master a genre: the academic essay. This means familiarizing students with the writing patterns, diction, and rhetorical techniques that comprise its conventional form, and then showing students how to apply these patterns and techniques in their own writing through guided and individual practice. Ideally, these skills will empower students to communicate hard-won conclusions in writing projects that model evidence-based reasoning, an empathetic desire to understand their opponents, and the good-faith interrogation of their own moral commitments, which are usually what prevent a person from empathizing in the first place. My courses embrace open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement as a matter of principle. I am both personally and professionally committed to creating classroom environments that welcome diverse people with diverse points of view, environments that teach students the habits of heart and mind to consider opposing perspectives with curiosity and intellectual humility. Moreover, I believe the university has an obligation to students, faculty, and the broader public to safeguard these principles. However controversial, opinions relevant to the subject matter and communicated in good faith should not be (and never should have been) regarded by the university as harassment or hate speech, but rather, as an honest attempt to learn, students subjecting their beliefs, courageously in some cases, to the scrutiny and interrogation of their peers.
After more than a decade of teaching, I have discovered through trial and error that thinking and writing well comes down to a few core principles that I strive to impart to my students. An effective writer has to learn the conventions of the genre; this is why the practiced use of writing templates is an essential part of my writing and literature courses. But more importantly, effective thinkers must learn to practice empathy, honestly questioning their moral and ideological commitments to understand their enemy, the Other, or the person with whom they most strongly disagree. Within the humanities, these core principles translate across the disciplines, but they apply especially well to writing and literature courses, where a panoply of perspectives are engaged, where readers journey through fictional worlds, and where our critical encounters with the “enemy” ideally give birth to compassion.
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