Keywords

We find a table in the Welcome Foundation café. It’s Sunday, and the British Library is closed. The café is crowded and noisy which rules out our plan to continue writing. Instead, we decide to discuss our future plans. We realize that the writing retreat is almost over. Susan is travelling to Los Angeles the next day as part of her sabbatical plans, another foreign land and a new adventure for her. Omri and Tamar plan to stay in London a bit longer. Australia and Israel are so far away and travelling back and forth is expensive, so this negates any option to meet up again while working on the manuscript. We know that instead of exchanging ideas and commenting on each other’s drafts as we did face to face for the last six days, we will connect by video conference applications and emails as we had before meeting in London. We will probably miss our long conversations and the time we had to sort out disagreements. How are we going to achieve these productive interactions online?

Susan sips her tea. She’s not sure which teaching story she wants to tell. Tamar reminds her of their first meeting at Edinburgh University in 2013 at a conference entitled Racism and Anti-Racism through Education and Community Practice: An International Exchange. Susan’s talk then had moved Tamar to tears. It was about an introductory course on working respectfully with Aboriginal peoples, including recognizing and being activist against racism, that she had initiated and had taught in the Social Work Department at her university. Susan shared her difficulties as an educator with the listeners at the conference, also identifying how some students’ hostility towards her manifested itself in the low teaching scores she had received in her subject assessments. When she spoke about her disappointment with the students’ reactions, and her concern that the feedback would damage her unceasing efforts to turn the course from an elective into a compulsory one, her voice was shaking with emotion. Tamar was overwhelmed. Susan’s story resonated with her painful experiences when facilitating a Jewish-Arab dialogue course in Tel Hai College, Israel, for more than a decade. After the talk was over, she approached Susan, sharing with her the similar experience of hurt, frustration and apprehension, when tackling students’ resentments towards exposure of social and political injustices that students unconsciously may have been complicit in.

“For me your story was a turning point,” Tamar now says. “Hearing it I realized how unfair the academic system is towards lecturers who address social and political controversies as part of the curriculum. The current teaching appraisal of academic institutions completely ignores our long-term educational efforts to raise students’ consciousness about social injustices and our efforts to confront their distress. Since teaching assessments focus on measuring students’ immediate satisfaction or dissatisfaction, our contribution to their education as citizens is nullified. Maybe, using your story, we could demonstrate how untenable teaching assessments are in their present form.” Susan is silent for a while. “OK,” she says at last: “It will be interesting to analyze this experience from the neoliberal angle.”

Susan’s Story: Blaming the Messenger

Australia is a multicultural society and the ancestors of all who have made Australia home have come from elsewhere, unless they are members of the two groups who are recognized as First Peoples of Australia. These groups are Aboriginal Australians, the recognized first peoples of mainland Australia, and Torres Strait Islanders, whose homelands are the islands of the Torres Straits, located beyond the northern tip of Australia’s Cape York Peninsula. For these groups, racism has been an enduring, everyday reality in Australian society since colonization by the British, reflecting the stories of Indigenous peoples in colonized countries worldwide. History records that Aboriginal people on mainland Australia were “dispersed” by white settlers, but in Australia dispersed was a euphemism for murdered. All new arrivals to Australia aspire to gain a better life for their family in mainstream Australian society. They do not aspire to be located on the same socioeconomic level as Aboriginal Australians, because newcomers quickly come to understand where the Indigenous groups of Australia are located on the social and economic ladder, on the bottom rung.

Social work graduates need to have a critical understanding of the intergenerational trauma Australia’s Indigenous peoples have suffered since colonization, because as a consequence of colonization, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are vastly over-represented in mental health and child protection services, and in statistics for incarceration, homelessness, suicide, unemployment and early school-leavers—all groups social workers are employed to work with. But many workers just become part of a system that continues to fail Aboriginal people.

I am of English/Irish heritage and I have taught social work at a regional Australian university for almost 25 years. The reality is that increased numbers of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander social work graduates are urgently needed to work within and beyond their own communities. Equally, skilled, critically reflective non-Indigenous social work graduates are needed who can provide culturally respectful service delivery. A few years after my employment at the university, I realized that the curriculum I was teaching needed to be transformed to better fit the skills and knowledge needed in our workforce. With support and mentoring from gracious Aboriginal elders I began to better understand the history and culture of Aboriginal peoples, and the repercussions, legacies and intergenerational damage of colonization including ever present oppression, racism and discrimination. I have had many difficult conversations with students and colleagues on these topics, and I had at times felt uncertain, unsettled, illegitimate, underprepared and weary because of my quest to change the curriculum, and to teach against the grain of accepted discourse. Sometimes I have faced reluctant and hostile students who seemed very uncomfortable with the content being taught. For over a decade, I have co-taught such content with an Aboriginal elder from our region, and we have invited other grassroots Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander guest speakers into the classroom.

Non-Aboriginal students, a significant majority of the student body in all classes, often come to the classroom with limited insight into Australia’s violent history and how much stereotypes could impact the way they work. “It is not our fault,” students have said over the years in various classes, while a minority have even announced their view that “it is just an excuse for them not getting on in life.” It is true, the students did not commit the historical atrocities we were discussing or cause the current disadvantages Aboriginal people faced. But they needed to comprehend the true history in order to understand the present-day legacies for some Australian families and communities. Many non-Indigenous students are less than insightful about how little they know about Australia’s historical treatment of Aboriginal peoples, and similarly, less than empathic about how Aboriginal students might feel when they voice their dissatisfaction in the classroom about why there is so much focus on Australia’s violent “settlement” past. Students often call for more focus on solutions and less on critical reflection of self. One student recently talked about “going to an Aboriginal community to start a programme for young women who abuse alcohol.” It is a familiar theme. Workers implementing seemingly helpful programmes, without any consultation with the relevant communities, in order to fix other people’s problems. Such programmes most often fail. Many do not see the need to become more activist to help fix widespread problems of structural injustice and debilitating discrimination that crushes peoples’ lives, hope and dignity. Our professional social work body calls for action for social justice, but it is hard to steer students away from wanting to fix people. “We have learnt this history before in high school,” some say, only to admit at the end of the course that much of what they learnt in this classroom was new to them.

What had fuelled the need for more curriculum changes was findings from a study we undertook back in 2003. We wanted to find out what was causing many Aboriginal students to drop out of their university studies in social work and welfare studies. As we reported at the time, key themes were that Aboriginal students believed their cultural knowledge was not respected in the university, and they came to realize that “only the white way” was acceptable knowledge and the required way of working. One student wrote that the problem was “Racism, including structural and in the classroom—not challenged by staff.” We increased content on Indigenous history, knowledge and ways of working in subjects across our programme after that study. In a more recent survey undertaken several years ago at the end of a 13-week semester, I asked my students about the role of empathy and social justice when working alongside Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians. What was surprising in those findings was that quite a few students said they would be empathic but would not have time to be activist for social justice, even though the majority agreed with the statement that social action and social justice were core to social work practice.

An evident tension for educators teaching frontline anti-racist practice for social justice is that transformative change regarding a person’s personal and cultural beliefs and perceptions can be a long-term project, while the university requires evidence of student satisfaction through formal evaluations over a short-term study period. The university gives high regard to students’ satisfaction evaluation metrics, and increasingly students in my classes were making negative comments about my teaching in their formal feedback. Teachers are required to score highly, otherwise the content of their subjects, their promotion prospects and their paid employment at the university can come under scrutiny and even threat. Yet the topics necessarily under discussion in social work requires unsettling subject content that students may not always want to embrace. I am not suggesting here that undertaking these challenging conversations is my experience alone. Kessaris (2006, p. 355) spoke of unpredictability and safety as the key concerns for “black teachers” teaching anti-racist content to white students and she admitted to needing stress counselling after teaching an introductory session on Indigenous studies.

My university is located in regional Australia. A significant number of our students are learners from this locality. Higher rates than the national average of Indigenous peoples live in our region. Equally, as documented by historians, frontier violence during colonization was more violent here than elsewhere in Australia (Bottoms, 2013). The task we set ourselves was to develop curricula that advanced social work practice knowledge for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students, while facilitating non-Indigenous social work students’ critical awareness of significant historical and resultant structural legacies impacting the lives and opportunities of Indigenous Australians. Many say that such content should be taught by Indigenous academics belonging to the same cultural groups under discussion. But do they mean we should wait to undertake relevant, necessary curriculum development while Aboriginal students study, graduate, undertake a PhD and become tertiary educators in social work, because only small numbers were graduating, and even fewer were going on to a higher degree. In fact, social work is not a particularly attractive profession to Aboriginal peoples because of social workers’ role in the trauma of the Stolen Generation—the forced removal of thousands of Aboriginal children—and the ongoing removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children deemed to be at risk of harm. And if new Indigenous staff were employed in our social work programme, were we going to “dump” on to them the responsibility for developing and teaching such content and in doing so avoid confronting these teaching challenges ourselves?

I introduced new Indigenous content from 2004 in a key elective subject I taught. Formal subject evaluations at my university use questions with a Likert scale from “unacceptable” to “outstanding” to record students’ responses, with space for additional qualitative comments. I had recorded “above average” or “outstanding” scores and comments in a range of subjects I taught across previous years. I was surprised to see students’ qualitative comments and scores now illustrating a much more mixed response.

In 2007 we developed a new subject with members of our newly formed Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Advisory group, with valued input from the Indigenous Student Support Officers working in our Department at the time. Topics in the early weeks of the semester included historical atrocities and violations with specific examples from our region, lived experiences and implications of the Stolen Generation of children removed from their families under policies of assimilation, and more recent examples of structural racism and discrimination within education, health and adult and juvenile justice systems. Later weeks covered Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders’ worldviews, stories, frameworks and ways of working that could be incorporated into culturally respectful social work practice. We wanted to present the true history and enduring social legacies for Aboriginal peoples and their significant suffering, but also to highlight their inspiring strengths. The final topic in the lecture series is about activism for social justice. Indigenous writers author almost all required subject readings. From 2010 I co-taught the subject in weekly tutorials and workshops with local Aboriginal Bindal elder Aunty Dorothy Savage. We secured local grassroots Indigenous guest speakers who, together with Dorothy, presented an inspiring lecture series.

Formal student qualitative and quantitative feedback indicated that students were impressed with guest speakers and input from the Aboriginal elder who was co-teaching in the subject, and they appreciated the opportunity to listen to Indigenous community workers. But some comments on my teaching performance could be interpreted as bordering on hostile. Students’ negative comments were directed at my teaching skills, my knowledge and legitimacy to teach in this subject and my abilities to assess their learning. It seems the spaces I created in the classroom to help them gain critical insight into mainstream complicity in racial dominance and the implications for social work practice aroused their negativity. Feedback scores were the lowest I had ever received in any subject. I felt so disappointed after seeing the subject evaluations I cried.

It was so frustrating and disheartening after all the effort needed to make this subject a reality and maintain its existence. It had been stressful advocating for the development of this new subject when other staff argued a new subject was not necessary and preferably the content could be spread across existing subjects. An ongoing persuasive argument was needed at staff meetings over years for this subject to become a core subject in our degree programmes when some staff preferred it to remain an elective. Advocacy was needed every year since its introduction for the funds to pay all guest speakers for their knowledge-sharing, amid ongoing cuts to our sessional budget. Now the subject would come under threat because of the very low student evaluation scores. While I am paid as an expert social work educator, negative student evaluations could provoke attention and input from managers and administrators about what students are taught or not taught. The feared end result is a severed connection between vital graduate skills and knowledge required in the social work profession and what is taught to produce satisfied students.

So, I asked myself, in trying to recover from the disappointing student evaluations, as a critical educator how can I try to make sense of the students’ feedback, and then what changes can we trial to enhance students’ learning experiences in the course. Qualitative comments indicated students gained useful learning from the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander weekly guest speakers and were highly satisfied with my Aboriginal co-teacher’s contributions and stories, and her feedback on their assessment. Students’ dissatisfaction was recorded specifically for questions asking about the university lecturer’s management of the subject, my approachability for support, whether they believed the subject objectives were met, and did the assessment and feedback enhance their learning.

Scores and qualitative comments identified that what was unacceptable was my marking, my feedback on assessment (as co-teachers we undertook a lot of shared marking, and we gave quite similar feedback after years of working together), my teaching and overall, my classroom contribution to the subject. Formal student feedback on teaching and subjects is anonymous, so I cannot assume that the feedback denoting dissatisfaction was only from non-Indigenous students. However, over time Indigenous students had offered unsolicited, positive comments about the inclusion of Indigenous knowledges in this subject and my respectful contributions in the classroom.

One interpretation of the evaluations is that the subject was a success, because students reported that they found the content and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander presenters interesting and useful for their learning and future practice. They just were not satisfied with my performance as an educator. But if that was the case, I wondered, why would the majority of students not have given a higher score? But the majority of students had allocated very low satisfaction scores to the subject overall. Equally, in other subjects my student evaluations remained higher. I thought it was helpful for me to more deeply reflect on these student feedback results.

To start somewhere, I found and read a small number of articles where other educators were discussing disquieting experiences and mixed student feedback in the classroom when teaching about racism. I read about the power of racism to hold individuals and nations hostage to its ideology. Some authors, such as Gordon (2004) and Clarke (2003, p. 134) had discussed Melanie Klein’s (1988) concept of “splitting,” to understanding the perpetuation of racism. Both Gordon and Clarke highlighted that children, through fear of difference, split the world into good and bad polarities. The good part of self is idealized and the bad is denigrated and projected onto something or someone else. This splitting also can permeate the social and political discourse. Equally, some authors, such as Gringeri and Roche (2010) and Robbins (2015) have highlighted the hazards of such binary thinking because it can lead to discrimination, and because it is more useful to see concepts as gradients between extremes. Nevertheless, I asked myself, could students be projecting some of their cultural anxieties around racism on to me? Perhaps students thought I was being disloyal to my own culture and ancestors by not defending their past brutality?

The writing of Irene Bruna Seu (2011) was useful at this point. She undertook focus groups to answer a question concerning what members of the public feel, think and do when informed about human rights violations through informative materials such as those produced by Amnesty. Bruna Seu (2011) drew on Cohen’s typology of the denial of racism, and positioning theory to explain what happened when participants were faced with competing storylines, the first one their own moral and cultural understandings, and the competing story one of significant violations coupled with an appeal to take up their social responsibility concerning those violations. What participants in that study appeared to demonstrate was a repositioning of themselves in relation to the message and attempts to “shoot the messenger” by discrediting the authenticity of the content or the authority of the speaker.

So, in pondering the content of Bruna Seu’s article in relation to my teaching, it seemed plausible that students might be avoiding the racism message by discrediting the messenger. But was it a bit more complex? Students appeared to pick only one messenger to shoot—me. But what if students felt reluctant to appear negative or racist by blaming (shooting) Dorothy (local elder; good messenger) or the Indigenous guest speakers (good messengers) for their discomfort. Therefore, an available option was to “reposition” themselves, in order to assert their authority as student learners and to discredit my contribution to the course.

It was interesting to me, and somewhat comforting to consider these explanations. Other ideas emerged as possible explanations from various publications, such as facing the hidden truth of one’s own cultural group’s brutality can jeopardize a person’s sense of identity beyond a point that can be easily accepted, at least in the short term, and that local atrocities committed by your own people are more difficult to accept than atrocities committed by other people elsewhere. Some have suggested that in a neoliberal environment, students understand they are buyers in the marketplace with power to demand what content they want without full understanding about what knowledge they need as a graduate.

But what could I do to change students’ learning experiences in this subject? Over several years Dorothy and I discussed how to help address what we thought was non-Indigenous students’ discomfort in the classroom because of the challenging subject content. We also wanted to better support Indigenous students; to respect their cultural knowledge and provide a safe space in the classroom. Dorothy had always told stories in the classroom about her family and their lived experiences. So I began to speak more explicitly about my own story, about my cultural origins, how I came to social work, about being socialized into mainstream Australian perspectives and denials about the past violence and ongoing trauma for Aboriginal people. I acknowledged my true gratitude for all the mentoring and guidance I had received from Aboriginal elders and colleagues over almost 20 years. I talked about my shortcomings, and about how it was confronting to learn and difficult to teach about atrocities, and about racism and whiteness. We put more explicit emphasis on cultivating deep listening and empathy and establishing trust and building relationships in the classroom by asking all students to tell their stories about who they are and where they are from. We changed one piece of assessment significantly, and both pieces required more evidence of engagement with subject materials and critical reflection. While we still focused on local examples of injustice, we encouraged passion for collective action in upholding social justice in social work. Student feedback scores over the following years increased to be equal to and sometimes higher than university averages.

I have continued to teach the course, and I have been well supported and mentored by Dorothy on understanding and teaching Aboriginal-related content. She has been a wonderful co-teacher and trusted friend. I have felt less supported by colleagues and by management. While student evaluations can be one source of information to maintain student engagement and improve student learning and satisfaction, the (un)reliability of student evaluations has been questioned by academics over time. This is particularly so when student evaluations are used within a university staff performance management context, or when considering the eligibility of a staff member for promotion. Yet student evaluations still are prioritized by management as core evidence of performance. I felt like I faced individualized reproach from management and decision-makers, underpinned by reasoning not dissimilar to that of the students: an individual was at fault with deficit teaching skills. I believed the subject may be under threat of being “refreshed” or even axed. What would have felt more like a collective approach was open acknowledgement that the subject presented crucial content within a degree programme where such knowledge was vital for professional practice, and that staff would be fully supported to help improve student satisfaction. I found comfort in these words by Brottman (2003), that for a faculty member to risk teaching courses that students find painful is to risk those same students blaming the messenger for the resultant feelings of unease (because) the most sobering aspects of the human condition are not easy to come to terms with.

But every year new students enrol in the subject and the tensions and doubts begin to emerge for me even though student evaluations have demonstrated quite high satisfaction in recent years. This year one student asked, “Why are almost all the speakers Indigenous? we need more non-Indigenous speakers” in this subject, even though I was in the classroom every week, and students have non-Indigenous teachers almost every week in almost every other subject in their entire degree.

Susan’s story is seemingly a narrative of success in a hostile climate. By changing the course, she and her colleague improved students’ satisfaction. But what would have happened if all their efforts had been in vain? What would have happened if the teaching assessments had remained low? Would students’ displeasure at the critical content have led to the termination of the course despite its relevance to students’ professional practice? Did it mean that, in neoliberal academia, students’/clients’ expectations determine the curriculum?

These questions seem to linger in the air. Susan says that she must drink more tea, that telling this story has taken lots of energy. It was lunchtime and we decide to go to a nearby restaurant. We still have to decide about two more teaching stories. Tamar, who is familiar with the area, suggests Italian or Japanese food, but Susan is not keen on eating sushi today, explaining that it is her main meal on campus with not many other preferred food options. We leave the café and are somewhat surprised by the Sunday crowds in Euston Road. After talking for more than an hour about teaching in a regional Australian campus, London’s busy streets seem a bit overwhelming. We pass Euston station, which is under reconstruction, while heading towards an Italian restaurant that seems the best choice. There is a feeling of urgency and we walk fast without talking, as if our words would slow our pace.

We are absorbed in our thoughts. It occurs to Tamar that consulting the students about their disapproval of Susan’s performance could be effective; yet it is an impossible step. In the neoliberal academia students are not regarded as our allies but rather as our inspectors and nemesis. For the academic administration they are an effective tool for supervising and controlling the lecturers. How convenient.

The Italian restaurant is quite empty. The waiter is welcoming. We order a bottle of wine to celebrate the end of our retreat and continue the discussion that was interrupted by our silent walk.

Several years after the conference in Edinburgh, while Susan was a visiting scholar in Tel Hai College, where Tamar was teaching, she told her story at the annual conference of the Education Department in front of 300 students. Tamar, who responded to her talk, called on faculty and academic administration to support critical teachers, who were engaged in social justice work. In the discussion that followed some students and lecturers disputed Tamar’s demands, asserting that teachers should avoid controversial issues which elicit feelings of discomfort. “Don’t tackle conflictual subjects if you are not certain that the space is safe,” one of the senior professors said to the audience, turning his back on Tamar and Susan who were still on stage.

Omri drinks his wine and says that his story may complicate our current perspective on the power relations in class. It will question our automatic notion that critical social analysis always serves the interests of political and ethnic minorities. But before he begins to tell us about a complex experience he had in his classroom, we order coffee and a slice of tiramisu cake that looks delicious. We look around. The restaurant has filled up with people eating their Sunday lunch, and it seems quite noisy.

Omri’s Story: “Stop telling me how screwed up I am!”

For six years I was the head of a cultural studies BA department. I don’t miss that job, especially not the summer before the start of the academic school year. It used to be stressful: Excel reports were sent by email, measuring the rise or drop in enrolment relative to the corresponding period in previous years. One especially worrying year, the college’s chief administrator called me: the situation is unsatisfactory, she said, special marketing efforts must be made. So, I did: I called prospective students at their homes, to tell them about the study programme; I volunteered to give public lectures to youngsters still making up their minds; I appeared in marketing campaigns. In all these endeavours, I put on an inviting smile and enthusiastic expression. I had to charm the candidates, to promise them an exciting course of study, personal attention and future employment possibilities. At times it was slightly humiliating, especially during the telephone calls to the candidates, where I felt a little like a telemarketing representative (“Hi, this is Omri Herzog from the Cultural Studies Department. I see you’ve taken an interest in studying with us in the past—would you like to hear more?”). But such feelings were irrelevant—it was and still is a part of academic work: to be a salesperson.

These marketing activities, which are seen necessary for academics who fulfil an administrative function, regard students as the clients of an organization that operates in a highly competitive market. As in other consumption arenas, they need to be satisfied clients. To that end, portraits of youngsters smiling in contentment appear upon billboard ads put up by universities and colleges; for that reason, teaching surveys are conducted in which students rank their satisfaction with courses and lecturers. The budgetary allocations to academic departments are determined in part on the basis of the number of students attending them, and therefore most of them (especially in the humanities) are under a constant threat of both intra-organizational competition (vs. other departments in the same institution) and inter-organizational competition (vs. similar departments in other institutions). In ongoing fashion, academic departments conduct wide-ranging activities to enrol students and retain them; they place emphasis on aspects of service and friendliness and spout marketing slogans about training for the labour market, a rich social environment, and even—mainly in the humanities—self-fulfilment and exhausting one’s individual fields of interest.

Sometimes, the consumer rights of students are taken to the absurd. A few years ago I was invited to teach at a private college in Israel at which the tuition is twice that at a public college. If the price is higher, the return should be too. However, it doesn’t necessarily manifest in academic quality. I shall never forget the elective course I taught there, especially not the very first lesson. When I entered the classroom, I explained to the students that attendance was compulsory. One of the students raised her hand: “Are you new here?,” she asked. I affirmed that I was. “So, drop your demand for compulsory attendance,” she said. “We don’t come to class. What’s going to happen when you submit an eligibility list for the final exam?”

Hearing that unsubtle threat, I was speechless. I hadn’t encountered such insolence before. But they really did have the power. As a lecturer, I could not submit an empty eligibility list for a course that I was teaching, for after all, what was I being paid for? But I was also unwilling to concede, because I felt I had to preserve my authority—or at least what was left of it, scant minutes from the start of the course. “Those are the course requirements,” I answered her. “Anyone who wants to can choose another course.” Some of them left the course, while others stayed and attended classes as I’d demanded. They came equipped with headphones attached to their laptops, watching Netflix or engaging in their own affairs. One of the students was appointed to take charge of the summaries, as she sat in class without headphones. She typed energetically on her laptop, constantly interrupting me to say, “Could you dictate that?” I tried everything—showing clips, inviting guest lecturers, bringing up juicy issues—but besides her nobody raised their eyes to look at me. Her summaries circulated among the entire class, I’m sure, because the final assignments resembled each other so much, citing the same sentences and replicating the same typos. The average grade I needed to attain was 80; the standard deviation in this case was very low. Everyone safely passed the course.

I never returned to teach there, despite the generous pay. I remember feeling actual resentment towards that class; I felt that I was disgracing my chosen profession. In the teaching surveys, the students wrote that I was unpleasant and haughty. It’s the only time in my career that I’ve ever got such feedback, but it was justified. Indeed, I was unpleasant to them. My mistake was that I failed to acknowledge their consumer power, the huge sums of money they’d paid, which were supposed to buy them easy and safe passage to the coveted degree. Could I have acknowledged it? Should I have acknowledged it?

Truly this is an extreme example, parallels to which are hard to find in the public education system in Israel. But even in more reasonable classrooms the situation is liable to be confusing, for both student and lecturer: when a student angrily accosts me, “I paid a lot of money for this course, you can’t fail me just because I didn’t show up for class!” I severely rebuke him. On the face of it, I mustn’t frame the academic learning experience within a relationship of client and service-provider; that would be contrary to the spirit of academe and the students’ role in it. They must execute academic assignments, exhibit diligence and persistence, and obey the strict rules of the principle of academic reality. They must earn their degree as junior workers in the academic enterprise, not as its clients.

On the other hand, however, with regard to marketing and retaining students, they certainly are grasped as clients, and the logic of the complaint mentioned above is rooted in that perception. The institution’s administration puts pressure on us to retain our students in order to draw budgetary allocations; the academic staff is sometimes required to bend the academic rules, to forgive and look the other way in order not to lose students. And it isn’t only external pressure that is applied to departments from the management. If students don’t enrol in a certain elective course because its requirements are too high, for example, that course may be closed and the lecturer—if he isn’t tenured—may lose his livelihood. It was my responsibility, as department head. At times I’ve had talks with lecturers, intimated to them that at least for the time being, it might be best to relax the requirements a bit.

In other words, like any client, the student too influences the decision-making of the organization and the quality of the products it offers. The confusion stems from the duality of the concept of “quality”: as it pertains to the student as a young scholar entitled to high-level intellectual stimuli and as it pertains to the student as the client of an organization that awards academic degrees in the framework of a free market, and is of high quality in terms of service, flexibility and adaptation to the clients’ needs.

The students’ classroom experience is also complicated in another, yet related, context. As Susan previously showed, the academic classroom is influenced by social contexts, one of which involves the interface between a feeling of personal and/or collective victimhood and the accumulation of symbolic capital (and sometimes economic capital too). This has to do with the discursive forms of identity politics, an ideology that has made a significant historic contribution to the recognition of the cultural and historic uniqueness of certain communities. It enables and requires certain ethnic, gender, sexual, political and social minorities to fight for their place in a world that is ruled by the cultural centre, usually identified with a white male elite. It demands that their oppression be recognized and corrected. In the academic context, identity politics has been visible since the 1970s and has tried to undo the exclusion of certain types of knowledge from the traditional curricula (Moran, 2018).

Several decades later, identity politics in neoliberal academe is conducted in cooperation with White guilt and the discursive rules that define it. White guilt is a highly valuable discursive instrument: it dictates a culture of political correctness, which respects minorities and is ever mindful of their sensibilities, and at the same time awards victimhood a preferential civil, emotional and sometimes even intellectual standing (Campbell & Manning, 2018). It’s no wonder that everyone conceives themselves as victims: women—and in their wake, men (who can’t even “pay compliments” anymore); minority group members—and the White elite (which is panicked by its loss of power and aspires to make itself great again); immigrants—as well as other citizens, who feel their culture and sometimes their physical boundaries are being violated; members of the LGBTQ+ community—and straights (e.g. who are threatened by changes in the standing of the traditional family). Our culture holds victimhood sacred; but is there any way to market an academic department using a slogan like “Come be a victim—with us?”

Neoliberal academe cultivates the culture of victimized identity discourse, consciously or not, for two major reasons. First, because the ideological principle of neoliberal culture holds sacred the principle of privatization. Identity, for instance, is privatized into sub-communities that are in a struggle over resources, including symbolic ones, under conditions of free competition. The free-market principle doesn’t apply only to the dynamic of academic institutions or academic departments competing against each other for recognition, but also to the student communities—each of which is demanding for itself the rights to which it is entitled.

Students, in large measure justifiably, are sensitive to questions of representation. But in free-market conditions and in an environment of limited symbolic resources, this sometimes has an unexpected consequence: the identity struggle becomes a zero-sum game, and recognition of one identity comes at the expense of another. Within the hierarchy of identities, the right of victimhood becomes a capital (sometimes for reasons of historic discrimination, and at other times—most ironically—by virtue of a sense of historic entitlement to rights). It gives rise to a complex political set of sensibilities—especially for someone teaching in a multicultural classroom.

The second reason for the growing phenomenon of victimhood in the classroom is that neoliberal culture aims at maximizing outputs, and so there’s a demand for industrial peace at all organizational levels—and mainly in the classrooms. As Susan pointed out earlier, a discourse that touches upon sensitive areas of knowledge—are there any “insensitive” areas in critical thinking?—upsets the system. It invites discomfort (I’m talking here about conducting a sensitive and responsible discourse on charged political or social issues. I’m not referring in any way to demonstrating racist, chauvinist or other views from a position of authority, or to abuse of any kind). Just discussing controversial issues with students can manifest in low satisfaction. In a climate that aims at grasping students as organizational clients, such feelings can be problematic; the system would do better without them. Therefore, in the classrooms the lecturers must be cautious when they wish to discuss historically, sociologically or culturally charged issues. It might be a challenge, not just when they bring it up—but also when they don’t.

It can be complicated to stand before a class and lecture, and on that day, when I stood on the podium in the study hall and delivered a compulsory first-year course, it was especially confusing. The course was called “Introduction to Israeli Culture,” and the lesson dealt with postcolonial contexts. I spoke about the racism directed against Jews of Eastern (Mizrahi) origin (i.e. Jews who came from Muslim nations), who arrived in Israel in the 1950s, racism which continues to this day. Jews who had emigrated from Europe only one generation earlier identified them as ignorant, superstitious, violent and unruly; they were considered the “Blacks” of Israel’s Jewish population at the time. Historical knowledge reveals harsh realities: Zionist history includes the creation of a gap in levels of education, employment and housing between Jews who originated in Europe and those who emigrated from Arab countries. It remains to this day, confirmed by the data on drastic inequality, lack of equal opportunities and discrimination (Kimmerling, 2008). Those are the subject matters I conveyed to my students, most of whom were Mizrahim hailing from Israel’s geographical and class periphery. I felt it was my academic duty to discuss it; to arouse civil and political awareness to the dark chapters in our local history, as mandated by the subject of the course.

Na’ama, one of the brightest and most opinionated students in the course, sought me out at the end of the lesson. She was agitated, speaking excitedly with her friends standing in the short line before my desk. When her turn came, she launched into a speech, fluently explaining to me that it was wrong for me (a White lecturer, of European origin) to explain to her (a student of Mizrahi origin) how much she, her family and her community had suffered and still suffer from discrimination that creates for them a position of inferiority. My lecture, she said, fixes her in that position; it marks her on the basis of her skin colour as the Other of Israeli culture, and of academe as well. “It’s about time White lecturers stopped telling me how screwed up I am,” she said; “it doesn’t help me. It doesn’t advance me and people who look like me. It only advances the refinement of your White guilt, you people of academe. I didn’t ask to be a victim, I don’t want to be a victim,” she said. “It would be better for White academe to be more sensitive towards students who are trying to escape the cycle of discrimination and advance in their lives as citizens with equal rights, without constantly being reminded of their place, the product of a history they didn’t choose.”

I was surprised by what she said, but there was logic in it. It’s a logic that stems from identity politics, but simultaneously turns against it. She used her protest to position herself as a victim, not just of a discriminatory history, but of an academic discourse that victimizes her against her will, in an impossible vicious circle. Na’ama asked me to censor subject matters, because in her view that censorship was a moral and social value, which accords with the identity agenda of students in the course, and her own.

I asked her, in a rather patronizing tone (which sometimes emerges against my will in such situations), what it would mean not to talk about these issues. Absence of speech is not identical to silence, because there is something performative about it. “The thing not talked about is present by its absence. It has meaning too,” I told her. Must we deliberately turn our attention away from a history of inequality, because it endangers the self-perception of minorities today? To the same degree, students of European origin would prefer not to know about the sins of the Ashkenazi establishment, which is identified historically with their ethnicity. Should unawareness be the solution?

I knew that my response was slightly didactic. But I meant it sincerely, because I understood her and her position. She answered saying she didn’t know. The answer wasn’t accompanied by a shrug of the shoulders. She’d thought about the question and meant her answer. And then she turned the question over to me: What did I think should be done? But I didn’t know either. Identity politics has various means, sometimes contradictory, to manifest itself; by demanding representation, or sometimes demanding lack of representation, according to circumstances. Where do I, who am acting by dint of the authority of academic knowledge (and status), but also of cultural sensitivity, stand vis-à-vis this dilemma?

The expected answer (“Students are not supposed to decide for us what we study and what we don’t”) isn’t acceptable to me, at least not categorically. Knowledge is an unstable instrument at the disposal of all of us—lecturers and students; it can empower, and it can oppress. I began the next lesson by presenting this dilemma to the class. I asked if there were others who felt as she did; I invited them to think about it together. But to tell the truth, most of the students didn’t understand what I wanted from them. “Does that mean that the material we studied last lesson won’t be in the exam?” one of them asked.

Teaching in diverse classrooms is liable to be a minefield, at least in my discipline, cultural studies, which has a distinctly critical bent. Even when the class is more homogeneous, there are issues that can rapidly ignite. For years, I spoke with students about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But today I will only do so in small classes of advanced students. Regardless of what the students feel (The Israelis are right! The Palestinians are right! Or even: I don’t know, and I don’t want to think about it!), someone will be offended—the students of a nationalist orientation, the peace-seekers on the Left of the political map, or those in the political Centre, who want to know as little as possible. The discussion in class immediately turns into a battle of political identities, over the question who the victim is—the Israelis or the Palestinians; whose story is entitled to resources of representation. But what’s clear is that many students feel victimized by the discourse itself, which is inflicted upon them against their will, confronts them with a narrative they prefer not to confront, that threatens their cultural and ideological identity. This is no pretence: it really does undermine their identity and may even endanger it. It’s not their fault and it’s not my fault. Maybe it’s the zeitgeist that they’ve grown into. It’s hermetical in its sense of certainty, who is the good and who is the bad in their civil story. Its being undermined can truly hurt or weaken.

Sometimes, teaching means being caught between retaining satisfied clients, a culture of political correctness, and identity politics, as well as academic integrity. Lecturers are required to provide in parallel two contradictory needs—contemporarily relevant subject matters, a high academic level and the intellectual rigour it entails, alongside accessibility, friendliness and constant consideration of the students’ sensibilities. Is it possible to keep the clients satisfied and meet the systemic demand for conduct that is subservient, well-oiled and devoid of conflicts, without being forced to censor myself from talking or even thinking about sensitive subjects—which are the significant subjects as far as my discipline is concerned?

Any tactic I choose, if I speak or if I don’t, may expose me to institutional punishment. The reason for that is however hard I try to deliver a sensitive, grounded lecture, which accommodates and presents different views—it may still be offensive to someone. Every word might be recorded; any perceived offence might draw the finger of blame from students and from the system. But perhaps in this state of affairs, students will be able—regardless of the choice I make—to feel they are victims (like I am now, in my story). That may be rewarding to them, within neoliberal academe and the discursive space in which it operates, since the victimhood that is granted ex ante manifests their identity politics and affirms it, as well as their consumer power. It is however less rewarding for academic freedom.

Omri’s story elicits the sense of a trap quite familiar to us. Each of us frequently feels caught between contradicting institutional demands, attempting to both satisfy and challenge his/her students-clients. Yet Tamar does not fully accept Omri’s analysis of victimhood in the academic setting. “What if the student who expresses his discomfort is truly a victim?” Tamar asks, “Does your discussion of victimhood disavow the validity of her/his argument? I think that your analysis could be perceived as ignoring the social, ethnic, gender and national power structure which are reflected in academia in general and in each class, in particular. Is a white middle-class Jew entitled to victimhood like a student with a disability? Can one ignore such a social hierarchy?”

“I don’t think I’m ignoring the social power structures which oppress and victimize ethnic, class, gender, sexual and national groups,” Omri answers, a bit annoyed by what he grasps as Tamar’s righteous criticism. “I refer to what sociologists Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning (2018) called “victimhood culture.” It is characterized by concern with status and hyper-sensitivity to slight. Domination and privilege are the main form of deviance, and victimization is a way of attracting empathy and identification, so rather than emphasize either their strength or inner worth, they emphasize their oppression and social marginalization.” Omri clarifies that research shows that victimhood culture, which is manifested by microaggressions among various groups, is quite a common phenomenon in university and college campuses. In a way, it legitimates all self-definitions of victimhood. But, of course, it comes at a price: when everyone’s a victim, no one’s a victim. And it may blur different degrees of personal or collective disadvantages, discrimination or trauma. Tamar opposes this generalization. She insists that one can and should distinguish between real victims and those who use victimhood as manipulation. White middle-class heterosexual able men for example still have more access to power than any other group, Tamar demonstrates, their claims for social victimhood should be politically challenged.

In the middle of this heated discussion, we ask for the bill. Tamar says that Omri’s story and the controversy it elicits makes her realize how complex it is to tackle differences and social justice in the current academia. In such a climate, the attempt to resist institutional oppression of ethnic and class minorities may turn into an act of compliance with neoliberal norms. “My academic socialization dictates conforming to the academic rules,” she explains. “It’s hard for me to oppose them since my submission to these norms has made me a successful and accomplished scholar and teacher. Yet my student Meir showed me the possible dangers of such blind obedience, since without even noticing, I have contributed to students’ oppression.” “Who is Meir?” Omri asks.

Tamar’s Story: The Interloper

“You’re always silencing me,” Meir complained to the class. “Ever since I got to college, I’m always being told, “That’s no way to talk” or “That’s no way to behave.” In Ramle, my hometown, it was perfectly alright to talk like that.” He was speaking to me, but he was actually talking to the whole class. We all fidgeted in our seats in embarrassment. We had had ten lessons since the beginning of the semester and Meir’s behaviour had aroused discomfort. He spoke too loudly, too quickly and delivered too often confusing and emotional statements which contradicted the attempts of my Arab co-facilitator and me to discuss the fundamental conflicts in Israeli society in a rational, organized and controlled manner, as was the established norm in the majority of dialogue groups conducted in a reality of social, cultural or national dispute (Hager et al., 2011; Bekerman et al., 2006).

Meir’s protest came during the course Jewish-Arab Dialogue: Action Research, which was offered by the Education Department at Tel Hai College, a public academic institution located in the northern periphery of Israel. Like most other Israeli institutions of higher education, Tel Hai is dominated by the Jewish hegemony. Hebrew is the chief spoken and written language, while the Arab culture and language of close to 20% of the student body are marginalized to hallways and lawns. Western Jewish culture, customs and holidays dictate the structure of the school year and the academic content. As in any other higher education institution in Israel, Ashkenazi (from western European descent) students equipped with hegemonic western cultural capital feel more “at home” and succeed more easily. Research shows (see e.g. Arar & Mustafa, 2011; Dagan-Buzaglo, 2011; Jabareen & Agbaria, 2011; Naaman, 2015) that Palestinian Arab students, and to a lesser extent their native Hebrew-speaking Mizrahim (of Middle Eastern and North African descent) counterparts—who like Meir were educated in underdeveloped, underfunded social or geographical peripheries—are marginalized in the academic space. Lacking required social and cultural knowledge as well as academic skills, they often suffer low achievements and feelings of alienation. However, Mizrahi students who frequently identify with their Jewish ethnicity and Zionist values, while giving precedence to local national interests, rather than to universal values of social justice and equal opportunities (see Mizrachi, 2016) are better institutionally positioned than their Palestinian Arab peers. When lecturers complain about students’ estrangement, ignorance, incompetence and low achievements, they regularly relate to Arab Palestinians, and thus the helplessness and frustration of some disadvantaged Mizrahi students like Meir becomes transparent.

Like most of the courses in Tel Hai, this class was composed of both women and men, most born in Israel. The Jewish students were Ashkenazi and Mizrahi, and the Arab Palestinians were Muslim, Christian, Druze or Allawi. The majority of the students were middle class, yet the socioeconomic status of Arab Palestinians was always relatively lower due to chronic social, economic and educational discrimination, as well as ongoing acts of dispossession and injustices by the state (Ghanem, 2001; Kimmerling, 2008).

As a working-class Jew from a poor background, Meir was an exception. He grew up in Israel’s social periphery, in one of the poorer neighbourhoods of Ramle, a city in which 25% of the population are Arabs, its crime rate is high and its inhabitants’ socioeconomic status is one of the worst in Israel. Unlike in other courses, Meir, who, most of the time felt like a fish out of water, as he told me in one of our conversations, remained silent and avoided expressing his opinions. In this course he felt comfortable enough to make his voice heard.

It has always been a unique course. Negating competitive and individualistic trends of the neoliberal academia, it drew on the philosophy of critical pedagogy (Freire, 2007) and provided space for continuous dialogue between participants, who shared their personal opinions and stories regarding their collective, national and cultural identities. The stories were told in conjunction with reading articles on social issues in Israel and on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, along with discussions and assignments in which students were asked to deal with questions of identity, power relations and systems of discrimination, exclusion and racism.

The administration’s efforts to standardize teaching and prevent joint instruction did not affect this course which was taught by Jewish and Arab facilitators who invited students to analyse the way social structure was reflected in class, while encouraging participants’ cooperation, and mutual support and solidarity in the process of painfully dismantling national, social and cultural hostilities and obstacles. This was not an easy process and my co-facilitator and I made an effort to listen, to give each student the space to speak, to contain negative feelings, to prevent the Ashkenazi students from dominating the discussion and to encourage all those who remained silent to express themselves. We also tried to calm students who felt offended or became irritated because of opinions that had come up in the classroom, so that their anger would not infect others.

By our efforts to contain the students, we hoped to prevent teaching evaluations like “The teachers only give space to those who have similar opinions to theirs,” “The teachers prevent us from expressing our opinions,” “The teachers only support Arab students,” or “The teachers” or complaints made to the head of the department or to the management. By addressing the deepest disputes in the Israeli society, we didn’t always succeed in calming discomfort or anger and so we received no small amount of criticism from students and administrators. And when teaching assessments resonated with accusations, and complaints were submitted, I was always struck anew at how the unequal power relations between groups in Israeli society, that were reflected in class, also echoed in the audacity with which individuals were willing to insult and to openly and angrily demand compensation from us or from the college. Those who complained about us were always Jewish students who felt that the space belonged to them and that, as unhappy consumers, they had the right to express their dissatisfaction and anger. Arab students, who had to endure a great number of racist remarks in class, remarks that were made offhandedly in their presence—like “Arabs are terrorists,” “You can’t depend on Arabs because they lie,” “I hate Arabs”—rarely complained, if at all, because they did not think/believe that they would be defended by the academic system.

Every time we were summoned by the head of department/faculty heads/administrators following a complaint, it was demanded that in the future we would make more effort to express balanced opinions, to avoid sensitive issues and discussions that would lead to students’ discomfort, and above all, we were required to sidestep our own opinions on touchy political and social matters. Every criticism and reproach reawakened the fear that the course would be cancelled, and with it, the possibility of discussing openly and honestly the Israeli-Palestinian dispute and the systems of inequality in Israeli society. Terminating the course would also mean eliminating difficult attempts to bridge between participants in order to initiate a new horizon for living together.

Because of our concern and fear of losing this unique teaching platform, we tried to obey the directives we had received from above without really believing that, in a space brimming with disputes, it would be possible to both ensure calm discussion and at the same time, create a meaningful dialogue. Yet again and again, we demanded that students only speak one at a time and we politely quieted those who deviated; we made every effort, even more than in the past, to present subjects neutrally and in a way that would enable everyone to feel comfortable in expressing what they were feeling. At the same time, we tried to assuage students’ insulted feelings when others invalidated them. It was difficult and exhausting, and we often failed. But we were ready to make the effort year after year for those moments when Jewish and Arab students were cooperating to conduct activities on campus or protested together against inequality and injustices. Those moments lessened our and the students’ despair when facing the growing social and political alienation in Israeli society.

Meir, in his emotional, contradictory and confusing outbursts, endangered our effort to cooperate with the demands of the college authorities and create an objective and balanced dialogue. One time he burst into a discussion on the damages of the Israeli occupation by saying that if not for the policing activities of the military border guards in which he served, Palestinians would constantly be threatening us with acts of terror, and it wasn’t that he hated Arabs since his grandmother’s best friends were Arab women who worked in the fields of her village. On another occasion, he excitedly erupted into a conversation addressing the segregation of Arab citizens of Israel by relating stories about his close Arab friends with whom he played in the streets of Ramle. But then in the same breath he opined that “if we let the Arabs have everything, there might be another Holocaust.” On yet another occasion, he fervently intervened in an argument regarding the nature of life in the occupied territories, comparing two women whose grief had torn him apart. One was an Arab woman whose son had died in front of his eyes, because the soldiers hadn’t let her go through a roadblock. He had been so upset by the boy’s death that he physically attacked one of the soldiers and only his friends, who kept him away, prevented further violence. The other woman was Jewish, whose son had died when a bus was blown up. As a soldier in the military police Meir had had to clean up glass fragments and body parts. He described the two incidents speaking fast, stammering, almost in tears, swallowing words, which made it hard to follow his talk. But then he became quiet and said apologetically to the class, but we can’t stop the violence, we have no choice. What can we do? We have no other country.

Meir’s tales mixed national militaristic statements with humanist compassionate proclamations and provided precious information regarding his military service and living in Israel’s social margins. He recounted with longing and empathy how he and his friends sat on the roof every Friday evening and talked of their dreams about the future, until most of them started using drugs, were drawn into crime, and then to prison, and how he had been saved from such a fate. He told us about the social worker who’d said to his mother: “Send him away now to a boarding school. He’s smart. If you don’t send him away, he will go downhill.” And his mother did not at all object to the establishment solution of taking children out of their homes instead of investing money to make the neighbourhood tolerable, and she sent him to the rough life of the boarding school. He told us how in the military police he was loved and respected and acquired friends who supported one another and how together with David, he gave sweets to the Palestinian children.

Meir’s storms of blurred inconsistent and passionate stories full of new information, care for others and feelings of hurt, despair, confusion and hope aroused embarrassment and recoil among all of us. Each time he burst in without paying attention to the other students who waited patiently for their turn to speak, talking hastily and emotionally about a piece of his biography, or his opinion regarding a current event, the students fidgeted in their seats and whispered complaints that sometimes turned into louder objections about his inconsiderate and ill-mannered behaviour. These complaints were generally directed towards the two of us, as we were perceived as responsible for discipline and order. How was it that he could burst out like that without taking others into account? What kind of a dialogue was it if a person spoke when he wants, and doesn’t listen? Why didn’t we stop it?

Not wanting to arouse either their antagonism or that of the administration, we got annoyed with Meir who was seen as a “disturbance,” an interloper, an outsider, and we tried to silence him with smiling reprimands—Meir, wait for your turn; Meir, not now; Meir, make it brief. We reframed his comments as part of rational arguments, trying to swallow him up into the seemingly neutral discussion of discrimination and of repression of minorities in the Israeli society. We constructed logical reasoning, provided evidence, critically and objectively analysed the situation, its results and even our emotions about the situation and its results. We reflected; we contained; we nodded in agreement; we asked questions even when we knew the answers. We used bourgeois codes of polite discourse and theories from the fields of critical sociology, human rights discourse, multiculturalism and feminism in order to clarify details of the chaotic reality that Meir revealed in his ill-mannered emotional inconsistent eruptions, but we actually wanted to mask reality and reduce confrontation. Most of the time, although we camouflaged it well, we were nevertheless, like Meir, mixed up, agitated and filled with incongruities.

Tsufit, who had come from a small town and had shared the story with us of the separation wall that had been built in the town school to separate the Ashkenazi Jews, so that they wouldn’t have to learn with the Yemenites, like her, also tried to calm Meir. At least, that’s the way she termed the reprimands that she directed towards him from time to time. Like most of us, she had adopted the academic code that presented rational arguments in a neutral tone, in an attempt not to make anyone angry. At some point, during another course titled “Art and Education in a Multicultural Society,” Tsufit had spoken about her repression, about the need to make herself fit in, as someone who had come from Mizrahi culture whose way of speaking and thinking was according to her different from that of bourgeois-Ashkenazi academia. “As a Mizrahi woman I have less license to speak than Ashkenazi women have, and I don’t intend to insult anyone; Efrat, don’t look at me that way.”

But it was relatively easier to deal with Tsufit because her criticism towards the hegemonic order was respectful and not wholly emotional. In contrast, Meir continually created irritation because he never accepted institutional-social-hierarchical dictates and refused to moderate his unsuitable and uncivilized outbursts, even at the price of “losing face.” Alluding to the repression that lecturers and students tried to apply to him—“you’re always silencing me,” “In Ramle, it was perfectly alright to talk like that”—he was rebelling against what hooks (1994) sees as the common academic attempts to overlook class, ethnic, national disparities within the classroom, referring to them only outside its walls. He also exposed how academia—in this case, its representatives, me, my colleague and the students—was trying as suggested by Jarvis (2014) to silence voices and to regiment people whose behaviour, attitudes and stories deviated from those of the polite and rational conduct of the ruling bourgeoisie and the neoliberal regime.

In retrospect Meir’s angry criticism of our attempts to silence him made me aware of the superficiality and shallowness of public references to diversity, equality and accessibility in higher education institution manifestos. Eva Bendix Petersen and Bronwyn Davies (2010) demonstrate that in the neoliberal academia “[i]nclusion has been made an ‘organizational priority’ and gender equity a ‘key performance indicator’ in deputy vice-chancellors’ portfolios, yet inclusion and gender equity have simultaneously become void of any real import” (Petersen & Davies, 2010, p. 96)—a convenient tokenism. The policies of inclusion and the marketing efforts to recruit new target audiences to broaden the economic foundation of higher education bring in students from various ethnic and class backgrounds—that is working-class Mizrahi students like Meir—who previously were almost absent from academic spaces. Consequently, campuses are more than ever disorienting “encounter zones” where national, ethnic and class groups whose members only infrequently meet in other spheres of Israeli life, come into contact (Pratt, 1992, pp. 6–7). It is a seemingly egalitarian encounter: All of the students have chosen what they are studying; they have all met the entrance requirements and they come to the same classes, use the same cafeteria and sit on the same lawns. Yet without advocating diversity and seeing difference as a positive resource to be developed, as suggested by Philomena Essed (1999), radical inequality and intractable conflict as well as alienation existing off campus are reproduced within the corridors and classes.

But diversity and difference in most higher education institutions are not desirable resources but rather tolerated at best. More likely, non-traditional students with their different worldview, social and cultural experiences and manners are regarded as a source of discomfort and a potential institutional risk and thus “needing to be brought within the realm of the same” (Petersen & Davies, 2010, p. 97). This explains our attempts to discipline Meir and to turn him into one of us, that is, to drive him to develop a proper academic self-contained, rational, neutral persona who suppresses emotions, speaks in level tones and avoids unaccepted attitudes.

But it was more than that. Meeting Meir provided an opportunity for me to also examine my own basic cultural and social assumptions about difference, and my pedagogy. For quite a few years, I have been aware that my critical worldview excludes no small number of people with different worldviews. Like other critical researchers, I tend to interpret the ambivalence of members of minority groups, like Meir, towards universal liberal values as a problem and an obstacle to proper education and knowledge. Although my feminist beliefs negate the pseudo-neutral discourse that has developed in academia, and the neoliberal demand to silence all political or social disagreements for the sake of consumer peace, I, like many of my peers, have found it difficult to deal with the sensitive and painful situations that Meir and many other students have created in their difficulty to embrace academic socialization. In retrospect, I understand that many times, due to my difficulties in contending with tempestuous emotions, I attempted to enforce Meir and other students into academic behaviour that suited the neoliberal ethos and thus, again and again, I missed important opportunities for valuable discussions and knowledge.

As the years go by, I am more and more aware that cooperating with the institutional silencing of difference is a mistake. The encounter with Meir clarified for me more than ever that in order to oppose the disrespect of the neoliberal regime to disparity, I had to begin broadening my interpretive framework to include non-liberal attitudes, in order to create meaningful dialogue between diverse individual worlds and groups—with the awareness that despite disparities and hostilities there are always opportunities for what Pratt presents as “copresence, interaction, interlocking understandings and practices” even within radically asymmetrical relations of power (Pratt, 1992, p. 6).

Gradually my classes turned into what Gloria Anzaldua (2002) terms an “in between space,” in which everything is unstable, impermanent and unexpected, and where boundaries are unclear. Being in such spaces exposes us, teachers and students, to other ideas, other people, other worlds, and creates new meaningful knowledge. In these sites my students and I are what the feminist scholar Anzaldua calls border people, mestizas. Open to diverse cultural, social and political possibilities in our encounter, we were “floundering in uncharted seas” and were required to be tolerant to tension and ambiguity taking place in the framework of our meeting (Anzaldua, 1987, p. 79). In such space we have been required to accept contradictions, conflicts, discomfort, suffocation, anger and chaos as an integral part of our teaching, learning and communication.

Being in the intermediate space means resisting the academic obsession, primarily in the neoliberal framework, on presenting rational positions that can be analysed and measured, separating intellect and emotion and eliminating the latter with the fear that it prevents us from being neutral. It means giving space to knowledge which at times expresses opposition to the academic norms of discourse—because it is not neutral; it is emotional, explosive, impolite, unanalytical, and contradicts itself—pointing to the importance of social hierarchies, local identity and group membership, and hence challenges our attempts at endowing liberal and universal values like social justice and equality.

This knowledge did not only disrupt my ideology or curriculum, it also turned into a work hazard, accompanying me off campus to my comfortable middle-class home in Tel Aviv. At the dinner table, or opposite the television, I conveyed the emotional, confused and agitated stories to my partner, sometimes crying in frustration for the injustices done to my students. I told him about an Arab student from an unrecognized village who disappeared from class after her house was demolished by state agencies; about another Arab student who recounted how when he was a teenager during the Second Intifada, a soldier aimed a rifle at him and made him realize that he would always be a second-class citizen in this country; about the Jewish student from a poor family who told our class, oblivious of the dozen Palestinians present, that she has hated Arabs since when she was a child and had watched in horror a rocket falling on a home when she was running to reach the shelter; about the young woman who had grown up in a settlement in the occupied territories and who had seen her mother mentally collapsing after losing a friend in a terror attack; about Meir who had been saved from a life of crime only by being sent away from his mother and his home.

I have to acknowledge that my antagonism towards fostering disparities also implied my fear and resentment from becoming helpless and vulnerable in the face of misery and injustice. But it also drew on my apprehension of institutional sanctions for encouraging controversies and explosive subjects while not disciplining and calming emotional students down. Despite my feminist beliefs that call for minimizing the hierarchy in class, this anxiety often led me to apply my authority as a teacher who owns the correct and proper knowledge and silence them. This was frequently my reaction to Meir. It was a proof of hook’s argument (1994) that the accepted expectation in academia—when we cross the threshold of the classroom, we enter a democratic space, a free area in which the desire to learn makes us all equals—is unfounded.

Reading his last paper, I could finally let myself listen to Meir’s voice. He wrote wonderfully and the pictures he drew with words still stay with me. I can see quite clearly a young man navigating through the poor neighbourhood, sometimes committing minor crimes, and then getting involved in violent incidents at the boarding school to which he was sent by the social worker and his mother, and finally making his way to Tel Hai College against all odds, where he still had to struggle with students, with lecturers, and with me, so as not to be swallowed up by hegemonic middle-class codes and dictates. For me, these pictures challenge the neoliberal project whose aim is to domesticate people like him, to peel off their differences and to turn them into “one of us”—a rational, neutral, polite figure, not one whose knowledge and manners challenge the existing academic structure and call us all to think.

Two years ago, when I asked his permission to share the story of our encounter at a lecture I gave at Tel Aviv University, he wrote to me: “I give you my approval to use my name and anything else that you want, since it is my story.” And when I thanked him and stated that “every time I think about it, I remember how much you taught me,” he replied, “I also learned from you.” This conversation made clear, in my opinion, how attempts by students and lecturers to strive against the neoliberal orientation to silence disagreement and to eradicate diversity make academia more meaningful.

The waiter hands us the bill with three chocolates. Susan must hurry to the hotel to pack her suitcase. She wants to join us later at the Hayward Gallery exhibition—Kiss My Genders—a group exhibition presenting more than 30 international artists whose work explores and engages with gender identity and fluidity. It seems like an appropriate closure of a complicated and confusing attempt to write about diversity within the neoliberal classroom.