Righteous Anger in the Classroom

In recent months, there’s been much public debate about Critical Race Theory, which most legislators believe boils down to teaching about race in the classroom. Obviously, how to do that matters, especially from the perspective of the content of what is being taught. But less attention has been paid to how we should teach about race and gender from a pedagogical perspective.

Professors who teach about social justice (racial justice, gender justice, etc.) are confronted with a dilemma when teaching in the classroom. How honest should I be about my personal frustrations with the injustice in the world? This question of authenticity is especially challenging when teaching on the philosophy of race and gender (and other identities). The American Philosophical Association, together with the American Association of Philosophy Teachers held a session at a recent conference on the special challenges of teaching on philosophy of race and gender.* Many professors, not just philosophers, struggle with this question.

Stereotypically, the role of a teacher is to be a detached observer, expressing only mild emotions, to create more space for student emotional investment while avoiding strong student reactions. But this is harder when teaching about social justice. Teaching the philosophy of race and gender necessarily involves teaching about oppression and moral wrongdoing. As I argue here, professors have good reasons to avoid expressing anger, as well as good reasons to express anger, placing them in a dilemma. I aim to clarify this dilemma and explain why this situation is especially difficult for faculty who are members of marginalized groups (namely, women and nonwhite faculty), where the consequences are more severe both for expressing and withholding anger.

What are some reasons to withhold strong emotions? Professors want to maintain an atmosphere in their classrooms that promotes learning and participation. However, expressions of strong emotions can violate expectations that conversation will be respectful and calm. The emotional atmosphere of the classroom should prioritize creating space for students to calmly and respectfully engage with one another. Students will be less able to learn if they feel personally targeted or attacked. Thus, the teacher-student relationship should be characterized by respect and trust. Strong emotional expressions can run counter to these classroom goals by violating norms of discussion, or by making faculty appear biased and untrustworthy. All of these could trigger negative reactions from students. To avoid this, a faculty member might want to cultivate a classroom emotional tone focused on student reactions, including avoiding any faculty expressions of anger.

What makes anger unique? Anger is an other-directed emotion, and is often seen as aggressive, seeking to hold the target accountable for a slight or wrongdoing against the person feeling angry. If a professor expresses anger at a student, the result will likely be a defensive and alienated reaction from the student, hindering learning and conversation.  However, even when anger is not directed at a student, it can easily be misconstrued or perceived as an attack. If students incorrectly perceive that anger is being directed at them, it may have a detrimental impact on the classroom.

Research has shown that students who perceive anger as a violation of social norms will have a more negative view of the course and professor. Other researchers have pointed out “students recognize that teachers get angry and that they are sometimes the reason for their teachers’ anger, but they are less sympathetic when assigning attributions to the expression or communication of this emotion.” This is an expression of the fundamental attribution error, where students attribute anger to some fact about the internal psychology of the faculty member rather than an external situation. The researchers are pessimistic about the ability of teachers to control this reaction, saying:

“Regardless of the manner in which they display their anger, students will most likely blame the teacher for the anger expression.”

McPherson and Young (2004)

Strong emotional expressions can also suggest that a professor is biased or overly personally involved with a topic. During debates, professors often act as a neutral party adjudicating between competing perspectives. Given these considerations, students witnessing outbursts of anger might no longer trust the professor to act as a non-biased guide to the subject matter. In the interest of maintaining conversational norms, preventing negative student reactions, and maintaining an appearance of unbiased expertise, faculty have numerous reasons not to express anger in the classroom.

On the other hand, there are good reasons to have strong emotions in response to injustice. Anger is a fitting response to instances of unethical behavior, and so expressions of anger seem appropriate when talking about injustice. Anger is an accurate response to angering events. So, failing to express anger means developing emotional habits that don’t match the world around you. This inaccuracy gets communicated to others, who might see a lack of anger as an indication that you don’t think injustice is angering. Commitments to racial and gender equality in fact make it appropriate to react with strong emotions in the face of injustice. As Maxine Waters put it: “I have a right to my anger”.

Expressing anger can be an important tool for addressing the problem of oppression. Macalester Bell argues for a “virtue of appropriate anger” as part of how a virtuous person should respond to oppression. And Myisha Cherry has argued that anger specifically is an important tool in responding to injustice by motivating action. Anger expression can promote secondary benefits for members of socially marginalized groups and function to affirm the rights of the oppressed. It can also promote solidarity, as well as motivate specific actions to fight injustice. Failing to express anger also risks alienating students who feel angry, further marginalizing students who are underrepresented in a philosophy classroom.

To sum up, anger is a fitting response to injustice. Faculty who teach about moral wrongs are being accurate when they feel (and show) emotional responses to those situations. Failing to express anger might show a failure to respond to the right reasons and could send the incorrect message that anger is unfitting.

The central problem with expressing anger is that perceptions of appropriateness largely depend on who is doing the expressing. And for members of historically marginalized social groups (like women and faculty of color), it’s a problem that comes with a cost.

Women faculty who express anger are often seen as overly emotional and biased, especially when teaching about gender. Researchers argue the data show that “women faculty are assumed to be biased, angry, and less objective than men faculty when teaching women’s studies and gender courses.” The same student perceptions of bias arise for non-white faculty teaching on race: “When women of color faculty address racism in the classroom, students may feel they are being personally attacked and assess the professor as unfair and incompetent.”  Research shows that women who express anger in workplace settings are conferred a lower status, while angry men were conferred a higher one. Even fitting emotions that might be socially normative for a white man can be perceived as biased and inappropriate in women faculty or faculty of color. These assessments can trigger strong negative reactions from students.

But there are also greater costs to failing to express anger as a member of a historically marginalized social group. First, faculty risk miscommunicating their views and sending the wrong message. Withholding anger can communicate to students that the wrong being discussed should not or does not deserve anger.  Faculty  might inadvertently suggest to the student that “oppression doesn’t elicit anger for women like me” or “women like me don’t get angry at oppression.” Faculty emotions can send signals that minimize the moral significance of injustice, even while aiming to do the opposite.

Second, faculty members miss out on an opportunity to build solidarity and to provide affirmation for marginalized students in the classroom who also feel angry, and who may benefit from seeing faculty who look like them expressing anger at injustice. There are many subjects in which a professor may not reveal their own commitments, but acts of social oppression visibly apply to faculty members who are women or people of color. In these cases, it is not only fitting to react to identity-based oppressions with anger but failure to express fitting anger encourages faculty depersonalization, and contributes to the stereotype of the detached professor.

Third, not expressing anger comes at a personal cost to the professor who disconnects from their own identity, if they feel they must act against an otherwise sincerely held moral commitment. Hiding one’s authentic emotions continues a trend where faculty from historically excluded groups feel they have to “act” like someone other than who they are in order to be successful in academia. Withholding anger can be an act of disconnection from one’s own identity, “covering” key features to be more socially palatable to those in the environment.

Unfortunately, faculty who are members of historically excluded social groups suffer long-term consequences of making a mistake regarding emotional expression in the classroom. Women faculty and faculty of color are also more at risk for receiving negative evaluations due to their race and gender (and biased) student evaluations. This is undoubtedly related to the fact that non-white faculty, and women faculty, are already under-represented in academia. There are proportionally fewer women throughout academia’s “leaky pipeline”; for example, there are proportionally fewer women assistant professors than Ph.D. graduates, fewer women associate professors than assistant professors, and so on. Many faculty were outraged – but not surprised – when Nikole Hannah Jones was denied tenure at the University of North Carolina, arguing that the decision “violated longstanding norms and established processes.” Underrepresentation in the profession contributes to the marginalization of faculty of color and the norms of classroom management.

So should faculty express or withhold their anger? As with many things in life, there’s no single solution to this dilemma: faculty take risks whether they choose to express or withhold anger. Most teachers will have good reasons to express and to not express anger in the classroom. An Aristotelian would point out one way to balance the competing concerns is to search for a moderate middle ground: get angry in the right amount, for the right reasons, at the right time. Alternatively, there are other fitting emotions in response to oppression, ones that can express disapproval with fewer risks of being perceived as aggressive (disappointment, sadness). Another solution to the dilemma would be for a wider variety of authentic emotions to be normalized in the collegiate classroom. A broader acceptance of a variety of emotions would give faculty more emotional tools to express the significance and impact of a philosophy topic.  

While these strategies may be helpful, they will be more difficult and costly for faculty who are members of underrepresented groups. Academia can reduce the stakes of this dilemma by doing more to diversify the profession and challenge the image of a typical philosopher as a non-biased white man passing along his wisdom. There are concrete ways to support diverse faculty in the classroom, such as mitigating some of the uneven burdens that fall upon them when teaching about oppression. Protective measures include taking steps to reduce the influence of student evaluations (when biased by race and gender) in the process of faculty evaluation, along with steps to address academia’s failures to attract and retain diverse faculty.

The difficulty of balancing one’s emotions is especially acute for faculty members teaching about oppression, who are also members of socially oppressed groups. I have argued here that while it is important to consider the impact of strong emotional expressions when facilitating discussion, including predicting the ways one’s personal emotions can interrupt the normal goals of the classroom, that withholding the fitting emotions that accompany one’s moral commitments comes with its own high costs, namely, failing to accurately recognize the significance of injustice and failing to clearly represent one’s own identity in the classroom.

*Thanks to participants in this APA session for feedback on an earlier draft of this essay.

Kate C.S. Schmidt

Kate C.S. Schmidt is an assistant professor of philosophy at the Metropolitan State University of Denver. Her research focuses on epistemic justice, moral emotions, and computer ethics.