Many members of the U-High community have been discussing ideas brought up in the Report of the Committee to Review the Laboratory Schools released on Nov. 20. One major area of focus was the idea that Lab has become somewhat ideologically homogenous, and that candid inclusion of teachers’ personal opinions damages open discourse. The Midway organized a discussion among four U-High students — seniors Maya Livni and Macabee Callard, junior Jessica Stainton-Simmons and sophomore Mila Bhatoey-Bertrand — to learn their opinions and to unpack Lab’s institutional neutrality. Responses have been lightly edited for length, clarity and style.
To start off, do you feel that U-High has a distinct political culture or commonly held beliefs? And if so, what beliefs characterize that culture?
Maya: U-High is, obviously, set in the community of the university, which is very infamous for being politically neutral and not taking stances on political views. But I think that U-High differs in that we definitely have a more liberal culture, and there’s a lot of focus on diversity, equity and inclusion. I think that can often be a positive, but definitely sets it such that political beliefs are not as diverse.
Macabee: I think you can have non-liberal beliefs. There are plenty of conservative people at Lab. I think it’s more that if you have beliefs which aren’t [liberal], you sort of have to set yourself into some kind of box. I think that’s not really specific to Lab. It’s just like you need to say, “I’m an ‘X.’” So you can’t really have a freedom of belief in that sense.
How comfortable do students feel when disagreeing with classmates or teachers in discussion, and how much does the nature of their views affect their comfort?
Jessica: I think people feel comfortable disagreeing on an academic topic or something that the whole class has the same grounding in. So if you’re given a text, people feel comfortable disagreeing about their opinion on the text. They feel less comfortable bringing their personal opinions into the conversation because of how it may be interpreted by their classmates or teachers.
Maya: I think it also depends on the class that you’re in. In a class like AT Latinx or AT Native American history, where the premise of the classes is that you’re studying a certain ethnic group, there’s a lot less room for kind of disagreement, because often those groups have been marginalized. So, to disagree with what the teacher might be presenting can often be construed with disagreeing with the liberation of those groups. Obviously, that’s not received well.
Does a teacher expressing their opinions help or hinder discussion?
Mila: Personally, I feel like a teacher expressing especially their political opinion allows more conversation about politics. Because if a teacher brings up their political views, maybe not even their political views, but just like politics in general, I feel like I feel comfortable sharing my beliefs on that topic, because I know that they feel comfortable sharing about that topic.
Macabee: Teachers are generally pretty hesitant to say anything political at all. I guess it might be something in the job, or it might be a personal thing for them, but when they do it, it’s usually the pretty medium thing. So I don’t think that it changes much.
Jessica: I think it’s important that teachers differentiate their opinion versus what they’re actually teaching within the lesson. Because if they don’t feel like they can express their opinion as an opinion, they may try putting it into their curriculum as sort of an underlying theme within the thing that they’re trying to teach to people. So then that’s not them expressing their opinion as an opinion; that’s them expressing their opinion through the curricula, rather than making them two discreet things.
As a general rule, does Lab teach students how to think or what to think? As in, to what extent does U-High provide the tools for students to form their opinions, and to what extent do they prescribe those opinions?
Maya: As an administration, I don’t think that U-High imposes any given belief on its students. But it’s kind of within social dynamics that that kind of comes out in what is socially acceptable.
Mila: I agree. I kind of think that teachers give you a background, and I think most of them try their best, especially when you’re younger, not to give you any of their own opinions. Because you haven’t really understood how you can, yourself, rebut their beliefs if you disagree or you agree with them.
Macabee: I think almost all censorship is social. It’s not always about someone having a belief that you disagree with. It’s about someone kind of making you uncomfortable. When we say “uncomfortable,” people almost always immediately jump to something political. But it can really just be someone breaking the fiber of a given conversation. I think that, almost, it’s never from the administration or a teacher. It’s just from people trying to signal to someone that they don’t like whatever direction you’re taking there, that you’re saying something which is, you know. I think that’s how 99% of censorship works. It’s not like, “you can’t say this.” It’s implicit.
What about the DEI programming by the administration? Does that feel prescriptive? And if so, how does that affect our ability to talk about these topics?
Maya: Where the line blurs, for me, is when they start to kind of assign that to a political ideology, where it becomes not moral anymore, but political. I think that they try their best to not do that, but inherently, DEI is politics because of the environment that we live in. They kind of jump the line sometimes. And I think that’s like where I disagree.
Is critiquing DEI seen as unacceptable?
Mila: I think so. I think that at Lab, if someone were to say, “Oh, why do we do all this stuff to learn about DEI, and why do we take all these steps to make sure we’re including this?” I think someone critiquing that would be crossing this boundary that we have socially at school.
Maya: I disagree with that. I think that I’ve heard a lot of people say kind of the frustration, either out of the amount of homework that we have, or like, “Why are we wasting our time on this?’ I think I’ve heard that often. It hasn’t really been shut down at all. To me, there’s a difference between disagreeing with DEI and diversity equity and inclusion, and disagreeing with affirmative action, and disagreeing with trying to ensure that our environment is one that is diverse. That is different than critiquing the assemblies and critiquing all this programming. That is kind of what you’re talking about, which is kind of an enforced ideology.
Jessica: I think the issue is that people conflate the DEI programming with the groups they’re talking about. So, a lot of the issue there is that any criticism of the programming is seen to be a criticism of the people. But that’s also partially because we’ve done this from such a young age, and then young children can misconstrue the programming with the people that they’re talking about. So then, having frustration with the programming that’s being put on or that’s taking up time away from homework can also translate into frustration with the group of people, which I think is a really problematic misconception for young children to have.
Maya: Also, the context of Lab being pushed to be ideologically neutral is that the Trump administration is cracking down on universities. So when I consider it in that context, to me, the idea that Lab should be less into DEI, that’s very frustrating to me — the idea that we have to move away from being accepting of having a diverse student body or move away from actively attempting to have a diverse student body. That shouldn’t be the case, in my opinion.
