Proud to be Political
Why Building a Just Democracy Should Guide Our Practice as Educators
By David Ingram, Ph.D. President, Loyola Chapter, AAUP
KEYNOTE ADDRESS TO THE ANNUAL MEETING OF THE TRAINING SCHOOL PSYCHOLOGISTS (TSP) ASSOCIATION, FEBRUARY 23, 2026, LOYOLA UNIVERSITY CHICAGO
INTRODUCTION: To begin with, I’d like to thank Professor Talapatra for having invited me to be your keynote speaker today. She asked me to speak for an hour, which seemed like a lot to me. [In case you’re wondering, I’m not accustomed to being a keynote speaker – most of my papers are in the 15-20 minute range]. Anyway, Prof. Talapatra suggested that I try to fill up my speaking time by involving you, the audience, in my talk, which I intend to do. After all, I told her, this is what I do with my students! I even include an icebreaker because that seems to wake my students up. We’ll see if it works for you, Anyway, I think I managed to stretch my keynote address to almost forty minutes, plus the filler.
I must confess that I was a bit surprised to receive her invitation, since I am a philosopher and social ethicist by training. It then became clearer why she invited me. It wasn’t because she wanted me to lecture you on the dialectical intricacies of Freud’s metapsychology as it informs the German social philosophical tradition familiarly known as the Frankfurt School – a school of critical social theory I happen to know a little about and whose pioneering studies on the authoritarian personality and fascism are particularly relevant today.
But, before I tell you why she invited me to speak, since I’m on the topic of the Frankfurt School, please allow me to lecture you just a little bit about why this School is relevant to our conversation today.[Speaking of my own formation as a critical theorist, perhaps some of you have heard of the philosopher Herbert Marcuse? He was a founding member of the Frankfurt School and very famous as an outspoken public intellectual in the Sixties, who exercised a profound influence on radical student movements throughout the world. I mention him because he was my mentor when I attended graduate school in philosophy at the University of California, San Diego. One could say that he made me the person I am today. He inspired my own political activism, from being vice-president of a faculty union to organizing boycotts on behalf of the United Farm Workers Union. He introduced me to a younger generation of critical theorists, chief among them Jurgen Habermas, whose psycho-social theories spanning such diverse topics as ideological brainwashing and child development drew from thinkers most of you probably encountered in your formation: Jean Piaget, Lawrence Kohlberg, Carol Gilligan, and Erik Erikson. Today, his theory of deliberative democracy, which owes a huge debt to the pragmatist social philosophies of John Dewey and George Herbert Mead, informs my own research on social recognition, identity politics, and the politics of resentment in our current crisis of democracy. Another Frankfurt School critical theorist that influences my research is Axel Honneth, whose philosophy of recognition also draws from these pragmatist thinkers as well as from familiar contemporary developmental psychologists, Jessica Benjamin and Donald Winnecott.]
BUT I DIGRESS. The reason Prof. Talapatra invited me here today is because I, as a philosopher and as president of our local chapter of the American Association of University Professors, could perhaps speak to the deeper ethical foundations of our common pedagogical mission that is currently under attack by our federal government.
We college educators are prime targets in today’s politicized culture wars. No less than Vice-President J.D. Vance has declared that we are quite literally the enemies of America. He and President Trump allege that we are subverting the youth of this country by spreading an anti-male, anti-white, anti-hetero-normative and, ultimately, anti-American “Woke” ideology promoting diversity, inclusion, and equity, more familiarly known as DEI.
Now, I’m sure we all have wondered how such seemingly noble pedagogical values came to be the target of anti-discrimination lawsuits, and I will share my own thoughts about this later.
Suffice it to say, the President’s efforts to root out diversity, equity, and inclusion by denying federal funding to research foundations, scholarships targeting minorities, and institutions of high education that incorporate inclusive debate and critical reflection on social injustice, has caused immense damage and suffering to you, your students, and the students they will be caring for.
Because I wanted to make my presentation as relevant as possible to you, I asked Professor Talapatra to send me some links to sources that describe how these policies have specifically impacted the training of school psychologists. Here is what she sent me.
The impact of federal policies on your research includes the following:
- Cancellation of five major federal grants totaling $1 billion that the National Association of School Psychologists had sought to address shortages and increase access to comprehensive school mental health services. These grants focused on training, recruiting, and retaining school psychologists, with some targeting psychological assistance in educating persons within the disability community.
- Cancellation of $900 million in federal contracts with the Institute of Education Sciences, an agency within the U.S. Department of Education that houses the National Center for Education Statistics, which funds research on how to improve higher education.
- AND Cancellation of National Science Foundation grants and $168 million in Education Department grants targeting the Full-Service Community Schools Program that supports school psychologists.
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- Turning to the impact of federal government policies on your teaching, I note the following unprecedented changes:
The ending of funding to Minority-Serving Institutions (MSI) grant programs that provide scholarships to historically marginalized racial and ethnic minority students
The imposition of visa restrictions on international students
Changes in federally funded student loans for graduate and professional students that cap lifetime and annual limits [for your students, I believe the borrowing cap will be set at $20,000 annually and $100, 000 lifetime beginning July 1, 2026], an extension of the time before graduate student debt can be forgiven to 30 years after the loan begins, the setting of an annual interest rate of income-driven repayment schedules of 12.5% of discretionary income combined with the termination of more generous IDR plans, all of which adds a significant burden to some students seeking training and certification as school psychologists
AND LAST BUT NOT LEAST, violent raids and kidnappings by Federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents that racially profile members of our community, encourage racism and racist bullying, threaten students and their parents with arrest, thereby disrupting school attendance and learning, and harm the psychological well-being of families, whether or not they have kids enrolled in K-12 schools.
Sadly, we see that many – thankfully, not all – of our most prestigious institutions of higher education have compromised their educational mission in seeking to placate the current administration by eliminating many programs designed to further diversity, equity, and inclusion. Happily, I don’t need to remind you that your own organization, along with the National Association of School Psychologists, has vigorously resisted these compromises. As president of our local chapter of the AAUP, which has joined many lawsuits aiming to reverse these policies, and as father of a gay college student who was, until recently, involved in suicide prevention studies of LGBTQ+ youth, let me just say that I have witnessed first-hand the devastating impact of our government’s assault on my family’s and our nation’s mental health.
But I was not invited here today to remind you of what you already know is happening to your profession and to higher education more broadly. I was invited to share with you my thinking about how what is happening impacts the basic values underlying our profession as educators. This is where I believe my training as a philosopher intersects your training as educators of school psychologists.
You are trained to promote the emotional and cognitive development of young people by removing barriers they encounter in their daily interactions with others. I am trained to think about how and why we value personal and social development as something that is conceptually coherent, meaningful and good. I’m sure that you and I would both agree that sustaining healthy social relationships, in which people feel mutually affirmed by each other and place trust in each other, is key to fostering self-confidence, empowerment, and emotional growth. This need for recognition runs through the German philosophical tradition I have devoted my entire life to studying. It teaches that traumas suffered at the hands of others, whether imagined or real, distort the very process of mutual understanding by which we come to interact with others as equals. Instead of seeing others as positive resources for our own self-understanding and agency, we see them as threats to who we are and respond by building walls to keep them out. “Bowling alone,” as social psychologist Robert Putnam reminds us in his famous book on the American decline of community, might reflect a hyper-individualistic and privatistic consumer culture; but this anti-social withdrawal from the public political sphere might also be indicative of social alienation and psychic pathology. It remains to be seen whether our siloed, polarizing media, go-it-alone service-based gig economy, and increasing dependence on artificial intelligence as surrogate for human relationship will eventually replace democratic self-actualization as we have hitherto experienced it.
If this is so, then there is no better time than now to begin to reflect on what it is we might be losing. I believe that no one articulated the democratic vision of personal self-actualization through mutual learning better than the great American educator, psychologist, and philosopher John Dewey. In a public lecture, “Creative Democracy: The Task Before Us,” which was written just before the outbreak of WWII, when fascist movements were gaining popularity in America, Dewey felt compelled to remind his fellow citizens that democratic institutions cannot survive and flourish unless democracy itself becomes, in his words, “a personal way of individual life [signifying] the possession and continual use of certain attitudes, forming personal character, and determining desire and purpose in all areas of life.” (151). He elaborated further on this point by underscoring the deep nexus between education and democracy, a topic of one of his most celebrated books.
He writes:
[D]emocracy is belief in the ability of human experience to generate the aims and methods by which further experience will grow in ordered richness. Every other moral and social faith rests upon the idea that experience must be subjected at some point or other to some form of external control; to some “authority” alleged to exist outside the process of experience. Democracy is the faith that the process of experience is more important than any special result attained, so that special results achieved are of ultimate value only as they are used to enrich and order the on-going process. Since the process of experience is capable of being educative, faith in democracy is all one with faith in experience and education” (151)
I could devote an entire lecture commenting on each line of this passage. Condensed to its essence, Dewey tells us that an educative experience, structured as a democratic way of learning, is essential for shaping individuals possessing the requisite moral qualities, of collaborative, open-minded and self-critical inquiry, that is essential for sustaining not only personal growth in all dimensions of life, but also rational community composed of knowledge-seekers AND cooperative problem-solvers, without which democratic institutions, tolerance, and respect for basic rights cannot be sustained. Schools, families, friendships, workplaces, and virtually all social relationships are, according to this view, the great laboratories of democracy. And here I would like to thank Prof. Talapatra for reminding me of a more recent assertion by bell hooks that could just as easily have been written by Dewey himself: “The classroom remains the most radical space of possibility in the academy.” Or, To recall an old slogan from the Sixties, the personal is political – and we might add, the political is personal.
When Dewey founded the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools in 1896, he sought to test his democratic vision by replacing rote memorization with “learning by doing.” From nursery school age through high school, students were encouraged to pursue their interests in concert with peers by acquiring skills in math, science, literacy, and communication while undertaking real life activities such as cooking and other manual arts. Today we call this experiential learning. Many parents, as well as some of Dewey’s own supervisors, felt that the absence of a traditional classroom divided into obedient subjects and dictatorial instructors was an instance of democracy taken too far, which ultimately led Dewey to leave the University of Chicago for Columbia University. Then as now, the critics of Dewey’s politicized, democratic philosophy of education sought to replace it with a narrower form of vocational instruction emphasizing the acquisition of job-related skills. If they believed that the educator should additionally impart skills of citizenship, these were understood to mean a fawning love of America’s founding fathers and its exceptional greatness. They therefore sought to place guardrails on what students could talk about. In short, they sought to cancel a vibrant political culture of radical questioning and debate that challenged racist, classist, sexist, and other narratives of natural hierarchy.
Given this critique of pedagogical orthodoxy, it is no surprise that Dewey would become one of the founders and very first president of the American Association of University Professors, which was established in 1915 to defend democratic principles of free speech, unconstrained academic freedom to pursue truth, and faculty co-governance. Earlier, in 1909, he, along with W.E.B. DuBois, became one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and signed the Call for a National Convention to Fight for Civil and Political Liberties. Given this history of political activism, it should come as no surprise that later, in 1920, he became one of the founders of the American Civil Liberties Union. [Today all three of these organizations are on the front lines fighting to resist the current administrations assault on free speech, social justice, and truth. ]
Having duly noted Dewey’s contributions to advancing civil, political, and academic freedom, I would now like to share with you his philosophy for training teachers. For Dewey, teachers should be trained to impart intelligence and moral character to their students, not just vocational skills. Unlike teaching skills, which can be mastered with the proper curriculum, the teaching of intelligence and character requires deep understanding of one’s students and a willingness to adapt to their concerns and experiential backgrounds. Emotionally engaging with one’s students in this way requires that teachers continually readjust their methods experimentally, learning, in turn, from those whom they are teaching. If carried out permanently, this teacher-student dialog fosters an on-going process of mutual questioning, leading to a concerted effort of critical reflection and experiential growth, what Dewey calls intelligence. The social constitution of experience and autonomous agency in genuine dialog demands the adoption of a liberal, open-minded and egalitarian, disposition toward mutual problem-solving. No one, no matter their ability or social positioning, should be excluded from participating in this endeavor as an equal. In this respect, teaching is not a skill but a moral habit, involving cultivation of a democratic character in oneself as well as in one’s charge.
To cite Dewey’s famous essay, “My Pedagogical Creed,” which he wrote in 1897: “the individual who is to be educated is a social individual and [ ] society is an organic unity of individuals.” Emphasizing that the psychological and the social must go hand-in-hand during the learning process, Dewey adds that “through these demands student[s] [are] stimulated to act as member[s] of a unity, to emerge from [their] original narrowness of action and feeling and to conceive [themselves] from the standpoint of the welfare of the group to which [they] belong.” He continues by saying that “the present educational systems, so far as they destroy or neglect this unity, render it difficult or impossible to get any genuine, regular moral meanings.” He concludes by adding “I believe it is the business of everyone interested in education to insist upon the school as the primary and most effective instrument of social progress and reform in order that society be awakened to realize what the school stands for, and aroused to the necessity of endowing the educator with sufficient equipment to perform [their] task.” [That quote bears repeating]]
The political nature of this educational ethos becomes evident when we realize that democracy, as a way of life, should inform all our relationships and institutions, including those economic institutions that are mainly under the private control of the investor class. [In this respect, Dewey’s visionary pedagogical philosophy looks ahead to the pedagogical philosophy of another educator and critic of the so-called ‘banking method’ of learning [PUN INTENDED], whose book you may have encountered somewhere in your formation: I’m referring, of course, to Paolo Friere’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed]. The importance of fostering trust between teacher and student, no less than the transference relationship between psychologist and client, requires the cultivation of a diverse body of teachers and students representing all major demographic groups. Although in theory Dewey’s pedagogical philosophy leans towards participatory rather than representative democracy, in practice it must foster equal opportunity participation through equal representation of all groups. Implementation of diversity, inclusion, and equity at all levels of higher education is the only way to ensure that all social perspectives – and not just all intellectual philosophies – inform the great democratic dialog of our educational enterprise.
Admittedly these are controversial ideas whose meanings are philosophically and politically contested. Adding to their complexity is their changing function within the context of free speech and academic freedom. When I was a student activist in the Sixties and Seventies, I was often lectured by some of my professors that the university, as a public, tax-funded institution dedicated to the impartial pursuit of knowledge, should stay out of politics. It could provide a forum for rationally debating both sides of a controversial war, but it should not take sides. Thus, my fellow anti-war activists and I were told to keep quiet when recruiters came to campus to enlist young men to fight in Vietnam. We could politely ask them why we should be bombing the people there, but we could not disrupt their recruitment efforts by shouting them down. Likewise, we were told that we should not pressure the university to disinvest from military research, since it was not the university that was making bombs using that research. In short, we were told by university administrators that all speech was to be tolerated and permitted a respectful hearing, no matter how mendacious and deadly its effect; and all knowledge was to be treated as innocent, no matter how deadly its intended social effect.
If this sounds all too familiar to you it is because we are again witnessing agents of the federal government entering universities to hijack – literally, kidnap - students for nefarious political ends; and we are again seeing unruly students protesting their government’s support of murderous policies in a foreign land. Let me be clear, I am not advocating censorship or cancel culture. Public spaces within a university should be open to virtually all social perspectives and protect a very wide range of speech and expression, including, I believe, behavior that is unruly, uncivil, and offensive to one or more groups. However, exposing the pretense of equal freedom of speech when the government monopolizes war coverage favoring its point of view by shouting down military recruiters and advocates of humanitarian crimes by another name, does not deny speech so much as signal the absence of an equally protected counter-speech. I would go so far as to argue that such offensive behavior should be tolerated as politically salient unless it poses some immanent harm to one or more targeted individuals. In general, when it comes to political protest, some disruption of normal life on campuses should be tolerated as necessary for the exercise of any robust freedom of political speech. Of course, knowing when political protest crosses the line of endangering property and person is not always easily discernable. We see today that guardians of the academy might have at times under-reacted – but, in my opinion, more often overreacted - to the dangers posed by campus protestors.
Let me now turn to a somewhat different area of speech that more directly impinges on diversity, equity, and inclusion: academic freedom. The defense of academic freedom poses different considerations. Professors are bound by a standard of excellence in the pursuit of knowledge. With very few exceptions, they should be free to set limits to that pursuit according to their own lights and the standards of their peers, not by government officials. Intellectual philosophies and social perspectives that can and should be expressed in the political public sphere might not be deemed appropriate in the classroom. Creationist accounts of the universe have a place within the humanities but not the hard sciences; the same – with considerably more qualification – might be said about some theories of gender and race. But here – speaking to scientifically trained professional psychologists like yourselves – I would like to amplify the qualification. Although few would deny that theories of gender and race are irrelevant to the study of quantum mechanics, it matters whether that study – and its teaching to others – is conducted exclusively by white men. It sends a message that only white men are capable of succeeding at what many regard as the pinnacle of intellectual endeavor. And lest it be forgotten, not only is knowledge power, as Francis Bacon and Michel Foucault remind us, but it is power that can be put to many social uses – not all of them innocent. All of this to say, that diversity in recruiting, hiring, and promoting in the hard sciences should be imperative in a democracy. It is even more imperative when we concede the undisputed presence of gender and racial bias throughout the modern history of those sciences that gravitate around biology, medicine, cognitive-behavioral-developmental psychology, and psychotherapy. Even when scientific research itself is free of racial and gender bias, its testing and application can deploy questionable ethical practices – for example, exposing patients to pathogens without their consent – that have tended to target racial minorities, women, the disabled, the poor, and other vulnerable groups (I have in mind such infamous studies as the United States Public Health Service Study on Syphilis that was conducted in Tuskegee from 1932 to 1972, in which penicillin treatment was intentionally withheld from poor Black men without their knowledge).
To sum up, as in so much of our politics today, how we draw the line demarcating appropriate campus and instructional speech will depend on how we frame what is happening before us. As psychologists, you know better than I do that how we perceive events is indelibly conditioned not only by our personal experience but by what others tell us. And today, what our government is saying about what many of us believe to be a necessary pedagogical pursuit of diversity, equity, and inclusion – that this pursuit is nothing more nor less than discrimination intentionally aimed at harming white people – must be vigorously refuted – and I say this as one who has concerns about using DEI statements as litmus tests for hiring and promotion. The charge of reverse discrimination must be refuted by insisting on the higher public purposes served by education, which require diversity both as a great stimulus to critical learning and mental growth and as a resource for a pool of public servants who will minister to all segments of society.
I propose that we begin our refutation by earnestly advocating on behalf of higher education as a laboratory for democracy. And by democracy here I mean a social learning process that aims to realize its own implicit practice of equal, inclusive, and diversified freedom throughout all areas of life and in all the ways that condition our social agency. The union of scientific inquiry and the liberal arts broadly conceived is a necessary one in a democratic society. The tendency to think that they can be separated unfortunately encourages what must seem like a zero-sum game in which one side of the equation can only win at the expense of the other side. Today the game is not just being fought within institutions of higher education as they seek to balance core requirements and distribute scarce resources. It is also being played by the current administration in its divide-and-conquer assault on higher education, as it offers to restore grant funding to the sciences in exchange for gutting what it regards as politically unsavory, radically progressive programs in the humanities. [As you know, students in some red states are now encouraged to monitor their classes for any evidence of DEI-related content that runs afoul of state law.
On pain of sounding like a broken record, let me repeat that education is a holistic endeavor. As a famous founder of our democracy once said, either we hang together or we hang alone. But education does not occur in a vacuum. It takes a community – one, I might add, that is free from violence, poverty, and all the material and mental stresses that stifle our development as competent moral agents. Nurturance of education as a way of life unabashedly calls for progressive social politics. This imperative demands of its practitioners that they have the courage to defend the political preconditions of education, as well as its political function which, in the words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. “is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically.” So, I admonish you to be proud of the social democratic ethos informing your profession as educators. Join a union or a professional organization like the American Association of University Professors that is defending your right to teach in the best way you know how. And speaking of teaching, organize a teach-in that will alert faculty, students, and staff about what’s happening to your profession, as our Loyola chapter of the AAUP just did. And don’t be afraid to take to the streets and protest actions that attack the learning community we are all trying to foster. And finally, with the risk of preaching out what might sound like another hackneyed slogan, let solidarity against oppression forever be your guide.
Thank you.
