Thank God for Evan Mandery and professors like him.
Mandery, the author of A Wild Justice: The Death and Resurrection of Capital Punishment in America, sought a better understanding of conservatives in America, and that led him to apply to teach somewhere other than the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, where he is a professor. He has written about the experience in “What Teaching Ethics in Appalachia Taught Me About Bridging America’s Partisan Divide,” published online Oct. 13 by Politico Magazine.
Other than a quick introduction to a classroom exercise of Mandery asking his students to sacrifice one of their classmates for a guaranteed A, he begins on a self-effacing note: “Finding a place to teach ethics in the South was more difficult than I had imagined. My initial idea was to go to the most remote school that would have me, but most don’t even offer an ethics course. … When I stumbled upon Appalachian State, the school immediately seemed like a good fit — open to me and the kind of conversation I wanted to foster.”
Mandery escalates the theoretical stakes with his students by presenting the trolley dilemma, which has elsewhere morphed into a lesson in Christian apologetics.
Mandery has not come to Appalachia to teach students what to think, but how to listen carefully and, as a result, how to think with greater empathy. This teacher wants to learn as well:
In the aftermath of the 2016 election, I read widely — and somewhat unsatisfyingly — to try and understand the root causes of polarization. J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy moved me, and it’s impossible to read George Packer’s The Unwinding, which takes place largely in North Carolina after the Great Recession, without being unsettled by the coming apart of bedrock American institutions. But nothing I read fully explains the mistrust — daresay hatred — that has evolved between liberals and conservatives.
Coming in, I assumed some of my students would reflect the conservatism of the surrounding region and others the liberalism generally prevalent among college students. What I didn’t know is whether my students — and young people generally — are predestined to sort themselves into those mutually loathing tribes, or if a shared conversation about foundational ethical beliefs could alter their views of people with whom they disagree.
I will leave most of the narrative to Mandery, largely because he tells the story so well.
