This piece is part of Letters on Pragmatic Hope, an essay series in which Wesleyan professors and administrators reflect on a daunting question: How can students act with purpose and efficacy amid an increasingly authoritarian environment? The series aims to gather responses from a diverse group of Wesleyan faculty, offering a vision for how students can turn despair into pragmatism and action.
After being asked to write about “pragmatic hope,” I felt the usual professor’s impulse to question the premise. I’m wary of indulging in this and dodging the issue, yet there’s something in the term itself that seems worth exploring. “Pragmatic hope,” on the face of it, sounds like a coping mechanism: a way to steel yourself in bad times and build resilience to carry on. That’s a valuable attitude to have. When students are feeling powerless and resigned, when there’s a culture of fear and apathy taking hold on university campuses and the daily news cycle brings fresh reasons for despair, we absolutely need ways to deal with that and not give in to paralysis.
I wonder, though, whether there’s also room for thinking about hope a bit differently, as a search for and response to the good, not just as a response to the bad. Let’s call this “aspirational hope,” so we have a label. I don’t mean to put it forward as a substitute for pragmatic hope. I mean it as something complementary that involves actively seeking out and embracing the good in the world and in other people, rather than simply guarding ourselves against what’s bad.
For me, this sense of hope originates in the classroom. It’s something I feel consistently as a teacher, but its roots are in my own experience as a student. My first encounter with philosophy as a subject in college was the first time in my education I felt genuinely respected as a thinker. The expectation that I engage with someone else’s ideas so deeply and try to read even the most distant and imposing figures in the history of philosophy on their own terms—that this was all they asked of me, really, that I come to understand their views (as it were) from the inside—this was a totally different habit of study for me. Learning was no longer a form of preening or about memorizing doctrines and reciting bits of knowledge to claim a badge of status. It was about thinking alongside these texts and their authors with others.
This was liberating and it continues to thrill me. Philosophy done right is invitational rather than instructional: it doesn’t tell you what to think; it invites you to think. It treats you as someone capable of grappling with difficult views and the reasons behind them, of seeing their force, of raising questions about them. It assumes your perspective matters, that your confusions and objections and insights are worth taking seriously. And through that invitation, by participating in a practice of shared inquiry, you exercise your capacity to engage seriously and playfully in the give and take of ideas, to analyze and evaluate them, to have fun with them, and to forge new ways of thinking for yourself.
An invitational approach to learning isn’t unique to philosophy as a subject. I now see it as central to a college education in general, and really to education as a whole. Over the last few years I’ve been discovering the work of bell hooks, who makes this point wonderfully in “Theory as Liberatory Practice”—an essay everyone should read and reread! What hooks means by “theory” in this piece isn’t some jargon-laden academic exercise removed from practical life. She sees it as an activity and a site of healing, born from a spirit of relentless questioning and the desire to understand. She also depicts it notably as a political activity, viewed broadly as the practice of seeking out a way to belong in the world with others.
hooks describes doing this kind of theorizing even as a young child growing up in the segregated South, seeing things differently than her parents, “wanting to comprehend—to grasp what was happening around and within me.” She writes about “desperately trying to discover the place of my belonging.” The work of theorizing and understanding, on this view, is an intensely human activity, something we do from our earliest years in trying to make sense of our experience, in navigating our relations with others and figuring out where and how we fit in. It begins long before any college seminar room.
What education does, at its best, is provide the tools and the space to do this work thoughtfully in community with others. It recognizes and respects the human need to comprehend the world and find our bearings in it. Such work is shaped by questions, disagreements, perplexity, and moments of deep wonder. It develops in real time and gradually, often in fits and starts. And because it has these features, despite what our tech overlords might claim, the work of understanding cannot be outsourced. An AI bot cannot do your thinking for you; it cannot do theory in hooks’ sense. The classroom remains the most essential space for what she calls the “lived experience of theorizing.”
All of this also makes the classroom a threat to authoritarianism. For the work of understanding requires that you think for yourself, and the best independent thinking is formed through collaborative thinking. The social habits that a classroom fosters make this work vibrant and deliberate. They’re habits of perception and engagement that demand the devotion of attention. In the classroom, you develop the ability to listen to and consider different perspectives charitably. You test hypotheses and interpretations carefully. You recognize and sit with confusion instead of rushing past it. You ask questions to open up rather than shut down discussion.
So when authoritarian voices speak of universities as the “enemy,” there’s more truth to that claim than they care to admit. Universities present a threat to authoritarianism because of the practices they sustain. What an authoritarian regime requires is incompatible with what’s formed in the classroom. Authoritarianism needs closed thinking, mistrust of difference, impatience with complexity and confusion, the acceptance of easy narratives. To create the conditions of fear in which it operates, it marshals the language of exclusion and isolation.
The classroom, however, is a space of maximal inclusion. It cultivates capacities that authoritarianism can’t accommodate. Most authoritarian rhetoric works by trying to box us into either/or modes of reasoning. Binary framing devices of this sort are effective since they’re part of how we’re conditioned to see the world. When you’re in a classroom space, you’re asked to move beyond such conditioning. Before adopting an either/or framework, you’re invited to see things in both/and terms. Or even as neither/nor! That’s the kind of reasoning that can spark your imagination. Along with independent thinking, it promotes creative thinking.
This means that the first move in resisting authoritarianism may be surprisingly ordinary: stay curious. Be interested in people with different outlooks and experiences than yours. Be wary of narratives—both comforting and alarming—that confirm your convictions without friction. Seek conversations that require patience instead of certainty, nuance instead of slogans. In over fifteen years of teaching, I’ve seen how the classroom enables the formation of these capacities as part of the collaborative work of understanding.
Know, too, that doing this work requires trust. The portrayal of universities as leftist enclaves out of touch with real-world concerns is a shallow caricature, easily weaponized to provoke public suspicion and agitation. But what’s more concerning is the way this portrayal reshapes academic life itself by provoking a climate of self-censorship on campuses. In such a climate, students cut short their own lines of thought preemptively, afraid that their unformed and perhaps unorthodox ideas might be misinterpreted or make them targets. Faculty likewise find themselves hesitating in approaching sensitive topics, subtly recalibrating syllabi and discussion plans out of an abundance of caution. University administrators worry that unless they adopt restrictive disciplinary policies and are perceived as doing something, their institutions will suffer repercussions.
So the next move in resisting authoritarianism is to resist the politics of provocation. And that means developing trust. The classroom relies on a culture of hope for shared inquiry to work. A culture of fear deforms that work. The hope I’m referring to is an implicit compact and feeling of confidence that in the classroom we attend to one another generously without policing each other’s thinking, trusting in our mutual commitment to explore ideas together without knowing where we’ll end up. When that trust’s in place, you’re motivated to ask questions and follow arguments where they lead. The quality of discussion lies in the quality of attention you give others and believe you’ll receive from others, rather than in performing the right answers and having conclusions scripted in advance.
I see this sort of hope as aspirational and not just pragmatic because it’s more than mere resilience during bad times. Authoritarian movements succeed primarily by hollowing out shared visions of the good. Their power grows when the language of politics becomes purely oppositional and people are united solely by what they reject. Aspirational hope insists instead on what draws us toward one another: the need to understand and belong, the prospect of living in a common world. We should encourage this at all times, from a sense that when we address differences wanting to comprehend things better, we bring out the best in ourselves and each other.
None of this is to downplay the assaults on democratic values we’re currently facing. On the contrary, I’m arguing that the capacities the classroom cultivates are the ground on which durable democratic life depends. Universities remain one of the few environments where young people from diverse backgrounds get together to ask fundamental questions about how to interpret the world and their place in it. But to view this period as a pause before the “real world” or as separate from political life is (again) a type of binary thinking. If we think of education alternatively as a mode of democratic life itself, then the classroom’s invitations—to listen, to inquire, to imagine—extend naturally into how we build communities beyond campus. This is because the habits of classroom life are the habits of genuine citizenship: the ability to think with care and appreciate complexity, the willingness to engage with perspectives unfamiliar to your own. They’re the habits that hold a diverse society together. To defend one is to defend the other.
Tushar Irani is a Professor of Philosophy and Letters. He can be reached at tirani@wesleyan.edu.
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