The first time I lost control of a college classroom, fiction played a starring role. Or maybe it was the absence of concrete facts. I was teaching undergraduates in the Deep South. The course was an honors seminar on race and American politics, focused on current events. That week’s topic: voting. The year: 2008.
To get my students thinking, I gave them a discussion prompt: If old enough, do you plan to vote in the upcoming presidential election? If you don’t plan on voting, why not? I made it clear I didn’t want to know which way they were leaning.
My students came to class ready to rumble.
Dr. Ray Block Jr
Passionate—and now familiar—debates broke out over whether then-candidate Barack Obama had been born in the U.S. or abroad, and whether being foreign-born would exclude him from running for president. Other students argued that Obama was secretly “a Muslim” because his middle name, “Hussein,” has Islamic roots and his father was Kenyan. My students’ fiery exchanges surprised me. And their reliance on flat-out fiction unnerved me.
There was yelling, crying, and name-calling with little respect for facts. Facts, however, are the active ingredients of truth. My next lesson almost planned itself: I would have to address what I’ve come to refer to as “Truth Decay,” the diminishing reliance on facts and analysis in American public life.
