Forbidden Perspectives: How Breaking Academic Consensus Cost Me a PhD

The purpose of grad school discussions (at least in my experience) is to make sure everyone thinks the same way

There’s a big difference between graduate and undergraduate college classes. In most undergraduate classes, you sit and listen to a lecture, take notes, and fill in the right answers on a test. In grad school, most classes are discussion-based. Everyone reads the same articles and spends most of the class period talking about them. The grade depends mostly on participation.

Naively, I thought that these class discussions were an opportunity for all of us to share our diverse perspectives on the day’s topic. But I quickly found out the hard way that, for all the university’s talk about diversity, the real purpose of discussions was to make sure that everyone thought the “right” thing—came to a predetermined consensus—about each topic.

Only two weeks into one of the core classes for my Agroecology degree, I ran into trouble with this discussion structure. The instructor selected readings that blamed the world’s social and environmental problems partly on Christianity—based mostly on inaccurate, uncited information. When I wrote something critical of the readings for the online discussion board, the other students started posting angry replies, and the in-person discussion was even worse.

It was in this far-too-emotional discussion that I made the comment that I believe made it impossible for me to get a PhD at UW-Madison like I had originally planned. Eventually the discussion turned to the causes of racism—the topic that overshadowed everything else in 2021. It was popular in Madison to blame Christianity for racism, and I tried to correct that misunderstanding by pointing out that Christians (both Black and white) were at the forefront of the abolition and civil rights movements. True, many pro-slavery advocates called themselves Christians, but they were definitely not following the Golden Rule or the command to “love your neighbor as yourself.” All I asked was that they judge Christianity by what it was supposed to be, not by how people distorted it into something it wasn’t.

Of course, pointing out that Christianity wasn’t the cause of racism meant that I had to provide an alternative explanation. And I had one with plenty of historical documentation. “What made racism in the nineteenth century so bad,” I said, “was Darwinian evolution. Scientists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries believed that people of African descent were less evolved and inferior to Europeans, and that’s how they justified segregation and Jim Crow laws and all those things that created the ‘structural racism’ people are protesting today.”

Though I figured my classmates would disagree with me, I wasn’t prepared for the severity of their response. One student ran off crying, and the professor went off and talked with her alone for about an hour. A month later, that same professor, who happened to be on my master’s committee, told me that he wouldn’t be on my PhD committee. When he told my advisor that, she said that she didn’t want to advise my PhD, either. They agreed to stay on my committee for the rest of the master’s degree, but that was all. I searched desperately for other committee members at UW-Madison, but when I mentioned that my dissertation would include positive mentions of Christian organic farmers, nobody who was eligible to advise me responded. It didn’t matter that I already had funding; the anti-Christian sentiment at UW was so strong that no one wanted to risk their own career by signing off on a dissertation that would portray Christians favorably. I learned the hard way that just one statement that threatens the consensus—even if it’s factually supported—can put an end to an academic career.