Why You Can’t Take Politics Out of Work
Your company is not apolitical, no matter what your CEO says
I have several jobs, and one of them is “lowly adjunct” in the graduate school of journalism at NYU, where I teach a class about digital media innovation. As part of the course, my students have to conceptualize and prototype a new media product that could be used in a journalistic or newsroom context. Its innovation might be technical, journalistic, or a new business model. The class is very entrepreneurial and involves hard business skills, but my Twitter bio just says “NYU j-school prof,” so people on the right who don’t like my politics periodically accuse me of indoctrinating journalism students into leftist groupthink or some form of Marxism that isn’t recognizable to anyone who’s read Marx. “Commie” has been invoked more than once.
As I said to one such correspondent, all of whom tend to disparage my intelligence in grammatically inexplicable ways, I don’t teach students how to do political reporting or even how to write political op-eds, which I do myself (for a living, even!). I teach them how to put together a P&L, how to determine what their minimum viable product is, how to prototype it, how to test their business models, and so on. Partisan discussions of what is and isn’t happening in the U.S. electoral cycle don’t really come up. And I…
