Classroom Of Fear

Earlier this week I wrote about a woke teacher who slipped up and asked on social media how teachers like him are going to succeed at “destabilizing” their students’ political and cultural opinions if they have to teach online, and parents might be watching. Fear of woke teachers, in other words.

Tonight I would like to say a word about teachers’ fear of woke students. Earlier in the day I was part of a group discussion online in which several conservative college professors voiced their dread of going back to teach this fall, in the new political environment on campus. I continued the discussion privately with one of the teachers, who told me that he is afraid to go to the classroom this fall. He knows that in his classes, he will be facing hundreds of students, any one of whom could decide that he or she was triggered by something the professor said, then run to the administration to lodge a complaint that he is racist, sexist, homophobic, or some other anti-woke offender. The mere accusation in this environment could destroy his career and his reputation.

I’ve been thinking about that conversation all day. It is hard to imagine having to work under such pressure, much less teach — an art that, if done right, requires challenging the perspectives of students, to get them to stretch their minds. I went back to this Vox piece by the pseudonymous Edward Schlosser, published five years ago, in which he said that he is a liberal professor who is terrified of his students. Excerpts:

The student-teacher dynamic has been reenvisioned along a line that’s simultaneously consumerist and hyper-protective, giving each and every student the ability to claim Grievous Harm in nearly any circumstance, after any affront, and a teacher’s formal ability to respond to these claims is limited at best.

He talks about the only formal complaint ever lodged against him: in 2009, by a conservative student who said that something the professor mentioned in class was “communistical.” The complaint was dismissed, as it should have been. More:

I have intentionally adjusted my teaching materials as the political winds have shifted. (I also make sure all my remotely offensive or challenging opinions, such as this article, are expressed either anonymously or pseudonymously). Most of my colleagues who still have jobs have done the same. We’ve seen bad things happen to too many good teachers — adjuncts getting axed because their evaluations dipped below a 3.0, grad students being removed from classes after a single student complaint, and so on.

I once saw an adjunct not get his contract renewed after students complained that he exposed them to “offensive” texts written by Edward Said and Mark Twain. His response, that the texts were meant to be a little upsetting, only fueled the students’ ire and sealed his fate. That was enough to get me to comb through my syllabi and cut out anything I could see upsetting a coddled undergrad, texts ranging from Upton Sinclair to Maureen Tkacik — and I wasn’t the only one who made adjustments, either.

I am frightened sometimes by the thought that a student would complain again like he did in 2009. Only this time it would be a student accusing me not of saying something too ideologically extreme — be it communism or racism or whatever — but of not being sensitive enough toward his feelings, of some simple act of indelicacy that’s considered tantamount to physical assault. As Northwestern University professor Laura Kipnis writes, “Emotional discomfort is [now] regarded as equivalent to material injury, and all injuries have to be remediated.” Hurting a student’s feelings, even in the course of instruction that is absolutely appropriate and respectful, can now get a teacher into serious trouble.

Schlosser writes that today (remember, this was 2015), a student lodging a complaint would not object to Schlosser’s supposed ideology. He or she would complain about how something the professor said hurt their feelings — something that is impossible to defend against.

More:

The current student-teacher dynamic has been shaped by a large confluence of factors, and perhaps the most important of these is the manner in which cultural studies and social justice writers have comported themselves in popular media. I have a great deal of respect for both of these fields, but their manifestations online, their desire to democratize complex fields of study by making them as digestible as a TGIF sitcom, has led to adoption of a totalizing, simplistic, unworkable, and ultimately stifling conception of social justice. The simplicity and absolutism of this conception has combined with the precarity of academic jobs to create higher ed’s current climate of fear, a heavily policed discourse of semantic sensitivity in which safety and comfort have become the ends and the means of the college experience.

Schlosser brings up two female liberal professors who outed and shamed a male colleague they accused of being creepy at conferences. They talked openly about how much they would like to ruin his career. Schlosser continues:

But part of the female professors’ shtick was the strong insistence that harassment victims should never be asked for proof, that an enunciation of an accusation is all it should ever take to secure a guilty verdict. The identity of the victims overrides the identity of the harasser, and that’s all the proof they need.

This is terrifying. No one will ever accept that. And if that becomes a salient part of liberal politics, liberals are going to suffer tremendous electoral defeat.

He wrote that in June 2015. A year and a half later, Donald Trump won the presidency, in part because some voters appreciated Trump’s hostility to political correctness.

Read it all. 

Schlosser wrote that before Nicholas Christakis was mobbed and shouted down on the Yale campus, and his wife Erika was driven out for the crime of suggesting that it’s not Yale’s business to police Halloween costumes to prevent adult students from hurting the feelings of other adult students. This was two years before Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying were cast out of Evergreen State for objecting to the woke mob. Think of all the things that have happened both in campus culture and in the culture at large since 2015. Nothing has gotten better than it was when Schlosser first wrote; it has, in fact, grown substantially worse.

Many of us who went to college in the Before Time treasure our classroom experiences with professors who challenged us and helped us to grow intellectually and morally. I pity the professors who now have to regard each student as a potential threat to their livelihood. I pity the students who really do want to be challenged, and to learn, but whose opportunity to learn has been crippled by the woke heckler’s veto that these puritanical woke rats exercise on many campuses.

Let me ask you readers who are teachers: are you afraid to go back to class this fall, in the current political environment? Why or why not?

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