The Real World is complicated. The Real World has lots of competing interests, emotions, rights, rules, ideals, and circumstances. The Real World loves to see the law delve into human behavior as if it can be broken up into bright lines of right and wrong, good and evil, permissible and impermissible.
This is one I struggle with. On the one hand, it is not unreasonable to expect members of an academic institution to not engage in sexually harassing or hostile behavior. "Sticks and stones will break my bones, but names will never hurt me" is a nice nursery rhyme, but there are certainly any number of cases of male profs hitting on female undergrads (or grad students), or making public and summary judgments about the suitability of women in certain academic pursuits; these may not be of criminal assault level of violence, but to argue that they are trivial and need not be considered is to support a snake pit of prejudice and academic caprice — especially since where you let that happen with gender (and sexual orientation, etc.), it will also be happening with race, religion, or any other attribute we really don't think it's right to discriminate against.
Professors, as the traditional top dogs in the academic power structure, have long had bad apples (not necessarily academically, but personally) who used their power imbalance to behave badly and get away with it. That's human nature, unfortunately. It is, again, not unreasonable for students, and, in fact, everyone, to want to figure out how to stop that.
On the other hand, I reject the idea that colleges and universities are half-way houses to Real Life and need to be, first and foremost, nurturing and caring and unchallenging hothouses of personal and emotional development. They are primarily sites of education, which means new facts and new ideas, which means ideas that might ruffle feathers or strike one as wrong or even be, on the face of it, offensive. Thousands of students may be in a given annual class; creating a curriculum where none of them get offended or disturbed by something they read, see, or hear is not only a mook's game, but counter to the very idea of education and academia. The intellectual dialectic only works when one side doesn't demand trigger warnings on everything.
That doesn't mean that schools shouldn't be safe (within the bounds of debate as to what that means). Absolutists in either direction here — "Professors should be able to say or do whatever they want" vs "Students should be able to get through school without having their personal stories and beliefs challenged" — are both drivers of this problem and roadblocks in resolving it.
Some of this is the academic old guard who are more offended at having their words and behavior questioned than the labels of academic freedom they hide behind; they are allied in some cases with folk who don't hide well that they think there's nothing wrong with professors hitting on students, or that some genders probably shouldn't be in school in the first place, or that feelings are icky (and girly) and should be soundly repressed and if those students would just man up then this wouldn't be a problem.
Another part (and the more vocal one at the moment) are college students who have all the fiery passion and pragmatic myopia of college students of every generation, who have The Big New Idea and are running with it to the barricades, who been taught that respect for feelings (their feelings in particular) is not only important (which it is) but of preeminent importance (which it arguably is not).
The article notes a third competing interest in this brew, and perhaps a reason why it's become so toxic. Colleges, as institutions, are increasingly being run like businesses — not just "we need to keep the budget balanced" but "we need to attract new customers/students, so we need to avoid stuff that might scare them away." That means administrations are much more likely to side with people (students) making complaints than take academic freedom and other abstract issues into consideration.
Granted, this is also not an all-or-nothing issue. It's not unreasonable to also point out that, in the past, the administration tended to side with professors — especially ones that brought academic prestige to the program and would draw in big alumni donors — and too often overlooked or swept under the rug real grievances and outrages. But does it have to be an either/or thing, where we either throw a professor (and the value of teaching challenging ideas) under a bus, or throw a student (at the bottom of the power pyramid) of the back of the sleigh?
Ultimately, this comes down to clashes of values and, more importantly, personal experiences and expectations and discomfort. In the Real World we would call it professionalism and courtesy, and overworked HR staff trying to clean up messes when people behave (or react) badly to something. And blow-ups happen there, too — though rarely with the high dudgeons of management thinking it can do or say whatever it wants, or the high dudgeons of staff thinking that disagreement means disrespect means personal and intolerable attack (followed by office-wide protest).
My personal tastes tend to fall toward valuing freedom of expression, especially in a research and academic setting, blended in some not-legally-definable sense of propriety and politeness to keep things from spinning out of control. Regardless, I know there have been injustices in the past, and that there are certainly other injustices in the present. While the Real World laughs at the idea of coming up with rules that don't lead to injustices in one direction or another, I think it's an ideal that that is worth pursuing, as ideals are, and in the process try to keep as few people from being hurt along the way as possible.
How Title IX Killed Free Speech on Campus
A new report highlights cases where campus administrations have invoked the gender protection law to fire, threaten, censor, and grossly mistreat academic staff.
What exactly are these delicate little flowers going to do when they start working alongside adults? What happens when they bump into someone in the street, and get sworn at? Some sort of support group?
There have always been perfectly good ways to deal with professorial bad apples, even tenured ones. I think the current climate swings the pendulum way too far against professors and in favor of students who are willing to abuse the system. I think it fits right in with the anti-intellectual trend in modern american society to show so little respect for college professors that people are willing to let students' wishes and desires control the classroom.
When I was a GTA at CSU, a couple of students used some administrators' belief that the students are always right to bring the wrath of the Computer Science department down on my head for telling the students to straighten up and fly right if they wanted to succeed. They were complaining about the class, the instructor, and me where I could hear them in the computer lab, and I felt that if I said nothing other students could interpret my silence as implicit agreement with their criticism. I told them that no, the assignments and grading were not unjust or unfair, and if they would put some more effort into preparation and studying and less into whining in public, they would be more likely to get a good grade. They complained to the department's administrator in charge of undergraduate education, who reportedly tried to get the department chairman to fire me. I think the department chair and my supervising professor saved my job, but I suspect they had to give lip-service to the administrator because she would have brought in someone from the Dean's office who could have forced them to fire me if they had not done so. I could tell you other stories as well, but the moral I take from those stories is that the students are now in charge of the university.
+David Newman I would certainly agree that where things get into "Instructor X is unfair because that class is hard" that student criticism is / should be of limited value or weight.
The stories I've been hearing from professors are, well, fucked up. Students that complain about having their ideas challenged, yes ideas. So now professors, especially philosophy ones, put in their syllabus that they will indeed challenge students ideas and may introduce ideas that are disturbing. Yet they still get brought in front of committees on charges of racism, bigotry, and trigger nonsense.
I'm floored on the multiple stories from all across the country and seeing these committees being created to judge if students have been challenged on their ideas. Education has to be about discussing ideas and challenging assumptions.
Wow writing that makes me sound like a right wing conspiracy theorist.
I think its probably the slow evolution over a number of years.
Imagine if you could express everyone’s opinion on a numeric scale. People are more likely to join if the average is close to their personal number.
The ones who are above the group average denounce the lowest numbered, who is then forced out. The average goes up slightly. This attracts those with higher numbers, and exposes the new lowest person, and so it goes on.
Republican politics are possibly the most visible iteration of this.
Add to this something that has never happened in human culture before: A belief in equality, added to instantaneous communication that is too often context free. While equality is not a bad thing, it can be misrepresented too easily. Add to that natural human psyche, as most people think of themselves as above average, and you can easily have people believing they are victims.
On top of this is the 1:9:90 rule. 90% of members of an organisation don’t contribute in any large amount, they put in, they get out (eg something like British Heritage- most members are there as it allows free entry to various Stately Homes etc). 9% are activist- they will help out at fund raising. 1% will stand for election.
Students don’t go to Uni for the politics. That can lead to that 1% having undue influence, not realising they are Big fish in a very small pond.