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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
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<\/i> 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.<\/p>\n
That doesn't mean that schools shouldn't be safe (within the bounds of debate as to what that<\/i> 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. <\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
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).<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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?<\/p>\n
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).<\/p>\n
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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
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\nHow Title IX Killed Free Speech on Campus<\/a><\/span>
\nA new report highlights cases where campus administrations have invoked the gender protection law to fire, threaten, censor, and grossly mistreat academic staff.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\nView on Google+<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
