I took a student’s essay to
bed last night. But I shouldn’t tell her that when I give it back to her.
That I had to work late on
Sunday night might surprise those Americans who think “teachers”, especially “college
professors”, have an easy life. It would not surprise the conservative
politicians, who know better, but encourage that belief as much as they can
anyway. But that’s a different essay.
My student might be amused to
think I was reading her writing in my pajamas, or she might be annoyed that I
might be dozing over her work, or she might be awestruck by how hard I was
working. But the connection of bed and her and me in one sentence might trigger
a different reaction, an uncertainty about what I really meant, a fear that I
might be flirting, and a loss of trust in my academic role.
Among 20-year old American
women, raised on the most lurid narratives that the private media can think up,
that would not be such a leap. Years of weekly headlines about some teacher
somewhere in the 50 states caught having sex with his students will already
have raised question marks about male teachers.
So I shouldn’t say it. I can
assure her that I took her work seriously without leaving any uncomfortable
questions open. I can think carefully about every word I say. Political
Correctness!” shouts the right. When being politically incorrect means
frightening and perhaps misleading one of my students, for whom I am a major
authority figure, why make that choice? When recognizing that precisely that
kind of double speak has enforced some men’s sexual power and gives the rest of
us a bad reputation, why choose that?
The whole political
correctness chant, made up by the right as their major reaction to the human
rights movements of the 1960s, is nonsense. Every human society advanced enough
to have politics has rules about politically correct speech. I can say things
in my classroom now that my own teachers would never have said, for fear of
being labeled politically incorrect. They couldn’t reprimand a student for
saying something disparaging about a black woman or a gay man, without concern
that they would get in political trouble. Politicians were worried about
talking too respectfully, too equally, about African Americans, women or
homosexuals.
A racist and sexist society
enforced these rules. I’m glad that the spectrum of political correctness has
shifted in my lifetime. I have more freedom to speak the truth about history,
and people with prejudices have less freedom to indulge them in public.
The real question was never
whether there would be political correctness. It always has been “what kind?”
Lately we have been hearing about new demands on our speech. Some students and
some adults want teachers to issue disclaimers when we are about to say
something that could be upsetting to some students. These notifications are
called trigger
warnings. At University of California at Santa Barbara, the Student Senate
passed a resolution mandating
such trigger warnings in syllabi, possibly for each class session, to alert
those students who have suffered trauma, like sexual assault, that they may
encounter upsetting material. The Oberlin College faculty
guide about how to act in the newly aware classroom is lengthy, detailed,
and guaranteed to make faculty uncomfortable. The list of subjects about
which students should be warned has been growing much too rapidly: it now
includes snakes, vomit, and skulls and skeletons (avoid Halloween!).
Conservatives have gleefully
leaped on this scattered demand for trigger warnings to criticize the whole
academic enterprise. Lindsey Burke at the Heritage
Foundation said, “Issues like this are part of the reason students, parents
and employers are increasingly questioning the value of a bachelor’s degree and
even whether its time as a proxy of employability has passed.” Of course, it is
not true that college education is “increasingly questioned”, except by those
who are trying to discredit it.
Although I am in favor of
carefully choosing my words, in and outside of class, I’m not in favor of
trigger warnings. What’s the difference between the two situations I have
outlined? For me the crucial distinction is that one interaction takes place in
the classroom and one is personal. What we can say and ought to say to a class
about our mutual subject is not the same as what we can say and ought to say to
one of our students when we are speaking alone. I can tell the class “I love
you”, but obviously not one student. I can describe in my course Holocaust
events which might make students cry, as it often makes me cry. The point is
not to upset them, but to show them what happened in the not-so-distant past,
what its causes were, and how different kinds of people responded. If they are
not upset, they are not paying attention.
But a student sitting in my
office is a different kind of audience. I’ll take care not to bring up subjects
with double meanings, that might maker her feel diminished or threatened. Life
is upsetting enough without worrying that your teacher is hitting on you.
Steve Hochstadt
Jacksonville IL
Published in the Jacksonville
Journal-Courier, May 5, 2015
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