I didn’t exactly play the Nazi card. See my post #104.
Well, I was referring to your post #96, but actually in post #104 you also referred to “Nazi professors.” So yes, you were playing the Nazi card.
Who is going to “deal with the bullying”, the administration who hired her for her political bent? Gimme a break.
You have not presented any inside knowledge about this particular university or this particular professor’s hiring process. Your claim that she was hired for her political bent is pure speculation based on the claims of right-wing propaganda.
I repeat: you and the OP are the ones who show unremitting hostility to the very idea of faculty daring to hold positions with which you disapprove. No doubt secular institutions often behave unfairly and with prejudice. But your views seem to require you to behave unfairly and with prejudice across the board without exception. (Because by your own logic, if you don’t behave in this way you risk aiding and abetting the rise of Nazism.)
Certainly some of the statements quoted by the student were highly inappropriate. But I get the impression that the student is offended simply by the fact that the professor possesses these views and is up-front about them. If right-wing students can object to that, then left-wing students will object to conservative Christian faculty mentioning
their beliefs in class. (When I taught part-time at a secular university, one of my students claimed in an evaluation that I was “very very religious” and talked about my religion all the time in class. I was teaching first-semester Western Civ, so I had every reason to talk about Christianity, and in my admittedly biased judgment I was doing so with great care
not to impose my religion on the students. But because I talked about religion more than the average history professor at a secular university, and because as a matter of honesty I told the students that I was myself a Christian, this secular student perceived me as trying to push my religion. Do you want to give such students the power to shut up Christian professors? If you don’t, then be very careful about calling for conservative Christian students to have the power to shut up left-wing secular professors.)
I don’t consider pushing your personal political agenda to be “challenging students’ ideas.”
It depends on what you mean by “pushing” and how she’s doing it. It certainly sounds as if she’s going it very badly and inappropriately. I also suspect that the OP is selecting the most outrageous things she’s said and ignoring everything else. The professor isn’t posting on the forum, so I don’t hear her side of it.
How is wearing pink hair remotely relevant to anything? The fact that the student even mentioned the color of the professor’s hair as part of his complaint does a lot to show how utterly prejudiced his perspective is. Note that the student himself said that he deliberately wore nationalistic and Christian symbols in order to affront the professor. The professor would be wrong if she objected to his doing so, but we know by his own admission that he was doing so with offensive intent. We have no way of knowing why the professor wears pink hair.
and insisting the student use “his or her” as the generic pronoun.
Like it or not, that’s standard linguistic usage at this point.
If the professor deserves the benefit of the doubt, then she should have enough abstract thought capability to realize that the masculine includes the feminine when gender is irrelevant to the discussion. One who cannot is the real sexist. One who will not is pushing an agenda.
The view that the grammatical masculine includes the feminine cannot be separated from the historic view held in Western civilization that the biologically masculine is more perfectly human than the feminine. To pretend that it doesn’t is to be historically ignorant and/or hopelessly naive about the ideological connotations of language. I agree that professors should respect students’ choice to use “exclusive” language and should not grade them down for doing so, but it’s appropriate to point out to the student that this language is no longer the norm in our culture, and that it is typically read as excluding women. (I have been “guilty” of writing in the margin something like “don’t women sometimes do this too?” when students say things like “men do X” in a clearly inclusive context.)
If there is a genuine concern about “students claiming ‘this professor offended me’, then please explain how they have no trouble avoiding offending Muslim, minority, and women students. When entering freshmen are told to “be prepared to have your most cherished ideas challenged,” it seems that it never applies to Muslims or blacks.
I agree that professors are inconsistent. We are flawed people. My problem is when conservative Christians jump on the bandwagon of shutting professors up because of these flaws, instead of encouraging students to challenge professors respectfully to be fairer and more consistent.
My perspective is no doubt shaped by the fact that I’m sitting in an office once occupied by a professor who was fired because he advocated controversial views (even though, by all accounts, he did so in writing and not explicitly in the classroom). In the Christian college world, academic freedom is a highly fragile and threatened thing. And it seems that this is often true in the secular university as well, but on the other side of the spectrum. My point is simply that the best way to challenge secular/liberal intolerance in state universities is to advocate for more freedom, not less. And that has to include freedom for professors to offend students.
