Question for college professors: What should a conservative do?

[Emiliana]

I am very, very liberal and I have an extremely conservative student who comes to chat with me during my office hours all the time. We have a blast. He’s smart and he’s thoughtful and he’s really passionate about politics and history.

A majority of Republicans think that colleges and universities are bad for this country. This is a problem. As opposed to made-up problems like fragile conservative students and their awful, awful librul professors.

[MandaJo]

Urbanredneck, serious question. Please answer.

Let’s say a group of students are in a Government class, talking about voting demographics. It comes up that African Americans overwhelmingly vote Democratic and there’s a class discussion about why that might be. Conservative Student raises his hand and says something like “It’s because black culture is lazy. They don’t raise their kids to value work, and they think the Democrats will keep the welfare and the reparations coming”. At this point, the class jumps his ass, metaphorically, pointing out all the ways that’s a stupid, racist thing to say–because it is. But it’s a thing a lot of conservatives believe.

At that point–the whole class is upset at this kid, and he is feeling put upon and persecuted–what do you think the appropriate thing is for the professor to do? What should the other students do? What should the student do?

[Dag_Otto]

@kenobi_65

I was giving an example of “fairly minimal requirement to take such courses.” Again, 16 credits at UW equates to, in essence, one course a year, and said engineering student can likely meet most of those requirements with foreign language, music, literature, etc. – not the sorts of courses where one is necessarily likely to run into ideologial debate that’s going to challenge their conservative mindset (though I suppose it depends on the literature class in question).

Regardless, what you said was “All students are required to take so many humanities and liberal arts courses,” and it’s the “all” in that post that both Procrustus and I noted was likely an ovestatement.

Most of the humanities courses that engineering students take are not difficult* courses (compared to the engineering courses), and both conservative and liberal engineering students just want to get them out of the way. No student is going to want to challenge an instructor to the point where it will affect their grade. And if they do, they probably shouldn’t be in engineering in the first place.

• This isn’t to say humanities or liberal art classes are not difficult, just that the ones likely taken by engineering students are not difficult. Unless for some reason the student is going for a liberal arts minor, these classes are not deep dives into humanities subjects.

[octopus]

@Kimstu

Speaking as an actual college professor (albeit one in a hard-science field where political issues literally never come up in connection with the vast majority of the course material, and who also maintains a personal rule against using office space or regular institutional duties as a free bulletin board for advertising general political opinions), I’d offer the following advice:

1) As other posters have noted, figure out what you really mean by “targeting”. A professor merely disagreeing with or criticizing your opinions is not the same thing as a professor actually being unfair to you because of your opinions unrelated to your abilities or performance in the course.

2) Study your college’s student code of conduct, mission statement, harassment/discrimination policies, and other information that spells out what behavior the institution officially considers ethically unacceptable. A surprisingly large number of conservative students come in with a chip on their shoulder about their rights to “freedom of speech” and “academic freedom” and what not, while apparently never noticing that they have contractually agreed to abide by the institution’s rules limiting their freedom to express certain kinds of opinions.

If your college has a policy statement along the lines of “committed to creating a welcoming environment for the campus community without bias on grounds of race, color, sex, pregnancy, religion, creed, national origin (including ancestry), citizenship status, physical or mental disability (including AIDS), age, marital status, sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, military status, predisposing genetic characteristics, domestic violence victim status, or any other protected category under applicable local, state, or federal law”, etc. etc., and you open your yap in class to say it’s unnatural and unwholesome for gay people to want to get married or for people to identify as transgender, you may be violating those anti-bias principles. A professor who shuts down your anti-gay or anti-trans or similar remarks, or points out that they’re bigoted against gay or trans people, is not “targeting” you: they’re doing their job in supporting the official policy of the institution.

If you feel that that’s an intolerable limitation of your freedom of expression, then as other posters have said, you need to seek out a different institution with different official policies. Don’t expect the college, whose rules you agreed to abide by when you accepted their offer of admission, to start bending or ignoring those rules just so you can express what you consider to be your fundamental conservative beliefs.

3) If, on careful consideration of points (1) and (2), you still feel that your professor is really out of line in gratuitously picking on your legitimate conservative opinions, then take detailed notes of at least two or three incidents that clearly illustrate that (which is good for your note-taking skills too), and approach the professor about it in a courteous and open way. Explain that you feel unfairly singled out for reasons that aren’t related to the course material or your performance in the course, and listen to what they have to say about their interactions with you.

4) If the professor really won’t listen to reason in response to your good-faith attempt to discuss the situation, make detailed notes of that exchange as well, and talk to the department chair and/or a dean about your concerns.

5) In the case of interactions with other students, review points (1) and (2). If you still feel you’re genuinely on the receiving end of unjust and unwarranted illtreatment, make some more detailed notes about the incidents that concern you (your note-taking skills are going to get so good! :)), and talk to your Residential Advisor and/or a dean about them.

I’m pretty sure public universities can’t legally prohibit speech. Now, are most students willing to test that policy and take it to court? Perhaps not. And that’s what those universities count on.

I’m not a professor but when I was in college, granted it was for engineering, I never censored myself in classes that asked for opinions. In retrospect, some of my arguments were actually quite poor but I never got grief for the content only the presentation which I was too immature and uneducated at the time to appreciate.

The modern nutty professors and nutty students that look for muscle and enforcers to silence others might be an entirely different situation for the modern student.

[Eonwe]

@Urbanredneck

They have a liberal professor who’s openly against and targets conservative students?

How is this hypothetical liberal professor “targeting” their conservative students?

[Kimstu]

@octopus

I’m pretty sure public universities can’t legally prohibit speech.

In the sense of not being constitutionally allowed to officially forbid speech based on content (e.g., in the form of campus speech codes), no, they can’t. But that doesn’t mean that they can’t legally push back pretty heavily against certain kinds of disfavored speech. As an anti-speech-codes statement by the American Association of University Professors put it:

In response to verbal assaults and use of hateful language, some campuses have felt it necessary to forbid the expression of racist, sexist, homophobic, or ethnically demeaning speech, along with conduct or behavior that harasses. […]

But, while we can acknowledge both the weight of these concerns and the thoughtfulness of those persuaded of the need for regulation, rules that ban or punish speech based upon its content cannot be justified. […]

[…] institutions devoted to freedom of thought and expression ought not adopt an institutionalized coercion of silence.

Moreover, banning speech often avoids consideration of means more compatible with the mission of an academic institution by which to deal with incivility, intolerance, offensive speech, and harassing behavior:

1. Institutions should adopt and invoke a range of measures that penalize conduct and behavior, rather than speech—such as rules against defacing property, physical intimidation or harassment, or disruption of campus activities. All members of the campus community should be made aware of such rules, and administrators should be ready to use them in preference to speech-directed sanctions.

2. Colleges and universities should stress the means they use best—to educate—including the development of courses and other curricular and co-curricular experiences designed to increase student understanding and to deter offensive or intolerant speech or conduct. These institutions should, of course, be free (indeed encouraged) to condemn manifestations of intolerance and discrimination, whether physical or verbal.

3. The governing board and the administration have a special duty not only to set an outstanding example of tolerance, but also to challenge boldly and condemn immediately serious breaches of civility.

4. Members of the faculty, too, have a major role; their voices may be critical in condemning intolerance, and their actions may set examples for understanding, making clear to their students that civility and tolerance are hallmarks of educated men and women.

5. Student-personnel administrators have in some ways the most demanding role of all, for hate speech occurs most often in dormitories, locker rooms, cafeterias, and student centers. Persons who guide this part of campus life should set high standards of their own for tolerance and should make unmistakably clear the harm that uncivil or intolerant speech inflicts.

I think a lot of those recommended actions against bigoted/hateful/intolerant speech would be regarded by a lot of belligerent and fragile conservative students as “being openly against” and “targeting” their views, even though they don’t violate constitutional restrictions on prohibiting speech.

[EdelweissPirate]

@MandaJo

Urbanredneck, serious question. Please answer.
[…]
[W]hat do you think the appropriate thing is for the professor to do? What should the other students do? What should the student do?

I’m also curious about your response, OP—and I mean that in a thoughtful way.

[skyr]

My actual advice to conservatives in school is this: Just smile and nod when a liberal professor starts on an ideological rant. Don’t try to argue with them. You will never change their mind, and plenty of “well-educated” people are incapable of overlooking their own biases to accept different opinions, so there is nothing to be gained by letting them know what you actually believe. Take it as an opportunity to learn what liberals are like when they think they are among their own kind. Think of it as being Jane Goodall observing the gorillas in their natural habitat - you can learn a lot if you just quietly observe them.

[Kimstu]

@skyr

Just smile and nod when a liberal professor starts on an ideological rant. Don’t try to argue with them.

A wise choice, especially for the many conservative students who consider a typical lecture on, say, geological events or human evolution or prehistoric anthropology to be an “ideological rant” stemming from the professor’s inability to “overlook their own biases”.

[skyr]

@Kimstu

A wise choice, especially for the many conservative students who consider a typical lecture on, say, geological events or human evolution or prehistoric anthropology to be an “ideological rant” stemming from the professor’s inability to “overlook their own biases”.

Nice straw man there, bro. Where did I say that I was talking about things like evolution in a biology class? I took a lot of classes in both social sciences and hard sciences. My own experience was that there wasn’t that much ideological ranting in the hard sciences at MY school because those classes do tend to be based more on actual facts rather than someone’s opinions. I certainly do not consider talking about evolution in a biology class to be an ideological rant. However, there were plenty of partisan soapbox rants from the social science professors.
Back during my day, they would waste a lot of class time bitching about GW Bush and Fox News. No doubt nowadays a lot of liberal professors think they are being edgy by screeching about what Trump has tweeted lately.

[RitterSport]

@octopus

…

The modern nutty professors and nutty students that look for muscle and enforcers to silence others might be an entirely different situation for the modern student.

Thank god that the 80s, 70s, 60s, etc., never had any nutty professors or nutty students. That’s why there were no anti-Reagan, anti-Nixon, anti-apartheid, or anti-Viet Nam war protests at the schools. I guess it was in the 2010s when kids were killed at Kent State by the National Guard, protesting some war or another. Bunch of nuts!

I mean, seriously, WTF? Do you (octopus or the OP) really think that social science professors have gotten more liberal over time? Social science students have gotten more liberal? Seems unlikely to me – campuses have been a hotbeds of liberalism for generations.

To me, it seems like conservatives on campus either have gotten more thin-skinned or just looking to make ridiculous claims of liberal hypocrisy (“your intolerance of my intolerance is hypocritical!”).

[Helena330]

@skyr

Back during my day, they would waste a lot of class time bitching about GW Bush and Fox News. No doubt nowadays a lot of liberal professors think they are being edgy by screeching about what Trump has tweeted lately.

Your day was a long time ago. I’m currently attending a university and am majoring in two social science disciplines. One of them is sociology, which would be the most obvious for professors to rant about Trump screeching. However, in over ten SOC classes, not one professor has even mentioned Trump. I once asked a prof why not, privately during office hours. She said because it wouldn’t be conducive to her students’ learning which was the most important thing. She wants to produce students who can think for themselves. Other professors have steered classroom discussions away from Trump without comment. It’s pretty obvious they feel the same.

This assumption by conservatives of what they’re SURE is going on in universities is so manufactured and ignorant. Unfortunately, it’s not very surprising. Education BAD! Learning BAD! :rolleyes:

[Mallard]

@Emiliana

I am very, very liberal and I have an extremely conservative student who comes to chat with me during my office hours all the time. We have a blast. He’s smart and he’s thoughtful and he’s really passionate about politics and history.

A majority of Republicans think that colleges and universities are bad for this country. This is a problem. As opposed to made-up problems like fragile conservative students and their awful, awful librul professors.

As a nearly 67 year old centre-left leaning individual life has taught me that there’s probably as many left wing pompous asses as there are right wing pompous asses. :dubious:

[Emiliana]

@Mallard

As a nearly 67 year old centre-left leaning individual life has taught me that there’s probably as many left wing pompous asses as there are right wing pompous asses. :dubious:

I would agree but I’m not sure what you’re responding to in my post.

[Urbanredneck]

@Enginerd

(I teach hydrology in a geology department)

Along these same lines, the student should understand what they’re getting into when they enroll in particular classes. If a Young-Earth Creationist wants to be a mining engineer, (s)he’s going to have some classes that take it as given that the earth and the universe are 4.5 billion and 14 billion years old, respectively. You (conservative-student you, not anybody in particular) don’t have to accept that as a belief, but you do have to accept it for the purposes of those classes and base your classwork on accepted scholarship instead of your personal beliefs. Biology classes will assume that evolution occurs by natural selection; natural resource classes will assume that climate change is happening according to the scientific consensus. If you can’t work within these frameworks as a premise for those classes, you’ll do better to choose a major where you’re not fighting the theoretical underpinnings of the entire field.

Or you can pick one of those classes specifically because you’re looking for a fight. But that’s a pretty large investment of time and money to fail the class (because you failed to accept the premises on which it was based) and lose that fight (because universities generally accept the scientific consensus as the basis for undergrad education).

Back in my day I wouldnt so much call myself “young earth” but I did believe in a form of mixed creationism-evolution type of thinking. Sometimes I would ask professors and TA’s what they thought and the response was usually that they believed in evolution; they knew it, they taught it, but even they had reservations about some of the nuts and bolts of it. Basically they saw holes in it but couldnt go so far as to attribute something to “God”. Which I get because creationism is not something you can prove using the scientific method.

I dont get why we cannot just say when a problem occurs we cant say “we dont know”.

So I learned evolution and could regurgitate the information on exams and I think got B’s in that class.

[Urbanredneck]

@MandaJo

Urbanredneck, serious question. Please answer.

Let’s say a group of students are in a Government class, talking about voting demographics. It comes up that African Americans overwhelmingly vote Democratic and there’s a class discussion about why that might be. Conservative Student raises his hand and says something like “It’s because black culture is lazy. They don’t raise their kids to value work, and they think the Democrats will keep the welfare and the reparations coming”. At this point, the class jumps his ass, metaphorically, pointing out all the ways that’s a stupid, racist thing to say–because it is. But it’s a thing a lot of conservatives believe.

At that point–the whole class is upset at this kid, and he is feeling put upon and persecuted–what do you think the appropriate thing is for the professor to do? What should the other students do? What should the student do?

Well it seems to me the kid is being a jerk. Very common among 19 years olds full of ideas and energy and think they know everything. Heck the kid might have even been doing it to get a rise out of the teacher. We dont know what views he/she had been pushing.

But then in your scenario you dont say what the previous discussion was about? If a few students are rock solid democrats with Bush or Trump derangement syndrome they will say some bad or maybe ludicrous things about republicans and the discussion might have gone downhill from there. I would hope the instructor would take control of the discussion.

Ok, I’ve answered.

Now tell me. Be honest. You know the left isnt perfect. What if the discussion had gone another way and some radical feminist had slammed men or a black lives matter person had slammed whites with some stereotypes? What if a student walks into class wearing a MAGA hat and another student rips it off his head and starts yelling at him?

How should the instructor deal with it?

[HMS_Irruncible]

@Urbanredneck

Sometimes I would ask professors and TA’s what they thought and the response was usually that they believed in evolution; they knew it, they taught it, but even they had reservations about some of the nuts and bolts of it. Basically they saw holes in it but couldnt go so far as to attribute something to “God”.

I dont get why we cannot just say when a problem occurs we cant say “we dont know”.

You absolutely can do that. Science does that all the time. “We don’t know. We have some ideas. We’ll keep looking. Please keep the grant money coming.”

What we don’t do is say “we don’t know, therefore God must have done it.”

I saw this conflict play out probably dozens of times with conservative students in my biology classes. Seems like every semester we wasted a week’s worth of tuition money haggling with the Baptist freshman who thought he found the fatal flaw in evolution based on some Jack Chick tracts about the Piltdown man hoax. I’m sure he went home and bragged to his church about how his professor tried to destroy him but he turned the tables and taught him a thing or two.

In reality, these snowflakes were pampered and indulged way more than I’d have done.

[Urbanredneck]

HERE is a story about a professor in California who went on a rant about Trump calling him a white supremacist and a terrorist. A student secretly recorded it and got suspended. The teacher was given “Teacher of the Year Award” for her actions.

So yes, liberal professors can go crazy.

[Helena330]

@Urbanredneck

HERE is a story about a professor in California who went on a rant about Trump calling him a white supremacist and a terrorist. A student secretly recorded it and got suspended. The teacher was given “Teacher of the Year Award” for her actions.

So yes, liberal professors can go crazy.

He was suspended for sharing the video online, which resulted in death threats to the professor, not for filming. I’m sure there are nutter profs at both ends of the spectrum. But rants about Trump as a regular occurrence? That’s propaganda.

[Dewey_Finn]

@Urbanredneck

HERE is a story about a professor in California who went on a rant about Trump calling him a white supremacist and a terrorist. A student secretly recorded it and got suspended. The teacher was given “Teacher of the Year Award” for her actions.

So yes, liberal professors can go crazy.

Did you read this paragraph? “But the student had also broken campus rules against using recording devices. Thus: a semesterlong suspension, which would only end if he apologized to Cox and wrote a three-page essay about what he did.”