Well, I Am a college professor, so I can give my 2 cents. There is no issue with conservative students being discriminated against for their beliefs. There is an issue with conservative students wanting to be asses without consequences, but that’s a different issue.
Politics don’t usually make their way into the things that I teach. But evolution does. I’ll outline something that happens at least once a term, feel free to substitute whatever belief you want for the term “evolution”. It’s the same process happening.
Me: talking about the role of evolution in XY
Creationist student" “Evolution is a myth! Blah blah blah!”
Me: “I don’t care what you believe. Feel free not to believe in evolution. But I expect you to understand it, whether or not you personally believe it”
[As an aside, I took a comparative religion class in college. Even though I’m an atheist, when time came on the test to talk about various aspects and beliefs about god, I answered it. It didn’t matter if I personally believed it]
Me: gives test/assignment where student must demonstrate understanding of evolution
CS: writes test answer/assignment with creationist/illogical answer
Me: gives a big fat “F”
CS: “Wah wah! I’m being discriminated against for my beliefs! I’m going to complain to your chair/dean/my mom and get you fired!!”
Me: “Whatever dood”
This is the kind of discrimination conservative students get. It’s not discrimination at all. They just want special coddling and a safe space for their beliefs and don’t want to be challenged. If that’s what they want, go to a fake place like Bob Jones University.
The problem with this all-caps philosophy is that it completely fails to work when your right to exist is considered a political question. A woman attending class instead of being a homemaker, men and women hanging out without a chaperone, trans people existing, gay people daring to mention that they have an SO or spouse, and more all hit conservative ‘hot button’ political topics simply by showing up. “DON’T DRAG POLITICS INTO EVERY SINGLE DISCUSSION” is actually saying that you want to exclude those people from being allowed to enter the discussion in the first place.
Look, this is how it works: you file a complaint against a coworker, a prof, or another student, and you won’t know what consequences that person had to face. That’s the way the law works. How the coworker, prof, or other student behaves after the complaint is what’s important.
If it makes you feel better, a conservative social studies teacher where I used to teach ranted in class about how climate change is a bunch of BS and refused to allow students to disagree. (Climate change is not part of the curriculum.) Students complained. They have no way of knowing what, if any, consequences he faced. And they shouldn’t.
And let’s not assume the teacher got the Faculty of the Year award BECAUSE of the incident.
Just take a step back and think of the reaction if a professor had called Obama a terrorist and slammed every democrat who voted for him.
And I dont think a paid professor taking up classroom time to rant and rave just because her candidate lost and calling the winner a terrorist and implying bad things about the people who voted for him is “frivolous”. She knew damn good and well this would get out because everything gets filmed nowadays.
She was the adult in the room and should have known better.
It was my opinion based on you being able to be kind of “palsy-walsy” with a conservative leaning student. Obviously you two aren’t “pompous” about your views.
I imagine the same thing would have happened and I’d have supported the dismissal of a frivolous complaint.
Complaining that someone is a sore loser is the definition of frivolous playground stuff, confirmed by the college laughing the student out of the room.
Unless there were early-enrollers, 100% of the people in the classroom were adults. College is for adults. Hopefully that student learned the adult lesson that you aren’t entitled to get someone in trouble every time your feelings get hurt.
However, it’s very telling that you expect the liberal to be the adult in the room, and not the conservative. It does seem reasonable, but I’m surprised to hear a conservative say it.
I was in college during the Bush (43) Administration at an institution that was known as very liberal. I had a couple of history professors who would frequently go off on anti-Bush (and, to some degree, anti-“America’s role in the world”) rants. It almost never had a tangible effect on the class (because it was usually largely irrelevant to the subject matter of the course), but it was off-putting. There were some professors (political science types mostly) whose overt hostility made me avoid taking classes with them (some also had reputations for penalizing conservative students who disagreed, but grading in those subjects is so subjective I don’t know how you could verify that).
Then again, one of the things I remember mostly clearly, was one day there was an edict from the Dean’s office that professors should take the first ten minutes of the class period and discuss some specific significant issue or event that was roiling campus (I can’t remember what it was). And I remember my (very clearly left-wing) English literature professor announcing that he wasn’t going to do that because it wasn’t his place to lecture us on politics. Which position I respected greatly.
In any event, I don’t think these experiences were particularly manufactured or unique to me. But they had no real effect on my academic experience.
Several friends of mine took a prep-course for a professional credentialling exam, and the instructor decided to take 45 minutes to rant about how homosexuals were taking over the public schools and they should all put their children in private school to protect them from the homosexual agenda. Or something like that.
It was extremely awkward. There were gay people enrolled in the class. Even the students who agreed with the instructor’s politics were annoyed that he’d wasted their time talking about something irrelevant to the exam. But other than a lot of gossip, I don’t think anything came if it.
It might be rare but every time it does happen nowadays there is almost sure to be someone there with their phone recording it and it goes on the internet.
Then there are sites like Campus Reform that expose some of things people professors and students on the left do on college campuses.
I have no doubt that the site you provided puts it all into context, showing how rare this is if you look at how many class-hours there are in all the classes in all the schools, right? Plus, I’m sure it also shows videos of white supremacists and racial “realists” giving their talks at schools, as examples of intolerance on the right. And, it no doubt shows creationists and climate change deniers talking in class about their counter-factual theories as examples of ridiculous things that conservatives bring into class, right? Please enlighten me, because I’m sure not visiting that site.
You never answered my question above – you went to college. How did you deal with this awful situation that’s heaped upon conservatives?
Most faculty tilt left because educated people tend to tilt left. Apart from the occasional ideological diatribes, left or right, in the classroom, it doesn’t much affect the work we do.