Wow. I mean, I try to be sympathetic to students who may not really know how college works, but that is some weapons-grade cluelessness and entitlement. (Also, I haven’t read any of the works in question, but I have seen the movie version of Persepolis, and if it’s at all a faithful adaptation, I’m having a hard time imagining how or why anybody could possibly find it offensive. Unless, of course, the student is offended by having to learn anything about Islam, and just clueful enough to know that she shouldn’t say that out loud.)
Not to mention the well known fact that the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter (commonly called pi these days) is 3.
Calculus I class: Trigger warning! May require student to think logically; to extend the limits of his/her knowledge; to integrate new concepts and differentiate between delta and epsilon!
On one side, it disturbs me that we can’t teach a variety of important facts in the public schools because the administrators don’t want to deal with the fallout. This leads directly to dewy eyed college students being badly shocked at the idea that they used to buy and sell brown people for use as sex toys and farm equipment, and actually fought a war so they could keep doing so.
On the other side, I have known some college professors who, upon achieving tenure, became some incredible shitheads, insisting that their personal hobbyhorses were holy grails, to the point of being offensive about it.
So… I’m still on the fence, except on a case by case basis.
I’m told that about a year or so ago, the programme leader for my department claims that had a letter from a parent asking if he could supply her with all of the lectures that the tutors would give over the course of each semester. She wanted them ahead of time so that she could look them over and make sure that there was nothing in any of them that would affect her son emotionally – and asked for assurance that if she found any triggers in any of the lectures, that we tutors would excise thm accordingly.
Now, the PL has a hell of a sense of humour, so I’m hoping he was just taking the piss…but judging from some of the emails and phone calls I’ve had from parents about the sensitive needs of their (at, 18+ years old, adult) children over the years I’ve been a lecturer, I wonder just how much of an exaggeration that scene was.
I work in a university in the UK and have specific responsibility for incoming first year students. There has been quite a significant increase in the number of students coming here with documented mental health, depression and anxiety problems, who are referred to our student support services before they’ve even got the exam results guaranteeing them a place here. It used to be the case that you’d maybe get one student a year with a learning agreement but now it’s every Charlotte, Emily and Louise.
We have not yet started putting content warnings on our course information, particular texts are studied and it is well-publicised as to what those are. Whether it is film, books, poetry, paintings etc, we treat our students as adults and expect them to make their own informed decisions. We will make it known what the subject material is for any particular module and it is up to them to research it for themselves and decide whether they feel it is appropriate/safe for them to read/watch/view.
If they choose to take a module and don’t want to get involved with the subject material, that’s their problem and they will not get any special treatment when it comes to marking. If you’re not prepared to engage with the course material but you still want to take the module, then you’re on your own. Our lecturers feel that there is sufficient breadth of choice amongst the modules offered that even the most sensitive of delicate little flowers can find enough credits to pass the year without getting their hands dirty.
‘Cis-’ has become popular as the opposite of ‘trans-’, so that the default opposite of ‘transexual’, for example, is not ‘normal’ (which you’ll surely agree is less than ideal) but ‘cis-sexual’. Cissexism, then, is prejudice deriving from discomfort with transexuals or transexuality.
Discrimination in favor of those who identify as the gender they were assigned at birth, i.e., only allowing ciswomen to use the women’s locker rooms, only allowing cismen on the men’s team.
It’s not. I haven’t had to deal with it, but some colleagues have. On occasion, an angry PARENT will show up in a dean’s office demanding that Prof. So-and-So be fired because s/he’s mean, unfair, gives too much work, is too hard, etc.
The prefixes cis- and trans- are standard usages in chemistry, where they describe the placement of extra atoms around carbon rings. Trans- also a standard prefix in many English words outside of chemistry, where it means “across” or possibly “opposite”. So cis- got borrowed from chemistry to mean “not trans” in the context of cis-sexual or cis-gendered, etc.
