Hi uke, I salute you for wanting to stand up for LGBT rights. Despite what you may think, I also support the LGBT movement. As I've attempted to describe, my issue with safe spaces isn't their intended purpose, it's the unintended consequences that follow.

I think you said you're a math teacher, and so I doubt your classroom will ever foster much political, ethical or philosophical debate beyond the rationality of pi. However, there are plenty of other classrooms that may indeed suffer from their intellectual spaces being converted into safe spaces. Take this example:

http://www.anorak.co.uk/414432/news/...iversity.html/

Cliffs: religious kid wants to argue against the right of gay marriage when it's brought up in his ethics class, but is told by the professor it would be homophobic, offensive, and that is not allowed in class. A conservative professor blogs about the incident explaining how that sort of logic is easily extended to arguments on abortion, policing, etc., essentially censoring other sides of the debate. That is clearly not what college is about. That professor is fired for misrepresenting the incident.

I would add another problem with this type of censorship is that it's useless and even damaging. It merely pushes those distasteful opinions underground instead of exposing them to reasoned discussion. Furthermore, I know plenty of gays and minorities who are more than happy to engage those arguments full on, and they don't need to be protected from them by safe spaces.

Instead of teaching students to shy away from opinions they dislike and become "offense-averse", colleges should be encouraging students to stand up and defend their positions, and also respect that others should be allowed to do the same.

In the words of Evelyn Beatrice Hall, "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."

Yeah, that prof was fired for doxxing his graduate student.

Indeed. This story is a favourite among the MRA chattering class, I've seen it many times. What I don't quite get though is why you are telling it to me? Like I get that [insert worst googleable incident you can find] is the knee jerk reaction , but is this all you get? You phrase it as fired for "misrepresenting the incident" but remember the start of the letter here is for this secretly taped conversation without getting permission from one of the participants. Is that the worst you can get? Like even if we agreed that this stripping of tenure was bad, this is both debatable and not about the ostensible issue which is the safe spaces - in fact there is nothing in the letter at all about the content of the professors beliefs.

By the way, as a professor you quickly get a handle on the types of students in your class. You try to have productive discussions, and you DO have the authority to control the types of questions and comments being raised. I do it every single day. Granted, it is about mathematics but I aggressively shut down certain types of questions (for instance, people wanting to grand stand about how amazing they are, weird tangents, and so forth) and so exactly what the professor did, which is take it to office hours if they want to continue. The rule isn't "anyone can talk about whatever they want, however they want" in class, and a professor with known agitators in their class (the type who would record secret conversations to show to employers) i'm rather fine with being shut down.

Wow, those people sound totally unlike any of the math enthusiasts we have in this forum...

ugh. there is nothing worse than the kind of student who hangs their self esteem on having the one redeeming quality of getting 90% in high school math (by, you know, doing more than 5 minutes of work in 4 years).

weird tangents sounds like interesting maths.

Can we talk about what a passive-aggressive bitch this prof is? So let's say one of your grad students is inappropriately stifling discussion in class. Do you A. take her aside and tell her how you'd like the class to be run or B. bitch about it on your blog. WTF dude, you're a grown-ass man acting like a teenage girl on Facebook.

Just feel like noting that time and time again we've established that there's simply not a argument against gay marriage that isn't rooted in bigotry and that that professor is exactly right to keep that non-discussion out of his classroom. If bigots want to pop off, they can do that on their own time.

It is unique from issues like abortion, as it's basically impossible to make a decent argument that gay marriage has an impact on any other part.

I wish this thread was a safe space from this type of misogyny. Even setting aside the use of the word bitch- in no way to teenage women have a monopoly on petty online gossip.

You should look up what actually happened from an actual news source and not the Cliffs of someone who didn't read his own link. The bigotry aspect is mostly irrelevant to his firing.

I will avoid mysogynistic comments going forward, but this dude handled it just like a teenager.

I agree but we don't need to talk about safe spaces. It's just being PC.

That's ageist bro

I'm not talking about the firing at all. I tried to read that article, but the formatting was too much for the current state of my attention span. Was just trying to say that the original person (who I guess maybe was a grad student and not a PHD) was correct to keep that conversation out of the classroom.

Sounds like you have some experience dealing with pesky students! I won't pretend to know what that's like. Why don't you take this example and reverse it though?

I imagine at a Catholic University like Marquette, it's not a reach to think a more conservative professor 50 (hell, 20) years ago may have tried to shut down discussion in favor of gay marriage with the same sort of arguments you're making. Would you not have objected in the same manner I am to censoring that discussion, and just letting the students decide for themselves?

Only got this far but this must be a joke type thing.

The actual Cliffs is:

Grad student who is a TA for a class doesn't allow a discussion on the cons of gay marriage to take place.

Undergrad student is upset with this, surreptitiously records a conversation with the grad student, then brings the recording to the Prof.

Prof calls the grad student, tells her hes going to post about it online, then posts a distorted version of the incident on his blog, using the grad students real name against her wishes (undergrad's name is of course redacted).

Grad student gets flooded with hate mail and death threats, feels she has to transfer to another school.

Bonus: Prof has harassed other students the same way in the past.

A+ hill for the SMP guys to die on.

Slightly related:

One of the challenges of working in academia is that there's typically not anybody in place or empowered to police bedside manner of established faculty. I've had more than a few situations where I've pushed back about faculty that were being ****ty to my reports (this may shock you, they were engineering PHDs), and it's almost always ended with somebody being either unwilling or unable to even request that their behavior change.

It's just a bad mix that leads to bad things, to be reductive- the older you are the more untouchable and out of touch you're likely to be. Throw that in with the Peter Principle being so incredibly common in the university setting (people that might be good teachers or researchers ending up as horribly miscast leaders and admins)- it's just a real bad time.

One of the best things that happened to my organization was a shift from PHDs to MBAs in management roles.

Which SMP guys do you have in mind Trolley?

Oh man.

First you try to come up with the oh so egregious example the MRAs love of a ~*professor fired*~ and won't we just think about the unintended consequences. This egregious example, as it turns out, has very little to do with it and everyone laughs at you. You don't even try to defend it.

So what happens next? You literally make up out of thin air a hypothetical we are supposed to care about. All prompted from me saying I was putting a sign on my door so LGBT students could feel comfortable.

Mole hills, mountains, etc.

This is a weird response on your part. I spent zero time in my original post discussing the merits of that professor's termination, and instead focused on the unintended consequences of trying to shield students from offense. We could get into the firing if you want, I hadn't even given that much thought, but why not finish the first discussion?

Suppose that is the case.

Wouldn't you agree there is a difference between discussing things that might offend people's beliefs and discussing things that harm people because of who they are?

A minor thing for me to get hung up on, but there's only so much class time a prof can set aside for students to discuss things not pertinent to the syllabus. Unless he's one of those profs who just dgaf and allows blocks of time to go by with nothing but off topic chatter.

Your ramblings about what you seem to think the problems of faculty at the universities are appear to be largely made up. My department certainly doesn't run anything like how you describe. The chair, associate chairs and other leadership are all absolutely fantastic, have ridiculous long and drawn out applications to become these with extensive review boards. There absolutely are procedures by which students can complain about their professors and this is taken VERY seriously with committees dedicated precisely to this (not to mention for people like me course evaluations are a huge portion of why I have a job).

So the great unintended consequence isn't that a professor got fired, the great unintended consequence is that a graduate student instructor decided to take up a clearly hot button offensive issue from a presumed agitator who secretly records conversations and complains to the instructors supervisor, and take that question in office hours instead of dedicating class time?

That's it?

That is your big reveal?

As I said - and as you ignored - every instructor such as myself always know you have to aggressively management classroom discussion to steer it into productive ways and there is absolutely no obligation that the student should deserve to get to drone on about the evils of gay marriage because of err child adoptions in the ethics class just because they want to. At the very best, it is a borderline case the kind of thing where the supervisor could have a quick conversation with the graduate student about how to handle it a bit differently. But some kind of sweeping challenge to safe spaces? Utter nonsense.

And from all of this you parlay to a made up hypothetical. Just lol fold.

Ya but you teach in Candanavia, where people are often surprisingly sensible. Dids could be living in Nevada or something.

Yeah- I totally made up my own experiences and haven't been working in this environment for like 20 years. It's great that yours are different, but your anecdotal evidence doesn't invalidate mine any more than mine does yours. (and frankly- I have the strong impression that my experience is far more typical than yours).

The complaints I'm talking about aren't from students (my team processes course evaluations, and there is a better structure in place to deal the ramifications from those). It's not anything that's so specifically actionable than it would enter into a formal discipline process. It's more just "Hey, could you maybe get Dr. XXXX to stop being a jerk to our employees."

Even setting aside people just being ****ty- we've been unable to implement utterly reasonable procedures because nobody is either willing or able (and I'm not guessing here, this is what we've been told) to (for example) have a conversation with a prof that says "Hey, we'd all save time and money if we could email you these assignments to your TA rather than hand delivering them to your office" or "Could you maybe tell us more than 1 day in advance that there's an exam we need to distribute to students". We've just been told that the department has real ability (or in some cases inclination) to dictate changes to tenured faculty.