BY KELLI PYRON ALVAREZ
In June, a colleague who did not attend my University of Oklahoma workshop “Anti-Racist Rhetoric & Pedagogies” decided to download the video and send it to off-campus parties. I cannot speak to his intent, but the result was that several organizations, including FIRE, misinterpreted and misconstrued the goal and purpose of the workshop, which was to foster a safe and productive learning environment when teaching our students how to write about social issues. The result was hate mail, threats of violence, and a disingenuous conversation on the complicated nature of free speech in the classroom. I establish boundaries in the classroom to foster a positive and respectful learning environment. What led me to establish those boundaries and how I do so is described here.
A few years ago, I had a student in one of my classes who was openly hostile to their classmates’ ideas, refused to listen to instructions, became combative when called out for not listening to instructions, and, outside of the classroom, engaged in behaviors and activities that made their classmates feel unsafe. What happens outside of my classroom is outside of my control, and I fully support everyone’s rights to free speech to make whatever claims and share whatever ideas they feel are important. However, when a student actively makes learning difficult for their classmates through verbal language or body language, I cannot stand by and allow that behavior to continue. This sort of behavior creates a hostile learning environment in which no one is learning, and I am not able to do my job. According to the US Department of Education, “a hostile environment may be created by behaviors such as intimidation and implied or overt threats of physical violence motivated by race, color, or national origin . . . and demeaning racial jokes, taunting, racial slurs and derogatory racial ‘nicknames’, innuendos, or other negative derogatory remarks of a racial nature or relating to national origin.” In instances when these behaviors are present, it is our responsibility as instructors to end such behavior. That may mean telling a student to stop talking, talking to the student after class, addressing the harm being done in that moment, contacting campus officials, making formal complaints, or a combination of any of these responses, all of which are valid. Unfortunately, I did not learn of my responsibilities and what exactly I could or should do to protect my students’ emotional and mental well-being until this particular semester. Several of my students suffered, one telling me that they called their mother in tears after class almost daily because of the hostility and covert threats they felt in my class. I felt powerless, and that should not happen again.
After this troubling semester, I researched my options as a non-tenured teaching professor and read countless articles and books on free speech rights within the classroom (because on-campus and in the classroom are not the same and rights differ). Now I am careful to be explicit in my discussion of behavior expectations with my students. I explain what I mean by derogatory remarks and offer students a reading on how free speech functions in the classroom and its limitations. We complete a discussion board on these boundaries and behaviors together. There is never any doubt what I mean when I tell my students that white supremacist ideologies are not tolerated—because I define them and offer examples of what they look like. There is never any doubt about what I mean by derogatory or racist remarks—because I define those concepts and offer examples. I spend at least one full class period on these concepts and what students’ responsibilities are in the first week of class, so that all students are aware of their rights and responsibilities—and the consequences of their actions—moving forward. Students are free, and encouraged, to ask questions and build on these concepts. I do not present the information as merely a lecture that students must accept without thinking it through—I work with them to build and foster these ideas and talk about what it means to be respectful in the classroom. I also know that my students are learning, which is why if they say something that could reasonably be perceived or interpreted as derogatory—according to the parameters we set early in the semester—I work with them to see how and why what they said was harmful and why or how they should reframe those ideas instead.
The curriculum I teach asks students to think about, learn about, and explore in-depth and in good faith the social issues within their communities. These issues vary, and we talk about what constitutes a social issue and where to find information and sources. I remind my students that, because they should be engaging in good-faith research and responses throughout the semester, they need to avoid obscenity, which is defined by Miller v. California (1973) as work that “taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.” Essentially, any argument that invalidates or seeks to impede someone’s basic human rights or their identities is not an acceptable argument for students to make, as it lacks political and scientific value and is in direct opposition to basic human rights. My students are free to form their own opinions, come to their own conclusions, and disagree with me openly at any time. They are not, however, permitted to openly discriminate against or deny someone their identity or human rights in their writing or in classroom discussions. There is a major difference between disagreements based on facts and interpretations and the denial of human rights. My students are welcome to disagree with me, and we often do, but the denial of someone’s identity or human rights is not a good faith argument and crosses the line, legally and morally. I will not and do not allow that line to be crossed.
What I ask of my students, and those not in my classes as well, is to really consider what constitutes a good faith argument. We are free to form our own opinions and verbalize them in most instances, but do those opinions cause real harm to others? If our intention is to cause harm, or if our thoughts or actions unintentionally cause harm, then how free is that speech? Someone has to pay for it, and we need to think about what that payment looks like. For students from marginalized and oppressed communities, that payment may be feeling unsafe to be on campus, being unable to participate in classroom discussions, inability to attend classes, and being unable to actively participate in their education. We cannot deny students these rights—these payments are too steep and cause lasting damage. This means we must be cognizant of what we say and do—as students and professors—in our classes, so that everyone feels welcome and safe and is able to learn and grow.
Kelli Pyron Alvarez teaches first-year composition and is a doctoral student in the Educational Studies program at the University of Oklahoma.
I’m very interested in knowing more about this student who was “openly hostile to their classmates’ ideas, refused to listen to instructions, became combative when called out for not listening to instructions, and, outside of the classroom, engaged in behaviors and activities that made their classmates feel unsafe.” Can you provide some specifics about this? What does “openly hostile” mean? How did they become “combative”? And most importantly, what were the “behaviors and activities” that made classmates feel unsafe? I think understanding these situations and the responses to them depend a lot on what these circumstances are.
I’m also interested in knowing about the “white supremacist ideologies” and the “derogatory or racial remarks,” since you say you define them and give examples. Can you give us your definition of these things and the examples you provide?
What if, instead of asking for 1200 more words from Kelli so that you can interrogate her interpretation of events that she experienced and you didn’t, you took this post on its face and considered the excellent points she makes?
I have been teaching for 25 years and it is not hard for me to imagine the scenario as she broadly describes it. In order to move on to the point she’s making, she can’t describe every situation with this student in the kind of detail that a skeptic needs to believe the situation occurred. She is relying on her understanding that this student can’t be the only student like this instructors have ever encountered, and I think most of us who have been teaching a long time, will find that to be a very reasonable assumption.
Asking for more information doesn’t make me a skeptic, and being a skeptic isn’t a crime, it’s what intellectual discussions are supposed to include. I’m not doubting the scenario. I’m trying to figure out exactly what happened. If students are threatening other students, that’s something that deserves more attention. And if faculty are going to ban hateful ideologies in classroom discussions, we ought to have that defined and examples provided, just like her students get. Why should I “imagine the scenario” and get it wrong when she could just tell us in a few words what happened? I’m not attacking her for following AcademeBlog’s guidelines and editing down her essay, I simply want to hear more from her argument and her pedagogical approaches so that we can all learn more from them. Why is “tell me more” such a terrible response?
I humbly disagree.
It is the responsibility of those in higher ed to be open to challenges to our hypothesis and statements. To inform students that their ideas do not have merit because you do not (personally) agree is the antithesis of critical thought and inquiry.
Why should a person only accept a single version of events without the opportunity to gain clarity to what the individual claims to be fact? The video is out there …. to continue to claim that other learned individuals somehow cannot comprehend what is included is the height of elitist thought.
If you have been teaching for 25 years maybe it is you, and those like you, that have failed to change and grow. Many an instructor, in my experience as a student/grad student/higher ed professional, check out on improving their skills once they hit a certain level of time in service.
I cannot–and will not–tell you more about the specific incident I mention because it would make it easy to then identify that student, which is a violation of FERPA. If you want to learn exactly how I have this discussion with my students beyond what I have already described–at length–then I recommend enrolling in my class. At this point, you are asking for even more work and specific information from me (and others) that I do not provide anyone for free. If you really need help figuring out what anyone might mean by “openly hostile” or “white supremacist ideologies”, then might I recommend reading work by scholars and activists in these fields or enrolling in courses, or even hiring a private tutor. Not only have you posted numerous times on my colleagues’ posts, but you emailed me directly for more work, more details, and more time, and I do not believe you are asking in good-faith or that you want to have a good-faith discussion at all. I appreciate being concerned about students, but I clearly articulated that my students are free to discuss whatever topics they would like, but under no circumstances may they make statements that deny basic human decency, perpetuate racism, white supremacy, or blatant hatred, nor are they permitted to create an environment in which their classmates (or myself) feel threatened or that results in psychological harm.
Kelli, I hate the chilling effect that FERPA has, but I do understand why you might be leery of discussing that particular student. But FERPA doesn’t apply to what you tell students about classroom expectations. There are some people (like FIRE) who presume you are silencing students, and there are some people (like Jennifer Ruth) who presume you are not. I’m still waiting for the evidence rather than presuming. It depends on what you mean by “perpetuate racism, white supremacy, or blatant hatred,” and you say that you tell students exactly what that means and give examples, and so I’d like to know without having to enroll in a class in Oklahoma You say that I’m asking in bad faith, which is rather insulting, but more importantly it’s irrelevant. In intellectual discussions, I think we should answer reasonable questions instead of requiring evidence about the faith of the questioner. We should answer questions from all comers, and not just those who we think will agree with us. And telling me to read the literature on white supremacy doesn’t tell me how you define the term. “What do you tell students is forbidden in your class” is not a trick question, or a bad-faith question. It’s a pretty simple question with many reasonable answers that’s directly relevant to this whole debate. You’re not obligated to answer questions, but it’s still a reasonable question.
John, Let’s be clear: FIRE and I are using the same evidence to come to our conclusions — the video. You are asking for evidence about a different case that she is referring to her from her past classroom experiences. As I’ve said in an earlier comment, if she or anyone else (such as myself) discriminates against a student, there are channels that the student can pursue within the university. You are not that channel and at this point I’m not sure what it is that you are arguing or how you are engaging her post in a productive way. I believe Kelli is wise to not engage with you by trying to give you evidence that her own reading of the events she refers to is reliable. I beg you to consider what I’ve said below and to read both Telfair’s post and Cooper’s CHE essay.
Instead of assuming (as FIRE and David Moshman, below, do) that Alvarez’s mention of “white supremacist ideas” is viewpoint discrimination against conservatives, or assuming (as you do) that it’s a legitimate ban on harassing racism, I am simply asking Alvarez a highly productive question: What do you actually mean by “white supremacist” ideas? What do you tell students they are not allowed to say in your class? FIRE points out that in the video and in her essay, Alvarez “does not provide her readers any of those examples, making it impossible to investigate her claim.” That’s true–although it’s an indictment of FIRE that they simply assume wrongdoing without adequate evidence. But we shouldn’t be afraid to discover the truth. If in fact Alvarez went a little too far in trying to protect her students from harassment, it may be deserving of critique, but certainly not official action or FIRE’s over-the-top reaction (complete with automated complaint forms), and any threats of violence against Alvarez deserve a law enforcement response. However, I want to hear the facts before I either criticize or completely support Alvarez. Alvarez is free to withhold those facts, but I’m not why you think she should conceal what she teaches.
As for your belief that discrimination complaints should only be heard in the official internal “channel” and not discussed publicly by anyone, I find that notion absurd. If I report about a racist professor accused of discriminating against African-American students, would you criticize me for denouncing that professor because I am not the official “channel” for discrimination complaints?
“I clearly articulated that my students are free to discuss whatever topics they would like, but under no circumstances may they make statements that deny basic human decency, perpetuate racism, white supremacy, or blatant hatred, nor are they permitted to create an environment in which their classmates (or myself) feel threatened or that results in psychological harm.” With all due respect, this is viewpoint discrimination, a fundamental violation of intellectual freedom and First Amendment rights. And it sends a powerful message to conservative students that they’d better keep their ideas to themselves.
Conservative students better keep their ideas to themselves because their ideas are racist, deny human decency and are hateful? That’s an astonishing thing to say.
Conservative students often report in surveys that they keep their ideas to themselves in some classes because they fear they will be deemed racist or hateful if they say what they think. I didn’t say anyone’s ideas are racist or hateful. In any serious discussion of race, however, most people support ideas that some other people consider racist or hateful.
I have never had a student as described here, but I have had suicidal students, which, given the data on college-age suicides, is probably more common. Overt physical threats are criminal matters and should be handled as such. Insulting epithets etc.need not be disruptive or threatening of properly handled by the instructor.
In some 40 years of teaching I probably had around a dozen or two students who basically fit Kelli Alvarez’s one-sentence description of the student she had difficulty with. Several were loud and brash young men who seemed to feel entitled to speak whenever they wished and whose demeanor visibly cowed more timid members of the class, female and male. Interestingly, I can recall one student who, this being the Bay Area, was a highly dogmatic leftist (at times a bit reminiscent of a younger me) who trashed everyone in the class (including me) as hopeless reactionaries, too often highjacking discussions and silencing others. I have no doubt that in many places students with racist or sexist attitudes may pose a similar problem for basic classroom discipline and decorum, but they’re not the only ones. The ideas proposed in this post for dealing with such situations are part of discussions that caring classroom instructors engage in all the time. Those discussions, too, need to be conducted in a tolerant atmosphere in which differing approaches can be rationally considered without the threat that someone’s ideas will be publicly pilloried by an outside group.
Speaking only for myself, in my 25 years of teaching, every course I taught was a required composition course. Very few students were eager to be there, particularly at the start of the term. Over that quarter century I had a few disruptive students (situations I never handled particularly well) and often wished I had a more dignified way to make a living than dealing with the opinions of 18 to 22 year olds. Still, it never would have occurred to me that censoring the students might be anything but an overwhelmingly disproportional response to my classroom challenges.
I appreciate that the poster is a graduate student, and likely has a perspective that differs from mine on a vast range of issues. Nonetheless, since she has already formulated definitions and examples and provided them to her class, I share John Wilson’s curiosity as to what might be an example of student speech so efficacious as to deny to others their basic human rights.
Kelli writes, “My students are welcome to disagree with me, and we often do, but the denial of someone’s identity or human rights is not a good faith argument and crosses the line, legally and morally.” She also writes, “If our intention is to cause harm, or if our thoughts or actions unintentionally cause harm, then how free is that speech? Someone has to pay for it, and we need to think about what that payment looks like. For students from marginalized and oppressed communities, that payment may be feeling unsafe to be on campus, being unable to participate in classroom discussions, inability to attend classes, and being unable to actively participate in their education. We cannot deny students these rights—these payments are too steep and cause lasting damage. This means we must be cognizant of what we say and do—as students and professors—in our classes, so that everyone feels welcome and safe and is able to learn and grow.”
It is imperative that people consider who they are, and how the world relates to them, in these discussions. If you are a white man, is the classroom often a different kind of space for you than if you are, say, a woman of color? As a white woman who was in high school in the 80s and college and grad school in the 90s, I know the serious toll sexist comments about women’s intellectual inferiority took on me as I was pursuing an academic career. I would have loved an instructor who didn’t make room for that bullshit in her classroom. The idea that when we walk into intellectual spaces, we all become disembodied and without racial, classed, and other markers is an illusion. Beginning to understand the stakes in these discussions starts with this acknowledgement, that not everyone is willing to make.
This post seems a good one to revisit here — a Black student at Princeton giving her perspective: https://academeblog.org/2020/11/12/what-have-we-learned-lessons-from-the-last-decade/
Please also see Brittany Cooper’s essay in The Chronicle of Higher Ed, “How Free Speech Works for White Academics” (Nov. 16, 2017).
FIRE just published on its website a detailed response to the recent critiques of its position:
https://www.thefire.org/what-exactly-is-the-problem-with-the-university-of-oklahomas-anti-racist-rhetoric-pedagogies-workshop/
The FIRE response to the OU AAUP and Alvarez’s commentary is compelling. I recommend everyone read it. As they point out, Alvarez is misquoting the Miller v. California case text regarding obscenity. Also, by the AAUP’s own 2007 statement regarding what constitutes indoctrination, the workshop is engaging in it – and the OU AAUP is now defending it.
https://www.thefire.org/what-exactly-is-the-problem-with-the-university-of-oklahomas-anti-racist-rhetoric-pedagogies-workshop/
Having watched the video, read the OU AAUP’s statements, and read Alvarez’s post about it, what sticks out to me in all this is that the workshop is about far more than preventing things like racial slurs and intimidation in class. The presenters seem blind that they hold a critical social justice ideology (or identity politics, as it’s sometimes called) which they are making unquestionable and dogmatic in the classroom. This ideology has its own very particular understanding of what constitutes “white supremacy” and “problematic” speech which is highly controversial and contested in our society today, not just by conservatives, but by classical marxists, classic liberals, and other ideologies.
Why do I say this? Let’s consider the video – as one of the presenters says, you can’t debate BlackLivesMatter, because it’s “not an argument. It’s a fact, right?” But of course the issue is in reference to the organization BLM, not the sentiment, which may or may not be the same thing. The great majority of the USA believes black lives matter, but many of these same people question whether black lives matter to BLM and question the many controversial political tenets of BLM, etc. Indeed, some of the most ardent critics of BLM are blacks. But this topic cannot be debated, because the presenter was apparently unable to go beyond the superficial slogan (BLM) and allow examination of the organization’s political platform and tactics. She didn’t allow critical thinking on this controversial organization. My point here is not whether BLM is right or wrong – it’s that BLM is a highly debated issue in our society, intensely political, and yet unchallengeable according to this workshop – heck, you can’t even spend time during class formulating arguments on behalf of BLM, but must instead rely solely on your lived experience to persuade other people.
Additionally, there’s the example in the video of demanding students use other people’s preferred pronouns – here again only the critical social justice view is permitted, wrapped in the notion that to do otherwise is “invalidating that person’s humanity and their existence.” Well, that assumes quite a bit about different aspects of the issue, and in a class that’s supposed to be partly about exposing and examining assumptions, it’s not allowed here. To borrow the words of Greg Lukianoff, the workshop is building a “perfect rhetorical fortress” to stop their students from having to critically assess political views that are at odds with the presenters’ own, and yet which are hotly contested in our society today.
Correction – my comment should read “Also, by the AAUP’s own 2007 statement regarding what constitutes indoctrination, the workshop is teaching how to engage in it – and the OU AAUP is now defending it.”
Last correction: my comment should also read at the end “the workshop is building a ‘perfect rhetorical fortress’ to stop these teachers’ students from being able to critically assess certain political views that are at odds with the presenters’ own” etc.
Rather than writing “Additionally, there’s the example in the video of demanding students use other people’s preferred pronouns” I should have said “Additionally, there’s the example in the video of not allowing students to argue in their writing that they shouldn’t have to use other people’s preferred pronouns”