Althouse: "In the past, I would simply have shut down inappropriate discussions, but I’m no longer legally allowed to do so....

April 29, 2022

"In the past, I would simply have shut down inappropriate discussions, but I’m no longer legally allowed to do so....

"My question, then, is whether it’s ethical to continue to teach material I know will expose students to bigoted, racist speech from their classmates, with whom they will then be expected to maintain a collegial working relationship. In a nutshell, if teaching the poet and activist Audre Lorde means forcing Black, queer and female students to endure racist, homophobic, misogynistic comments from their classmates, is it still ethical to teach Audre Lorde?"

A question to the NYT "Ethicist," Kwame Anthony Appiah, in "How Can I Teach When I’m Not Allowed to Shut Down Trolls?/The magazine’s Ethicist columnist on how to navigate new state laws restricting classroom discussions."

54 comments:

BUMBLE BEE said...: She'll be there to help...
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2022/04/29/watch-biden-truth-minister-sings-who-do-i-fck-to-be-rich-famous-and-powerful/; 4/29/22, 3:24 PM
gahrie said...: How many times has this asshole shut people down for saying: "All White people are racist" or "Only White people can be racist"? How many times has he told Black kids they can't use the 'N" word? Has he ever admonished someone for telling someone else they're acting White?; 4/29/22, 3:24 PM
MikeR said...: I would like to hear examples of (a) what she was saying, (b) what the inappropriate comments were, (c) how she used to shut them down.
I have zero doubt that she was the offender, and the "inappropriate comments" were some brave students who gingerly tried to push back.
Since she will never ever provide my examples (she could have given an example in the letter if she had wished to), maybe some of her students could record the lectures and post examples.
The "Ethicist" is of course oblivious to any of this. When I was younger, people like Dear Abby and Ann Landers and even Miss Manners used to be more sensitive. Part of their job was trying to see the dynamic involving the questioner.; 4/29/22, 3:30 PM
Freeman Hunt said...: If you can't easily refute actual racism, you are not very good at arguing.; 4/29/22, 3:33 PM
gilbar said...: In a nutshell, if teaching the economist Adam Smith means forcing Non Leftist students to endure racist, homophobic, misogynistic comments from their classmates, is it still ethical to teach Adam Smith?"

Well?; 4/29/22, 3:33 PM
Original Mike said...: ""My question, then, is whether it’s ethical to continue to teach material I know will expose students to bigoted, racist speech from their classmates,…"

It's been 10 years since I retired from teaching, but apparently something has happened in that short span of time to turn students into bigots and racists. Hard to believe …; 4/29/22, 3:34 PM
Dave Begley said...: I say resign and go work at Starbucks.; 4/29/22, 3:35 PM
Mason G said...: NYT "Ethicist," Kwame Anthony Appiah: "How Can I Teach When I’m Not Allowed to Shut Down Trolls?"

A question to the NYT "Ethicist": "How Do You Know You're Not the Troll?"; 4/29/22, 3:56 PM
mccullough said...: This is what happens after Chicken Little calls everything racist, white supremacy, and hate speech.

They don’t trust your judgment.; 4/29/22, 3:56 PM
The Vault Dweller said...: The more people are protected the more fragile they become. The mere utterance of a word should not significantly negatively affect a person. The cure for a fragility like this should be engaging in the, at first, uncomfortable discourse. I think therapists call this exposure therapy.; 4/29/22, 3:57 PM
lane ranger said...: Anyone who pushes back in the slightest on the dominant left-wing narrative is automatically racist, homophobic and misogynistic, which is just a way of labeling "ideas I don't agree with'. The better question is whether it's ethical to suppress dissent by labeling it as "hate speech" when it's simply disagreement.; 4/29/22, 4:03 PM
Krumhorn said...: The ethicist treats the question with the presumption of the professor's good will and ideological balance. in a nutshell, that's the problem. i would argue that using the writings of an angry black, lesbian nutjob in class pretty much settles the question of ideological balance...unless, of course, the class is listed in the school catalogue as Angry Black Lesbo Poetry Sudies 101.

- Krumhorn; 4/29/22, 4:04 PM
Owen said...: How about she teaches her students to GROW UP? Not everybody in the whole world is put there just to please you. Sometimes you have to manage your emotions and keep a civil tongue even though the jackass with whom you converse is almost BEGGING for a beating.

It's called character. Get OVER yourselves.; 4/29/22, 4:04 PM
mikee said...: In 9th grade I went from parochial school to public school, during the 4th year or so of forced desegregation in Charlotte, NC. What that meant was that my older brother saw & participated in mass race riots in the school I attended two years after his time there, and that I was among kids who had decided school was a stupid place to fight.

What we kids said to each other was considered by the teachers and administration to be between the individuals involved, unless fights broke out. Somehow both the very white bread suburbanite kids and the urban POC kids all survived, and some even flourished, under the concept that learning to ignore insults and make friends of potential enemies are useful life skills.

Today? I wish I could introduce some of the kids of today to some of my classmates of that era.; 4/29/22, 4:07 PM
Ice Nine said...: The fact that she even knows who the (Black, queer and female) poet and activist Audre Lorde is provides you all you need in evaluating the true basis and severity of her supposed teaching problem.; 4/29/22, 4:12 PM
Static Ping said...: Is the troll in the room with you right now?

Are you the troll?

It is amazing to continue to see teachers who object to actually teaching.; 4/29/22, 4:16 PM
Lucien said...: Yes, obviously, the answer is to only teach poetry by dead white men. Then objections to the poems cannot, but definition, be racist. Any other approach is White Supremacy! (Interrogate your pedagogy based on the space in which it’s situated, so that it may be less problematically contextualized.); 4/29/22, 4:26 PM
Jupiter said...: Has it occurred to you that maybe this troubled teacher doesn't actually exist, and "ethicist" Kwame Anthony Appiah has actually fabricated this entire episode, in order to be paid BY THE WORD by the NYT?; 4/29/22, 4:27 PM
rcocean said...: In a nutshell, if teaching the poet and activist Audre Lorde means forcing Black, queer and female students to endure racist, homophobic, misogynistic comments from their classmates, is it still ethical to teach Audre Lorde?"

What about forcing WHite chrisitians to endure Anti-white, anti-american, Anti-christian comments and views? What comments about making THEM feel bad? I'm perfectly happy to cancel anything that makes minorities uncomfortable if the "White majority" has the saem privilage.

Anyway, that's a consistent application of the principle. But is that what's going on here? Is that what's really being asserted? You make the call.; 4/29/22, 4:31 PM
Jupiter said...: But on the assumption that Kwame Anthony Appiah is not a lying whore, despite his employment at the NYT, and the troubled teacher actually exists, No, it is not ethical to teach Audre Lorde. Don't. Just stop.; 4/29/22, 4:35 PM
Kevin said...: Shorter Teacher: You will only engage with the designated material in the approved ways!; 4/29/22, 4:58 PM
Robert Cook said...: Rather than worrying about "shutting down trolls," the instructor might try to engage them, ask them explain their thinking, encourage the other (non-troll) students, similarly, to engage the trolls in discussion, and explain their own thinking on the topic at hand. The professor can certainly cut off students from interrupting others or being personally rude or insulting. Just put them on the spot of defending their points of view and their objections to the volatile subject matter. If the professor is a good manager of student behavior, perhaps no "trollishness" will even arise.; 4/29/22, 5:01 PM
Real American said...: Gotta surmise that the allegedly racist, homophobic, and misogynistic comments aren't actually racist, homophobic, or misogynistic at all.; 4/29/22, 5:17 PM
Enigma said...: When all you have is a hammer, the world is full of nails.

The predictability and sarcasm of the comments above shows we've heard all this before. The sad thing is that one can build from the fundamentals of reading, writing, and arithmetic. Learning logic and reason follows from strong math and reading skills, as applied to new puzzles. Struggle. Fail. Try, try again.

This ethicists deep concern about emotions and student fragility is exactly why the students don't have fundamental skills and cannot handle the extremely distasteful content of the human experience and history. Hurt feelings or millions killed by wars? Which is worse? Worry is a first-world problem. How quickly will these folks recover from a severe economic crash? How many will curl up and die?; 4/29/22, 5:18 PM
dgstock said...: The illustration accompanying the article tells you all you need to know.; 4/29/22, 5:20 PM
loudogblog said...: The key word here is, "discussions." A discussion can include all sides of any issue. If someone in the discussion breaks any school policies or civil laws with their inappropriate comments then they should punished appropriately. And even if someone was "over the top," inappropriate, people need to learn to deal with that. The real world is a harsh place. People need to be able to mentally deal with others who disagree with them whether it's appropriately or inappropriately.

Back in 1982, I had my ass kicked by a bunch of guys who picked me out to rob that night. I ended up in the Emergency room. I would much rather that they had only taunted me.

"Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of Elderberries!"; 4/29/22, 5:21 PM
Ampersand said...: I detect in advice columns generally, and in ethics advice columns in particular, the likely phenomenon of "letters" to the columnist that were authored by the columnist. Try to imagine a real human being in a moral quandary actually sitting down and penning such an absurd document. I call BS.; 4/29/22, 5:32 PM
hawkeyedjb said...: This seems of the same genre as "Letters to Penthouse."; 4/29/22, 5:50 PM
PerthJim said...: So, the story is that a group of racist yobs has enrolled in a class that's teaching the works of Audre Lorde? Color me skeptical. I'd say this letter is as legit as the ones in the old Penthouse magazine.; 4/29/22, 5:52 PM
Clyde said...: Maybe they should be teaching things that are useful. And by useful, I mean things that students will need in their post-secondary education lives. Reading, writing, mathematics, science, money skills, basic mechanical and home skills (what we would have called "shop" and "home ec" when I was in school, for both sexes), etc. When we read that high percentages of students are functionally illiterate and innumerate, especially in schools in large cities, time that is wasted teaching about material about minority groups just to make them feel good should be better used to fix functional illiteracy and innumeracy. Otherwise, you'll just end up with a bunch of woke dopes.; 4/29/22, 6:33 PM
Owen said...: Enigma @ 5:18: Good comment, esp. the point about how these snowflakes hope to survive an encounter with the real world. Which is coming at them like a freight train. One thing about young people (and hey, I'm an authority on that topic, I was once young) is that they really don't know what they don't know. If they are lucky growing up, they don't have to deal with too much raw reality from Day One. It gets introduced step by step (sorta kinda) in a process on which a given society/community tends to agree. Which is why it's called "pedagogy." And along the way, the kids move from having every random desire accommodated, to learning to choose and to wait, to empathize, to use words and not blows to negotiate. Maybe by the time they're in HS or college they can master their emotions enough to engage in logic-driven, data-based "learning" experiences. Where they have to Harden themselves further. before hitting Reality. Which really does not care.

If they aren't ready for Reality by then, they're roadkill. This "teacher" is not doing much to make them ready. IMHO.; 4/29/22, 6:41 PM
JaimeRoberto said...: I don't agree with him often, but when Cook is right, he's right. Or should I say when he's correct, he's correct?; 4/29/22, 6:56 PM
Jupiter said...: Wait a minute. I believe Florida recently passed a law that would make it illegal for this fictional idiot to discuss her sexuality with 7-year-olds. But what State has passed "new state laws restricting classroom discussions" that would make it illegal for instructors to "shut down inappropriate discussions"?; 4/29/22, 7:01 PM
M said...: When they are given good reasons to not impose their insanity on students they work hard to come up with new reasons it is necessary. Everything for them revolves around their “identity” and grievances. Nothing else matters. Certainly not normal children that they are damaging with their crap.; 4/29/22, 7:05 PM
AlbertAnonymous said...: Just fuck off with this shit. Teach the material, whatever material you’re paid to teach. Students will say to each other whatever they’ll say…. And you can fuck off.; 4/29/22, 7:09 PM
Lurker21 said...: Kids, especially boys, are bored with English class. They're going to be rowdy and make trouble. Don't assume that it's racism or sexism or homophobia. They may be trying hard to avoid being bigoted while still expressing their boredom and the fact that they don't like that particular book, or maybe any book.; 4/29/22, 7:27 PM
Owen said...: Clyde @ 6:33: "...Otherwise, you'll just end up with a bunch of woke dopes." Actually, I think you end up with "woke blame-shifting self-pitying paranoid and resentful dopes." But your wording is enviably more concise.; 4/29/22, 7:39 PM
JK Brown said...: Who is this person to teach a contemporary author? What are they explaining that couldn't be found from the author themselves. Sure, the women mentioned did die 30 years ago, but there are not writings or videos of her?

This is the problem with the modern English department. Having completed the Enlightenment intellectual archeology of ancient texts, they had to find something to justify the budget. The likely apocraphyl story of the poet who got the question "What did the poet mean by this passage" wrong on some professors test.

Paul Graham in his 2004, 'The Age of the Essay'

"And so began the study of modern literature. There was a good deal of resistance at first. The first courses in English literature seem to have been offered by the newer colleges, particularly American ones. Dartmouth, the University of Vermont, Amherst, and University College, London taught English literature in the 1820s. But Harvard didn't have a professor of English literature until 1876, and Oxford not till 1885. (Oxford had a chair of Chinese before it had one of English.) [2]

"What tipped the scales, at least in the US, seems to have been the idea that professors should do research as well as teach. This idea (along with the PhD, the department, and indeed the whole concept of the modern university) was imported from Germany in the late 19th century. Beginning at Johns Hopkins in 1876, the new model spread rapidly."; 4/29/22, 7:48 PM
Lurker21 said...: Sometime the smartest students are the ones with the least tolerance for school. I sat through the Vicar of Wakefield without protesting or acting up, but (without claiming to be the smartest) I was terribly dissatisfied with the stuff I was being force-fed. One consolation: at least I was spared Mockingbird.

We don't have a common culture today, and woke educators are one reason why we aren't going to get one (though not the only reason). Maybe the answer is to back away from authoritarian one size fits all or teacher knows best education and admit more alternatives into the curriculum. Educators will tell you they are trying to do just that, but "everybody must read Audre Lord" doesn't sound like students have much choice in the matter.; 4/29/22, 7:53 PM
Derve Swanson said...: This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.; 4/29/22, 8:09 PM
PM said...: Oh, I get it. A troll is someone you don't agree with. That makes it easy. A troll used to be someone who, for the lulz, would say whatever they thought would get a rise out of people. You know, a dick. Now it's simply the person who expresses 'wrong-think'.; 4/29/22, 8:17 PM
Mason G said...: "Otherwise, you'll just end up with a bunch of woke dopes."

Perhaps that's the goal?; 4/29/22, 8:31 PM
Mark said...: There are decades and centuries of reasoned thought explaining the free marketplace of ideas. Is there really no one left in academia to enlighten these people? Do they really not understand? Have they really been robbed of someone exposing them to such right reason?

Why must it be some nobody who doesn't have a pointy head to explain it to them?

Seriously --- why should not every university in this country be immediately shuttered if this is what it is?; 4/29/22, 8:37 PM
effinayright said...: Notice this?

"In “Sister Outsider,” Lorde wrote, “Your silence will not protect you.” When bigotry speaks, we should learn to speak back."

So...the assumption is, disagreement and questioning premises IS bigotry.

Got it.; 4/29/22, 8:54 PM
effinayright said...: Lurker21 said...
Kids, especially boys, are bored with English class. They're going to be rowdy and make trouble. Don't assume that it's racism or sexism or homophobia. They may be trying hard to avoid being bigoted while still expressing their boredom and the fact that they don't like that particular book, or maybe any book.
**********
WTF?

Project much?

If you had written such nonsense even 15 years ago---especially the "avoid being bigoted" part---people would be scratching their heads wondering how you had come to such a conclusion.

And here are the most recent stats on male vs. female readers:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/249781/book-reading-population-in-the-us-by-gender/

"In 2021, survey data on book readers in the United States revealed that 78 percent of female respondents stated they had read or listened to at least one book in the previous 12 months. The share of men who had read a book in that time frame was slightly lower at 73 percent, but marked an increase from the 67 percent recorded two years earlier."

Funny, innit, if "boys" purportedly hate college English classes, that they still manage to read.; 4/29/22, 9:08 PM
Stephanie A. Richer said...: In short, dear Professor, you will have to actually work and maintain control of your classroom. And you will have to grow comfortable having your own views challenged instead of teaching to a class of simpering sycophants.; 4/30/22, 5:46 AM
Rollo said...: It seems like there's a misapprehension at work here. Either you are teaching material intended for all students or you are teaching material designed to appeal to a smaller group. Teachers once believed that everybody needed a little Shakespeare, Austen, Dickens. Now they want to offer a diet of POC fortified with LGBTQQ2S+ to all pupils. There have been students who hated both approaches, but the older pedagogy worked out alright in its time.

Today, Teachers believe that "diversity" is the only thing that unites us -- the only thing holding society together. It isn't holding us together. It would be nice if we could go back to some common culture, but is there one? English teachers apparently think Shakespeare is too exclusionary and elitist and the POC LGBTQQ2S+of the month is not.

Try to save authors you think will be divisive or for specialized tastes for students who want those writers and are ready for them, and try not to think that Shakespeare is more divisive than Audre Lorde.; 4/30/22, 7:41 AM
Lurker21 said...: Funny, innit, if "boys" purportedly hate college English classes, that they still manage to read.

People choose to get angry about the strangest things nowadays. Maybe because of all the general frustration going around today.

I didn't read the article, but assumed it was about high school. The "state laws" mentioned in the snippet wouldn't apply very much to college.

After Freshman English, if college students are in lit classes it's because they want to be and have chosen what they want to read. It's different in high school and the lower grades.

Everyone's educational experiences are different, and I'd have to say that mine were on the whole positive. I may have exaggerated a little, but there were enough rowdies and disruptives through the years to make an impression.

It's those incidents, rather than the many hours spent either very interested or intensely bored with what the teacher was saying that colored my view. There were a lot of rougher schools where I imagine things were worse, and not any better nowadays. Teacher burnout, I'm told is a real thing.

I also took into account the increased lack of interest in reading in boys (rather than grown men), the drop in boys' reading scores, and the fact that fewer young men are going to college now than young women.; 4/30/22, 7:59 AM
Tina Trent said...: Shut down trolls? Lourde was a pretentious, narcissistic, nasty autobiographer, inaccurate about historical events, and a terrible poet. Terrible poet. Perhaps he can start by learning what makes poetry bad. She has passages where she describes parties where she shaped cold cuts into female sexual anatomy, and we were just supposed to be awed by that sort of tedious lesbianism.

She also blamed white men for her breast cancer. Are white male students just supposed to sit there and literally be accused of killing her? Are their peers supposed to stay silent in the face of such unhinged hate and prejudice? That's some crazy, sick stuff. Who's trolling whom? I suppose being "categorically derogated" is in the eye of the beholder, per Appiah.

I was banned from speaking once because I listed the problems with Lourdes' poetry, which for some reason was assigned in a philosophy class taught by someone who didn't even know the proper terminology to use in discussing poetry and poetics. I learned more about poetic form in grade school, and I showed Lourde more respect as a writer than the other students and the professor, who ignorantly felt she was too special and fragile to treat her ideas seriously. What a sad spectacle by Appiah and the anonymous professor, both stupidly defending speech suppression and categorically derogating white males in general -- and Lourde herself, who deserves to be held to standards like any other author.; 4/30/22, 10:27 AM
ccscientist said...: "racist, homophobic, misogynistic comments" given how the Left defiles words, I don't trust this author one bit. Is objecting to the 2020-2021 riots racism? Is saying women should not be in combat misogyny? When every republican is literally hitler the entire basis for this discussion is suspect.
In addition, I have found poetry by POC to be crap, even the famous ones. It is generally 100% whining about racism and oppression. It has little imagery or word play, no erudition, no rhyme or meter. whine whine whine.; 4/30/22, 11:05 AM
Jupiter said...: "A troll used to be someone who, for the lulz, would say whatever they thought would get a rise out of people. You know, a dick."

In this forum, that would be a howard, not a dick.; 4/30/22, 11:42 AM
Jupiter said...: I think we can take it as given, that some considerable fraction of "letters to advice columnists" are fiction. The columnist may invent them, or someone may invent them and mail them in. There is no attempt made to verify them, by anyone.

But this is worse than that. This is not entertainment, it is tendentious propaganda. There is no state that has passed a law which would prevent an English teacher from controlling offensive remarks in a classroom discussion. If the talented prevaricationist employed by the NYT had wanted to present a fictional situation in which the Florida law actually constrained a teacher, it might have gone like this; "I have long been in the habit of educating my second-grade students about my sexual orientation, so that they can feel more comfortable with their own, when it finally develops. But my state has passed a law that says I can't even discuss the goings-on after dinner in my seven-member polyamatory "marriage", let alone show them my penis, or help them to master the art of fellatio. Is it ethical for me to pretend that I am not consumed with lust for their smooth, prepubescent bodies?".

But of course, that would not be effective propaganda against the Florida law, so that is not the lie we were sold. Or rather, you were sold.; 4/30/22, 3:09 PM
Greg The Class Traitor said...: My question, then, is whether it’s ethical to continue to teach material I know will expose students to bigoted, racist speech from their classmates, with whom they will then be expected to maintain a collegial working relationship.

1: News flash: When your students graduate, those who get real jobs will have to "maintain a collegial working relationship" who say things they don't like.
So it's far better for them to learn that in college, then to have to learn it out in the real world, where a failure can get them fired
2: As ccscientist said, there's absolutely no reason to believe that the instructor's definitions of those words are reasonable
3: "If teaching the poet and activist Audre Lorde means forcing Black, queer and female students to endure racist, homophobic, misogynistic comments from their classmates" makes it sound like white, straight, and male students will be forced to endure racist (anti-white is racist), heterophobic, misandrist text from the "poet".
If you think doing that is ethical, then you've lost any grounds to complain about those students returning the favor by pointing out what a pathetic freak Audre Lorde is, and how worthless Audre's writing is; 4/30/22, 3:59 PM
Rick67 said...: I don't understand the many negative comments left so far. I was genuinely impressed by Appiah's answer.; 4/30/22, 4:02 PM