The Professor Hit 'Send' and Boom

The Chronicle of Higher Education has an article describing how a statement about current events in a message from a professor at UW LaCrosse turned into a barrage of hateful emails, a conservative-media feeding frenzy, and an administrative betrayal.

Professor Slocum's geography class was impacted by the government shutdown last year. Students were not going to be able to access federal databases required for an assignment. Slocum's email suggested that the shutdown was caused by Tea Party Republicans in the House of Representatives.

This strikes me as a non-controversial statement, since everyone who was paying attention in the run up to the government shutdown saw Tea Party representative Ted Cruz calling for a shutdown.

A screenshot of that course-related email was posted by a student, and things took on an absurd life of their own.

Vitriolic emails from strangers denounced the message [Slocum] had sent to 18 students the night before.

Some threatened to have her fired. Others described plans to lobby state lawmakers to stop giving tax money to her college.

"Clearly you have forgotten that the student is your customer," one person wrote. "They pay you for services rendered." Another told Ms. Slocum: "Quit your job because you are a worthless douchebag." By lunch, the professor would find herself up against an entire network of conservative organizations.

The Chronicle's article is a long read, but it is worth it. These events speak to issues of academic freedom, freedom of speech, classroom discourse, the function of the university, digital literacy, and digital privacy.

It's okay to be angry while reading the article. It is an angry-making story in which the behaviors of trolls and bitter small-minded people are reinforced.

The last and most aggravating words come from the student who initially posted the professor's email, Katie Johnson; the student who, after the email became a "scandal" on the conservative blogosphere (see here, here, and here), continued to feed the flames, sending even more material to conservative media outlets.

[Johnson] takes comfort, she says, in knowing professors have been made "more aware of political speech and what they shouldn’t say."

Before I get into why that is a horrible and ignorant thing to say, let me be clear, I have zero issues with someone holding a set of political beliefs different from my own. I like to argue with those people, but that doesn't make their views more or less valuable.

However, to include political speech on a list of things professors "shouldn't say" is an anti-democratic, anti-education attitude that people of all political persuasions should reject. And I say that as someone who actively works to keep my politics out of my lectures and lessons.

No one in a university classroom needs to be shielded from conventional political points of view (especially ones as banal as 'The Tea Party caused the shutdown'). To suggest otherwise is to misunderstand the role of the university.

A university classroom is populated by educated adults getting ready to take complex ideas out of the classroom and into other settings -- settings where politics, relationships, culture, and countless other factors will play a role. If an adult is afraid that their politics are threatened by one geography professor's point of view, then that adult's politics are a bit too delicate and underdeveloped in the first place.

Can you imagine becoming a genetic engineer who has never discussed the politics of genetic engineering? Or becoming a surgeon who avoids talking about the funding of healthcare? Or a geographer who ignores political boundaries?