I’ve been through some traumatic stuff in my life, my father passed away when I was only 6. I understand how certain things people can find things upsetting. But this is part of life, its how you learn to handle your emotions and feelings. If you are never “challenged” emotionally, you won’t be able to function as an…

First mistake, pedagogy learning. Andragogy, treat students like adults. We read Antigone and no one lost it, no one got upset beyond the normal unease with the material. If they did, they would be sent to counciling because something is wrong with them.

If a student has a diagnosed case of PTSD and has special needs that need to be accommodated, they should get academic advisors that help steer them away from triggering material, and they should certainly be able to go to a professor’s office hours and discuss their needs and how they might be affected by the content…

This is ridiculous. Millennialism run amok.

I was 17, but there were kids as young as 14 on the bus. We were making our way to a small farming community for a baseball game. I went to high school in a rural area so traveling a few hours each way was not uncommon. As we approached an intersection the bus pulled to the side of the road. An old farm truck was…

What bothered me about the article on Oberlin is not the call for content warnings. I can totally get behind a professor, who is about to teach something that may be disturbing or upsetting, addressing the fact that it may make students uncomfortable, but that it is still of value. For example, I had a professor at…

I did undergrad research in micro-material structures. While getting my undergrad, I was asked by a colleague to join the Women’s Engineering Society on the campus. Basically the university had a rule that you needed to have at least 6 members or the group would lose its funding support from the university. We had…

Obviously you liked what the liberal kids had to say... You’re a writer for Jezebel... Other than that, I like the idea of calling them “content warnings”. It somehow sounds less like a flaming heap of bullshit crackling as it torches up in the warm summer heat.

When I read articles about liberal arts education, often written by or about frightened professors, I sometimes find myself imagining The Frightened Professor as a stock character in a horror movie

Funny how ‘apathy’ is only something that can be applied to those callow students, not the plucky adjuncts themselves. Nevermind that a lot of those adjuncts were students themselves, not all that long ago...

I completely disagree with this mindset. As someone who teaches controversial material, I might briefly preview the material for the students the class before or on the first day, but issuing any kind of “warning” poisons the well before students can encounter the work. It is completely appropriate to be upset by some…

The entire university model is outdated. I thought this article would be about that. Instead it's about the near zero number of high school graduates who will benefit from a course in the Classics Department.

I was thinking the same thing. Those poor, poor adjuncts. I’m shedding a solitary tear as I type this.

I don’t understand why it’s necessarily the case that a student who doesn’t react in barely-muted horror is apathetic. I’ve had plenty of students who were clearly engaged in the material intellectually not react to it emotionally. I tend to use horror films a lot in my classes and I’ve never found that a student who…

Sometimes, on the other hand, an activist student can successfully engage the rest of the class in a lively and productive discussion

If I had gotten “the education that I wanted” when I went to college as an 18 year old, then that education would have been all about the Reagan-era conservatism and middle/upper-middle class upbringing that I came in with.

But I didn’t have a big say in that education - other than picking and choosing the classes and…

This article sounded like Foucault being raped in a closet of the Frankfurt school.

Jesus fucking Christ, quit using the fucking idiotic term “woke” already.

I took ancient Greek in high school and I remember translating the Odyssey and getting to a part in the banquet hall that had young boys going under the tables. I thought I had translated it wrong, but the teacher told us ‘nope, that’s exactly what it means and it’s exactly what you think, the ancient Greeks didn’t…

Not sure if Donna is a real person or just a nom de plume of Hamilton Nolan who really, really, really(!) wants us to care about the plight of the adjuncts.